Uhhh good point actually... Man, you're right, WTF was I thinking, most browsers natively support PNG, I suppose I just wanted to bash Microsoft a little. Plus my *ahem* beta testing of astalavista.box.sk errrr products threw a whole bunch of ads in my face which made me lose track of what I was reading. Sorry. Or perhaps I was feeling a little nostalgic sympathy for my 386SX-25 running Win3.1 and IE2.x (which doesn't support PNG) that I had to throw in the junkyard today because a y2k failure made Mail-On-Net show emails dated year 2000 as !Unparsable date! The fix for this was buying a Dell P2-450MHz. I suppose I'm feeling guilty, I should have used my 386 as a...... heater or something. But the only thing that generates real heat is the PSU, oh man poor 386:.....( Well I suppose it could have been worse, it could have been neglected by me and become a NetBus'd or BackOrifice'd DDoS node against IRC servers. Hmmm... User GauteL I take that back - you're not a hypocrite.
Unfortunately, one effect of better compression will be more bloat -- web pages with more graphics and more advertising
True, however in these recession times when we are close to the threshold of the collapse of all free content on the Internet when,
cost of AD bandwidth > price of AD
this at least gives us a little extra breathing room. I was not worried until Webshots started charging subscription fees. I mean for God's sake they dish out loads of ads and a few 100k JPEGs. If they can't break even with all those ads.... Then Geocities and all other free content providers will be going down, and the Internet will become just another medium for TV. If you look at it this way then JPEG2k is critical to the survival of the Internet as we know it.
Why is it important that everyone should use new standards? As long as they are supported in browsers (*) and I am free to use them, I don't care what everyone else is using.
Hypocritical. If this was the case then you would have no right to complain when Micro$oft added proprietary kerberos extensions to Win2k SMB that made it pseudo-incompatible with MIT kerberos (via reserved field) and thus kerberos-Samba. Beter to say standards are standards are standards.
Same old advertising hype. Is there a tomshardware equivalent for comparing movie-making software like Adobe Premiere, Alias WaveFront Maya, Cinema 4D, Videowave, Worldbuilder, etc. ?
Zzzzzzzz old news, the Russians alreay invented this, but they might not have a patent on it... Hmmmm... Apparently the US air force has needed this for quite some time. Clearly they expect to be getting in close and dirty. Quoting,
What would you consider the most remarkable feature of the Fulcrum ?
The most remarkable feature of the Fulcrum is its helmet mounted sight and the R-73 (NATO code AA-11 Archer) infra red homing missile. This combination is a very deadly system in a close in fight. No western jet has this combination of quick high off-boresight designation and highly manoeuvrable dog fight missile. This gives us an edge versus every other fighter since our opponents have to deal with missiles coming at them, whilst they have to manoeuvre to bring their gun to bear
How does the Mig-29 perform compared to other fighters ?
The results of those mock fights clearly show that an AMRAAM equipped western fighter is far superior to the MiG in the BVR arena if tactically and operationally correctly employed. It is Our job to exploit and punish any mistakes that Our partners make in those training fights and help them not make the same mistakes in real combat. We show them that the MiG-29 is very dangerous at the merge, if they screw up their search plan, their targeting or sorting and we get close to them. To make live difficult for Our training partners, we have developed some sophisticated decoy and resolution tactics, against which our partners have to be very disciplined in their radarplans, if they don't want to lose some of their flight members.
In the dog fight arena, BFM so to speak, the MiG-29 is on a par with any western fighter. The F-16C block 30, 50 and 52 can develop a slightly better turnrate than the MiG, but only when flying without pods and few weapons. In normal combat configuration the MiG is better. Many times American F-16 squadrons had the impression that they can outmanoeuvre us, forgetting that they flew a completely clean jet while ours were carrying a centreline tank and the engines were tuned down. During one detachement did we also take down our tanks and flew with the engines in the normal power regime. That was a very bloody time for the F-16s during the BFM sorties. But not only does the MiG manoeuvre very well it also has a big trump up it's sleeve in form of the helmet sight and the AA-11 Archer. This combination gives us firing opportunities in close in situations where other pilots never think of shooting anything. This scares many NATO pilots. But all this manoeuvring and weapon potential in dog fights doesn't help much if you don't see your opponent. And here do the western fighters have the clear advantage with their superior avionics that help the pilot find his target
SU-27: The Flanker is equipped with a single internal 30 mm gun carrying over 200 rounds of ammunition, which given its rate of fire is a reasonable figure if Soviet statements concerning the accuracy of the infrared/laser fire control are correct.
Mig29: The IRST/LR and radar are slaved such that the inactive sensor tracks the boresight of the active sensor, this allows radar silent IR stalking of targets under VFR conditions with automatic switchover to radar if infrared lock is lost eg by cloud cover. Soviet engineers claim the IRST/LR is extremely accurate providing more precise gun solutions than the radar in visual engagements. What is not stated is that this arrangement can defeat jamming of the fire control radar, by switching to IRST/LR to complete the engagement
The helmet-mounted target designator, used on the MiG-29 fighter to rapidly lock on air targets visually detected through the cockpit glazing, makes it possible within 1 s to deliver a target designation command to the infra-red search/track sensor or directly to a missile homing head with an accuracy sufficient to effectively use the weapon.
In terms of close air combat, the MiG-29 has some superiority over the USAF F-15C fighter, outperforms the USAF F-16 fighter by 15%, and French Mirage-2000 by 40%. In terms of long-range air combat, the MiG-29 outperforms the Mirage-2000 fighter by approximately 20% and enjoys overwhelming superiority over the USAF F-16A aircraft (without medium-range missiles).
And there's Tom Cruise sitting there in Top Gun with his targetting computer going beep-beep-beep and the Mig-29 instead locks him up in - what was that, 1 second? Nice.
Finally, this can put the world wide into the world wide web
The ultimate open source - every spot in the world on camera, everybody in the world is everyone elses' big brother => lots of little brothers. I don't see why anybody would want to travel abroad now, just take these pictures in London (England), Macchu Pichu (Andes), ancient ruins as of yet unnamed (Bolivia), Pyramids (Egypt). Personally I can spend a few months at this site alone if it was big enough, honestly. Just look at the success of Webshots and that just spews out pictures of rabbits, mountains, dogs, cats all at random. Nothing can beat the Dallas skyline on a beautiful red sunset evening reflecting off the skyscrapers with hazy-red skyline. Nice. I'm sure there are lots of other places with views just as spectacular but nobody has ever been there or heard of it.
