If they want IP protection, then they must disclose. Disclosure is the price of admission for IP protection.
If they claim that the information was stolen, then disclosed to third parties, *it doesn't matter* if the original disclosure was illegal: the information loses trade secret status, and the damages they are able to recover are *only* against the original discloser.
Only patents and copyrights provide IP protection for disclosed information.
The GPL is an instrumentality of the GNU Manifesto: it exists to achive the goals of the GNU Manifesto, and to help the world envisioned by RMS, when he set those goals, to come into existance.
That is the reason for the existance of the GPL.
Likewise, the BKL is an instrumentality of the same philosophy, but with a somewhat narrower scope of operation. It intends to make source code available, and gives economic incentive for that to happen, by providing a service for free which would otherwise have a high price attached to it, in exchange.
The interesting thing here is that the GPL does not work, if the source code is available under terms other than the GPL.
The BKL doesn't work if the service it provides in exchange for making source code available is available under other terms.
Consider that, with a comparable product available, there is no need to accept the GPL restrictions placed upon you for redistribution and source availability that use of GCC contractually requires.
Similarly, with a comparable product available, there is no need to accept the BKL restrictions placed upon you for source availability that use of BitKeeper contractually requires.
Both achieve their goals through force of contract, and both achieve their goals through the unavailability of alternatives. This unavailability is through an enforced barrier to entry.
In the GCC case, the barrier to entry is that one is not permitted to make derivative works which are not also under the GPL; in the BitKeeper case, it is that one is not permitted to use BitKeeper itself in the creation of derivative works.
In both cases, what is being controlled is derivation.
In fact, the GPL is not a very effective instrumentality of the GNU Manifesto; it fails to address patent and other issues addressed by the M nifesto, and it's emergent properties are not precisely aligned with the results the GNU Manifesto claims it wants. A better instrumentality would be something like the Cygnus eCOS license. I think the GPL is a trade-off, required by a complexity barrier: any more complex, and it would be a better instrumentality, but it would be harder to get programmers to attach it to their code, without them feeling the need to consult a lawyer first.
On a side note, your Microsoft argument is specious; assuming wide deployment of a "trusted computing environment", Microsoft no longer has an incentive to keep their source code to themselves in order to achieve their own barrier to entry: the barrier is replaced with the fact that you can not digitally sign the resulting code in order to get the hardware to run it, only Microsoft can, so the source code no longer needs obscurity protection.
At this point, it is all about controlling barriers to your competition, and it doesn't matter if you are the FSF, BitMover, or Microsoft.
The net effect of all this is that it destroys the intellectual commons, no matter how you look at it. The FSF is just as guilty as Microsoft, in this regard.
I first met Larry McVoy on usenet. He was highly cogent in his arguments, and generally a very intelligent guy. Unlike a lot of the idiots who came in after the NSF quit running the Internet, you could actually hold a technical discussion with him, after which you would have a solution, or an approach to a solution, for the problem at hand.
I've talked with him on the telephone on several occasions, when issues have come up that merited a telephone conversation; I've called him, and he's called me, though it has been a while since our last voice conversation.
When Larry McVoy left Sun, he wanted to take the SunOS 4.1.3_U1 code (U2 has not yet come out), and release it under the GPL. This was quite visionary, given the amount of competition that Linux is now giving Sun, even internally, within their own engineering staff, these days. Sun would not do the release, because it would cannibalize their SVR4-derived "Solaris" market.
Larry's motivations in this case were, I think, base... in that he wanted to "rescue" the important work which had been done on the BSD dervice Solaris (SunOS) code base. He saw the GPL as a way to do that.
Larry was an early GPL advocate, in this sense. Frankly, I'm glad he failed in this endeavor; it wporbably would have meant the end of BSD derived OSs, which generally exist only because the GPL is too draconian for people who need to do business.
Larry became an outspoken Linux advocate; he authored the "lmbench" suite of micro-benchmarks, all of which show Linux in a good light, compared to its competition. One can argue that these tools drove a number of the important design decisions in the Linux kernel itself, which, among other things, led to the current threading model and code, which *depends* upon the fact that process context switch overhead is minimal, and there is very little difference between it and thread context switch overhead.
Larry advocated Open Source software, in general: BitKeeper, by it's nature, *from the beginning*, offered free licenses those people who woul publish their source archive, as the cost of the license.
Thus, by its nature, BitKeeper encourages free software by providing economic incentive.
But, like the GPL itself, it is an instrumentality, and the instrumentality must not obey the same rules as that on which it acts.
The GPL carries a prohibition against modification: it is not itself under the GPL. Ask yourself "Why?".
For this same reason, good or bad, BitKeeper can not itself be Open Source software. Yes, there are economic issues. Despite people's intentional misinterpretation of the word "support" in Larry's statements to mean "technical support" rather than "economic support", Larry's correct: the Open Source model is not economically self supporting for stategic projects... it only supports itself for tactical projects.
That RMS is complaining about BitKeeper now is, I think, sour grapes. That's the kind interpretation. The unkind interpreation is that BitKeeper is a more effective mechanism than the GPL itself for achiving the goals of the GNU Manifesto, of which the GPL is an instrumentality.
So before you call Larry an idiot, or blindly GPL or even BSDL your next set of source code, understand the long term consequences of the license.
