...they have the best chance of actually doing it and doing it well.
[emphasis mine]
WTF? Have you not been paying attention?
Microsoft have been fscking around with DirectX for the last ten years, and it's still a complete mess. It's taken them 25 years to get an OS even remotely as stable as any UNIX variant you'd care to name. And now they're going to Take Over The World with yet another half-assed, rushed-out-the-door collection of hacks?
I run a CVS server on behalf of a client on a FreeBSD box. It is running in pserver mode, and is launched by cvsd, which is a chroot() jail for CVS.
It is not clear from the sensationalistic news story what an administrator should do, or whether my particular configuration is vulnerable. Could a more knowledgeable person please summarize the issues involved, or point to the original vulnerability report so I can evaluate my risk?
With the latest versions of ntfsresize, fairly safe. I did it on a machine at work with very important data on it (yes, I backed it up first), and had no trouble at all. However, all ntfsresize can do is truncate an NTFS partition's free space. In other words, it won't relocate blocks to other free areas of the disk. So the most you can shrink it is by however much free space you have at the end of the partition. ((After Googling around a bit, I've learned that the most recent versions of ntfsresize will now move datablocks around, so apparently that restriction is now gone. I have not personally tested this, however.))
Incidentally, ntfsresize is part of Knoppix, and gets run through QTPartEd, a partition editing tool. It is an older, non-relocating version, however.
No, it's just that the defragger built-in to Win2K/XP is shite. Its runs like molasses in liquid helium, and it almost never does a complete job in a single run. You have to run it several times in a row before it's even close to doing a reasonable job. And if it's your system drive, then there are some files (including the swap file) that it simply won't touch no matter how badly the blocks are scattered. This can be a real pain in the posterior if you're trying to defrag a drive in preparation for a Linux install.
The believe of intelligent and respected people does not affect the legal status of the agreements until the disagreement is ruled on by a court or codified in legislation. Until then, it's illegal, [... ]
Incorrect.
It is not illegal. It is not legal. It isn't anything until directly addressed by a court ruling or legislation. Until either of those things happens, it's just the vendor pissing in the wind. You are free to heed or ignore their shrill bleating, as you prefer, according to your own sense of morals and ethics.
Many other stories are fairly gray, but I'm pretty sure the license to use OSX pretty much says that you are only allowed to install it on Apple hardware (although correct me if I'm wrong). This is promoting a fairly blatant breach of the license [... ]
This presumes such "agreements" are valid and binding. Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.
He may have committed a single instance of copyright infringement by running the same copy of OS-X on both his Mac and his PC (assuming he has a Mac, and that it's running the install image from the same CD). This may or may not be worth dragging before a court, but it's important to note such a copyright infringement is distinct from a breach of a fictious "license".
Moller's been been taking investors' money for decades, and has exactly squat to show for it. Credible aerospace engineers say that, unless Moller's invented a radically new, ultra-compact engine, there's no way you can move enough air mass to actually lift the thing.
The spiffy model on the showroom floor is nothing more than a stage prop. It doesn't fly, it never did, and it probably never will.
...Is for them to flash in sequence, so you see little ribbons of light flowing down the freeway.
Trouble is, for it to look interesting, the lights would have to appear to be moving at about three to four times the speed limit. Which would encourage a certain class of Stupid Person to try and keep up with them.
It seems that javascript for example was designed with no regard to security, or more likely badly implemented by the likes of Microsoft. [... ]
Alas, no. The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape, who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java. Any moron with even a passing familiarity with MSWord macro viruses would have realized that including and automatically executing code within what is fundamentally a document was a monumentally stupid idea. But no, they did it, anyway.
Microsoft doesn't get off scot-free, however. They uncritically re-implemented this braindamage and -- as first-hand observers of the problems caused by MSWord macro viruses -- had even less excuse for proliferating this.
Said an unnamed representative from the USPTO, "Oops, sorry, that one was supposed to go to Monsanto. Honestly, keeping track of evil amoral corporations these days is a real Pain-in-the-Ass(R)."