For instance, an architect would love to see places with beautiful buildings, the travel agent doesn't give two hoots about what building is where and who made it. This architect can just log on and see the building structure in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, heck even Vietnam and other thrid world countries.
A computer programmer would want to see the last remaining building with a VAX inside to mourn (or last Win 95 machine to celebrate), the travel agent would have no idea what he is talking about, but the computer programmer could call up any worlwide location at will so it's not a problem.
I can't imagine how many people there are in Oklahoma or whatever that can't afford travelling to Canada or France or England or Mexico or Brazil. This way they can get one heck of a taste. Brilliant idea, I'll be watching this closely.
I love seeing these new novel ways of using the web. When something like this happens it reminds me of the good old dot-com days when every idea seemed like a good idea. This is a brilliant way to use the web, and could become a new central nexus like Webshots Desktop and the incredibly profound Jonnie Walker's keep walking
Absolutely beautiful invention for travel diaries. Please do route 19 or route 9 in Virginia down past the Gorge and Toronto to Ottawa cross-country route via Kaladar, a town of 87 citizens, with nothing else but serene terrain for 30 miles around. Also the Toronto to Vancouver train journey in Winter if you can adapt this device to trains, with a 360 degree lens, perhaps placing it on the top of the train.
524,288Tb of resiliant storage is only $1b at current prices, and that's dropping rapidly. If historical trends continue, it'll be $1m in about a decade, and it will be included standard in the PlayStation 9.
Buddy, don't forget about the dot-com crash. Property in London, England is now more expensive than in Tokyo, Japan, a few years ago this would have been unthinkable. So the pace of storage systems advancement has decreased. If you saturate an ADSL download pipe, then you can't fill a hard drive. 120Megabytes/hour ADSL download * 24 * 365 * 2 = 2,100,000 Megabytes if you constantly download for 2 years. So 2100 Gigs is the maximum hard drive size anyone would need unless there is an advance in technology and holographic 3D videos start to come to market, or ADSL speeds increase massively, which with Telcos screwed as they currently are and for the next few years with loads of dark fibre, and less than 1 percent of homes taking up high speed internet seems very unlikely.
Good sex: Java especially with Swing unless like most people you ignore "Swing is NOT threadsafe" Python for text parsing (as opposed to Perl) Haskell, especially as a language to code up compilers on HTML I honestly think artisic web designers have the best sex in the world *Cringe* <HateMicrosoftOverride> VisualBasic </HateMicrosoftOverride>
Bad sex: Java RMI/CORBA C++ you'd be constantly thinking "should I kill those segfaults using double-free()" Assembly - if you thought C free() was bad.... Perl writing 1 line takes a couple of days, debugging is more difficult than sex, advice: USE PYTHON. Machine code nuff said
Besides this kindof humour is basically immature teenage male "I'm a virgin and really want to find anyone remotely female to shag" humour
Oh.... my... God... How do you know so much about us? You must be a CIA agent monitoring us, you are the Indymedia spy... We've found you agent 17, you've blown your cover, your licence to kill is revoked.
But the whole point is that people can buy devices to play the music, it's just that computers are 'smarter' and thus can't play the CDs. I fail to see how it would be illegal to turn off error correction in a device, considering other devices are sold without said error correction.
Good, you agree my solution 1 is trash. Using solution 4, the CBDTPA people can make drives that can play non-DRM illegal, I suppose this watermarking can be encapsulated into the ECC. Current ECC: Data XOR(whatever) ECC = 0 means data integrity
DRM ECC for DRM drives only: Data XOR(whatever) DRM-ECC = DRMwatermarkforthisusersignedbyRIAA_RSAkey means data integrity OR pirated CD
But in general, obviously, the tighter encoded a a file is lossly encoded, the less errors it can handle. Correcting for errors takes space.
Yeah, or allow the errors and drop them like streamed MPEG-L4
Encapsulating ECC into UDP can be detected by layer 7 routers and blocked.
I don't have any idea what you're talking about, but if you're serious, a simple solution is to just send each packet ten times. But I don't see how a router can the difference between a reply that says 'the last fifty packets received successfully, keep sending' and 'the last fifty packets received, resend packets 32, 33, 35, and 41'.
Yeah, that's cos the layer 7 routers I mentioned don't exist. I was talking trash because it was 2am. I meant gateways, proxy servers and firewalls like in big companies - except all ISPs would require people to use their proxies and firewalls, and these would be controlled from a central point by the RIAA. I am talking about breaking the Internet, that you talk about below here.... btw here in the UK, GCHQ military intelligence flags every IP address that sends a PGP-encrypted message, that's a fact, I worked for the massive UK telco that did it. I can't remember how they did it, it was a few years ago, I think it was fast packet-content analysis on the core routers or at the multiplex/demultiplex stages on the SDH (SONET for you Americans). Oh sorry I remember now, it's flagging PGP-encrypted emails via a content-analysis system on the SMTP server/relays. I didn't ask whether they log incoming ones on POP3. Man these military people have it good, billions of pounds sterling for doing whatever they want, they get bored and do stuff like this, just like in the movie The Cube
If companies firewall, people will just go with other ISPs. If it's required they firewall all ports by law, then people will just set up fake FTP connections, which by defination requiring incoming ports, and hence will go though the firewall
True, it would still be a bumber though.
The only way you can keep two computers from talking to each other on the internet is to use NAT, and forward no ports at all, which completely breaks large sections of the internet. It makes all online games unplayable, for one thing.
Ha ha!!!! If Hollywood breaks the Internet then CNN and other news programmes would get higher ratings as people try to find out what the heck is going on, Hollywood is in a win-win situation. Seriously though, this is what I'm afraid will happen (really). US constitution protects free speech NOT free IP packets. With enough campaign contributions, corrupt cops, corrupt judges and big lawyers I'm sure this is a worrying possibility. The free internet vs. Hollywood/RIAA/MPAA seriously I think the corporates will win. Just look at the policies these companies have for their own employees - they read employee's emails and fire whoever uses Napster/whatever, heck they even fire people for no reason now. In the past the law has created nightmares like people that developed encryption products in the states and all of a sudden found out they couldn't export it and had to flee from the US to dream/code up encryption algorithms? This is how much power these people have and I don't like it. I'm talking NAT+gateway+maybepacketfiltering.