Frankly, I'm glad he's let go of the understandable bitterness that comes from pouring your soul into a product, only to have it hidden away in a vault by an employer with goals other than advancement of the art and science of computer science.
I think this license demonstrates that he's come to his senses, on strategic issues -- a painful lesson. Would that RMS would so the same.
There is one that's especially good for Halloween, where it starts out whit, and after about a 20 second delay, turns orange, and then another 20 seconds or so, turns black. It's a Potassium dichromate experiment that's pretty cool (it's an endothermic reastion that causes the color change for yellow (hidden in the white) through orange, to black (a dark blue/black).
You may also want to look at:
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/demoser.html
And:
Chemical Demonstrations - A Sourcebook for Teachers - 2nd edition L.R.Summerlin, J.L.Ealy Jr. Amer.Chem.Soc. (1988) ISBN 0-8412-1481-6 (v1), 0-8412-1535-9 (v2)
So? Harmonize already... Taiwan is 50 years after the death of the author, Australia is 50 years after the death of the author. What part of "Don't think originally, and adopt everyone else's laws" doesn't the U.S. understand? I guess it only works with European laws...
I would say that this was an example of "Some pigs being more equal than others", but of course, since the Sonny Bono extension, "Animal Farm" is back to being copywritten...
Have they tried advertising? If so, that's probably the problem: the people who are interested in the low-brow games they produce these days are illiterate.
None of the games they are producing these days are targetted at the market "people who can read".
You want to sell a game to my mother? She plays "Zelda" on her Nintendo; she also played "Pogo Joe", and "Space Invaders".
You want to sell a game to one of my three sisters? Try "Zork", or any of the other text adventure games. Or try "Breakout" or "Arachnoid" or "Ms. Pacman" or an older pinball game. Or, if you want to sell a PC game, try "Sim City" or "Lemmings".
I know that doesn't sound like most of the games they sell these days I guess that's why they don't sell them to women.
My suggestion is... take off the rose-colored glasses.
If you put the hardware in the physical posession of the students, it's going to have all sorts of things done to it, no matter what you try to do to stop it.
I understand that the reason for this is to limit the support overhead, but you are not going to win, and if you go in with the assumption you are, you are going to get hurt much worse than if you don't.
"That's nice Terry, but being able to write C code doesn't disqualify you from being a son of a bitch."
And pretending that poverty isn't something all political parties define one way or another in order to achieve their goals doesn't make it any less true.
| poverty: 1 a : the state of one who lacks | a usual or socially acceptable amount of | money or material possessions
If it can be defined into existance, it can be defined away.
RIAA's *real* problem is going to be that none of these computers have static IP addresses, because the U.S. has hogged the IPv4 space, and isn't very interested in switching over to IPv6 until it can decrupt everything in real time.
Makes them really hard to block at the routers, without blocking everything. 8-).
You want to define certain people as poor? You have three manifest constants to work with. All three of them can only be changed with the approval of standards committees. Knock yourself out.
Notice: Cranking up any of these values to crank up income for the bottom rung is fine... but nothing you do will make them definitionally "poor"... the only thing that can do that is them not working full time.
FWIW: Most wealthy Libertarians, just like most wealthy Democrats or wealthy Republicans, etc., are all for bribing less well-off people to not steal their stuff. The various political parties just disagree as to what form the bribes should take.
In related news, the MPAA lobbies for legislation to illegalize Viagra...
Let's see their thinking...
A DVD has about as many bits per second as you can transfer. Basically, that means that for a 1:40 DVD, you would need to keep up the contact for an hour and 40 minutes to be able to transfer the 6GB involved.
Therefore, anyone who attempts to obtain the ability to do that must be a video pirate...
I love W5. It implies that the vulnerability is the leakage of information to an intruder.
It seems to me that, since it points out the the scans are often run as "System" by the legitimate users, then by properly crafting a response to an inquiry, and puttting my machine out there, the real vulnerability is to the systems, like the domain controllers, which scan (potentially trojaned) remote machine, without dropping "System" priviledge first.
It seems to me that an exploit using SAMBA source code ought not to be that hard to write...
Is it really "winning", when Google removes all links to your web site?
I guess you could always live with print advertising... that really works well on the Internet, doesn't it?
Clue: URLs in a print advertisements aren't "clickable"...
-- Terry
36 bits = 64GB, not 64 Exabytes
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Itanium Problems
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· Score: 2
2^36 = 2^4 (16) * 2^32 (4G) = 64G.
Also, the use of the extra 4 bits to get the full 36 bits requires use of the PAE.
Which, if you had ever read the processor manual, you would know requires *bank selection*.
Bank selection is incredibly useless. It doesn't let me have more than 4G of virtual address space split between user space and kernel space, combined.
Since I already have that with only 4G of RAM, and since the people who build servers that use that much memory aren't *stone stupid*, and tend to *dedicate* them to tasks, the extra RAM is basically useless.
The best you can get out of it is *a RAM disk*, and that still requires you copy crap all over.
You can't use the memory for *DMA buffers* or anything useful on which *the user process or the kernel operates*, without...bank selecting it in for the *entire duration* of the operation.