Final Postgraduate CS Exam, Exercise 11 (Extra Credit): Design a new computer network, or a compatible retrofit for the existing Internet, that continues to express the priciples of transparency, open access, Free Speech, and anonymity-by-default while at the same time being resilient and resistant to intelligent sociopaths (both human and automated).
You know what hapens when you do a lookup on a plate that has no crime associated with it?
Name
Address
Zip code
Social Security Number (mandatory since 1994 to obtain CA license; true in FL?)
Automobile particulars:
Make
Model & year
Engine number
Financing institution (if loan not yet paid off)
All past offenses, including speeding and parking infractions.
So the real question is, what will the computer (and the human reviewer) actually be shown when they run the query on my license plate? If the computer only shows, "No outstanding warrants," then I'm fine with that.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
I saw a presentation on spintronics given at WorldCon by Kevin Roche, who is one of the IBM researchers developing this stuff. He will be giving another presentation on it at -- of all places -- BayCon 2004.
I found his talk absolutely fascinating. He's basically created a "transistor" that allows through only electrons of a particular spin. Once you have an electric current composed of electrons spinning all the same way, you can do lots of unexpected things. One example: Light-emitting diodes emit polarized light! Even if you have only a cursory exposure to physics or chemistry, you'd probably enjoy his talk.
I'm going to start from the middle and work my way out:
A moral argument must, at a minimum, contain: a factual premise, a moral premise, and a conclusion that falls naturally and logically from the premises. [... ]
Very well:
Factual: Computers were and are designed to make perfect copies of data, in any quantity, for an infinitesimally small incremental cost.
Factual: Computers were and are designed to facilitate transformation of data in any form imaginable.
Factual: Constraining the previous two characteristics would seriously impair the utility of computers.
Factual: One of the chief hallmarks of technological progress over the past few centuries, particularly in the manufacturing sectors, has been increased abundance at reduced cost.
Moral: Increased abundance is a good thing. (Presented as axiomatic, but plenty of empirical confirmation is available.)
Moral: Increasing abundance is a good thing. (Again, presented as axiomatic; empirical evidence available.)
Moral: Sharing one's resources is a good thing. (Tenet of Western culture; ask any parent with young children.)
Conclusion: The copying and sharing of computer data expresses and reinforces the moral values of sharing, and increasing abundance for all.
Corrollary: Constraining the copying and sharing of computer data acts against the moral values of sharing and increasing abundance by attempting to impose scarcity.
So the actual, real, honest to $(GOD) question that is actually before our society is: How can we reconcile the infinite sharing and abundance afforded by computers with our scarcity-dependent economic models? That is the question I've been trying to get people to ask themselves for years.
Trouble is, almost no one's thinking about it. The media corporations see nothing to reconcile; they believe the old way is the way, and anything that challenges it is clearly Wrong and must be swept away. Meanwhile, more thoughtful people see these attempts to place constraints on their computers, and think to themselves, "How dare you try and take this good and wonderful thing away from us! You'd better have a damn good reason..." So far, the only reason offered is to preserve the revenue stream at current-or-increasing levels. Which brings us to another moral premise:
Sacrificing or diminishing other positive moral values in the pursuit of money is, overall, a bad thing.
Which causes the proffered reason to fail the "damn good" test. And therein lies the root of the conflict.
...People who indulge in histrionics ("piracy", indeed) to make their point should expect to receive the same in return. It's certainly not the fairest way to conduct a meaningful, enlightening debate. [... ]
What term you use to describe the subject is irrelevant in the discussion of the relative morality of the subject matter, so long as what is meant by the term is understood. Quibbling over the term is merely rhetoric, meant to manipulate the audience to feel sympathy for the author.
Were all participants in the debate fully informed on all issues, then such shorthand or "jargon" would be acceptable. As it stands, however, your counter-argument is disingenous.
