I don't have enough sysadmin experience to judge, but IF Apple chose poor* permissions, then it is partially their fault.
After all, there seem to be a lot of people on/. who have jumped on MS for not making people run as non-admin before Vista; and what's that besides just choosing a poor set of default permissions?
* You could define poor as "not as strict as reasonably possible"
(VMWare I can kind of see, if they were deliberately sticking to all free solutions, but no comparison to running on the host system? That's just bad reporting IMO.)
I know I can do something like this with VMWare right now, but if it's built in to the kernel that would be even better.
Better why?
Keeping in mind that they have an active interest in promoting this view, a VMWare paper states that their software is substantially faster (we're talking an order of magnitude less overhead in some microbenchmarks) than hardware VM.
Even university libraries often don't carry them, and when they do, they're often on reserve so you can't take them out, and have to stay in the library. (Or have a very short loan period of a couple hours or so.) At least from my experience.
However, for some topics, old editions can be great. For the calc book mentioned, the previous edition can be had from half.com for as little as $5; $15 supposedly new. For something like calc, this should work pretty well unless the assignments are saying "do this problem from the book". (Then again, if you're not actually taking the class, whether it matches its assignment is unimportant if you can figure out an appropriately relevant sample of questions.) For other topics, like some areas of computer science or bio, this isn't necessarily an ideal solution.
More important, I think, than homework assignments is having the textbooks
And also equally important in many topics is the ability to get feedback from the prof about your work. Suppose I do an assignment from MIT's intro CS class. It works, but now where can I get feedback about my design? About alternate approaches? For that matter, how can I be sure that I thought of everything the professor did? If I'm stuck on something, who can I turn to for help?
There's a LOT more to what you get from a college education than just what MIT has up on the OCW site. (Not to bash them, because it really seems like it could be a great resource for a lot of stuff. I'm just saying that it still falls far short of even just the academic part of college.)
I'm sorry, but some of the people working on this stuff are incredibly smart. Maybe the system will be cracked, but it is by no means guaranteed.
Don't you get it? The system *HAS* been cracked, because it's using the same system as DVD-videos usually use (CSS)! You can't have hardware that's easily updatable, because it's backwards compatible with all the DVD players that are out there that don't have that. The worst they could do is make you get a new burner. But once you burn it, BAM!, it's yours to crack.
Once it is ratified as an ISO Standard, the standard is locked up and anyone that does want to a copy has to buy it from ISO. These are copyrighted. They're not cheap; thousands of dollars. Out of the reach of the average hobbyist, and not listed anywhere on the Internet. That 6,000 page draft will vanish into the mists of time.
You mean like the C++ standard (ISO:14882) which can be downloaded as a PDF for $32 or purchased hardcopy for something like $300, and for which there are multiple sources for drafts?
Current DVD-video DRM doesn't have that ability. The proposed product will be compatible with current players. Therefore there almost can't be a limit on the number of playings.
The only thing they could do is sell special discs that have decaying dye, a la Divx. But in that case you could burn, then immediately rip the discs, then write to normal DVD.
In any case, the summary's statement that they limit the number of playings is entirely unsupported by either linked article, and the submitter probably made it up.
There are a number of posts in this story talking about the CSS region of DVD-Rs. Currently, these regions are "pre-burned" with all zeros essentially, but this won't work for burning CSS-encrypted discs. Hence the new discs. (You could probably get by with just a firmware update in many current drives I would reckon.)
I did a neat little project with ncurses for a class as an undergrad. It was mostly an excuse to learn curses, but it was a neat little program that would send HTTP requests you could define and display the response. (Sort of like a telnet, but without the free-form "type anything" aspect of it.) I ended up writing some widget classes, like text boxes or checkboxes, that worked somewhat like what you'd see in a GUI toolkit. There were a couple projects along that line already, but it was sort of a fun exercise to do ourselves.
But at the same time, every browser has ctrl-+ and ctrl-- to change text size. Opera goes further and scales everything somewhat uniformly, so the layout stays in the same proportions. (This has both advantages and disadvantages.)
It's not quite as nice as resize the window -> resize the text size, but it's not exactly a major disadvantage either unless you're constantly changing your layout. (Not to mention many terminals *don't* scale text size when you resize the windows, but do essentially the same thing the browser does.)
Of course, they will tell you that it requires a special drive because they will want to keep the cost extremely high (so that it is only affordable by people running kiosks)...
Um, you do realize that there is a version of this that is meant for direct-to-consumer use, right?
This technology is a few years too early to have a serious impact on Netflix.... Who in their right mind is going to feel good about waiting 5 hours for a movie download?
The same people who have to wait at least a day for Netflix to mail you a movie you want?
