when you're working with files 50mb+, every revision takes up large amounts of space
That's not true. The whole point of incremental revisions is to store only the differences between two adjacent versions instead of the entire file. While for some types of files this may not be practical at this point (say, images or other binary data), I'm sure that there would be ways of getting that problem solved as well (for images: subtract one from another (or whatever the proper Photoshop term is); for Word(tm) documents: either use some sort of a macro that would insert/remove the portion of the text that's different, or save that as some form of metadata (not sure if that's possible here right now, but may be in the future when MS adopts XML)).
So, not only is it not impossible, but with a bit of work it might even be fairly straight-forward: set up a library of 'filters' or 'helpers', which can be modified by packages as they come and go. You install libjpg or libpng, and it comes with a filter that gets dropped somewhere into the "system folder", which defines how to create "diffs" of things; every time someone works with a jpg or a png file, the system knows how to save incremental changes. Worst-case scenario, naturally, is "save the whole damn thing".
But, as you point out, "we have the space, harddrives are so big nowadays"
Think about it. Transparent revision control built into the OS would be a godsend to many.
Version / revision control really sounds like *the* solution here. You get all the benefits of incremental changes getting recorded, the ability to bring up any previous version you'd like, creating branches for temporary documents as well as forks -- all as you mention.
Now, there are tools which would let you accomplish this, both in Unix-land as well as Windows-country (cvs and its derivative, cervisia, respectively). So why don't people use them?
1) the tools have to be installed manually 2) the tools have to be used explicitly 3) the tools have to be learned 4) all the concepts behind them are confusing to the user
So why doesn't someone incorporate those tools into the operating system? Would that be part of the backwards-compatibility cruft that the article talks about? Wouldn't people want this functionality there? After all, the user interface wouldn't require too many changes: opening up of a document would bring up the latest version on file, with an option in the "File" menu to select from the list of previous versions (potentially with a preview pane for comparison). Additionally, the program working on a document could save a new revision of the document with each exit of said program / closure of that document. Add to that the creation of a new revision (either by replacing the "Save" command with "Save as revision" or something along the lines, thereby making it a default; or by adding a new option / replacing "Save as" with "Save as revision").
Now, as far as I remember, someone's already done that at some point -- IIRC, VM or some other older OS had that option -- actually, it was the default. So why did that go away?
The streaming presentation will begin about 30 minutes before the test firing, roughly at 5:30 pm CST (23:30 GMT) Friday. Note that these times are the scheduled times. However, since this really is rocket science, times are approximate.
Most thieves using this method will just stand in the middle of the parking lot and hit the button. I.E. they're probably not going to be targetting a single car.
Exactly. If they have a 31337 h4x0r3d remote for scanning / opening doors to Fords/Mercurys/Lincolns (all manufactured by the same company), only the Fords, Mercurys and Lincolns will unlock their doors. Given the choice of an unlocked Ford vs. a still-locked Pontiac with a remote operating on a different (not-apparently-obbious-since-it's-aftermarket) frequency, the thief will prolly go for the Ford. At first. Then he'll smash the Pontiac's window, because the driver left their purse/wallet/portable cd player/radar detector/cb radio in the car.
Damn. I gotta take out the cb radio out of my car.
Although I usually do not recommend this approach, consider obtaining security through obscurity.
Factory-installed keyless entry / remote starter systems all come from the same company, so if you get a Dodge Intrepid with an installed system, it will be identical to every other Dodge Intrepid's system. If you're afraid of someone scanning the remote's codes to gain access to your car, consider getting an aftermarket system. They're abundant in today's DYI market, and every automotive store carries a few different brands. Most of them are likely to have varying circuitry, varying frequencies, varying communication protocols, which make it that much harder and impractical for a would-be thief to get a scanner for (instead, get a scanner that caters to a wider "audience", if you will).
Naturally, a thief bent on stealing your car might get frustrated with not being able to crack your remote's code, perhaps to the point of using a jimmy and scratching the precious paint job, or even using a blunt object and simply breaking the glass. But at least your car will still be there:)
Personally, I use a remote system from ICDynamics. It gives me remote start, keyless entry and trunk release options, and that's good enough for me. Gets good range, too (over 300ft), so I can start my car up from the comfort of my home on days like today (a few degrees below freezing).
No, I do not work for them:) I'm just a happy customer.
It would be grounded through the power-supply, would it not?
