The entire script used to be online, but I can't seem to find it anymore. A shame, because it had some funny lines in it.
If you've read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, you already have a vague idea of Shada's premise. Adams re-used some characters in Shada to create DGHDA.
Does this new chip have support for Digital Restrictions Mechanisms? Does it still have the universally reviled serial number feature? Can it still be shut off?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Um, didn't you see the CVS update?
$MiniPAX: quotes/franklin/benjamin,v 1.1 2001/09/11 11:53:22 jashcroft Exp $
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety are the first among patriots."
From reading the USENET commentary on Google Groups, it seems like RedSheriff only works on Microsoft's broken virtual machine that ships with Windows. It appears that, if you install Sun's JVM, the problem doesn't arise (or at least alerts the user). This would also seem to suggest that Mozilla is immune, since they have their own JVM, yes?
Forgive me, but do you have the vaguest idea what you're talking about?
What I always thought that was cool about the idea of DirectX was where you could in theory make certain calls (API or direct) that would stay the same while the actual logic behind the action could be updated and upgraded.
This is the whole point of OpenGL. It also pre-dates DirectMess by ten years or so.
Silicon Graphics, the creators of OpenGL, originally wrote APIs for their workstations that were more or less hardware-specific. Every time they came out with a new machine, a new version of the API would come out, and all the apps would have to be re-written. After the fifth time or so, SGI got enough flak from both internal and external developers that they decided to write an abstract API such that the client software wouldn't know or care about the underlying implementation. This gave SGI the freedom to take features previously implemented in software and drop them into hardware, and the application would work without recompiliation.
The same principle applies to this day. Back when the first version of GLQuake was released, 3D-accelerated cards had one -- perhaps two -- texturing units. They also didn't have hardware transform and/or lighting. Now, graphics cards typically have four texture units, hardware transform and lighting, vertex shaders, full-scene anti-aliasing, etc. etc. etc. But that old copy of GLQuake id Software released five years ago still works. Heck, it even works better now. Which is the whole point.
What you describe already exists. It's called OpenGL, and it works.
DirectPlay - A high level networking API. DirectPlay is independent of the underlying protocol, and encapsulates high level networking concepts like meeting places and session management.
It also has never worked.
Fire up Mechwarrior 4, which uses DirectPlay. Try to connect to an Internet server. Can't connect? You must be running an unsupported network configuration, such as being behind a firewall running NAT. Oh, sure, there's a technote on how to gouge holes in your NAT gateway to let Microsoft's broken protocol through, but why should you be bothered when Quake, Unreal Tournament, HalfLife, and nearly every other DirectPlay-less game Just Plain Work?
DirectPlay typically causes enough grief for developers that nearly everyone ends up rolling their own network code (since the Berkeley socket API is so straightforward).
It was because of recurring problems with IBM drives that I ended up replacing them with Fujitsus about six months ago.
My system is all SCSI, all the time. As a result, I end up paying in the neighborhood of $200 for an 18G drive. With prices like that, failure is simply not acceptable. Some people say that all hard drives are crud and are going to fail, so one should simply plan for it. Well, then why are the hard drives in my 12-year-old Amiga still working fine?
After enduring my most spectacular failure to date, I resolved to change drive brands. A couple of years prior, I upgraded the drive in my laptop computer. The first drive I tried was an IBM Travelstar, and it made the most gawd-awful racket. I could hear the thing two rooms away over the fans in my main rig. So I sent it back and took a Fujitsu instead. It's been perfectly quiet and reliable ever since.
After this happy experience, I decided to put a couple of Fujitsu MAN3184MP SCSI drives in my main rig. So far, they have given me no trouble at all.
I can't imagine what the heck's going on in the hard drive industry to cause so many failures. I can only hope one of the manufacturers will spill the beans at some point.
Now that the RSA patent has expired, why does anyone bother with RSA Security, Inc. anymore? RSA, Inc's crypto software was widely regarded to be poorly implemented and slow. According to my (limited) understanding, nearly everyone serious about crypto purchased their suite but never actually used it; they considered it the cost of a patent license and used widely available Open Source implementations, which were almost universally better.
Pitch: 89.90 degrees.
Heading: 180.00.
Force: 1 bar.