The internet doesn't lose packets that much in general, be they TCP or UDP. The place you're most likely to lose data is over a modem, but modems have built-in low-level error correction.
The mostly likely reason to lose data on the wires is bad routing somewhere, where you cannot get to there from here that way, even though it claims you can.
Normal networks, be they fiber optics, ATMs, T3s, simply don't have data disappear en route. Stuff goes out one router, and shows up at the other end of the wires. Only crappy telephone wires have static and crosstalk on them, when people buy more than 50 M/s worth of bandwidth, they will not tolerate lossage. Thus UDP is fairly reliable
Cool, the older packet-leaking Netscape routing software is being phased out, Cisco, NEC, etc. routers are pretty solid now. But I still know some companies that are using 386's as webservers so I wouldn't be too sure that there aren't any leaky routers lying around. Hopefully when the last routers go to IPv6 we can say goodbye to all these losses for good. I'd be willing to bet though that even then you won't exchange mission-critical binary files over UDP;-) better to stick with the 20% TCP overhead. Trust me, I've worked at these Telcos, employees bring guests/kids in all the time, and they always seem to be good at finding that reset button on the side of the Cisco router ?!? ECC isn't the solution to everything though, IBM 120GXP harddrives have pretty heavy Reed-Solomon ECC, you'd think that even with 30% bit errors you wouldn't get unrecoverable errors... Hell dual-pumped (quadrature whatever stupid buzzword) ECC on-the-fly then quad-pumped ECC upon retry... Basically saying that the technology has gone backwards from when all ECC was done on-the-fly, they must think we're stupid, unless they retry the data read while they're at it hmmm. Oh well so much for the specs, probably the same reason that planes fall out of the sky even without binLaden's help, and then everyone blames it on luck, heh.
On your sig you mention http://afree87.phatstart.net/sd.html I had this happen to me a couple of days ago after I pressed the preview button underneath this comment (when I write it). I was pissed because it was a beautiful comment. I remember what I said but the wording wasn't quite right, I think it's a bug in slashcode (or heck maybe even Apache perlmod) not an AnalagBoy's hidden sid thread conspiracy. When my comment preview got lost it gave the same blank section that those "lost threads" have. I'd like to make this an official bug report if you concur.
Solution 1 Obfuscation - Forget CDs, use Read-Only MiniDiscs instead, or any other proprietary format. Problem: it has to be converted to analogue in the earphone (even if this link is encrypted) which can be ripped. This creates extra trouble for the ripper, but for a song to be Napstered only 1 person has to set up the equipment to do this.
If the record companies started distributing songs on minidiscs, within a year people would be buying minidisc players for their computers.
Ahhh difference is it'll be a DRM minidisc (the only type legal under US law)
If any type of 'broken' CD becomes the standard copy-protected version, then CD-ROM drive manufacturers will just start making their drives be able to read it
Nope, under DRM reverse-engineering this copy protection is illegal and importing devices that breach this standard into the US could easily be made illegal. To prove my point how many Russian cars (there are Russian car enthusiasts) are there in California (they totally breach all pollution control laws)?
Making them illegal won't solve any problem at all. People will just come out with something else. And as the real problem is supposed to be people trading music, that won't help at all, as no one trades music with CD-Rs anymore.
Not true, few people will rip out their car stereo and put a triple height HP Ultrium 200GB tapedrive with laptop to decode.
Erm, no. Sorry, doesn't work that way. First of all, if you can 'force' the P2P systems to use UDP, then you can force them to shut down. Second, the only difference between UDP and TCP is that UDP doesn't have the builtin error-correction that TCP does. There's nothing to stop you from adding your own error-correction. Third, UDP does not 'degrade' the signal in the way you're thinking of. A packet either gets there or not, and thus you'd have to invent some new sort of format that works like interlaces GIFs, where you can just get half the packets and you'll get half the song. An MP3 sounds like crap if you drop only 1/1000th of its packets. Fourth, many transmission mediums already have low-level error correction anyway, so UDP is just as reliable as TCP over those links.
Hmmm I thought mp3s were designed to accept bit flips and shoddy resumes from incorrect files, sorry must have confused it with a WAV file or especially MPEG-L4 designed to aborb these errors. Encapsulating ECC into UDP can be detected by layer 7 routers and blocked. NASA already blocks packets like this, for National Security, all packets targetted towards any NASA webservers with port destination set to other than 80 are blocked by all ISPs at the US border (layer 3/4), NO small independent ISPs exist that can send their own packets to the undersea cables bypassing the major telcos. As for the built-in error correction on core routers - yes, I read about that, but I can't remember if they proliferated much, I can remember PSI.NET had some really advanced routers like that but then they dot-bombed, I thought they were one-of-a-kind, apparently not, don't tempt me to use UDP;-)
Not to mention the one, fatal flaw...there are other places besides the US. People will just rip it there, and we'll download it here
The US is a massive lucrative market for all mainboards and processors. Most popular retailer in Europe is guess who... Dell. Chinese market is the only free one but we can't get mp3s off them because they have a massive communist firewall at their country's border. VIA stuff is made in Taiwan - but their instruction booklet is written in English. It's in their interests to adopt DRM if they have to, and since its not profitable (hware has small margins, industry of scale) to have two parrallel chipsets, they'll just put DRM in all of them, same as when Bush told Pakistan, "Unless you let us kick some Afghanistani butt it would be a shame for your country to become a nuclear wasteland". The only country that doesn't care about US worlwide standards on Intellectual Property is Saudi Arabia, and that's because they're all a bunch of Al-Qaeda ragheads. Have to get Al-Qaeda to rip your mp3s for you, oh man I think we just invented the new God damn techno-mafia!
If you're talking about watermarking, watermarking simply doesn't work, period
Yeah, good point, I didn't think about it that way, I take it back.
Of course, I have yet to see how DRM is supposed to stop someone from setting up a microphone in front of even the most encrypted-all-the-way-to-the-speakers DRM system.
Actually you could, if the DRM watermark is not present then you cannot share "personally marked" audio like that. The OS would recognise this file as being unwatermarked audio by its file extension, and would deny access to it, apart from DRM-compliant apps that copy it to DRM-compliant devices. Although as I said watermarking won't work, but don't tell the RiAA;-)
Mod this down, I have an alternate point of view - don't be frightened CBDTPA is not that bad, just a bit too all-encompassing at the moment but it'll be distilled down. As long as it doesnt kill free speech on the net I'm not OK with it but I accept that they have to protect their bottom line, especially with recession sending companies the same way as Enron. I could be wrong but let's try to analyse this logically.