Yes indeed, and that was my point -- majority of motherboards are designed to get their ground via the power supplies (I haven't actually heard of any mobos getting their ground otherwise, but I'll leave it at "majority" just in case there's an odd-ball out there). So if the original poster's mobo was getting grounded by other means, it was most likely not by design, but due to error.
A lot of people have suggested LCD, but here's my take on this:
take an old LCD display, say, 800x240 or something similar and place it in the cutout for the keys in the keyboard, and cover it with a touch-screen layer. Draw your 'keyboard' on the LCD panel with software (very easy to reconfigure that way), and use the data from the touch-screen layer to determine which areas have been 'touched', mapping them to your 'keyboard'. Naturally, this gives you no keyboard feel, and would be very 'touchy' (pardon the pun).
Or instead of a touch-screen layer, build your own gloves, for which the only requirement would be an optical sensor under each fingertip, hooked up to the computer, which would tell you what area of the keyboard your fingertips are over based on timing data (analogous to the way arcade games "know" where you're pointing your gun at in Wild West Shootout or something). The only problem is, I don't know if this approach would work with LCD panels (somehow I don't think they're refreshed the same way as CRTs). So, the LCD + touchscreen approach might be more practical (if not simply feasible).
Either way, it would probably be expensive. But, if you're catering to an eager market (or planning to), you might be able to pull it off.
the mounting holes are surrounded by solder rings and obviously supposed to be grounded
I'm not so sure they're supposed to be grounded... IIRC, the solder rings aren't actually connected to other areas of the motherboards in a lot of cases (though some may be), so not much of motherboard grounding here. I think the solder rings are there to provide cushioning, if you will, for the screw / peg / riser that will be anchoring the mobo -- IOW, to dissipate the pressure across a larger area, like a washer would -- to avoid damage (e.g. cracking) of the circuit board. Also forces the mobo designers to route leads away from those holes, so screw heads and the like won't damage / short-circuit them.
The above statement was brought you by the nit-picking dept.
Wouldn't the motherboard be grounded as well through the PCI cards that contact both the MB and the case?
Not necessarily. Have a look at this picture, from an article at The Register, recently featured on Slashdot in the most dangerous server rooms. There's no enclosure for the cards to ground the motherboard to, but that "server" most is running. Therefore the motherboard manufacturers can't rely on grounding the mobos that way, either.
Incidentally, haven't you ever tested a motherboard that was *not* mounted in a case?:) You know, rest it on the foam it ships with, shlop in a video card, a stick of RAM and a CPU, hook up a power supply, keyboard and monitor...:)
Not all enclosures use metal risers for mounting motherboards. Some use plastic pegs. Plastic pegs don't conduct electricity. Motherboards have to work even if anchored with plastic pegs. Motherboards can't rely on being grounded via pegs/risers.
Motherboards require power to be supplied to them. Power supply cables have 'ground' leads in them. Motherboards get grounded via power supply cables.
Grounding of the motherboard most likely is not an issue here.
Have you made sure that with the lower risers all expansion cards (particularly the video card) were fully going into their slots? Sounds to me like your problem is right there, especially since you say that with the new risers the motherboard is 2mm higher than previously. 2mm is a *big* difference, and very well could have prevented your video card from working and/or made it work only some of the time.
Just my CDN$0.02
Ramifications for other distributed projects?
on
Cheating at Seti@home
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I wonder how this will affect other distributed projects, such as the cancer search. Apparently any time there is a prize involved, people are willing to forgo their ethics and the ulterior goals in favor of money. What would happen if this sort of cheating were uncovered in the cancer project? Will it undermine its reputation and credibility, even if only the stats were to have been sabotaged and not the results themselves? I'm sure that people would start peeping "Well, we can't trust those results now, can we?" And all those CPU cycles would have been wasted, after all.
1. Make sure software compiles! (judging from some replies, even that can't be taken for granted...) 2. Make sure software runs! (ditto) 3. Make sure all the functionality you expect from the kernel is there (i.e. if you compiled a driver for a network card, it better work and be backwards compatible, unless it's not supposed to anymore) 4. Make sure the software is stable (test the bejeezus out of the features -- if your cdrom or a scsi card requires a particular setting to work, or there are three ways for you to reference a device, test all of them (or at least the ones you care about) 5. If you encounter any bugs (related or unrelated), report them in enough detail for them to be reproducible. Keep it to the point and relevant to the topic. Use spell and grammar checkers:) 6. When updates/bugfixes come out, lather, rinse, repeat.