The reason anyone want more address bits is to access more memory *simultaneously*, in a single program. If I were bumping my head on available RAM, I'd implement demand paging, and be done with it, wouldn't I? But that only works if I have the virtual address space to back the real memory *plus* the virtual memory, and I'm still limited to *32 bits* there, aren't I?
I guess maybe you are one of the Intel engineers who thought *bank selection* was a good idea?
Let me give you a clue: it's not.
Let me give you another clue: Segments are for worms: segment registers were a bad idea, too, which is why no one uses the damn things, except as extra registers ro hold things like thread contexts.
Try naming one modern OS that uses segments; the last one to do it was medium model Windows 3.11 and SCO Xenix 2.x, a full *decade* ago.
PS: If I wanted to use bank selection, I'd be writing software for the Commodore 64.
PPS: While we are at it: ring 1 and ring 2 were also stupid ideas; no modern OS uses anything other than ring 0 (kernel) and ring 3 (user). At least on the VAX architecture, you could use ring 2 to implement asynchronous system traps to call user functions from the kernel that ran as if they were in ring 3, only on a different stack. Too bad Intel's ring 1 & 2 aren't even useful for that.
PPPS: Try building a processor that's friendly to how people are actually going to use it, instead of pretending we live in some imaginary hardware designer universe where Spock has a beard, for a change.
It means, in this context, "removing the middleman". The original definition is "removal of the intermediary".
-- Terry
The number one value of a 64 bit CPU...
on
Itanium Problems
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· Score: 2
The number one value of a 64 bit CPU, to my mind, is the ability for it to address more than 4G of RAM, without destroying locality, like the PAE does on 32 bit processors.
PAE, for those of you who are, as yet, unaware of it, allows you to access more than 4G of physical RAM, by reviving an old technique called "bank selection". It's fairly useless for most of the applicaitons for which you would want more RAM in the first place, since it doesn't increase the allowable size of the kernel or process virtual address space at all, so the only thing it lets ou do is use RAM instead of swap, and not run lots of applications at the same time, without a lot of VM changes.
Intel keeps trying to sell us Itanium on performance, when, in fact, we don't care. What we care about is the ability to operate on larger data sets.
Intel: just because your delivery of access to larger amounts of physical RAM on 32 bit processors, via the PAE, was not welcomed (mostly because it was implemented in a way that was totally useless to software engineers and OS designers), doesn't mean that access to more RAM *by a single kernel or process* will not be the major selling point for Itanium: it will.
Get your crap together, and quit concentrating on clock rates.
An embedded system is not a general purpose computer, on which people can run third party applications.
Your argument is valid for an embedded system, in which you control all software running on the platform, and in which your business model doesn't permit for future expansion into markets where there are application specific software requirements that don't result from consulting or OEM work by the original vendor.
For everything else, though, there's a need for protection domains, to act as a barrier between code you (the product vendor) wrote, and code written by someone else, and hosted on your device.
The Palm Pilot and similar devices don't have that.
You can argue that the Palm people didn't expect to have third party applicaitons which weren't vetted by their own Q.C. department, but if that's even ture, it would be because they overestimated their own ability to provide a "whole product", without third party involvement.
The Palm Pilot and related devices are popular today because the PalmOS platform, which may not have been intended to be any more open than your average game console, is in fact now much more open than, say, a firewall product.
Considering your firewall product, you've placed yourself in the position of having to support all third party applications that require an application layer proxy, by yourself.
This lets you manage the stability of the hardware platform you are using, since it lacks protection, but your cost is that every time Real comes out with a new product, or any time anyone else who doesn't know how to design a protocol comes out with a product that needs to transit your firewall to function, the options are only either the application isn't supported, or your company takes on the grunt work of creating the application layer proxy to support it.
IMO, that's not a sustainable business model. As an example: do you already support streaming media for Microsoft Media and Real Player? What about streaming Ogg Vorbis? How about FTP, which requires a stateful proxy?
For every mainstream protocol you can answer "yes" to, there are dozens of emerging protocols, with no clear winners, and even more protocols that are mainstream, but with little deployment in that model (how do you handle NAT-fanout of H.323 connections, for example?).
This is not to jump down your throat on this; I was a senior software engineer for a company that built a similar product (the Whistle InterJet), that did not permit third party access to the platform. I know from cold, personal experience that preventing platform access by third parties is not a long term success strategy.
"I believe that sometimes it could be better when a minority group of dissidents are able to dictate a form of government (for instance, to replace tyranny which has been instituted and sustained by a brainwashed majority)."
Aren't all majorities with which you don't personally agree the result of brainwashing?
"Democracy isn't necessarily the ultimate good. Imagine three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...."
This analogy works for the first night, if everyone wears their "I am a wolf" or their "I am a sheep" T-shirts, respectively. After the first night, the analogy breaks down.
I will now pause for everyone to finish going rabidly insane.
OK.
Yes, there are one or two phrases in the job description that are, at least on the fact of them, objectionable to the Slashdot crowd.
My personal concerns about this are whether this is a real CTO job, where there is a person who can set technology direction on behalf of the company, or whether you would be one CTO among dozens, and have no real power to implement changes at any fundamental level.
Unless it's the real thing, it's likely not going to result in anything at all, and you can all stop your paranoid worries. And if it *is* the real thing, and they get someone competent (a big "if"), you can all stop your paranoid worries.