As new people enter the debate and seek to inform themselves about the isues, semantics become very important. To choose a particularly crass example, it is no accident that the debate surrounding the practice of abortion is framed as "pro-life" and "pro-choice". Each side seeks, in the most lasting and immediate way, to paint their position in the most favorable light, and likewise their opponent's position in an unfavorable light. Hence our emotionally-charged terms, "piracy," and, "theft," rather than the more accurate
(1) I don't personally believe in copying CDs illegally-- but I think we should avoid using unkind words like "piracy" to describe those that do -- instead, we should describe it as an "infringement", much like a parking infringement.
The above idea is presented as if it's prima facie absurd, without bothering to explain why it might be absurd, Since no justifications or reasons are supplied, we must set this argument aside. Next.
(2) I don't believe in the record companies emotively abusing the word "theft," but I do believe in emotively abusing words like "information," "sharing," and "Copyright Enforcement Militia."
"What's good for the goose...," etc., etc. People who indulge in histrionics ("piracy", indeed) to make their point should expect to receive the same in return. It's certainly not the fairest way to conduct a meaningful, enlightening debate. But I don't see intellectual property adherents abandoning their rhetoric any time soon, so we're kinda stuck here. Next.
(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.
Inaccurate. Retail price of CDs has remained almost flat for the last twenty or so years (unless you're talking in Constant Dollars, in which case the price has fallen). However, manufacturing costs over the same time period have fallen precipitously (today, less than USD$1.00 per CD, silkscreened, in a jewel case with liner). Traditionally, this means a corresponding reduction in consumer pricing. This hasn't happened in the music space. No justification for this has been presented. Did everything else suddenly get more expensive?
Since the music labels refuse to afford consumers the cost benefits of advancing technology, the consumers have opted to take matters into their own hands. See Smith, Adam; and Hand, Invisible.
(4) I believe that piracy is driven by overly long copyright duration, even though most pirated works are recent releases.
The first problem with this is that it is a tautology, and therefore invalid. The copying would be legal had copyright terms not been extended, and extended again, and extended yet again.
The second problem is that no one is claiming that long copyright terms are "driving" unsanctioned copying. It has long been self-evident that the copying is being driven by a marketplace demand that has yet to be met by the record labels. People wanted their music in a compact, easily-moved, unencumbered form that lent itself well to external data processing and manipulation (e.g. build a "jukebox" on your own laptop). Since the labels didn't move first on this, the marketplace did. Now the labels find themselves fighting the First Mover's Advantage. If they wanted to define the marketplace, they should have moved earlier.
(5) I believe that illegitimately downloading music is giving the author "free advertising". I don't buy any of the music I download, of course--but lots of other people probably do.
The statements are juxtaposed to suggest they are related. This is a false association. Music downloads can be "free advertising" and still be worth paying for (in higher-resolution format), or drive the sales of something else.
Also, consider the converse: Suppose I downloaded and saved every Web banner ad I saw, then made them available on a P2P server for people to download for anthropological study, or just to laugh at. Ads are most definitely provided for free, and are meant to be viewed by the widest audience possible. Yet I would still be smacked down for copyright infringement. So the idea of copyright existing primarily to protect a revenue stream doesn't hol
What I don't quite understand is how copy protection of 3d models will be addressed.
Answer: It won't. Get over it.
In reality, this isn't a big deal. If you're a studio creating models for a film, then you're not distributing the models, anyway; only the rendered result. OTOH, if you're creating models for dynamic realtime rendering in a user's Web browser, then it's going to be copied, period. Just like HTML and CSS sheets have been copied for years, and no one has been complaining about that in any meaningful way.
There used to be one: The SpaceORB 360. Sadly, it's not made any longer. SpaceTec later folded and had its assets acquired by LabTec, who still manufacture high-end 3D input devices, mostly targeted at the CAD market.
Another one of their schemes offers to download a program that will automatically sync your system time, which is useful to most people who notice that consumer PCs are usually pathetic at keeping a system time. However, I personally use the adware-free Automachron which provides the same useful function.
If you're running Win2K or WinXP, you don't need to download a damn thing to sync your clock. Windoze has an SNTP client built-in:
Open a Command Prompt.
Enter the command: net time/setsntp:servername
where servername is the name of your preferred NTP server (your ISP should be able to provide this; typically something like ntp.my-isp.com).
