...television works on a 24-Hz cycle, so you can't flash it for less then 1/24th of a second,
Ah, you must be in France with that SECAM stuff. (SECAM is French for, "PAL.")
Seriously, no television standard in the world does 24 frames per second. The US and Japan are 60 fields per second, or 30 frames/sec. (Actually, US NTSC is 59.94 fields/sec, but 60 is close enough for conversational purposes). Europe does 50 fields/sec, or 25 frames/sec.
Your computer monitor refreshes at whatever the graphics card tells it, so it's essentially arbitrary. Most CRT monitors today can refresh anywhere between 45 - 150 frames/second, with 60, 72, 75, and 85 Hz being the most popular frequencies.
24 frames/second is film....Unless it's Douglas Trumbull's Showscan format, in which case it's 60 frames/second...
Schwab
Re:Recursive Make Considered Harmful
on
Optimizing distcc
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Seconded.
When I was at Be, Inc. (RIP), one of our engineers, motivated largely by the above-referenced article, converted our entire build environment to a non-recursive structure using gmake. The result was a large speedup, as well as more effective use of multiple processors (which BeOS utilized very well). gmake would grovel over the build tree for a minute or two, then launch build commands in very quick succession. 'Twas great.
I want it on the record so that there's no misunderstanding on the part of future generations, or the current generation who's building the future:
I don't want to end up living in a Neal Stephenson novel. No, not even if I get to be Hiro Protagonist.
Reading this writeup reminded me of the scene in Snow Crash where we discover the police have outsourced incarceration, and take YT to The Clink. All that is left is dollars. The human equation is lost, and anyone holding a sense of morals or ethics is seen as an anachronism. I don't know about anyone else, but... Yuck.
I realize it is popular Slashdot dogmatism to insist that filesharing doesn't harm CD sales, and this may be true now, but what about in the future as bandwidth increases??
I got news for you: Bandwidth isn't going to increase.
The cost of real bandwidth -- actual, symmetrical, guaranteed bandwidth, not that overprovisioned ADSL or cable modem crud you may be using -- has remained essentially flat for the last three years. Costs for T1 circuits are still running roughly USD$1/kilobit/sec for "dialtone"; extra charges may apply for bandwidth usage over a certain amount.
There is no market pressure to bring these prices down, and no alternative source to provide lower-cost services since the ILECs have a monopoly and just got the government to agree to lock out CLECs from their central offices. Wireless won't help; at some point, you have to tie down to the wired networks, and you're back to paying the ILECs again. Fiber to the home won't help; it will be rolled out by the ILECs or, worse, by your cable company who only wants you to watch, not talk back (no Counterstrike servers for you, muttonhead).
So, no, I don't see a significant drop in datacomm prices any time soon, which means the Internet for end-users isn't going to get any faster.
That has got to be one of the stupidest damn things I've ever read.
The hallmark of superior software design is flexibility, not rigidity. Rigid systems keel over at the slightest provocation, unanticipated conditions being the most typical (out of disk, out of RAM, bad input from operator, dropped connection, power fluctuation, installed new mouse driver, etc.) If your system cannot tolerate substitution of a component with a compatible alternative, then your system is, by definition, fragile, and sooner or later is going to go toes-up on you.
Your thesis is also manifestly disproved by the very thing you hope to defend. By (pretending to) integrate the browser with Windows, they massively destabilized the system.
Cobind and other Linux distros are not a monopoly. Thus, exclusive bundling, though perhaps short-sighted, is not illegal. Once you're a monopoly, the rules change.
Microsoft has made much hash of the claim that their browser is "integrated" with the OS and cannot be removed, and that if you try to remove it the system will fall over dead. Linux does not suffer from such a design handicap. Mozilla is not "integrated" into Linux. You can swap out the browser freely and the rest of the system will not care. Thus, forced bundling is not taking place as it is with Windows -- no one is forced to keep Mozilla around if they don't want it.
Schwab
Blithely ignoring the Do Not Feed The Trolls sign
Apart from armed rebellion, voting is the only meaningful feedback mechanism you have, and is considerably less messy, so I suggest you use it.
The press has been bought off. Shame is obsolete. Overt corruption has somehow morphed into an asset. Bald-faced lying to the public no longer surprises anyone, much less gets anyone in hot water. And, if you're not careful, voting will become just another CBS/Gallump/Diebold opinion poll, with every bit as much scientific and moral validity.