>>The statute goes even further. It says that if Spanish authorities deem >>something on a foreign-hosted Web site threatening to Spain's national >>defence, public order, consumer rights or other values, they can order >>Spanish operators to sever access to that site.
>>That clause puts Spain in the same league of content control as Saudi >>Arabia and China, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School expert >>on international Internet regulation.
>>"What is this going to cause?" Sanchez Almeida asked rhetorically. >>"Censorship."
>Nonsense again.
How is that nonsense? How is that not censorship?? Google and Freenet were deemed to be a threat to public order and to the government by Chinese officials -- that is not censorship either?
You cannot, therefore, create content and make it available at a certain address all the time.
That, however, is the whole idea, as far as I'm concerned. Not making your content distributed (i.e. making it available only at a certain address) makes it easy for those who oppose you to shut you down by getting your uplink disconnected, as well as leads you to being slashdotted and prevents you from getting your message across. This is why TV stations *broadcast* their signal via satellite to regional distribution centers (local cable companies) and make their content available via personal satellite dish receivers. Doing it point-to-point would be too costly.
All you can do is create the content and watch it get mixed with all the other content.
Well, kind of. Posting to Freenet will make your content available to people, but (if I understand the theory correctly) there's no way of browsing the network, but instead you have to have prior knowledge of what you're looking for. Thus you still need to have a means of advertising somewhere what people should be requesting (like knowing which coordinates to point your satellite dish to to receive the signal). Once you do that, though, the content can reach your audience. So your argument would be analogous to saying "why put up a satellite transmitter in the orbit, the signal will just get mixed with all the other signals from other satellites".
if you want a particular piece of content to remain available, the only way to ensure that is to keep injecting it again and again and again -- like the way spammers use email
If your issue is important, you'll find it worthwhile to - remind people about it - update your content (very few issues out there in the world do not have new developments coming out periodically) - make sure your content is always available to your audience
In that last respect, how would reinjectnig into Freenet be different from setting up a web page and never checking that it's actually accessible (network outage, web server crash, slashdotting)?
Otherwise, it goes through each node once, in the midst of whatever other content is being injected, and soon is gone.
This is common in ordinary distribution medias as well. Information no longer timely is being removed to make room for newer, pertinent, more important etc. data. Leaving things stored forever leads to space bloat. Do you keep archives of your local newspaper "just in case", "for future reference", or do you throw the issues out regularly, save for a timeless article or a humorous cartoon? If you keep everything around forever, I hope you have a big basement.
Most likely not. Casual pirates won't have the drive to go out of their way to pirate something and "stick it to the man" or prove their 1337-ness. Casual pirates usually try the easy route, or two, but give up afterwards. They don't know how to get around obstacles that seasoned pirates take for granted.
Seasoned pirates, on the other hand, just stay seasoned pirates, and go about their business.
Naturally, there are those who like new and shiny things, even if they pose no advantage over what they already own. But these people usually just go and buy the latest-and-greatest anyway instead of pirating.
Those who can, buy. Those who can't (and therefore have the drive), frequently pirate (e.g. overpriced Adobe products), don't do anything at all (i.e. use Paintbrush from Windows 3.1), or switch to cheaper alternatives (e.g. Linux).
Since 3G seems to be offering higher speeds, will the telco(s) introduce the service at low prices, only to win customers, garner major share of the market, only to raise prices afterwards (price increase follows bandwidth increase; "gotta pay recoup the cost of 3G license")? How are they coping with potential interference issues? What *is* the range of 3G anyway?
Pending the final outcome of this patent infringement case, I wonder how this will affect AMD and its *hammer chip uptake in the higher-end 64-bit x86 architecture market. Should Intel lose the case, does any of this have the potential to help AMD increase market share in the 64-bit arena, whether by virtue of being a pure, innovative technology (as opposed to being ripped from someone else), or by having an advantage of already being on the market while Intel redesigns their chips? Or by having cheaper chips (by not having to tack a litigation 'tax' onto the price of processors)?
Does any of this even matter? Will AMD still be the Cinderella in the corporate eyes when this is over?
That's a very good question. According to the Register article mentioned in an earlier post,
Intergraph and Intel have been involved in patent infringement lawsuits since 1997. In April this year, Intel agreed to pay Intergraph $300m damages to settle a separate infringement suit in Alabama that centered on Pentium processors.