The record and movie companies don't want computers to be used to rip one cd, and then distribute its contents worldwide. Let's look at the physical steps that make this possible:
1. The CD drive reads all CDs digitally, the laser scans in the CD tracks by tracking the reflection. 2. The firmware uses the ECC to reconstruct damaged data. 3. The data is translated to IDE/SCSI/USB, etc. bus format and transmitted to the IDE/SCSI controller, USB controller, etc. (the CD drive can have an optional Analogue2Digital converter for a headphone feed) 4. These ASIC controllers translate this data from controller format to PCI/Northbridge bus format where it's DMA'd to main memory. 5. App processes this data and stores it to HD or plays it or whatever. 6. Computer connects to a server or a P2P node (sorta lightweight server) over TCP/IP, any data stored on HD can be perfectly transferred over
this link incoming or outgoing. App does not distinguish between native/downloaded data.
People have a reasonable right to break the law if they choose, so a slightly flawed system must be implemented. So how can the record companies attack this system? As far as I can see, these are their choices,
Solution 1 Obfuscation - Forget CDs, use Read-Only MiniDiscs instead, or any other proprietary format. Problem: it has to be converted to analogue in the earphone (even if this link is encrypted) which can be ripped. This creates extra trouble for the ripper, but for a song to be Napstered only 1 person has to set up the equipment to do this.
Solution 2 Taint the data - Make the data on the CD different like companies are doing now so that i doesn't meet the CD standard any more but CAN play on most dumb CD players, but not advanced CD players like computers CD drives and so can't be copied, it requires a dongle on the USB port to play.
Solution 3 Make CD writers illegal. If you really want to copy data or make a backup, then why use CDs which just happen to be compatible with CD drives? Use tape drives instead like Onstream, they're better. So you'll still be able to download mp3s, so what you can only play them on your computer, make mp3 players illegal, people should have proper retail CDs that they carry around.
Solution 4 Taint P2P systems - I THINK THIS WOULD BE GREAT! Force music transferred P2P clients to go over UDP, not TCP/IP, thus you get quality degradation in mp3s transferred, same as casette tapes with fair use that the industry asked for. Unfortunately rogue P2P like Freenet could subvert this, forcing CBDTPA to attack Cisco and router manufacturers via ISPs by ordering them to use layer 7 filtering on all traffic to search for mp3 (or whatever) headers. This would signal the end of the free Internet, a very sad day, but the law is *very* powerful
Solution 5 Taint the hardware - if none of the measures above works, then this is the nightmare scenario, can you make an x86 compatible processor in your garage? I laugh at all these pathetic people that say some company will not adhere to the standard, what commodity desktop PC processor manufacterer doesn't support big standards e.g. x86/G3/Sparc, Motorola 68000 or something. Developing an x86 processor on ASIC (otherwise like 1MHz), needs like $100million investment minimum. This provides precision targets for CBDTPA, they will be forced to provide DRM instructions on their processors otherwise they will not be allowed to import to USA, same as heroin. Same with chipset manufacturers, I've yet to see someone make a full-blown Northbridge out of 555 timers and BC108 transistors. They will be forced to provide encrypted tranmission to USB-DRM, IDE-DRM, etc. devices. New DRM drives will be incompatible with non-DRM chipsets and non-DRM processors cannot run on DRM chipsets. This won't necessarily be a difficult transition, the introduction of MMX, SiS motherboards with Northbridge/Southbridge on the same chip, the introduction of DDR hasn't caused any blue smoke and recalls larger than on the scale of 120GXP.
Only inserting a DRM-flagged CD into a DRM drive connected to a DRM chipset with a DRM processor will cause the DRM code in the OS to allow it to play but it would implant an encrypted CPU_ID or DRM_ID into the song every 5 seconds using steganography. The music industry will possess this database, and any music on Napster/Kazaa etc. could be tracked back to source and law enforcement would bust down their door. Solution 1/2/3/4 and CD levies are suddeny starting to sound good now aren't they?
Remember, hard drive, CD-writer, processor and chipset are things even the most advanced slashdot person can't build in his garage. In 10 years I can imagine an episode of Macguyver where Dr Evil encodes his plans on DRM, so RDA has to build a non-compliant HD using an egg, peanut, cassette tape and glue and a CD drive with a laser-pointer, mirror, precision motor, and writing drive firmware in C using RTlinux-on-FPGA. After all if bin Laden was using some network to blow stuff up, and there was no way to shut him out, then come on honestly I don't think that anyone would be surprised if the CIA implemented AI layer 7 recognition and blocking of Freenet encrypted packets at all ISP core routers.
I don't like it, but this is just the way it is. The again this could all be a crock of shit that came out of my imagination.
Re:24/7 vs. on and off, failures and Seagate in RA
on
IBM 120GXP Revisited
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· Score: 1
Globaldirect (UK) says quote, "this 120GXP drive is suitable for entry-level servers, low cost routers, switches and traditional desktop applications" in their catalogue that I got this morning. Looks like IBM is playing this down with their suppliers. Maybe entry level servers are uhhh 333 hours per month?
In other words in some corner of IBM's website it says that 120GXP is for 333 per month, but all of the resellers and suppliers and OEMs say 24/7
So why not pay the kid in Hershey bars instead of cash? It's open source code so ANYONE can look at it, surely they can get some guy to give his code a quick once over and that'll be that? What sort of message is this sending? Kids can be ha33ors and get away with it because they're under-age, but if they want to make a positive contribution to society then they get shut out by the companies. No wonder all these kids burglarise houses and smoke crack ?-)
Ahhhhhh so this is why they are pushing through the SSSCA (DDBTC.. whatever), they want to stop people under 18 from using P2P completely. In that case the RIAA and MPAA could be guilty of specifically targetting legislation to restrict the semi-legitmate activities of minors (kids buy loads of CDs). Surely the extra laws protecting the rights of minors could be used to defeat the RIAA|MPAA????