Close the Command Prompt.
Right-click on My Computer (or whatever you renamed it to); select Manage.
In the left-hand pane, select Services & Applications.
In the right-hand pane, double-click on Services.
Double-click on Windows Time (near the bottom of the list).
In the configuration window, click the Start button. Your clock will be synchronized to the NTP time server.
In the drop-down menu Startup Type, select Automatic. This will start the NTP client each time you boot Windows.
Click OK. Close the Management interface.
There. No cheesy spyware necessary. Bandwidth consumption is negligible, so gamers need not worry about additional lag.
Hercules/Guillemot Game Theater XP 7.1 (Crystal Semiconductor CS4630), driver version 6.09. Every time I try to turn on 3D sound features for my games, the sound either becomes very soft, or the echo effects start appearing before the primary effect, or sound effects terminate early, or the thing just locks up outright after a few minutes of play.
It's fairly damn clear they're not using MP-safe locking primitives to arbitrate access to the chip and/or shared resources. So I have to keep the hardware acceleration cranked back. I've tried setting an interrupt affinity mask for just the sound card, such that only one CPU receives the interrupts. It's helped slightly, but it still exhibits problems.
Anecdotal evidence on USENET suggests that no one provides an SMP-safe sound driver.
I have an SMP machine (Asus P2B-D, dual 1GHz P3) running Win2K-SP4. Mozilla 1.6 crashes perhaps once every six weeks on me. Mind you, I keep Javascript turned off and visit a limited number of sites, none of them especially complex.
Now if you want to talk sound drivers on SMP machines, then we can talk about gratuitous crashing...
About a year ago, it occurred to me that this technique of making square wheels work could form the basis of a good analogy as to why Microsoft was such an entrenched monopoly. It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, Microsoft made a square wheel. To make the square wheel work, they got people to build roads of inverted catenary curves so that the wheels would roll smoothly. Now, most people had never seen a wheel before, much less how to evaluate wheel quality and design. So when they started buying their first wheeled transports, they bought the one that most easily came to hand which, thanks to Microsoft's backroom dealmaking, usually had Microsoft's square wheels on it. This led to the building of more wheels, which led to the building of more inverted catenary roads.
Of course, people who were experts in the sciences of wheels and roadbuilding knew for a fact that square wheels were a perfectly stupid idea -- that it had been long established that circular wheels work much better, are far more flexible, and make roadbuilding much easier. Furthermore, they were safer. A square wheel hitting a hole or debris would make the car leap into the air violently, causing damage to the car and occupants. A round wheel rolling over a road imperfection would perhaps thump, but would usually recover immediately without incident.
Unfortunately, circular wheels didn't work too well on the inverted catenary roads being built everywhere, and no one was building flat roads because, well, where was the demand for them? Everyone's cars had square wheels.
The result was millions of cars with square wheels, running on thousands of miles of roads that require constant, precision maintenance. Flat roads are starting to appear here and there, but even though everyone who's changed over to the round wheel loves it, they still reluctantly keep a square-wheeled car around, so they can go places flat roads don't go yet.
Schwab
(Slashdot: Where we can work Microsoft-bashing into any topic.)
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? Have you not been paying attention?
Microsoft have been fscking around with DirectX for the last ten years, and it's still a complete mess. It's taken them 25 years to get an OS even remotely as stable as any UNIX variant you'd care to name. And now they're going to Take Over The World with yet another half-assed, rushed-out-the-door collection of hacks?
You'll forgive me if I remain skeptical.
Schwab
I run a CVS server on behalf of a client on a FreeBSD box. It is running in pserver mode, and is launched by cvsd , which is a chroot() jail for CVS.
It is not clear from the sensationalistic news story what an administrator should do, or whether my particular configuration is vulnerable. Could a more knowledgeable person please summarize the issues involved, or point to the original vulnerability report so I can evaluate my risk?