Now, this is before we even get started on the addition DRM crap they want to subject their customers to.
Which for practical purposes is no more DRM than Netflix gives you. Once you take a file you download and burn it, you have what Netflix would have sent you except on a DVD-R instead of a pressed disc. (I think the bit of the summary about limiting playback is FUD; I don't see anything in either article mentioning it, and two other posters as-of now concur. I think it's just an iTunes-like thing: you download a DRM'd file, then can burn it.)
In fact, in some sense, you can do MORE with this file because you can gave it on your computer hard drive without running the DVD through DeCSS first.
How fast would I get the DVD if I'm downloading it from one source? It'd take days if not weeks of downloading in the background
Don't assume that. The fastest transfer rates I've seen are from single, high-powered sources. 3 MB/s from Napster at one point (this is the "new", subscription Napster, not the old one; I had a "free" subscription at the time from my university, though I was off campus at the time I saw this) is my all-time high. 800 KB/s from Microsoft last night is the higest I've seen since from non-LAN sources.
They'd certainly need beefy servers and an enviable connection, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time.
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
The first limitation is not possible, unless DIVX really won against DVD.
I don't see anything in either article that says they limit playback.
The second limitation is also not part of the DVD-Video standard, and it means that you probably need some windows program that downloads the video in Arbitrariy-proprietary-DRM-format-173, then converts they to a a non-standard DVD you can only play on windows or off-standard DVD players.
You're half right I think. My reading is that what you download isn't DVD-Video, but can then be burned to DVD, at which point it is converted to DVD-Video and will playback on any DVD player. But the number of times you can do that burn from the original file (as opposed to copying the resulting DVD) is limited. Just like the way that iTunes will let you burn AAC-encoded files to CD some limited number of times.
Oops. I think that computers should come with some sort of lock where you have to pass a simple mental function test before you can use them to prevent things like posting to/. when you're dead tired.;-)
Yeah, I can't read; my original post should probably be modded down, and/or you up. (/. needs a -1, misinformative rating...)
The power sheet, says Takao Someya, professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo, relies on the well-known physical principle of electromagnetic induction, used to charge electric toothbrushes and some RFID tags. (Emphasis mine)
So the device more or less tells the pad that it wants power.
These wouldn't exactly be cheaper, but I paid $30 for a charger for my cell phone a couple weeks ago. (Don't shop at the Cingular store for stuff like.) Even the 3rd party one that Best Buy or Circuit City was like $22...
Keep in mind, Windows is a *lot* more than the Linux kernel, so it's not easy to do a direct comparison. Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for the size of the equivalent components of a Linux distro based upon the (admittedly very strong) assumpition that the ratio of bzip2'd tarball size is proportional to the SLOC count with the same coefficient across kernel versions and across projects.
This site gives the SLOC count of an unspecified version of kernel 2.6 as of oct 2004 at 4.3 million. The 2.6.8 (released Oct 04) bzip2'd tarball is 35M, so that's about 125,000 SLOC per meg of tarballs.
* The latest kernel version, 2.6.19.1, is 41MB, so estimate 5.1M SLOC. * X.org 6.9 is 45MB, so estimate 5.4M SLOC. Note that the latest version is 7.1, and I think it's likely that it's noticably larger, so this is probably an underestimate. (Modular x.org is harder to get a total size of because 6.9's src is one file.) * I had a hard time getting a good estimate of KDE, because it has a lot of stuff that isn't part of Windows (e.g. kdevelop, koffice) and because I'm not sure what each package does. I estimate 90MB of bzip2'd stuff that corresponds to Windows code. I counted from the development snapshot: kdeaccessibility (8.4MB), kdeadmin (2), kdebase (23), kdebindings (5.4), kdegames (10.3), kdegraphics (7.1), kdelibs (15.1), kdemultimedia (6), kdenetwork (7.2), kdeutils (2.8). In particular, I omitted kdeartwork and kdeedu, as well as all the kdeextragear packages. That's 11M SLOC.
Between those numbers, we're still at under 25M SLOC, even if you add a couple million for inaccuracies. This leaves a huge gap to the 50 mil. in Windows.
Anyone have any explanation of why it's so high? I don't know how those were counted (I've just heard the 50 mil tossed around), so is it possible they difference is just how you count? Are they including things like MSIE and the.Net framework? Is MS's style just more verbose?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have enough sysadmin experience to judge, but IF Apple chose poor* permissions, then it is partially their fault.
/. who have jumped on MS for not making people run as non-admin before Vista; and what's that besides just choosing a poor set of default permissions?
After all, there seem to be a lot of people on
* You could define poor as "not as strict as reasonably possible"
Okay, I read the charts wrong because I'm apparently an idiot. Native times are the first bar in each graph.