WHY WHY WHY do all the lawyers seem to post as Anonymous Cowards? Is it some sort of legal liability thing? In that case I'd better tell you that software installed by your boss (transparent proxy e.g. squid, VNC, whatever) tracks what you post as anonymous coward as well as when you're logged in. You aren't buying yourself any anonymity. (We have to get rid of the anti-Napster peeps somehow;-)
Cats have the right to privacy. When doubleclick.net and SSSCA try to take our rights us/. people scream out loud, but when the owner (employer-for-entertainment-and-companionship purposes) of this cat imprisons it due to what it just happens to be carrying is just plain violating the cat's privacy rights. Personally I'd rather let the SSSCA become law than lose my right to walk into any store with a juicy steak in my mouth drippin' steak-juice and drool all over the place.
Every computer-related device having to have copy protection? Can you imagine how much that would slow down even the simplest programs like Vi?
The law doesn't care. Intel will probably support this bill because everyone will need much faster processors to run the extra hardware+software layer. Transmeta will probably hate it - I don't think their chips are designed to decrypt everything they run. Heck they could probably say that this is an "economic stimulus package" that will stimulate content growth.
Very pricey to produce but has 4-5 times the efficiency of copper at 1/5th the weight of aluminum.
Isn't that like saying "4-5 times faster than the SR-71 at 1/5th the weight of a Buick Regala"? Can't we keep our denominators straight here?
No, it's important that lay people understand what we're talking about. If we said, "Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella and all clones are going to die because of the SSSCA" we would have created far more attention than writing in the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack source "/*DoWn W3th th3 SSSCA*/"
Hey that's a good idea. If the fan and blades are made of aluminium and thermally coupled to the heatsink, the fan would also operate as a very effective radiator as the flow of air over the fan blades is at a very high velocity compared to even the most aerodynamically streamlined part of the heatsink.
The number of fan blades (now heat conductors) could be increased to transfer more heat especially using the new fans that have no central motor housing. As in most notebook PCs the fan can be used to augment the airflow through the heat pipe and over the heatsink when the temperature is high, e.g. Pentium III speedstep is operating on mains power, but such a thermally radiative fan could impede airflow when it's switched off.... Hmmmm looks like a trade-off.
<karma hoard> This is quite a good thing when doing ports, e.g. Wux applications from Unix to Windows PDF here. Particularly insightful is "Chapter 3.2.2 Operating Systems Differences". This document can also serve as Unix to Windows porting 101. I wonder if the Win 3.1 stuff they are talking about is still valid in the non-MSDOS WinME,NT,2000,XP ? </karma hoard>
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh good point actually... Man, you're right, WTF was I thinking, most browsers natively support PNG, I suppose I just wanted to bash Microsoft a little. Plus my *ahem* beta testing of astalavista.box.sk errrr products threw a whole bunch of ads in my face which made me lose track of what I was reading. Sorry. :.....(
Or perhaps I was feeling a little nostalgic sympathy for my 386SX-25 running Win3.1 and IE2.x (which doesn't support PNG) that I had to throw in the junkyard today because a y2k failure made Mail-On-Net show emails dated year 2000 as !Unparsable date! The fix for this was buying a Dell P2-450MHz. I suppose I'm feeling guilty, I should have used my 386 as a...... heater or something. But the only thing that generates real heat is the PSU, oh man poor 386
Well I suppose it could have been worse, it could have been neglected by me and become a NetBus'd or BackOrifice'd DDoS node against IRC servers. Hmmm... User GauteL I take that back - you're not a hypocrite.
True, however in these recession times when we are close to the threshold of the collapse of all free content on the Internet when,
cost of AD bandwidth > price of AD
this at least gives us a little extra breathing room. I was not worried until Webshots started charging subscription fees. I mean for God's sake they dish out loads of ads and a few 100k JPEGs. If they can't break even with all those ads.... Then Geocities and all other free content providers will be going down, and the Internet will become just another medium for TV. If you look at it this way then JPEG2k is critical to the survival of the Internet as we know it.
Same old advertising hype. Is there a tomshardware equivalent for comparing movie-making software like Adobe Premiere, Alias WaveFront Maya, Cinema 4D, Videowave, Worldbuilder, etc. ?
Pardonez-moi did I hear you right? Can Soviet planes kick American ass when they get in close? Let's see if the Mig-29 or SU-27 Flanker can
Sure I'm sure? Let's see
And there's Tom Cruise sitting there in Top Gun with his targetting computer going beep-beep-beep and the Mig-29 instead locks him up in - what was that, 1 second? Nice.
The ultimate open source - every spot in the world on camera, everybody in the world is everyone elses' big brother => lots of little brothers. I don't see why anybody would want to travel abroad now, just take these pictures in London (England), Macchu Pichu (Andes), ancient ruins as of yet unnamed (Bolivia), Pyramids (Egypt). Personally I can spend a few months at this site alone if it was big enough, honestly. Just look at the success of Webshots and that just spews out pictures of rabbits, mountains, dogs, cats all at random. Nothing can beat the Dallas skyline on a beautiful red sunset evening reflecting off the skyscrapers with hazy-red skyline. Nice. I'm sure there are lots of other places with views just as spectacular but nobody has ever been there or heard of it.
For instance, an architect would love to see places with beautiful buildings, the travel agent doesn't give two hoots about what building is where and who made it. This architect can just log on and see the building structure in Spain, France, Canada, Russia, heck even Vietnam and other thrid world countries.
A computer programmer would want to see the last remaining building with a VAX inside to mourn (or last Win 95 machine to celebrate), the travel agent would have no idea what he is talking about, but the computer programmer could call up any worlwide location at will so it's not a problem.
I can't imagine how many people there are in Oklahoma or whatever that can't afford travelling to Canada or France or England or Mexico or Brazil. This way they can get one heck of a taste. Brilliant idea, I'll be watching this closely.
I love seeing these new novel ways of using the web. When something like this happens it reminds me of the good old dot-com days when every idea seemed like a good idea. This is a brilliant way to use the web, and could become a new central nexus like Webshots Desktop and the incredibly profound Jonnie Walker's keep walking
Absolutely beautiful invention for travel diaries. Please do route 19 or route 9 in Virginia down past the Gorge and Toronto to Ottawa cross-country route via Kaladar, a town of 87 citizens, with nothing else but serene terrain for 30 miles around. Also the Toronto to Vancouver train journey in Winter if you can adapt this device to trains, with a 360 degree lens, perhaps placing it on the top of the train.