I'd be very surprised if they had no knowledge of the technology.
Also, why a proprietary audio encoding scheme? Why not open source, royalty free Ogg Vorbis?
RIAA, my friend. RIAA. Do you think they'd let you build your own FM receiver coupled with an Ogg Vorbis decoder so that you could rip all of their high quality-encoded music to your hard drive and not pay for it? So what that MP3, Ogg and others are lossy compression -- given high enough bitrate, it's hard to tell. For listening in the car, with all the noise around you, even smaller bitrate is quality bitrate. But they'd be damned if they made your (or my) job of ripping their music easier.
While I agree with you that lack of driver support for a lot of hardware out there is a pain for linux users, I would like to point out two things to you:
- thanks to the power of the 'net, you can research your purchases ahead of time for compatibility issues, because if it's on the market, someone's prolly tried to use it already; additionally, for some of the more popular hardware, someone might have even written a (better) driver, or at least posted a hack on how to get the hardware to work -- which brings me to my second point: - a lot of hardware manufacturers do not disclose specs for their creations, for whatever reasons (some just, some not as much so)
This is why companies like Epson will continue to get my business, because they either provide a plethora of drivers for their hardware (mind you, I'm not talking strictly linux here), or at least they let you know how to write one yourself (should you feel so inclined and determined). In case of Epson, there are pages out there that tell you which scanners and which printers are supported, how to get them to work properly and get best results etc. All you have to do is 1) figure out your needs (i.e. a parport printer with high print speeds and cheap ink; or a network card that won't burden your CPU too much); 2) pick a few manufacturers; 3) pick models which match your needs; 4) research their support. In your case, I'd prolly pick a 3com-905 card, because I know they're fast, they're fairly cheap ($20-30), they beat the common Realtek8139 chipset in performance, and they're supported by the kernel. If performance is not an issue and you don't feel like spending 2x the money, get a Realtek-based card. They'll get you a link light, and they're painless to set up, too.
Bottom line is, research first, then make an educated purchase. And, I reiterate, this is not a linux-specific issue. A lot of hardware won't work with some Windows flavors either. Most purchases I make must meet this criterium: support under both linux and windows2k. I like the stability of win2k, so if your latest video-grabbing tv-tuner-equipped 512MB-RAM woof-woof-woof video card will only fully work under windows9x/me/xp, it might not even exist as far as I'm concerned. And I am not going to find that out after I've shelled out $300 for it.
The information is out there. Use it. Be creative with your google searches, spend as much time as is worth to you pursuing the data, and if at the end of the day you come up empty-handed (or worse, you find out you're SOL), go with the next hardware item on your list. Your next car choice. Your next mutual fund choice. The other presidential candidate.
As a few posters already mentioned, any distribution would probably work. From your rather short question it's hard to give an example of a definite solution. Some questions which come to mind are: - how will these people access the net once they have the machines at their final destination? ethernet? modem? how will they get network information? static? dhcp? - how do you want to assure that the machines are not 'tinkered with'? no root? no sudo? - how do you want to arrange for security / functionality updates / upgrades? will the people need to come in with their equipment to you? will the updates take place after the user is done surfing (a la AOL)? will they be automatic (you run 'current' on a central server with updates, they run a cron job as root to check for updates once a day, say)? will a pop-up ask them if they want to download updates now? schedule for later?
Questions abound. I can say for certain that most of the questions just posed are solvable with RedHat, because I've done it here (albeit for a more less unified platform hardware-wise). You can set up a kickstart server, auto-partition drives, throw in a set of custom packages + dependencies, configure various subsystems etc etc. You should try to determine the ranges of hardware configurations you're likely to expect (e.g. IDE harddrives between 500 and 4000MB; video cards with no more than 4MB RAM) and set up your kickstarts accordingly. You could also set up a central file server (with quota) so that any document the end users wants preserved in case of a hardware failure on their end, will be. A central server with software updates, available to a pre-determined ranges of IP addresses, would provide your users with an easy way of keeping their machines up-to-date on all the latest ssl/ssh patches.
How many machines total are you talking about here? 100? 1,000? 10,000?
If you'd like to think about the RedHat path, I can point you to some pretty decent documentation which will take you through more details.
Slashdot Mirror
...aspiring model friend...