Though VMWare would still have been nice...
Why no comparison against VMWare or native?
(VMWare I can kind of see, if they were deliberately sticking to all free solutions, but no comparison to running on the host system? That's just bad reporting IMO.)
I know I can do something like this with VMWare right now, but if it's built in to the kernel that would be even better.
Better why?
Keeping in mind that they have an active interest in promoting this view, a VMWare paper states that their software is substantially faster (we're talking an order of magnitude less overhead in some microbenchmarks) than hardware VM.
Even university libraries often don't carry them, and when they do, they're often on reserve so you can't take them out, and have to stay in the library. (Or have a very short loan period of a couple hours or so.) At least from my experience.
However, for some topics, old editions can be great. For the calc book mentioned, the previous edition can be had from half.com for as little as $5; $15 supposedly new. For something like calc, this should work pretty well unless the assignments are saying "do this problem from the book". (Then again, if you're not actually taking the class, whether it matches its assignment is unimportant if you can figure out an appropriately relevant sample of questions.) For other topics, like some areas of computer science or bio, this isn't necessarily an ideal solution.
More important, I think, than homework assignments is having the textbooks
And also equally important in many topics is the ability to get feedback from the prof about your work. Suppose I do an assignment from MIT's intro CS class. It works, but now where can I get feedback about my design? About alternate approaches? For that matter, how can I be sure that I thought of everything the professor did? If I'm stuck on something, who can I turn to for help?
There's a LOT more to what you get from a college education than just what MIT has up on the OCW site. (Not to bash them, because it really seems like it could be a great resource for a lot of stuff. I'm just saying that it still falls far short of even just the academic part of college.)
I'm sorry, but some of the people working on this stuff are incredibly smart. Maybe the system will be cracked, but it is by no means guaranteed.
Don't you get it? The system *HAS* been cracked, because it's using the same system as DVD-videos usually use (CSS)! You can't have hardware that's easily updatable, because it's backwards compatible with all the DVD players that are out there that don't have that. The worst they could do is make you get a new burner. But once you burn it, BAM!, it's yours to crack.
Once it is ratified as an ISO Standard, the standard is locked up and anyone that does want to a copy has to buy it from ISO. These are copyrighted. They're not cheap; thousands of dollars. Out of the reach of the average hobbyist, and not listed anywhere on the Internet. That 6,000 page draft will vanish into the mists of time.
You mean like the C++ standard (ISO:14882) which can be downloaded as a PDF for $32 or purchased hardcopy for something like $300, and for which there are multiple sources for drafts?
Current DVD-video DRM doesn't have that ability. The proposed product will be compatible with current players. Therefore there almost can't be a limit on the number of playings.
The only thing they could do is sell special discs that have decaying dye, a la Divx. But in that case you could burn, then immediately rip the discs, then write to normal DVD.
In any case, the summary's statement that they limit the number of playings is entirely unsupported by either linked article, and the submitter probably made it up.
There are a number of posts in this story talking about the CSS region of DVD-Rs. Currently, these regions are "pre-burned" with all zeros essentially, but this won't work for burning CSS-encrypted discs. Hence the new discs. (You could probably get by with just a firmware update in many current drives I would reckon.)
I did a neat little project with ncurses for a class as an undergrad. It was mostly an excuse to learn curses, but it was a neat little program that would send HTTP requests you could define and display the response. (Sort of like a telnet, but without the free-form "type anything" aspect of it.) I ended up writing some widget classes, like text boxes or checkboxes, that worked somewhat like what you'd see in a GUI toolkit. There were a couple projects along that line already, but it was sort of a fun exercise to do ourselves.
But at the same time, every browser has ctrl-+ and ctrl-- to change text size. Opera goes further and scales everything somewhat uniformly, so the layout stays in the same proportions. (This has both advantages and disadvantages.)
It's not quite as nice as resize the window -> resize the text size, but it's not exactly a major disadvantage either unless you're constantly changing your layout. (Not to mention many terminals *don't* scale text size when you resize the windows, but do essentially the same thing the browser does.)
Of course, they will tell you that it requires a special drive because they will want to keep the cost extremely high (so that it is only affordable by people running kiosks)...
Um, you do realize that there is a version of this that is meant for direct-to-consumer use, right?
Hmm, apparently I've had the wrong impression.
I don't use iTunes, so don't have firsthand knowledge. (I rarely get new music, and when I do, it's usually full albums, so I buy the CD.)
This technology is a few years too early to have a serious impact on Netflix. ... Who in their right mind is going to feel good about waiting 5 hours for a movie download?
The same people who have to wait at least a day for Netflix to mail you a movie you want?