Thanks,
Schwab
RBOC: Regional Bell Operating Company
ILEC: Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier
RBOC and ILEC are largely synonymous, ILEC being the more modern term. And, for completeness:
CLEC: Competitive Local Exchange Carrier
Schwab
With the latest versions of ntfsresize, fairly safe. I did it on a machine at work with very important data on it (yes, I backed it up first), and had no trouble at all. However, all ntfsresize can do is truncate an NTFS partition's free space. In other words, it won't relocate blocks to other free areas of the disk. So the most you can shrink it is by however much free space you have at the end of the partition. ((After Googling around a bit, I've learned that the most recent versions of ntfsresize will now move datablocks around, so apparently that restriction is now gone. I have not personally tested this, however.))
Incidentally, ntfsresize is part of Knoppix, and gets run through QTPartEd, a partition editing tool. It is an older, non-relocating version, however.
Schwab
CWA: Communications Workers of America: a labor union.
SBC: Southwestern Bell Corporation (nee Pacific Bell): an evil, money-grubbing RBOC/ILEC :-).
Schwab
No, it's just that the defragger built-in to Win2K/XP is shite. Its runs like molasses in liquid helium, and it almost never does a complete job in a single run. You have to run it several times in a row before it's even close to doing a reasonable job. And if it's your system drive, then there are some files (including the swap file) that it simply won't touch no matter how badly the blocks are scattered. This can be a real pain in the posterior if you're trying to defrag a drive in preparation for a Linux install.
Schwab
Incorrect.
It is not illegal. It is not legal. It isn't anything until directly addressed by a court ruling or legislation. Until either of those things happens, it's just the vendor pissing in the wind. You are free to heed or ignore their shrill bleating, as you prefer, according to your own sense of morals and ethics.
Schwab
This presumes such "agreements" are valid and binding. Many intelligent, respected people do not believe they are, for very good reasons.
He may have committed a single instance of copyright infringement by running the same copy of OS-X on both his Mac and his PC (assuming he has a Mac, and that it's running the install image from the same CD). This may or may not be worth dragging before a court, but it's important to note such a copyright infringement is distinct from a breach of a fictious "license".
Schwab
Moller's been been taking investors' money for decades, and has exactly squat to show for it. Credible aerospace engineers say that, unless Moller's invented a radically new, ultra-compact engine, there's no way you can move enough air mass to actually lift the thing.
The spiffy model on the showroom floor is nothing more than a stage prop. It doesn't fly, it never did, and it probably never will.
Schwab
...Is for them to flash in sequence, so you see little ribbons of light flowing down the freeway.
Trouble is, for it to look interesting, the lights would have to appear to be moving at about three to four times the speed limit. Which would encourage a certain class of Stupid Person to try and keep up with them.
Schwab
Alas, no. The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape, who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java. Any moron with even a passing familiarity with MSWord macro viruses would have realized that including and automatically executing code within what is fundamentally a document was a monumentally stupid idea. But no, they did it, anyway.
Microsoft doesn't get off scot-free, however. They uncritically re-implemented this braindamage and -- as first-hand observers of the problems caused by MSWord macro viruses -- had even less excuse for proliferating this.
Schwab
Said an unnamed representative from the USPTO, "Oops, sorry, that one was supposed to go to Monsanto. Honestly, keeping track of evil amoral corporations these days is a real Pain-in-the-Ass(R)."
Schwab
Thump thump thump? The kids in your neighborhood are into waltzes?
Schwab
Final Postgraduate CS Exam, Exercise 11 (Extra Credit): Design a new computer network, or a compatible retrofit for the existing Internet, that continues to express the priciples of transparency, open access, Free Speech, and anonymity-by-default while at the same time being resilient and resistant to intelligent sociopaths (both human and automated).
Schwab
So the real question is, what will the computer (and the human reviewer) actually be shown when they run the query on my license plate? If the computer only shows, "No outstanding warrants," then I'm fine with that.
Something tells me, however, they'll be shown a lot more.
Schwab
VirtuaWin - Virtual desktop manager
PuTTY - SSH client
WinSCP - GUI-based SSH file copier
Mozilla - The Web browser
CygWin - UNIX-like command line tools and environment
FuhQuake - QuakeWorld client with advanced rendering.