Buddy, don't forget about the dot-com crash. Property in London, England is now more expensive than in Tokyo, Japan, a few years ago this would have been unthinkable. So the pace of storage systems advancement has decreased. If you saturate an ADSL download pipe, then you can't fill a hard drive. 120Megabytes/hour ADSL download * 24 * 365 * 2 = 2,100,000 Megabytes if you constantly download for 2 years. So 2100 Gigs is the maximum hard drive size anyone would need unless there is an advance in technology and holographic 3D videos start to come to market, or ADSL speeds increase massively, which with Telcos screwed as they currently are and for the next few years with loads of dark fibre, and less than 1 percent of homes taking up high speed internet seems very unlikely.
Why is nobody taking this post seriously?
Good sex:
Java especially with Swing unless like most people you ignore "Swing is NOT threadsafe"
Python for text parsing (as opposed to Perl)
Haskell, especially as a language to code up compilers on
HTML I honestly think artisic web designers have the best sex in the world
*Cringe* <HateMicrosoftOverride> VisualBasic </HateMicrosoftOverride>
Bad sex:
Java RMI/CORBA
C++ you'd be constantly thinking "should I kill those segfaults using double-free()"
Assembly - if you thought C free() was bad....
Perl writing 1 line takes a couple of days, debugging is more difficult than sex, advice: USE PYTHON.
Machine code nuff said
Besides this kindof humour is basically immature teenage male "I'm a virgin and really want to find anyone remotely female to shag" humour
Oh.... my... God... How do you know so much about us? You must be a CIA agent monitoring us, you are the Indymedia spy... We've found you agent 17, you've blown your cover, your licence to kill is revoked.
But the whole point is that people can buy devices to play the music, it's just that computers are 'smarter' and thus can't play the CDs. I fail to see how it would be illegal to turn off error correction in a device, considering other devices are sold without said error correction.
Good, you agree my solution 1 is trash. Using solution 4, the CBDTPA people can make drives that can play non-DRM illegal, I suppose this watermarking can be encapsulated into the ECC.
Current ECC:
Data XOR(whatever) ECC = 0 means data integrity
DRM ECC for DRM drives only:
Data XOR(whatever) DRM-ECC = DRMwatermarkforthisusersignedbyRIAA_RSAkey means data integrity OR pirated CD
But in general, obviously, the tighter encoded a a file is lossly encoded, the less errors it can handle. Correcting for errors takes space.
Yeah, or allow the errors and drop them like streamed MPEG-L4
Encapsulating ECC into UDP can be detected by layer 7 routers and blocked. I don't have any idea what you're talking about, but if you're serious, a simple solution is to just send each packet ten times. But I don't see how a router can the difference between a reply that says 'the last fifty packets received successfully, keep sending' and 'the last fifty packets received, resend packets 32, 33, 35, and 41'.
Yeah, that's cos the layer 7 routers I mentioned don't exist. I was talking trash because it was 2am. I meant gateways, proxy servers and firewalls like in big companies - except all ISPs would require people to use their proxies and firewalls, and these would be controlled from a central point by the RIAA. I am talking about breaking the Internet, that you talk about below here.... btw here in the UK, GCHQ military intelligence flags every IP address that sends a PGP-encrypted message, that's a fact, I worked for the massive UK telco that did it. I can't remember how they did it, it was a few years ago, I think it was fast packet-content analysis on the core routers or at the multiplex/demultiplex stages on the SDH (SONET for you Americans). Oh sorry I remember now, it's flagging PGP-encrypted emails via a content-analysis system on the SMTP server/relays. I didn't ask whether they log incoming ones on POP3. Man these military people have it good, billions of pounds sterling for doing whatever they want, they get bored and do stuff like this, just like in the movie The Cube
If companies firewall, people will just go with other ISPs. If it's required they firewall all ports by law, then people will just set up fake FTP connections, which by defination requiring incoming ports, and hence will go though the firewall
True, it would still be a bumber though.
The only way you can keep two computers from talking to each other on the internet is to use NAT, and forward no ports at all, which completely breaks large sections of the internet. It makes all online games unplayable, for one thing.
Ha ha!!!! If Hollywood breaks the Internet then CNN and other news programmes would get higher ratings as people try to find out what the heck is going on, Hollywood is in a win-win situation. Seriously though, this is what I'm afraid will happen (really). US constitution protects free speech NOT free IP packets. With enough campaign contributions, corrupt cops, corrupt judges and big lawyers I'm sure this is a worrying possibility. The free internet vs. Hollywood/RIAA/MPAA seriously I think the corporates will win. Just look at the policies these companies have for their own employees - they read employee's emails and fire whoever uses Napster/whatever, heck they even fire people for no reason now. In the past the law has created nightmares like people that developed encryption products in the states and all of a sudden found out they couldn't export it and had to flee from the US to dream/code up encryption algorithms? This is how much power these people have and I don't like it. I'm talking NAT+gateway+maybepacketfiltering.
The internet doesn't lose packets that much in general, be they TCP or UDP. The place you're most likely to lose data is over a modem, but modems have built-in low-level error correction. The mostly likely reason to lose data on the wires is bad routing somewhere, where you cannot get to there from here that way, even though it claims you can. Normal networks, be they fiber optics, ATMs, T3s, simply don't have data disappear en route. Stuff goes out one router, and shows up at the other end of the wires. Only crappy telephone wires have static and crosstalk on them, when people buy more than 50 M/s worth of bandwidth, they will not tolerate lossage. Thus UDP is fairly reliable
Cool, the older packet-leaking Netscape routing software is being phased out, Cisco, NEC, etc. routers are pretty solid now. But I still know some companies that are using 386's as webservers so I wouldn't be too sure that there aren't any leaky routers lying around. Hopefully when the last routers go to IPv6 we can say goodbye to all these losses for good. I'd be willing to bet though that even then you won't exchange mission-critical binary files over UDP ;-) better to stick with the 20% TCP overhead. Trust me, I've worked at these Telcos, employees bring guests/kids in all the time, and they always seem to be good at finding that reset button on the side of the Cisco router ?!? ECC isn't the solution to everything though, IBM 120GXP harddrives have pretty heavy Reed-Solomon ECC, you'd think that even with 30% bit errors you wouldn't get unrecoverable errors... Hell dual-pumped (quadrature whatever stupid buzzword) ECC on-the-fly then quad-pumped ECC upon retry... Basically saying that the technology has gone backwards from when all ECC was done on-the-fly, they must think we're stupid, unless they retry the data read while they're at it hmmm. Oh well so much for the specs, probably the same reason that planes fall out of the sky even without binLaden's help, and then everyone blames it on luck, heh.