Out here in the real world, however, comporting oneself in a civilized, socially-redeeming manner goes a long way. Yes, there will still be insane people and people who hate you. But if your behavior has been as close to exemplary as possible, those people will find it considerably more difficult to build a support network because fewer people will be able to find a factual basis for their hatred; ergo, their ability to wreak havoc will be severely diminished.
Or, with so many voices singing your praises, and so many good deeds to your name, maybe -- just maybe -- they'll get the idea that they're hatred is unfounded and go away.
This suit seeks to have the laws that implement the Berne Convention struck down as unconstitutional. However, my highly inexpert reading of the Constitution reveals that the Constitution and all treaties entered into by the US are the supreme law of the land. The Berne Convention is just such an international treaty. Thus, it would seem that the supremacy clause trumps any argument Lessig et al may bring before the court, since the terms of the Berne Convention enjoy equal footing with the Constitution.
Now, if the US enters into a treaty that is in direct opposition to the Constitution, which document wins? I have no idea if this issue in Constitutional law has ever been addressed.
Seeing this reminded me of a brilliant monologue from the film Network, which will be thirty years old before too long.
In this scene, Howard Beale, an insane TV news anchor, is being given a dressing down by the president of the network for exhorting viewers on the air to stop an important business deal. Ask yourself if this is the kind of world you want to live in.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I... WON'T... HAVE IT!! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance.
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars. It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet.
That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature!AND YOU! WILL! ATONE!!! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21 inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock -- all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
See this movie. It is at least as quotable as anything by Quentin Tarantino. Find it, rent it, watch it. Apart from the fashions and faded film stock, you'd swear this film was made last month.
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You get the idea,
Schwab
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[[The following lines of rubbish are to defeat Slashdot's badly-implemented lameness detection heuristics. I extend my apologies for injecting noise into the Net.]]
It Ain't Dead Until NetCraft Confirms It :-)
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
TiVo dying? Please, no. My sweetie just bought one on Tuesday this week. She's been lusting after one for a few years now, and finally had the means. I even went out and bought a USB-Ethernet adapter so it can live on my LAN and pull updates.
Already the thing has proved its value; it's automatically grabbing episodes of shows we would otherwise miss via its Season Pass feature. Oh, and did you know there's a secret 30-second skip feature you can activate? Makes advertising essentially go away.
So, no, please don't kill it yet. We've only just begun to love it.
For people who've never done this before (such as myself), this is an intimidating operation; care to walk me through it? It also glosses over insignificant little details, such as:
How do you set up your supfile?
Over a period of several updates, how do you avoid having stale libraries/executables/config files scattered all over your machine?
Is there a risk that 'make installworld' will silently overwrite a functional replacement previously installed from ports? (E.g. I'm using postfix, thankyouverymuch, and don't want sendmail to reappear.)
Dumb questions I'm sure, but the answers have never been revealed in a form I can understand.
This is supposed to be a new installer for Debian? Apart from the opening splash page, it looks just like the installer I used to install Woody and Potato years ago. What am I missing?
The point is that anyone but that inventor knows that that patent is wasted time and effort on the inventors part, but he paid his share of the fees too. I dont want some one at the government looking at my patent for worthyness or not; that's NOT what they should do. The *marketplace* determines that, not the patent office. A patent on a stupid or unneeded thing is worthless.
In an ideal universe, where all patents issued were novel and non-obvious; and infringement required substantial overlap, you would be correct.
Sadly, it is not that way. Patents are awarded for trivia and, as such, infringement can happen on an equally trivial basis. In the case of your example, a sealed helmet with a cactus as an O2 source is pretty silly. However, if someone came up with a helmet using a different O2 regenerator, then the cactus guy could sue him, claiming infringement. After all, substituting the O2 regenerator is a "trivial" change to his patent. Who cares if the suit has merit? The court costs alone will ruin you.
You can't just hand out patents like Roman Catholic Indulgences. They need to be founded on solid principles. The "value" of an invention may not be a very good principle, but it's better than what the USPTO is using now (which, to the jaundiced eye, appears to be nothing at all).
I have a very, very stupid question: Why are lawyers involved in the patent process at all?
I mean, yeah, it's a legal document at all, and a lawyer could wordsmith your similar creation into non-infringing territory. But, at the core, patents are about engineers communicating with other engineers. So why are patents written by lawyers, people unfamiliar with the engineer's, "dialect?"