Now look at the big picture: why is the music industry afraid of P2P and other online digitial distribution, when it's pretty clear that the primary use for these channels is for content that they would not usually consider distributing themselves?
My answer to this question is that the eventual results of this technology, if it prospers, is going to be disintermediation of artists and consumers.
There are a number to consequences to this which are -- believe it or not -- generally undesirable, and there are a number of *other* consequences to this which break their revenue models, and damage their ability to continue to do business.
To paraphrase what I think they've realized, "you can't piss in the wind"; it's reasonable for the company to seek alternatives to protecting their revenue model -- and, as a side effect, protect the generally desirable things which come with that revenue model, such as the ability of individual bands to make enough money that they can *be* bands full time, and have a reasonable chance of paying the rent when they are 65 and no longer interesting to their former primary markets. Bands die out because they're old, or because they've lost their social relevence, or their superstar lead singer has died, or any of the dozens of fates which can befall a band. If you have to stay in school for that accounting degree "to fall back on", in the full expectation of "falling back", it *will* effect your ability to make music.
At least Warner is looking out there, and noticing that things have in fact changed out from under them, and that they need to do something, other than just "business as usual".
Actually, there are literally dozens of ways they could deal with these issues technologically; several of them even involve the record companies themselves setting up *real* P2P networks, which don't actually suck for their revenue models, like Napster or GNUtella (the first because of the central control given to a single company, the second because of lack of scalability -- neither because of real piracy concerns).
It's amusing that they've emphasized "Agile development" (corporate code from a particular corporation for "Extreme Programming"). Most likely, they already have someone in mind, and the posting is to satisfy legal requirements.
No one would make that mistake... the Dragon chip apparently has an MMU.
The Motorolla "DragonBall" CPU (the CPU used in the "Palm Pilot" and similar toys) doesn't have an MMU. Without an MMU, it's useless for running a protected mode OS with virtual memory.
Yeah, there's a couple of kludgy ports to the thing (a kludgy Linux and a kludgy BSD 2.9, last I heard), but they are just as unstable as the PalmOS (or Windows 3.11, for that matter), because of lack of memory protection.
I don't understand why they don't put an MMU into the "Palm Pilot" or other devices. Maybe they *like* having the things crash because one idiot writes one bad program, and stomps on everything else so bad you have to hit the rest buttin with a paper-clip.
Maybe we all need to compare PalmOS to Windows 3.11 more often and more loudly, to shame them into putting in the extra square millimeter of doped silicon into the surface mount plastic case...
To make an incredibly unpopular comment, I will point out that even at over 1,000,000 people (a gross overestimate by the news media, IMO), nation-wide, in China protesting their government at the time of Tieneman Square, that's a really tiny fraction of the population.
In fact, it's 1/10th of 1% of the population of China, at the time.
The moral equivalent in the U.S. would be if all the people camped out in and around Hayden Lake, Idaho (~250,000 people) demanded that the U.S. Government change to suit them.
Also, FWIW, the U.S. currently has about 6 times that many people in prison -- an an equal number of police officers.
Should we let our own dissidents dictate our form of government "because there's a lot of them"?
The people involved in both cases are tiny minorities of radical dissidents, and aren't representative of the will of the overwhelming majority of the general population.
Yeah,the numbers seem like large numbers, but it's really relative.
The Chevy Sprint and Geo Metro and other Chevy cars of that vintage had a blinking "check engine" light, which would go on automatically as soon as you hit 30,000 miles, and each 30,000 miles, after that.
This was a result of a single-pole, double throw switch in the odometer. There was also a single-pole double-throw switch inside the fuse area (below and two the left of the steering wheel). In other words, a standard two location three-way switch assembly.
The "corrective" action for the blinky light was to bring the car into the dealer, pay them a lot of money for "scheduled maintenance", and whatever engine parts they happened to have an excess of in inventory in their parts department that month.
And for them to toggle the position of the switch in the fuse holder, to turn off the blinky light until you'd gone another 30,000 miles.
Hooray for blinky lights that get people to spend money at the dealer!
Slashdot Mirror
"Seems like a waste..."
Yes. Kind of like "Bombing Al Qaeda Back To The Stone Age(tm)".
When we're done, those people will be living in caves!
Uh, what do you mean, "they are *already* living in caves"?
-- Terry
If they want IP protection, then they must disclose. Disclosure is the price of admission for IP protection.
If they claim that the information was stolen, then disclosed to third parties, *it doesn't matter* if the original disclosure was illegal: the information loses trade secret status, and the damages they are able to recover are *only* against the original discloser.
Only patents and copyrights provide IP protection for disclosed information.
-- Terry
The GPL/BKL are exactly analogous.
The GPL is an instrumentality of the GNU Manifesto: it exists to achive the goals of the GNU Manifesto, and to help the world envisioned by RMS, when he set those goals, to come into existance.
That is the reason for the existance of the GPL.
Likewise, the BKL is an instrumentality of the same philosophy, but with a somewhat narrower scope of operation. It intends to make source code available, and gives economic incentive for that to happen, by providing a service for free which would otherwise have a high price attached to it, in exchange.