Yeah, no problems with aspiration here, that's for sure, not with that chest...
when you're working with files 50mb+, every revision takes up large amounts of space
That's not true. The whole point of incremental revisions is to store only the differences between two adjacent versions instead of the entire file. While for some types of files this may not be practical at this point (say, images or other binary data), I'm sure that there would be ways of getting that problem solved as well (for images: subtract one from another (or whatever the proper Photoshop term is); for Word(tm) documents: either use some sort of a macro that would insert/remove the portion of the text that's different, or save that as some form of metadata (not sure if that's possible here right now, but may be in the future when MS adopts XML)).
So, not only is it not impossible, but with a bit of work it might even be fairly straight-forward: set up a library of 'filters' or 'helpers', which can be modified by packages as they come and go. You install libjpg or libpng, and it comes with a filter that gets dropped somewhere into the "system folder", which defines how to create "diffs" of things; every time someone works with a jpg or a png file, the system knows how to save incremental changes. Worst-case scenario, naturally, is "save the whole damn thing".
But, as you point out, "we have the space, harddrives are so big nowadays"
Think about it. Transparent revision control built into the OS would be a godsend to many.
If I had modpoints, I'd mod you up.
Version / revision control really sounds like *the* solution here. You get all the benefits of incremental changes getting recorded, the ability to bring up any previous version you'd like, creating branches for temporary documents as well as forks -- all as you mention.
Now, there are tools which would let you accomplish this, both in Unix-land as well as Windows-country (cvs and its derivative, cervisia, respectively). So why don't people use them?
1) the tools have to be installed manually
2) the tools have to be used explicitly
3) the tools have to be learned
4) all the concepts behind them are confusing to the user
So why doesn't someone incorporate those tools into the operating system? Would that be part of the backwards-compatibility cruft that the article talks about? Wouldn't people want this functionality there? After all, the user interface wouldn't require too many changes: opening up of a document would bring up the latest version on file, with an option in the "File" menu to select from the list of previous versions (potentially with a preview pane for comparison). Additionally, the program working on a document could save a new revision of the document with each exit of said program / closure of that document. Add to that the creation of a new revision (either by replacing the "Save" command with "Save as revision" or something along the lines, thereby making it a default; or by adding a new option / replacing "Save as" with "Save as revision").
Now, as far as I remember, someone's already done that at some point -- IIRC, VM or some other older OS had that option -- actually, it was the default. So why did that go away?
... to, say, Feenyx / Feenics / Fienix or something.
Just don't start a Hukt on Feenics marketing campaign.
That might not "fly" too well, if ya know what I mean...
from the news blurb (emphasis mine):
:)
The streaming presentation will begin about 30 minutes before the test firing, roughly at 5:30 pm CST (23:30 GMT) Friday. Note that these times are the scheduled times. However, since this really is rocket science, times are approximate.
Even NASA has a sense of humor
Most thieves using this method will just stand in the middle of the parking lot and hit the button. I.E. they're probably not going to be targetting a single car.
Exactly. If they have a 31337 h4x0r3d remote for scanning / opening doors to Fords/Mercurys/Lincolns (all manufactured by the same company), only the Fords, Mercurys and Lincolns will unlock their doors. Given the choice of an unlocked Ford vs. a still-locked Pontiac with a remote operating on a different (not-apparently-obbious-since-it's-aftermarket) frequency, the thief will prolly go for the Ford. At first. Then he'll smash the Pontiac's window, because the driver left their purse/wallet/portable cd player/radar detector/cb radio in the car.
Damn. I gotta take out the cb radio out of my car.
Although I usually do not recommend this approach, consider obtaining security through obscurity.
:)
:) I'm just a happy customer.
Factory-installed keyless entry / remote starter systems all come from the same company, so if you get a Dodge Intrepid with an installed system, it will be identical to every other Dodge Intrepid's system. If you're afraid of someone scanning the remote's codes to gain access to your car, consider getting an aftermarket system. They're abundant in today's DYI market, and every automotive store carries a few different brands. Most of them are likely to have varying circuitry, varying frequencies, varying communication protocols, which make it that much harder and impractical for a would-be thief to get a scanner for (instead, get a scanner that caters to a wider "audience", if you will).
Naturally, a thief bent on stealing your car might get frustrated with not being able to crack your remote's code, perhaps to the point of using a jimmy and scratching the precious paint job, or even using a blunt object and simply breaking the glass. But at least your car will still be there
Personally, I use a remote system from ICDynamics. It gives me remote start, keyless entry and trunk release options, and that's good enough for me. Gets good range, too (over 300ft), so I can start my car up from the comfort of my home on days like today (a few degrees below freezing).