Vim - text editor extraordinaire
VoodooLights - screen saver (alas, no longer supported or available)
TweakUI - Allows tweaking of various Windows UI details
DeliPlayer 2 - music player, including support for "MOD" formats
Schwab
I saw a presentation on spintronics given at WorldCon by Kevin Roche, who is one of the IBM researchers developing this stuff. He will be giving another presentation on it at -- of all places -- BayCon 2004.
I found his talk absolutely fascinating. He's basically created a "transistor" that allows through only electrons of a particular spin. Once you have an electric current composed of electrons spinning all the same way, you can do lots of unexpected things. One example: Light-emitting diodes emit polarized light! Even if you have only a cursory exposure to physics or chemistry, you'd probably enjoy his talk.
Schwab
I'm going to start from the middle and work my way out:
Very well:
Conclusion: The copying and sharing of computer data expresses and reinforces the moral values of sharing, and increasing abundance for all.
Corrollary: Constraining the copying and sharing of computer data acts against the moral values of sharing and increasing abundance by attempting to impose scarcity.
So the actual, real, honest to $(GOD) question that is actually before our society is: How can we reconcile the infinite sharing and abundance afforded by computers with our scarcity-dependent economic models? That is the question I've been trying to get people to ask themselves for years.
Trouble is, almost no one's thinking about it. The media corporations see nothing to reconcile; they believe the old way is the way, and anything that challenges it is clearly Wrong and must be swept away. Meanwhile, more thoughtful people see these attempts to place constraints on their computers, and think to themselves, "How dare you try and take this good and wonderful thing away from us! You'd better have a damn good reason..." So far, the only reason offered is to preserve the revenue stream at current-or-increasing levels. Which brings us to another moral premise:
Which causes the proffered reason to fail the "damn good" test. And therein lies the root of the conflict.
Were all participants in the debate fully informed on all issues, then such shorthand or "jargon" would be acceptable. As it stands, however, your counter-argument is disingenous.
As new people enter the debate and seek to inform themselves about the isues, semantics become very important. To choose a particularly crass example, it is no accident that the debate surrounding the practice of abortion is framed as "pro-life" and "pro-choice". Each side seeks, in the most lasting and immediate way, to paint their position in the most favorable light, and likewise their opponent's position in an unfavorable light. Hence our emotionally-charged terms, "piracy," and, "theft," rather than the more accurate
Refutation follows.
The above idea is presented as if it's prima facie absurd, without bothering to explain why it might be absurd, Since no justifications or reasons are supplied, we must set this argument aside. Next.
"What's good for the goose...," etc., etc. People who indulge in histrionics ("piracy", indeed) to make their point should expect to receive the same in return. It's certainly not the fairest way to conduct a meaningful, enlightening debate. But I don't see intellectual property adherents abandoning their rhetoric any time soon, so we're kinda stuck here. Next.
Inaccurate. Retail price of CDs has remained almost flat for the last twenty or so years (unless you're talking in Constant Dollars, in which case the price has fallen). However, manufacturing costs over the same time period have fallen precipitously (today, less than USD$1.00 per CD, silkscreened, in a jewel case with liner). Traditionally, this means a corresponding reduction in consumer pricing. This hasn't happened in the music space. No justification for this has been presented. Did everything else suddenly get more expensive?
Since the music labels refuse to afford consumers the cost benefits of advancing technology, the consumers have opted to take matters into their own hands. See Smith, Adam; and Hand, Invisible.
The first problem with this is that it is a tautology, and therefore invalid. The copying would be legal had copyright terms not been extended, and extended again, and extended yet again.
The second problem is that no one is claiming that long copyright terms are "driving" unsanctioned copying. It has long been self-evident that the copying is being driven by a marketplace demand that has yet to be met by the record labels. People wanted their music in a compact, easily-moved, unencumbered form that lent itself well to external data processing and manipulation (e.g. build a "jukebox" on your own laptop). Since the labels didn't move first on this, the marketplace did. Now the labels find themselves fighting the First Mover's Advantage. If they wanted to define the marketplace, they should have moved earlier.