The interesting thing here is that the GPL does not work, if the source code is available under terms other than the GPL.
The BKL doesn't work if the service it provides in exchange for making source code available is available under other terms.
Consider that, with a comparable product available, there is no need to accept the GPL restrictions placed upon you for redistribution and source availability that use of GCC contractually requires.
Similarly, with a comparable product available, there is no need to accept the BKL restrictions placed upon you for source availability that use of BitKeeper contractually requires.
Both achieve their goals through force of contract, and both achieve their goals through the unavailability of alternatives. This unavailability is through an enforced barrier to entry.
In the GCC case, the barrier to entry is that one is not permitted to make derivative works which are not also under the GPL; in the BitKeeper case, it is that one is not permitted to use BitKeeper itself in the creation of derivative works.
In both cases, what is being controlled is derivation.
In fact, the GPL is not a very effective instrumentality of the GNU Manifesto; it fails to address patent and other issues addressed by the M
nifesto, and it's emergent properties are not precisely aligned with the results the GNU Manifesto claims it wants. A better instrumentality would be something like the Cygnus eCOS license. I think the GPL is a trade-off, required by a complexity barrier: any more complex, and it would be a better instrumentality, but it would be harder to get programmers to attach it to their code, without them feeling the need to consult a lawyer first.
On a side note, your Microsoft argument is specious; assuming wide deployment of a "trusted computing environment", Microsoft no longer has an incentive to keep their source code to themselves in order to achieve their own barrier to entry: the barrier is replaced with the fact that you can not digitally sign the resulting code in order to get the hardware to run it, only Microsoft can, so the source code no longer needs obscurity protection.
At this point, it is all about controlling barriers to your competition, and it doesn't matter if you are the FSF, BitMover, or Microsoft.
The net effect of all this is that it destroys the intellectual commons, no matter how you look at it. The FSF is just as guilty as Microsoft, in this regard.
-- Terry
You obviously don't know Larry McVoy.
I first met Larry McVoy on usenet. He was highly cogent in his arguments, and generally a very intelligent guy. Unlike a lot of the idiots who came in after the NSF quit running the Internet, you could actually hold a technical discussion with him, after which you would have a solution, or an approach to a solution, for the problem at hand.
I've talked with him on the telephone on several occasions, when issues have come up that merited a telephone conversation; I've called him, and he's called me, though it has been a while since our last voice conversation.
When Larry McVoy left Sun, he wanted to take the SunOS 4.1.3_U1 code (U2 has not yet come out), and release it under the GPL. This was quite visionary, given the amount of competition that Linux is now giving Sun, even internally, within their own engineering staff, these days. Sun would not do the release, because it would cannibalize their SVR4-derived "Solaris" market.
Larry's motivations in this case were, I think, base... in that he wanted to "rescue" the important work which had been done on the BSD dervice Solaris (SunOS) code base. He saw the GPL as a way to do that.
Larry was an early GPL advocate, in this sense. Frankly, I'm glad he failed in this endeavor; it wporbably would have meant the end of BSD derived OSs, which generally exist only because the GPL is too draconian for people who need to do business.
Larry became an outspoken Linux advocate; he authored the "lmbench" suite of micro-benchmarks, all of which show Linux in a good light, compared to its competition. One can argue that these tools drove a number of the important design decisions in the Linux kernel itself, which, among other things, led to the current threading model and code, which *depends* upon the fact that process context switch overhead is minimal, and there is very little difference between it and thread context switch overhead.
Larry advocated Open Source software, in general: BitKeeper, by it's nature, *from the beginning*, offered free licenses those people who woul publish their source archive, as the cost of the license.
Thus, by its nature, BitKeeper encourages free software by providing economic incentive.
But, like the GPL itself, it is an instrumentality, and the instrumentality must not obey the same rules as that on which it acts.
The GPL carries a prohibition against modification: it is not itself under the GPL. Ask yourself "Why?".
For this same reason, good or bad, BitKeeper can not itself be Open Source software. Yes, there are economic issues. Despite people's intentional misinterpretation of the word "support" in Larry's statements to mean "technical support" rather than "economic support", Larry's correct: the Open Source model is not economically self supporting for stategic projects... it only supports itself for tactical projects.
That RMS is complaining about BitKeeper now is, I think, sour grapes. That's the kind interpretation. The unkind interpreation is that BitKeeper is a more effective mechanism than the GPL itself for achiving the goals of the GNU Manifesto, of which the GPL is an instrumentality.
So before you call Larry an idiot, or blindly GPL or even BSDL your next set of source code, understand the long term consequences of the license.
Frankly, I'm glad he's let go of the understandable bitterness that comes from pouring your soul into a product, only to have it hidden away in a vault by an employer with goals other than advancement of the art and science of computer science.
I think this license demonstrates that he's come to his senses, on strategic issues -- a painful lesson. Would that RMS would so the same.
Thanks,
-- Terry
Chemical Magic - 2nd edition
L.A.Ford, E.W.Grundmeier (Designer)
Dover Pubications (August 1993)
ISBN: 0486676285
There is one that's especially good for Halloween, where it starts out whit, and after about a 20 second delay, turns orange, and then another 20 seconds or so, turns black. It's a Potassium dichromate experiment that's pretty cool (it's an endothermic reastion that causes the color change for yellow (hidden in the white) through orange, to black (a dark blue/black).