No, I do not work for them
It would be grounded through the power-supply, would it not?
Yes indeed, and that was my point -- majority of motherboards are designed to get their ground via the power supplies (I haven't actually heard of any mobos getting their ground otherwise, but I'll leave it at "majority" just in case there's an odd-ball out there). So if the original poster's mobo was getting grounded by other means, it was most likely not by design, but due to error.
First time around I read this as
...the lady side-blotched lizard wins it all: she selects her many mates, decides whether they'll live...
A lot of people have suggested LCD, but here's my take on this:
take an old LCD display, say, 800x240 or something similar and place it in the cutout for the keys in the keyboard, and cover it with a touch-screen layer. Draw your 'keyboard' on the LCD panel with software (very easy to reconfigure that way), and use the data from the touch-screen layer to determine which areas have been 'touched', mapping them to your 'keyboard'. Naturally, this gives you no keyboard feel, and would be very 'touchy' (pardon the pun).
Or instead of a touch-screen layer, build your own gloves, for which the only requirement would be an optical sensor under each fingertip, hooked up to the computer, which would tell you what area of the keyboard your fingertips are over based on timing data (analogous to the way arcade games "know" where you're pointing your gun at in Wild West Shootout or something). The only problem is, I don't know if this approach would work with LCD panels (somehow I don't think they're refreshed the same way as CRTs). So, the LCD + touchscreen approach might be more practical (if not simply feasible).
Either way, it would probably be expensive. But, if you're catering to an eager market (or planning to), you might be able to pull it off.
the mounting holes are surrounded by solder rings and obviously supposed to be grounded
I'm not so sure they're supposed to be grounded... IIRC, the solder rings aren't actually connected to other areas of the motherboards in a lot of cases (though some may be), so not much of motherboard grounding here. I think the solder rings are there to provide cushioning, if you will, for the screw / peg / riser that will be anchoring the mobo -- IOW, to dissipate the pressure across a larger area, like a washer would -- to avoid damage (e.g. cracking) of the circuit board. Also forces the mobo designers to route leads away from those holes, so screw heads and the like won't damage / short-circuit them.
The above statement was brought you by the nit-picking dept.
Wouldn't the motherboard be grounded as well through the PCI cards that contact both the MB and the case?
:) You know, rest it on the foam it ships with, shlop in a video card, a stick of RAM and a CPU, hook up a power supply, keyboard and monitor... :)
Not necessarily. Have a look at this picture, from an article at The Register, recently featured on Slashdot in the most dangerous server rooms. There's no enclosure for the cards to ground the motherboard to, but that "server" most is running. Therefore the motherboard manufacturers can't rely on grounding the mobos that way, either.
Incidentally, haven't you ever tested a motherboard that was *not* mounted in a case?
Eh, just realized something else.
Not all enclosures use metal risers for mounting motherboards. Some use plastic pegs. Plastic pegs don't conduct electricity. Motherboards have to work even if anchored with plastic pegs. Motherboards can't rely on being grounded via pegs/risers.
Motherboards require power to be supplied to them. Power supply cables have 'ground' leads in them. Motherboards get grounded via power supply cables.
Grounding of the motherboard most likely is not an issue here.
Have you made sure that with the lower risers all expansion cards (particularly the video card) were fully going into their slots? Sounds to me like your problem is right there, especially since you say that with the new risers the motherboard is 2mm higher than previously. 2mm is a *big* difference, and very well could have prevented your video card from working and/or made it work only some of the time.
Just my CDN$0.02
I wonder how this will affect other distributed projects, such as the cancer search.
Apparently any time there is a prize involved, people are willing to forgo their ethics
and the ulterior goals in favor of money. What would happen if this sort of cheating were
uncovered in the cancer project? Will it undermine its reputation and credibility, even
if only the stats were to have been sabotaged and not the results themselves? I'm sure
that people would start peeping "Well, we can't trust those results now, can we?" And all
those CPU cycles would have been wasted, after all.