It seems my report and analysis from August 2001 was closer to the mark than I dared believe. To wit:
...the evidence in this case is very sparse with respect to whether the
offending program was actually created by improper means. Reverse engineering alone
is not improper means. (See footnote 7 ante.) Here the creator is believed to be a
Norwegian resident who probably had to breach a Xing license in order to access the
information he needed. -- Court ruling, page 12 [emphasis mine]
I essentially said the same thing in my analysis: That DVD CCA's entire case hinged on whether the end-user "license" was valid and binding.
My opinion remains unchanged: end-user "licenses" are unethical, and should not be allowed to stand. See my old-ish editorial on the subject for more detail.
I did a wee bit of research on this, and the short answer is No.
The longer answer is that CVS has a nearly undocumented feature called "keep permissions", which maintains in the repository the UNIX-style permission bits on a file, and sets those permissions correctly on checkout. Since softlinks on UNIX systems are essentially short text files (the path to the destination) with a special permission flag set, you can sometimes use the keep-permissions feature to check softlinks in and out of CVS.
In practice, however, it's not very reliable, and breaks completely if you try to check out softlinks on to a system that doesn't meaningfully support them, such as Windows.
Apparently Subversion 1.0 doesn't support "sharing", where the same file appears in more than one place in the source tree. That's a lack. Microsoft SourceSafe does that, [... ]
That's because everyone else uses softlinks to do that. Windows doesn't have softlinks (shortcuts aren't softlinks), so SourceUnSafe had to hack on "sharing" to make up for it.
Schwab
Re:RCS can handle binary data since v5.7
on
Subversion 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's possible, through a variety of easily-made missteps, for a file to lose the tag that marks it as binary. Suddenly, fresh checkouts of the file have newline translations done on them, and all hell breaks loose. And, if you edit the,v file that stores the revision history, you'll discover that the binary file is actually stored as a raw byte range within a text file.
So, yeah, RCS supports binary files. It just doesn't do it very well.
there are no legal protections for "trade secrets"
Uh, no.
There are very definitely protections for trade secrets, even when they have been disclosed. We learned all about this when the DVD-CCA sued over DeCSS, claiming it was a trade secret.
As I have been led to understand, there are two primary tests to determine if one is illicitly trafficking in trade secrets:
Was the person disclosing/sharing the material under obligation not to do so?
Did the person sharing the material know, or should they have known, that the material was a trade secret?
DVD-CCA argued that both #1 and #2 were true. They (erroneously) argued #1 was established by the so-called "license" attached to the DVD playback software that was reverse-engineered. They (also erroneously) argued #2 was established by the fact that the "license" clearly stated the playback software was a trade secret, and that constituted sufficient disclosure to the public. (DVD-CCA is no longer claiming trade secret, now that they finally got their patent.)
In the immediately present case, Microsoft can probably legitimately argue #2, since the code leak has been all over the press. Since I haven't looked at the sources, I don't know if they can argue #1, but I'd be very surprised if the source files didn't have "Confidential and Proprietary" scrawled all over them.
BTW, there's a great article commenting on the leaked code itself over at Kuro5hin.
Slashdot Mirror
Got a cite for this one?
Schwab
Ah, you must be in France with that SECAM stuff. (SECAM is French for, "PAL.")
Seriously, no television standard in the world does 24 frames per second. The US and Japan are 60 fields per second, or 30 frames/sec. (Actually, US NTSC is 59.94 fields/sec, but 60 is close enough for conversational purposes). Europe does 50 fields/sec, or 25 frames/sec.
Your computer monitor refreshes at whatever the graphics card tells it, so it's essentially arbitrary. Most CRT monitors today can refresh anywhere between 45 - 150 frames/second, with 60, 72, 75, and 85 Hz being the most popular frequencies.
24 frames/second is film. ...Unless it's Douglas Trumbull's Showscan format, in which case it's 60 frames/second...
Schwab
Seconded.
When I was at Be, Inc. (RIP), one of our engineers, motivated largely by the above-referenced article, converted our entire build environment to a non-recursive structure using gmake. The result was a large speedup, as well as more effective use of multiple processors (which BeOS utilized very well). gmake would grovel over the build tree for a minute or two, then launch build commands in very quick succession. 'Twas great.
Schwab
I want it on the record so that there's no misunderstanding on the part of future generations, or the current generation who's building the future:
I don't want to end up living in a Neal Stephenson novel. No, not even if I get to be Hiro Protagonist.