You may also want to look at:
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/demoser.html
And:
Chemical Demonstrations - A Sourcebook for Teachers - 2nd edition
L.R.Summerlin, J.L.Ealy Jr.
Amer.Chem.Soc. (1988)
ISBN 0-8412-1481-6 (v1), 0-8412-1535-9 (v2)
-- Terry
So? Harmonize already... Taiwan is 50 years after the death of the author, Australia is 50 years after the death of the author. What part of "Don't think originally, and adopt everyone else's laws" doesn't the U.S. understand? I guess it only works with European laws...
I would say that this was an example of "Some pigs being more equal than others", but of course, since the Sonny Bono extension, "Animal Farm" is back to being copywritten...
-- Terry
Have they tried advertising? If so, that's probably the problem: the people who are interested in the low-brow games they produce these days are illiterate.
None of the games they are producing these days are targetted at the market "people who can read".
You want to sell a game to my mother? She plays "Zelda" on her Nintendo; she also played "Pogo Joe", and "Space Invaders".
You want to sell a game to one of my three sisters? Try "Zork", or any of the other text adventure games. Or try "Breakout" or "Arachnoid" or "Ms. Pacman" or an older pinball game. Or, if you want to sell a PC game, try "Sim City" or "Lemmings".
I know that doesn't sound like most of the games they sell these days I guess that's why they don't sell them to women.
-- Terry
My suggestion is... take off the rose-colored glasses.
If you put the hardware in the physical posession of the students, it's going to have all sorts of things done to it, no matter what you try to do to stop it.
I understand that the reason for this is to limit the support overhead, but you are not going to win, and if you go in with the assumption you are, you are going to get hurt much worse than if you don't.
-- Terry
"That's nice Terry, but being able to write C code doesn't disqualify you from being a son of a bitch."
And pretending that poverty isn't something all political parties define one way or another in order to achieve their goals doesn't make it any less true.
| poverty: 1 a : the state of one who lacks
| a usual or socially acceptable amount of
| money or material possessions
If it can be defined into existance, it can be defined away.
-- Terry
RIAA's *real* problem is going to be that none of these computers have static IP addresses, because the U.S. has hogged the IPv4 space, and isn't very interested in switching over to IPv6 until it can decrupt everything in real time.
Makes them really hard to block at the routers, without blocking everything. 8-).
-- Terry
Quit redefining "poor"... use the system header file instead. Thanks.
/* __POOR_H__ */
#ifndef __POOR_H__
#define __POOR_H__ 1
#define WEEKS_PER_YEAR 52
#define WORK_HOURS_PER_WEEK 40
#define MINIMUM_WAGE 5.15
#define IS_POOR(yearly_income) \
((yearly_income (MINIMUM_WAGE * \
WORK_HOURS_PER_WEEK * WEEKS_PER_YEAR) ? 1 : 0)
#endif
You want to define certain people as poor? You have three manifest constants to work with. All three of them can only be changed with the approval of standards committees. Knock yourself out.
Notice: Cranking up any of these values to crank up income for the bottom rung is fine... but nothing you do will make them definitionally "poor"... the only thing that can do that is them not working full time.
FWIW: Most wealthy Libertarians, just like most wealthy Democrats or wealthy Republicans, etc., are all for bribing less well-off people to not steal their stuff. The various political parties just disagree as to what form the bribes should take.
-- Terry
In related news, the MPAA lobbies for legislation to illegalize Viagra...
Let's see their thinking...
A DVD has about as many bits per second as you can transfer. Basically, that means that for a 1:40 DVD, you would need to keep up the contact for an hour and 40 minutes to be able to transfer the 6GB involved.
Therefore, anyone who attempts to obtain the ability to do that must be a video pirate...
-- Terry
I love W5. It implies that the vulnerability is the leakage of information to an intruder.
It seems to me that, since it points out the the scans are often run as "System" by the legitimate users, then by properly crafting a response to an inquiry, and puttting my machine out there, the real vulnerability is to the systems, like the domain controllers, which scan (potentially trojaned) remote machine, without dropping "System" priviledge first.
It seems to me that an exploit using SAMBA source code ought not to be that hard to write...
-- Terry
Is it really "winning", when Google removes all links to your web site?
I guess you could always live with print advertising... that really works well on the Internet, doesn't it?
Clue: URLs in a print advertisements aren't "clickable"...
-- Terry
2^36 = 2^4 (16) * 2^32 (4G) = 64G.
...bank selecting it in for the *entire duration* of the operation.
Also, the use of the extra 4 bits to get the full 36 bits requires use of the PAE.
Which, if you had ever read the processor manual, you would know requires *bank selection*.
Bank selection is incredibly useless. It doesn't let me have more than 4G of virtual address space split between user space and kernel space, combined.
Since I already have that with only 4G of RAM, and since the people who build servers that use that much memory aren't *stone stupid*, and tend to *dedicate* them to tasks, the extra RAM is basically useless.
The best you can get out of it is *a RAM disk*, and that still requires you copy crap all over.