1. Make sure software compiles! (judging from some replies, even that can't be taken for granted...) :)
2. Make sure software runs! (ditto)
3. Make sure all the functionality you expect from the kernel is there (i.e. if you compiled a driver for a network card, it better work and be backwards compatible, unless it's not supposed to anymore)
4. Make sure the software is stable (test the bejeezus out of the features -- if your cdrom or a scsi card requires a particular setting to work, or there are three ways for you to reference a device, test all of them (or at least the ones you care about)
5. If you encounter any bugs (related or unrelated), report them in enough detail for them to be reproducible. Keep it to the point and relevant to the topic. Use spell and grammar checkers
6. When updates/bugfixes come out, lather, rinse, repeat.
>>The statute goes even further. It says that if Spanish authorities deem
>>something on a foreign-hosted Web site threatening to Spain's national
>>defence, public order, consumer rights or other values, they can order
>>Spanish operators to sever access to that site.
>>That clause puts Spain in the same league of content control as Saudi
>>Arabia and China, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School expert
>>on international Internet regulation.
>>"What is this going to cause?" Sanchez Almeida asked rhetorically.
>>"Censorship."
>Nonsense again.
How is that nonsense? How is that not censorship?? Google and Freenet were
deemed to be a threat to public order and to the government by Chinese
officials -- that is not censorship either?
You cannot, therefore, create content and make it available at a certain address all the time.
That, however, is the whole idea, as far as I'm concerned. Not making your content distributed (i.e. making it available only at a certain address) makes it easy for those who oppose you to shut you down by getting your uplink disconnected, as well as leads you to being slashdotted and prevents you from getting your message across. This is why TV stations *broadcast* their signal via satellite to regional distribution centers (local cable companies) and make their content available via personal satellite dish receivers. Doing it point-to-point would be too costly.
All you can do is create the content and watch it get mixed with all the other content.
Well, kind of. Posting to Freenet will make your content available to people, but (if I understand the theory correctly) there's no way of browsing the network, but instead you have to have prior knowledge of what you're looking for. Thus you still need to have a means of advertising somewhere what people should be requesting (like knowing which coordinates to point your satellite dish to to receive the signal). Once you do that, though, the content can reach your audience. So your argument would be analogous to saying "why put up a satellite transmitter in the orbit, the signal will just get mixed with all the other signals from other satellites".
if you want a particular piece of content to remain available, the only way to ensure that is to keep injecting it again and again and again -- like the way spammers use email
If your issue is important, you'll find it worthwhile to
- remind people about it
- update your content (very few issues out there in the world do not have new developments coming out periodically)
- make sure your content is always available to your audience
In that last respect, how would reinjectnig into Freenet be different from setting up a web page and never checking that it's actually accessible (network outage, web server crash, slashdotting)?
Otherwise, it goes through each node once, in the midst of whatever other content is being injected, and soon is gone.
This is common in ordinary distribution medias as well. Information no longer timely is being removed to make room for newer, pertinent, more important etc. data. Leaving things stored forever leads to space bloat. Do you keep archives of your local newspaper "just in case", "for future reference", or do you throw the issues out regularly, save for a timeless article or a humorous cartoon? If you keep everything around forever, I hope you have a big basement.
So it turns casual pirates into seasoned ones?
Most likely not. Casual pirates won't have the drive to go out of their way to pirate something and "stick it to the man" or prove their 1337-ness. Casual pirates usually try the easy route, or two, but give up afterwards. They don't know how to get around obstacles that seasoned pirates take for granted.
Seasoned pirates, on the other hand, just stay seasoned pirates, and go about their business.
Naturally, there are those who like new and shiny things, even if they pose no advantage over what they already own. But these people usually just go and buy the latest-and-greatest anyway instead of pirating.
Those who can, buy. Those who can't (and therefore have the drive), frequently pirate (e.g. overpriced Adobe products), don't do anything at all (i.e. use Paintbrush from Windows 3.1), or switch to cheaper alternatives (e.g. Linux).
Since 3G seems to be offering higher speeds, will the telco(s) introduce the service at low prices, only to win customers, garner major share of the market, only to raise prices afterwards (price increase follows bandwidth increase; "gotta pay recoup the cost of 3G license")? How are they coping with potential interference issues? What *is* the range of 3G anyway?
Pending the final outcome of this patent infringement case, I wonder how this will affect AMD and its *hammer chip uptake in the higher-end 64-bit x86 architecture market. Should Intel lose the case, does any of this have the potential to help AMD increase market share in the 64-bit arena, whether by virtue of being a pure, innovative technology (as opposed to being ripped from someone else), or by having an advantage of already being on the market while Intel redesigns their chips? Or by having cheaper chips (by not having to tack a litigation 'tax' onto the price of processors)?