On your sig you mention http://afree87.phatstart.net/sd.html I had this happen to me a couple of days ago after I pressed the preview button underneath this comment (when I write it). I was pissed because it was a beautiful comment. I remember what I said but the wording wasn't quite right, I think it's a bug in slashcode (or heck maybe even Apache perlmod) not an AnalagBoy's hidden sid thread conspiracy. When my comment preview got lost it gave the same blank section that those "lost threads" have. I'd like to make this an official bug report if you concur.
Solution 1 Obfuscation - Forget CDs, use Read-Only MiniDiscs instead, or any other proprietary format. Problem: it has to be converted to analogue in the earphone (even if this link is encrypted) which can be ripped. This creates extra trouble for the ripper, but for a song to be Napstered only 1 person has to set up the equipment to do this.
If the record companies started distributing songs on minidiscs, within a year people would be buying minidisc players for their computers.
Ahhh difference is it'll be a DRM minidisc (the only type legal under US law)
If any type of 'broken' CD becomes the standard copy-protected version, then CD-ROM drive manufacturers will just start making their drives be able to read it
Nope, under DRM reverse-engineering this copy protection is illegal and importing devices that breach this standard into the US could easily be made illegal. To prove my point how many Russian cars (there are Russian car enthusiasts) are there in California (they totally breach all pollution control laws)?
Making them illegal won't solve any problem at all. People will just come out with something else. And as the real problem is supposed to be people trading music, that won't help at all, as no one trades music with CD-Rs anymore.
Not true, few people will rip out their car stereo and put a triple height HP Ultrium 200GB tapedrive with laptop to decode.
Erm, no. Sorry, doesn't work that way. First of all, if you can 'force' the P2P systems to use UDP, then you can force them to shut down. Second, the only difference between UDP and TCP is that UDP doesn't have the builtin error-correction that TCP does. There's nothing to stop you from adding your own error-correction. Third, UDP does not 'degrade' the signal in the way you're thinking of. A packet either gets there or not, and thus you'd have to invent some new sort of format that works like interlaces GIFs, where you can just get half the packets and you'll get half the song. An MP3 sounds like crap if you drop only 1/1000th of its packets. Fourth, many transmission mediums already have low-level error correction anyway, so UDP is just as reliable as TCP over those links.
Hmmm I thought mp3s were designed to accept bit flips and shoddy resumes from incorrect files, sorry must have confused it with a WAV file or especially MPEG-L4 designed to aborb these errors. Encapsulating ECC into UDP can be detected by layer 7 routers and blocked. NASA already blocks packets like this, for National Security, all packets targetted towards any NASA webservers with port destination set to other than 80 are blocked by all ISPs at the US border (layer 3/4), NO small independent ISPs exist that can send their own packets to the undersea cables bypassing the major telcos. As for the built-in error correction on core routers - yes, I read about that, but I can't remember if they proliferated much, I can remember PSI.NET had some really advanced routers like that but then they dot-bombed, I thought they were one-of-a-kind, apparently not, don't tempt me to use UDP ;-)
Not to mention the one, fatal flaw...there are other places besides the US. People will just rip it there, and we'll download it here
The US is a massive lucrative market for all mainboards and processors. Most popular retailer in Europe is guess who... Dell. Chinese market is the only free one but we can't get mp3s off them because they have a massive communist firewall at their country's border. VIA stuff is made in Taiwan - but their instruction booklet is written in English. It's in their interests to adopt DRM if they have to, and since its not profitable (hware has small margins, industry of scale) to have two parrallel chipsets, they'll just put DRM in all of them, same as when Bush told Pakistan, "Unless you let us kick some Afghanistani butt it would be a shame for your country to become a nuclear wasteland". The only country that doesn't care about US worlwide standards on Intellectual Property is Saudi Arabia, and that's because they're all a bunch of Al-Qaeda ragheads. Have to get Al-Qaeda to rip your mp3s for you, oh man I think we just invented the new God damn techno-mafia!
If you're talking about watermarking, watermarking simply doesn't work, period
Yeah, good point, I didn't think about it that way, I take it back.
Of course, I have yet to see how DRM is supposed to stop someone from setting up a microphone in front of even the most encrypted-all-the-way-to-the-speakers DRM system.
Actually you could, if the DRM watermark is not present then you cannot share "personally marked" audio like that. The OS would recognise this file as being unwatermarked audio by its file extension, and would deny access to it, apart from DRM-compliant apps that copy it to DRM-compliant devices. Although as I said watermarking won't work, but don't tell the RiAA ;-)
Mod this down, I have an alternate point of view - don't be frightened CBDTPA is not that bad, just a bit too all-encompassing at the moment but it'll be distilled down. As long as it doesnt kill free speech on the net I'm not OK with it but I accept that they have to protect their bottom line, especially with recession sending companies the same way as Enron. I could be wrong but let's try to analyse this logically.
The record and movie companies don't want computers to be used to rip one cd, and then distribute its contents worldwide. Let's look at the physical steps that make this possible:
1. The CD drive reads all CDs digitally, the laser scans in the CD tracks by tracking the reflection.
2. The firmware uses the ECC to reconstruct damaged data.
3. The data is translated to IDE/SCSI/USB, etc. bus format and transmitted to the IDE/SCSI controller, USB controller, etc. (the CD drive can have an optional Analogue2Digital converter for a headphone feed)
4. These ASIC controllers translate this data from controller format to PCI/Northbridge bus format where it's DMA'd to main memory.
5. App processes this data and stores it to HD or plays it or whatever.
6. Computer connects to a server or a P2P node (sorta lightweight server) over TCP/IP, any data stored on HD can be perfectly transferred over this link incoming or outgoing. App does not distinguish between native/downloaded data.
People have a reasonable right to break the law if they choose, so a slightly flawed system must be implemented. So how can the record companies attack this system? As far as I can see, these are their choices,
Solution 1 Obfuscation - Forget CDs, use Read-Only MiniDiscs instead, or any other proprietary format. Problem: it has to be converted to analogue in the earphone (even if this link is encrypted) which can be ripped. This creates extra trouble for the ripper, but for a song to be Napstered only 1 person has to set up the equipment to do this.
Solution 2 Taint the data - Make the data on the CD different like companies are doing now so that i doesn't meet the CD standard any more but CAN play on most dumb CD players, but not advanced CD players like computers CD drives and so can't be copied, it requires a dongle on the USB port to play.