You can't use the memory for *DMA buffers* or anything useful on which *the user process or the kernel operates*, without
The reason anyone want more address bits is to access more memory *simultaneously*, in a single program. If I were bumping my head on available RAM, I'd implement demand paging, and be done with it, wouldn't I? But that only works if I have the virtual address space to back the real memory *plus* the virtual memory, and I'm still limited to *32 bits* there, aren't I?
I guess maybe you are one of the Intel engineers who thought *bank selection* was a good idea?
Let me give you a clue: it's not.
Let me give you another clue: Segments are for worms: segment registers were a bad idea, too, which is why no one uses the damn things, except as extra registers ro hold things like thread contexts.
Try naming one modern OS that uses segments; the last one to do it was medium model Windows 3.11 and SCO Xenix 2.x, a full *decade* ago.
PS: If I wanted to use bank selection, I'd be writing software for the Commodore 64.
PPS: While we are at it: ring 1 and ring 2 were also stupid ideas; no modern OS uses anything other than ring 0 (kernel) and ring 3 (user). At least on the VAX architecture, you could use ring 2 to implement asynchronous system traps to call user functions from the kernel that ran as if they were in ring 3, only on a different stack. Too bad Intel's ring 1 & 2 aren't even useful for that.
PPPS: Try building a processor that's friendly to how people are actually going to use it, instead of pretending we live in some imaginary hardware designer universe where Spock has a beard, for a change.
-- Terry
It's a word originating in 1967.
It means, in this context, "removing the middleman". The original definition is "removal of the intermediary".
-- Terry
The number one value of a 64 bit CPU, to my mind, is the ability for it to address more than 4G of RAM, without destroying locality, like the PAE does on 32 bit processors.
PAE, for those of you who are, as yet, unaware of it, allows you to access more than 4G of physical RAM, by reviving an old technique called "bank selection". It's fairly useless for most of the applicaitons for which you would want more RAM in the first place, since it doesn't increase the allowable size of the kernel or process virtual address space at all, so the only thing it lets ou do is use RAM instead of swap, and not run lots of applications at the same time, without a lot of VM changes.
Intel keeps trying to sell us Itanium on performance, when, in fact, we don't care. What we care about is the ability to operate on larger data sets.
Intel: just because your delivery of access to larger amounts of physical RAM on 32 bit processors, via the PAE, was not welcomed (mostly because it was implemented in a way that was totally useless to software engineers and OS designers), doesn't mean that access to more RAM *by a single kernel or process* will not be the major selling point for Itanium: it will.
Get your crap together, and quit concentrating on clock rates.
-- Terry
An embedded system is not a general purpose computer, on which people can run third party applications.
Your argument is valid for an embedded system, in which you control all software running on the platform, and in which your business model doesn't permit for future expansion into markets where there are application specific software requirements that don't result from consulting or OEM work by the original vendor.
For everything else, though, there's a need for protection domains, to act as a barrier between code you (the product vendor) wrote, and code written by someone else, and hosted on your device.
The Palm Pilot and similar devices don't have that.
You can argue that the Palm people didn't expect to have third party applicaitons which weren't vetted by their own Q.C. department, but if that's even ture, it would be because they overestimated their own ability to provide a "whole product", without third party involvement.
The Palm Pilot and related devices are popular today because the PalmOS platform, which may not have been intended to be any more open than your average game console, is in fact now much more open than, say, a firewall product.
Considering your firewall product, you've placed yourself in the position of having to support all third party applications that require an application layer proxy, by yourself.
This lets you manage the stability of the hardware platform you are using, since it lacks protection, but your cost is that every time Real comes out with a new product, or any time anyone else who doesn't know how to design a protocol comes out with a product that needs to transit your firewall to function, the options are only either the application isn't supported, or your company takes on the grunt work of creating the application layer proxy to support it.
IMO, that's not a sustainable business model. As an example: do you already support streaming media for Microsoft Media and Real Player? What about streaming Ogg Vorbis? How about FTP, which requires a stateful proxy?
For every mainstream protocol you can answer "yes" to, there are dozens of emerging protocols, with no clear winners, and even more protocols that are mainstream, but with little deployment in that model (how do you handle NAT-fanout of H.323 connections, for example?).
This is not to jump down your throat on this; I was a senior software engineer for a company that built a similar product (the Whistle InterJet), that did not permit third party access to the platform. I know from cold, personal experience that preventing platform access by third parties is not a long term success strategy.
-- Terry
"I believe that sometimes it could be better when a minority group of dissidents are able to dictate a form of government (for instance, to replace tyranny which has been instituted and sustained by a brainwashed majority)."
Aren't all majorities with which you don't personally agree the result of brainwashing?
"Democracy isn't necessarily the ultimate good. Imagine three wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner...."
This analogy works for the first night, if everyone wears their "I am a wolf" or their "I am a sheep" T-shirts, respectively. After the first night, the analogy breaks down.
-- Terry
Honestly this is a job I would consider doing.
I will now pause for everyone to finish going rabidly insane.
OK.
Yes, there are one or two phrases in the job description that are, at least on the fact of them, objectionable to the Slashdot crowd.
My personal concerns about this are whether this is a real CTO job, where there is a person who can set technology direction on behalf of the company, or whether you would be one CTO among dozens, and have no real power to implement changes at any fundamental level.