The statements are juxtaposed to suggest they are related. This is a false association. Music downloads can be "free advertising" and still be worth paying for (in higher-resolution format), or drive the sales of something else.
Also, consider the converse: Suppose I downloaded and saved every Web banner ad I saw, then made them available on a P2P server for people to download for anthropological study, or just to laugh at. Ads are most definitely provided for free, and are meant to be viewed by the widest audience possible. Yet I would still be smacked down for copyright infringement. So the idea of copyright existing primarily to protect a revenue stream doesn't hol
Answer: It won't. Get over it.
In reality, this isn't a big deal. If you're a studio creating models for a film, then you're not distributing the models, anyway; only the rendered result. OTOH, if you're creating models for dynamic realtime rendering in a user's Web browser, then it's going to be copied, period. Just like HTML and CSS sheets have been copied for years, and no one has been complaining about that in any meaningful way.
Schwab
There used to be one: The SpaceORB 360. Sadly, it's not made any longer. SpaceTec later folded and had its assets acquired by LabTec, who still manufacture high-end 3D input devices, mostly targeted at the CAD market.
Schwab
If you're running Win2K or WinXP, you don't need to download a damn thing to sync your clock. Windoze has an SNTP client built-in:
net time
where servername is the name of your preferred NTP server (your ISP should be able to provide this; typically something like ntp.my-isp.com).
There. No cheesy spyware necessary. Bandwidth consumption is negligible, so gamers need not worry about additional lag.
Schwab
Hercules/Guillemot Game Theater XP 7.1 (Crystal Semiconductor CS4630), driver version 6.09. Every time I try to turn on 3D sound features for my games, the sound either becomes very soft, or the echo effects start appearing before the primary effect, or sound effects terminate early, or the thing just locks up outright after a few minutes of play.
It's fairly damn clear they're not using MP-safe locking primitives to arbitrate access to the chip and/or shared resources. So I have to keep the hardware acceleration cranked back. I've tried setting an interrupt affinity mask for just the sound card, such that only one CPU receives the interrupts. It's helped slightly, but it still exhibits problems.
Anecdotal evidence on USENET suggests that no one provides an SMP-safe sound driver.
Schwab
I have an SMP machine (Asus P2B-D, dual 1GHz P3) running Win2K-SP4. Mozilla 1.6 crashes perhaps once every six weeks on me. Mind you, I keep Javascript turned off and visit a limited number of sites, none of them especially complex.
Now if you want to talk sound drivers on SMP machines, then we can talk about gratuitous crashing...
Schwab
About a year ago, it occurred to me that this technique of making square wheels work could form the basis of a good analogy as to why Microsoft was such an entrenched monopoly. It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, Microsoft made a square wheel. To make the square wheel work, they got people to build roads of inverted catenary curves so that the wheels would roll smoothly. Now, most people had never seen a wheel before, much less how to evaluate wheel quality and design. So when they started buying their first wheeled transports, they bought the one that most easily came to hand which, thanks to Microsoft's backroom dealmaking, usually had Microsoft's square wheels on it. This led to the building of more wheels, which led to the building of more inverted catenary roads.
Of course, people who were experts in the sciences of wheels and roadbuilding knew for a fact that square wheels were a perfectly stupid idea -- that it had been long established that circular wheels work much better, are far more flexible, and make roadbuilding much easier. Furthermore, they were safer. A square wheel hitting a hole or debris would make the car leap into the air violently, causing damage to the car and occupants. A round wheel rolling over a road imperfection would perhaps thump, but would usually recover immediately without incident.
Unfortunately, circular wheels didn't work too well on the inverted catenary roads being built everywhere, and no one was building flat roads because, well, where was the demand for them? Everyone's cars had square wheels.
The result was millions of cars with square wheels, running on thousands of miles of roads that require constant, precision maintenance. Flat roads are starting to appear here and there, but even though everyone who's changed over to the round wheel loves it, they still reluctantly keep a square-wheeled car around, so they can go places flat roads don't go yet.
Schwab
(Slashdot: Where we can work Microsoft-bashing into any topic.)