Now, this is before we even get started on the addition DRM crap they want to subject their customers to.
Which for practical purposes is no more DRM than Netflix gives you. Once you take a file you download and burn it, you have what Netflix would have sent you except on a DVD-R instead of a pressed disc. (I think the bit of the summary about limiting playback is FUD; I don't see anything in either article mentioning it, and two other posters as-of now concur. I think it's just an iTunes-like thing: you download a DRM'd file, then can burn it.)
In fact, in some sense, you can do MORE with this file because you can gave it on your computer hard drive without running the DVD through DeCSS first.
How fast would I get the DVD if I'm downloading it from one source? It'd take days if not weeks of downloading in the background
Don't assume that. The fastest transfer rates I've seen are from single, high-powered sources. 3 MB/s from Napster at one point (this is the "new", subscription Napster, not the old one; I had a "free" subscription at the time from my university, though I was off campus at the time I saw this) is my all-time high. 800 KB/s from Microsoft last night is the higest I've seen since from non-LAN sources.
They'd certainly need beefy servers and an enviable connection, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time.
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
The first limitation is not possible, unless DIVX really won against DVD.
I don't see anything in either article that says they limit playback.
The second limitation is also not part of the DVD-Video standard, and it means that you probably need some windows program that downloads the video in Arbitrariy-proprietary-DRM-format-173, then converts they to a a non-standard DVD you can only play on windows or off-standard DVD players.
You're half right I think. My reading is that what you download isn't DVD-Video, but can then be burned to DVD, at which point it is converted to DVD-Video and will playback on any DVD player. But the number of times you can do that burn from the original file (as opposed to copying the resulting DVD) is limited. Just like the way that iTunes will let you burn AAC-encoded files to CD some limited number of times.
"All DVD players come equipped with a key that fits the lock and allows for playback."
This is the equivalent of leaving your front door key underneath the mat. It won't be long at all until the crack is widely available.
Wow! Yeah! Those hackers are so cunning they got a crack done 7 years ago!
I don't see anywhere in either article that says they are limiting the number of times it's viewed. Can anyone clarify?
At 6AM in the morning
;-)
A little redundant, wouldn't you say? As opposed to the 6AM in the evening?
Oops. I think that computers should come with some sort of lock where you have to pass a simple mental function test before you can use them to prevent things like posting to /. when you're dead tired. ;-)
Yeah, I can't read; my original post should probably be modded down, and/or you up. (/. needs a -1, misinformative rating...)
So the device more or less tells the pad that it wants power.
These wouldn't exactly be cheaper, but I paid $30 for a charger for my cell phone a couple weeks ago. (Don't shop at the Cingular store for stuff like.) Even the 3rd party one that Best Buy or Circuit City was like $22...
50+ millions lines of code bloat
.Net framework? Is MS's style just more verbose?
I've wondered about this myself.
Keep in mind, Windows is a *lot* more than the Linux kernel, so it's not easy to do a direct comparison. Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for the size of the equivalent components of a Linux distro based upon the (admittedly very strong) assumpition that the ratio of bzip2'd tarball size is proportional to the SLOC count with the same coefficient across kernel versions and across projects.
This site gives the SLOC count of an unspecified version of kernel 2.6 as of oct 2004 at 4.3 million.
The 2.6.8 (released Oct 04) bzip2'd tarball is 35M, so that's about 125,000 SLOC per meg of tarballs.
* The latest kernel version, 2.6.19.1, is 41MB, so estimate 5.1M SLOC.
* X.org 6.9 is 45MB, so estimate 5.4M SLOC. Note that the latest version is 7.1, and I think it's likely that it's noticably larger, so this is probably an underestimate. (Modular x.org is harder to get a total size of because 6.9's src is one file.)
* I had a hard time getting a good estimate of KDE, because it has a lot of stuff that isn't part of Windows (e.g. kdevelop, koffice) and because I'm not sure what each package does. I estimate 90MB of bzip2'd stuff that corresponds to Windows code. I counted from the development snapshot: kdeaccessibility (8.4MB), kdeadmin (2), kdebase (23), kdebindings (5.4), kdegames (10.3), kdegraphics (7.1), kdelibs (15.1), kdemultimedia (6), kdenetwork (7.2), kdeutils (2.8). In particular, I omitted kdeartwork and kdeedu, as well as all the kdeextragear packages. That's 11M SLOC.
Between those numbers, we're still at under 25M SLOC, even if you add a couple million for inaccuracies. This leaves a huge gap to the 50 mil. in Windows.
Anyone have any explanation of why it's so high? I don't know how those were counted (I've just heard the 50 mil tossed around), so is it possible they difference is just how you count? Are they including things like MSIE and the