Unless it's the real thing, it's likely not going to result in anything at all, and you can all stop your paranoid worries. And if it *is* the real thing, and they get someone competent (a big "if"), you can all stop your paranoid worries.
Now look at the big picture: why is the music industry afraid of P2P and other online digitial distribution, when it's pretty clear that the primary use for these channels is for content that they would not usually consider distributing themselves?
My answer to this question is that the eventual results of this technology, if it prospers, is going to be disintermediation of artists and consumers.
There are a number to consequences to this which are -- believe it or not -- generally undesirable, and there are a number of *other* consequences to this which break their revenue models, and damage their ability to continue to do business.
To paraphrase what I think they've realized, "you can't piss in the wind"; it's reasonable for the company to seek alternatives to protecting their revenue model -- and, as a side effect, protect the generally desirable things which come with that revenue model, such as the ability of individual bands to make enough money that they can *be* bands full time, and have a reasonable chance of paying the rent when they are 65 and no longer interesting to their former primary markets. Bands die out because they're old, or because they've lost their social relevence, or their superstar lead singer has died, or any of the dozens of fates which can befall a band. If you have to stay in school for that accounting degree "to fall back on", in the full expectation of "falling back", it *will* effect your ability to make music.
At least Warner is looking out there, and noticing that things have in fact changed out from under them, and that they need to do something, other than just "business as usual".
Actually, there are literally dozens of ways they could deal with these issues technologically; several of them even involve the record companies themselves setting up *real* P2P networks, which don't actually suck for their revenue models, like Napster or GNUtella (the first because of the central control given to a single company, the second because of lack of scalability -- neither because of real piracy concerns).
It's amusing that they've emphasized "Agile development" (corporate code from a particular corporation for "Extreme Programming"). Most likely, they already have someone in mind, and the posting is to satisfy legal requirements.
-- Terry
No one would make that mistake... the Dragon chip apparently has an MMU.
The Motorolla "DragonBall" CPU (the CPU used in the "Palm Pilot" and similar toys) doesn't have an MMU. Without an MMU, it's useless for running a protected mode OS with virtual memory.
Yeah, there's a couple of kludgy ports to the thing (a kludgy Linux and a kludgy BSD 2.9, last I heard), but they are just as unstable as the PalmOS (or Windows 3.11, for that matter), because of lack of memory protection.
I don't understand why they don't put an MMU into the "Palm Pilot" or other devices. Maybe they *like* having the things crash because one idiot writes one bad program, and stomps on everything else so bad you have to hit the rest buttin with a paper-clip.
Maybe we all need to compare PalmOS to Windows 3.11 more often and more loudly, to shame them into putting in the extra square millimeter of doped silicon into the surface mount plastic case...
-- Terry
To make an incredibly unpopular comment, I will point out that even at over 1,000,000 people (a gross overestimate by the news media, IMO), nation-wide, in China protesting their government at the time of Tieneman Square, that's a really tiny fraction of the population.
In fact, it's 1/10th of 1% of the population of China, at the time.
The moral equivalent in the U.S. would be if all the people camped out in and around Hayden Lake, Idaho (~250,000 people) demanded that the U.S. Government change to suit them.
Also, FWIW, the U.S. currently has about 6 times that many people in prison -- an an equal number of police officers.
Should we let our own dissidents dictate our form of government "because there's a lot of them"?
The people involved in both cases are tiny minorities of radical dissidents, and aren't representative of the will of the overwhelming majority of the general population.
Yeah,the numbers seem like large numbers, but it's really relative.
-- Terry
RMS is not a Communist; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Karl Marx did.
He's also not a luddite; if he were, he would have written a "Manifesto", like Theodore "Ted, The Unibomber" Kazinsky did.
Uh... Oh... Er... Wait...
-- Terry
Don't just keep driving... also, flip a switch.
The Chevy Sprint and Geo Metro and other Chevy cars of that vintage had a blinking "check engine" light, which would go on automatically as soon as you hit 30,000 miles, and each 30,000 miles, after that.
This was a result of a single-pole, double throw switch in the odometer. There was also a single-pole double-throw switch inside the fuse area (below and two the left of the steering wheel). In other words, a standard two location three-way switch assembly.
The "corrective" action for the blinky light was to bring the car into the dealer, pay them a lot of money for "scheduled maintenance", and whatever engine parts they happened to have an excess of in inventory in their parts department that month.
And for them to toggle the position of the switch in the fuse holder, to turn off the blinky light until you'd gone another 30,000 miles.
Hooray for blinky lights that get people to spend money at the dealer!
-- Terry
Where the name "voodoo" comes from: it's from a song:
.
...
...
"You Do Something to Me"
Words and Music by ColePorter , 1929
You do somethin' to me,
Somethin' that simply mystifies me,
Tell me, why should it be?
You have the power to hypnotize me . .
Let me live 'neath your spell,
Do do that 'voodoo' that you do so well!
For you do somethin' to me,
That nobody else could do!
You . . . do . . . somethin' to me,
Somethin' that simply mystifies me,
Tell . . . me . . . why should it be?
You have the power to hypnotize me
Let me live 'neath your spell,
Do do that 'voodoo' that
you do so well!
For you do somethin' to me,
That nobody else could do!
That nobody else could do
-- Terry