Reading this writeup reminded me of the scene in Snow Crash where we discover the police have outsourced incarceration, and take YT to The Clink. All that is left is dollars. The human equation is lost, and anyone holding a sense of morals or ethics is seen as an anachronism. I don't know about anyone else, but... Yuck.
Great books, but I wouldn't want to live there.
Schwab
I got news for you: Bandwidth isn't going to increase.
The cost of real bandwidth -- actual, symmetrical, guaranteed bandwidth, not that overprovisioned ADSL or cable modem crud you may be using -- has remained essentially flat for the last three years. Costs for T1 circuits are still running roughly USD$1/kilobit/sec for "dialtone"; extra charges may apply for bandwidth usage over a certain amount.
There is no market pressure to bring these prices down, and no alternative source to provide lower-cost services since the ILECs have a monopoly and just got the government to agree to lock out CLECs from their central offices. Wireless won't help; at some point, you have to tie down to the wired networks, and you're back to paying the ILECs again. Fiber to the home won't help; it will be rolled out by the ILECs or, worse, by your cable company who only wants you to watch, not talk back (no Counterstrike servers for you, muttonhead).
So, no, I don't see a significant drop in datacomm prices any time soon, which means the Internet for end-users isn't going to get any faster.
Schwab
That has got to be one of the stupidest damn things I've ever read.
The hallmark of superior software design is flexibility, not rigidity. Rigid systems keel over at the slightest provocation, unanticipated conditions being the most typical (out of disk, out of RAM, bad input from operator, dropped connection, power fluctuation, installed new mouse driver, etc.) If your system cannot tolerate substitution of a component with a compatible alternative, then your system is, by definition, fragile, and sooner or later is going to go toes-up on you.
Your thesis is also manifestly disproved by the very thing you hope to defend. By (pretending to) integrate the browser with Windows, they massively destabilized the system.
Schwab
Two factors invalidate your claim:
Schwab
Blithely ignoring the Do Not Feed The Trolls sign
Apart from armed rebellion, voting is the only meaningful feedback mechanism you have, and is considerably less messy, so I suggest you use it.
The press has been bought off. Shame is obsolete. Overt corruption has somehow morphed into an asset. Bald-faced lying to the public no longer surprises anyone, much less gets anyone in hot water. And, if you're not careful, voting will become just another CBS/Gallump/Diebold opinion poll, with every bit as much scientific and moral validity.
Don't give up the last lever you have.
Schwab
Thank you, Machiavelli.
Out here in the real world, however, comporting oneself in a civilized, socially-redeeming manner goes a long way. Yes, there will still be insane people and people who hate you. But if your behavior has been as close to exemplary as possible, those people will find it considerably more difficult to build a support network because fewer people will be able to find a factual basis for their hatred; ergo, their ability to wreak havoc will be severely diminished.
Or, with so many voices singing your praises, and so many good deeds to your name, maybe -- just maybe -- they'll get the idea that they're hatred is unfounded and go away.
Schwab
This suit seeks to have the laws that implement the Berne Convention struck down as unconstitutional. However, my highly inexpert reading of the Constitution reveals that the Constitution and all treaties entered into by the US are the supreme law of the land. The Berne Convention is just such an international treaty. Thus, it would seem that the supremacy clause trumps any argument Lessig et al may bring before the court, since the terms of the Berne Convention enjoy equal footing with the Constitution.
Now, if the US enters into a treaty that is in direct opposition to the Constitution, which document wins? I have no idea if this issue in Constitutional law has ever been addressed.
Schwab
Seeing this reminded me of a brilliant monologue from the film Network, which will be thirty years old before too long.
In this scene, Howard Beale, an insane TV news anchor, is being given a dressing down by the president of the network for exhorting viewers on the air to stop an important business deal. Ask yourself if this is the kind of world you want to live in.
See this movie. It is at least as quotable as anything by Quentin Tarantino. Find it, rent it, watch it. Apart from the fashions and faded film stock, you'd swear this film was made last month.
Schwab
Actually, it would be more like this:
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You get the idea,
Schwab
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[[The following lines of rubbish are to defeat Slashdot's badly-implemented lameness detection heuristics. I extend my apologies for injecting noise into the Net.]]
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TiVo dying? Please, no. My sweetie just bought one on Tuesday this week. She's been lusting after one for a few years now, and finally had the means. I even went out and bought a USB-Ethernet adapter so it can live on my LAN and pull updates.