Solution 3 Make CD writers illegal. If you really want to copy data or make a backup, then why use CDs which just happen to be compatible with CD drives? Use tape drives instead like Onstream, they're better. So you'll still be able to download mp3s, so what you can only play them on your computer, make mp3 players illegal, people should have proper retail CDs that they carry around.
Solution 4 Taint P2P systems - I THINK THIS WOULD BE GREAT! Force music transferred P2P clients to go over UDP, not TCP/IP, thus you get quality degradation in mp3s transferred, same as casette tapes with fair use that the industry asked for. Unfortunately rogue P2P like Freenet could subvert this, forcing CBDTPA to attack Cisco and router manufacturers via ISPs by ordering them to use layer 7 filtering on all traffic to search for mp3 (or whatever) headers. This would signal the end of the free Internet, a very sad day, but the law is *very* powerful
Solution 5 Taint the hardware - if none of the measures above works, then this is the nightmare scenario, can you make an x86 compatible processor in your garage? I laugh at all these pathetic people that say some company will not adhere to the standard, what commodity desktop PC processor manufacterer doesn't support big standards e.g. x86/G3/Sparc, Motorola 68000 or something. Developing an x86 processor on ASIC (otherwise like 1MHz), needs like $100million investment minimum. This provides precision targets for CBDTPA, they will be forced to provide DRM instructions on their processors otherwise they will not be allowed to import to USA, same as heroin. Same with chipset manufacturers, I've yet to see someone make a full-blown Northbridge out of 555 timers and BC108 transistors. They will be forced to provide encrypted tranmission to USB-DRM, IDE-DRM, etc. devices. New DRM drives will be incompatible with non-DRM chipsets and non-DRM processors cannot run on DRM chipsets. This won't necessarily be a difficult transition, the introduction of MMX, SiS motherboards with Northbridge/Southbridge on the same chip, the introduction of DDR hasn't caused any blue smoke and recalls larger than on the scale of 120GXP.
Only inserting a DRM-flagged CD into a DRM drive connected to a DRM chipset with a DRM processor will cause the DRM code in the OS to allow it to play but it would implant an encrypted CPU_ID or DRM_ID into the song every 5 seconds using steganography. The music industry will possess this database, and any music on Napster/Kazaa etc. could be tracked back to source and law enforcement would bust down their door. Solution 1/2/3/4 and CD levies are suddeny starting to sound good now aren't they?
Remember, hard drive, CD-writer, processor and chipset are things even the most advanced slashdot person can't build in his garage. In 10 years I can imagine an episode of Macguyver where Dr Evil encodes his plans on DRM, so RDA has to build a non-compliant HD using an egg, peanut, cassette tape and glue and a CD drive with a laser-pointer, mirror, precision motor, and writing drive firmware in C using RTlinux-on-FPGA. After all if bin Laden was using some network to blow stuff up, and there was no way to shut him out, then come on honestly I don't think that anyone would be surprised if the CIA implemented AI layer 7 recognition and blocking of Freenet encrypted packets at all ISP core routers.
I don't like it, but this is just the way it is. The again this could all be a crock of shit that came out of my imagination.
In other words in some corner of IBM's website it says that 120GXP is for 333 per month, but all of the resellers and suppliers and OEMs say 24/7
ha33ors is errrr hAcK33rS pronounced with a British accent I think, I better go look it up in the Hacker's dictionary if I can find an unhacked copy.
So why not pay the kid in Hershey bars instead of cash? It's open source code so ANYONE can look at it, surely they can get some guy to give his code a quick once over and that'll be that? What sort of message is this sending? Kids can be ha33ors and get away with it because they're under-age, but if they want to make a positive contribution to society then they get shut out by the companies. No wonder all these kids burglarise houses and smoke crack ?-)
Ahhhhhh so this is why they are pushing through the SSSCA (DDBTC.. whatever), they want to stop people under 18 from using P2P completely. In that case the RIAA and MPAA could be guilty of specifically targetting legislation to restrict the semi-legitmate activities of minors (kids buy loads of CDs). Surely the extra laws protecting the rights of minors could be used to defeat the RIAA|MPAA????
WHY WHY WHY do all the lawyers seem to post as Anonymous Cowards? Is it some sort of legal liability thing? In that case I'd better tell you that software installed by your boss (transparent proxy e.g. squid, VNC, whatever) tracks what you post as anonymous coward as well as when you're logged in. You aren't buying yourself any anonymity. (We have to get rid of the anti-Napster peeps somehow ;-)
Cats have the right to privacy. When doubleclick.net and SSSCA try to take our rights us /. people scream out loud, but when the owner (employer-for-entertainment-and-companionship purposes) of this cat imprisons it due to what it just happens to be carrying is just plain violating the cat's privacy rights. Personally I'd rather let the SSSCA become law than lose my right to walk into any store with a juicy steak in my mouth drippin' steak-juice and drool all over the place.
The law doesn't care. Intel will probably support this bill because everyone will need much faster processors to run the extra hardware+software layer. Transmeta will probably hate it - I don't think their chips are designed to decrypt everything they run. Heck they could probably say that this is an "economic stimulus package" that will stimulate content growth.
No, it's important that lay people understand what we're talking about. If we said, "Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella and all clones are going to die because of the SSSCA" we would have created far more attention than writing in the OpenBSD TCP/IP stack source "/*DoWn W3th th3 SSSCA*/"
Hey that's a good idea. If the fan and blades are made of aluminium and thermally coupled to the heatsink, the fan would also operate as a very effective radiator as the flow of air over the fan blades is at a very high velocity compared to even the most aerodynamically streamlined part of the heatsink.
The number of fan blades (now heat conductors) could be increased to transfer more heat especially using the new fans that have no central motor housing. As in most notebook PCs the fan can be used to augment the airflow through the heat pipe and over the heatsink when the temperature is high, e.g. Pentium III speedstep is operating on mains power, but such a thermally radiative fan could impede airflow when it's switched off.... Hmmmm looks like a trade-off.
Here's the big list of links of a lot of VNC derivatives in case anyone's wondering where all these contribs suddeny appeared from (like me ;-) )
<karma hoard>
This is quite a good thing when doing ports, e.g. Wux applications from Unix to Windows PDF here. Particularly insightful is "Chapter 3.2.2 Operating Systems Differences". This document can also serve as Unix to Windows porting 101. I wonder if the Win 3.1 stuff they are talking about is still valid in the non-MSDOS WinME,NT,2000,XP ?
</karma hoard>