Does any of this even matter? Will AMD still be the Cinderella in the corporate eyes when this is over?
I'd be very surprised if they had no knowledge of the technology.
Also, why a proprietary audio encoding scheme? Why not open source, royalty free Ogg Vorbis?
RIAA, my friend. RIAA.
Do you think they'd let you build your own FM receiver coupled with an Ogg Vorbis decoder so that you could rip all of their high quality-encoded music to your hard drive and not pay for it? So what that MP3, Ogg and others are lossy compression -- given high enough bitrate, it's hard to tell. For listening in the car, with all the noise around you, even smaller bitrate is quality bitrate. But they'd be damned if they made your (or my) job of ripping their music easier.
While I agree with you that lack of driver support for a lot of hardware out there is a pain for linux users, I would like to point out two things to you:
- thanks to the power of the 'net, you can research your purchases ahead of time for compatibility issues, because if it's on the market, someone's prolly tried to use it already; additionally, for some of the more popular hardware, someone might have even written a (better) driver, or at least posted a hack on how to get the hardware to work -- which brings me to my second point:
- a lot of hardware manufacturers do not disclose specs for their creations, for whatever reasons (some just, some not as much so)
This is why companies like Epson will continue to get my business, because they either provide a plethora of drivers for their hardware (mind you, I'm not talking strictly linux here), or at least they let you know how to write one yourself (should you feel so inclined and determined). In case of Epson, there are pages out there that tell you which scanners and which printers are supported, how to get them to work properly and get best results etc. All you have to do is 1) figure out your needs (i.e. a parport printer with high print speeds and cheap ink; or a network card that won't burden your CPU too much); 2) pick a few manufacturers; 3) pick models which match your needs; 4) research their support. In your case, I'd prolly pick a 3com-905 card, because I know they're fast, they're fairly cheap ($20-30), they beat the common Realtek8139 chipset in performance, and they're supported by the kernel. If performance is not an issue and you don't feel like spending 2x the money, get a Realtek-based card. They'll get you a link light, and they're painless to set up, too.
Bottom line is, research first, then make an educated purchase. And, I reiterate, this is not a linux-specific issue. A lot of hardware won't work with some Windows flavors either. Most purchases I make must meet this criterium: support under both linux and windows2k. I like the stability of win2k, so if your latest video-grabbing tv-tuner-equipped 512MB-RAM woof-woof-woof video card will only fully work under windows9x/me/xp, it might not even exist as far as I'm concerned. And I am not going to find that out after I've shelled out $300 for it.
The information is out there. Use it. Be creative with your google searches, spend as much time as is worth to you pursuing the data, and if at the end of the day you come up empty-handed (or worse, you find out you're SOL), go with the next hardware item on your list. Your next car choice. Your next mutual fund choice. The other presidential candidate.
As a few posters already mentioned, any distribution would probably work. From your rather short question it's hard to give an example of a definite solution. Some questions which come to mind are:
- how will these people access the net once they have the machines at their final destination? ethernet? modem? how will
they get network information? static? dhcp?
- how do you want to assure that the machines are not 'tinkered with'? no root? no sudo?
- how do you want to arrange for security / functionality updates / upgrades? will the people need to come in with their equipment to you? will the updates take place after the user is done surfing (a la AOL)? will they be automatic (you run 'current' on a central server with updates, they run a cron job as root to check for updates once a day, say)? will a pop-up ask them if they want to download updates now? schedule for later?
Questions abound. I can say for certain that most of the questions just posed are solvable with RedHat, because I've done it here (albeit for a more less unified platform hardware-wise). You can set up a kickstart server, auto-partition drives, throw in a set of custom packages + dependencies, configure various subsystems etc etc. You should try to determine the ranges of hardware configurations you're likely to expect (e.g. IDE harddrives between 500 and 4000MB; video cards with no more than 4MB RAM) and set up your kickstarts accordingly. You could also set up a central file server (with quota) so that any document the end users wants preserved in case of a hardware failure on their end, will be. A central server with software updates, available to a pre-determined ranges of IP addresses, would provide your users with an easy way of keeping their machines up-to-date on all the latest ssl/ssh patches.
How many machines total are you talking about here? 100? 1,000? 10,000?
If you'd like to think about the RedHat path, I can point you to some pretty decent documentation which will take you through more details.
Sherloqq