Already the thing has proved its value; it's automatically grabbing episodes of shows we would otherwise miss via its Season Pass feature. Oh, and did you know there's a secret 30-second skip feature you can activate? Makes advertising essentially go away.
So, no, please don't kill it yet. We've only just begun to love it.
Schwab
For people who've never done this before (such as myself), this is an intimidating operation; care to walk me through it? It also glosses over insignificant little details, such as:
Dumb questions I'm sure, but the answers have never been revealed in a form I can understand.
Schwab
This is supposed to be a new installer for Debian? Apart from the opening splash page, it looks just like the installer I used to install Woody and Potato years ago. What am I missing?
Schwab
Found on USENET:
Original post
Schwab
In an ideal universe, where all patents issued were novel and non-obvious; and infringement required substantial overlap, you would be correct.
Sadly, it is not that way. Patents are awarded for trivia and, as such, infringement can happen on an equally trivial basis. In the case of your example, a sealed helmet with a cactus as an O2 source is pretty silly. However, if someone came up with a helmet using a different O2 regenerator, then the cactus guy could sue him, claiming infringement. After all, substituting the O2 regenerator is a "trivial" change to his patent. Who cares if the suit has merit? The court costs alone will ruin you.
You can't just hand out patents like Roman Catholic Indulgences. They need to be founded on solid principles. The "value" of an invention may not be a very good principle, but it's better than what the USPTO is using now (which, to the jaundiced eye, appears to be nothing at all).
Schwab
I have a very, very stupid question: Why are lawyers involved in the patent process at all?
I mean, yeah, it's a legal document at all, and a lawyer could wordsmith your similar creation into non-infringing territory. But, at the core, patents are about engineers communicating with other engineers. So why are patents written by lawyers, people unfamiliar with the engineer's, "dialect?"
Schwab
Go check out these guys.
Schwab
The term for that practice is, "Felony."
Schwab
It seems my report and analysis from August 2001 was closer to the mark than I dared believe. To wit:
I essentially said the same thing in my analysis: That DVD CCA's entire case hinged on whether the end-user "license" was valid and binding.
My opinion remains unchanged: end-user "licenses" are unethical, and should not be allowed to stand. See my old-ish editorial on the subject for more detail.
Schwab
I did a wee bit of research on this, and the short answer is No.
The longer answer is that CVS has a nearly undocumented feature called "keep permissions", which maintains in the repository the UNIX-style permission bits on a file, and sets those permissions correctly on checkout. Since softlinks on UNIX systems are essentially short text files (the path to the destination) with a special permission flag set, you can sometimes use the keep-permissions feature to check softlinks in and out of CVS.
In practice, however, it's not very reliable, and breaks completely if you try to check out softlinks on to a system that doesn't meaningfully support them, such as Windows.
Schwab
That's because everyone else uses softlinks to do that. Windows doesn't have softlinks (shortcuts aren't softlinks), so SourceUnSafe had to hack on "sharing" to make up for it.
Schwab
It's possible, through a variety of easily-made missteps, for a file to lose the tag that marks it as binary. Suddenly, fresh checkouts of the file have newline translations done on them, and all hell breaks loose. And, if you edit the ,v file that stores the revision history, you'll discover that the binary file is actually stored as a raw byte range within a text file.
So, yeah, RCS supports binary files. It just doesn't do it very well.
Schwab
Uh, no.
There are very definitely protections for trade secrets, even when they have been disclosed. We learned all about this when the DVD-CCA sued over DeCSS, claiming it was a trade secret.
As I have been led to understand, there are two primary tests to determine if one is illicitly trafficking in trade secrets:
DVD-CCA argued that both #1 and #2 were true. They (erroneously) argued #1 was established by the so-called "license" attached to the DVD playback software that was reverse-engineered. They (also erroneously) argued #2 was established by the fact that the "license" clearly stated the playback software was a trade secret, and that constituted sufficient disclosure to the public. (DVD-CCA is no longer claiming trade secret, now that they finally got their patent.)
In the immediately present case, Microsoft can probably legitimately argue #2, since the code leak has been all over the press. Since I haven't looked at the sources, I don't know if they can argue #1, but I'd be very surprised if the source files didn't have "Confidential and Proprietary" scrawled all over them.
BTW, there's a great article commenting on the leaked code itself over at Kuro5hin.
Schwab