Apply to neck.
The fellow will land on his can, flop back, and not move any further. Sometimes it looks like he'll start to ooze down the stairs, but the game usually decides he's not going to take any further damage and cuts out before anything more happens.
I was the first to simulate falling downstairs. I first showed "Falling Bodies" at the Softimage user convention in 1997. [... ]
It's unclear whether you're laying claim to human forms falling down stairs, or any object falling down stairs, but I was watching stuff fall down stairs at SIGGRAPH in 1987, ten years earlier.
I'm pretty sure the research was peformed by MIT. I saw renderings of a vase, a toy car, and a park bench fall down stairs. I also saw a bunch of rigid soccer balls bouncing against each other and the environment. The techniques were published in the proceedings that year.
You're missing one of the chief points: There is now pointed and conspicuous dissent among the several states concerning the Federal Government's drug policy. While Federal statutes may override state laws in many cases, the fact that State legislatures and electorates are breaking ranks is itself significant.
Although there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest it's so, cannabis may or may not have medicinal value. We don't know for sure because, by unconditionally criminalizing pot, research into the subject has been forbidden by the Feds. Now, by passing these referenda, the States are calling the Feds on the carpet and demanding changes. Unthinkable just a decade ago.
Whatever this judge may say tomorrow is irrelevant and will not affect MS in the slightest way.
Really? What if the court said this:
"It is the order of this court that Microsoft's copyrights on all versions of Windows, and all software normally accompanying Windows, are hereby revoked."
Microsoft's abuses against citizens the world over proceed from a government-sanctioned monopoly in the form of copyright. Therefore, the government need only rescind its sanction and let the much-vaunted Free Market take over. Implementation and enforcement costs to the government would be nil.
In the late 1980's, one of the Amiga luminaries, Dale Luck, got his hands on a Commodore SX-64 (when they were slightly less rare), hollowed it out, and stuck an Amiga 500 in it.
Apparently one of the toughest parts of the hack was getting the keyboard to work as the C-64 keyboard layout and electronics are completely different from everything else. Fitting the motherboard was also a bit of a squeeze. All in all, it was an amusing hack, but because the SX-64's color monitor was of such low resolution, it was a struggle to read, even at 640 * 200 pixels. So it was cute but, alas, not useful.
As others have already observered, gutting one of these rarities to stick a PC in it is just sacrelige.
I realize it's disingenuous of me to select but a single remark as a basis for a lengthy Windows bash, but:
Windows XP is as slow as a dog! I don't know what spec the machine is, but there is very noticable latency between clicking and menu's appearing for example. This might have something to do with it having an absolute shitpile graphics card.
No, it has something to do with having an absolute shitpile OS.
Extremely responsive user interfaces were developed over fifteen years ago on machines that had a 7 or 8 MHz MC68000 as their CPU. Maybe they had blitting hardware, maybe not. The definitely didn't have floating-point math HW. I'm referring of course to the Amiga and the Mac. (Atari ST owners can chime in on their own.)
Here we are fifteen years later, and what have we got? A slow, poorly responsive user interface. Well, the pixels have gotten deeper, from two to 32 bits in some cases. So the machine needs to be 16 times faster to compensate, right? 16 * 7 MHz == 112MHz. National Semiconductor Geodes -- widely regarded as the cheapest pieces of crud currently available -- start at around 180MHz. Moreover, all machines these days have some kind of blitter, with anything from a 32- to a 256-bit bus. So the machine should be every bit as fast, if not faster, right?
Since it's slower, this illustrates that the software is, as you say, an absolute shitpile. And don't try to hand me any rubbish about, "Oh, the OS has to do so much more than Amiga or MacOS did back then." There's only so much that could possibly need to happen between a mouse click and deploying a menu and, unless you're a complete muppet of a software programmer, there's no way those operations are going to perceptibly eat up a 180MHz CPU.
On a surface level, the argument "Why would you buy something if you already have the MP3?" is a hard one to give a definite answer to [.. ]
Only for greedy, shrill children who lack imagination. To wit:
In the case of music:
So I can have the full-resolution "original" at hand on durable, read-only media that can't get accidentally erased by a Windows crash.
Having the original also lets me re-compress it when the Next Best CoDec comes out.
In the case of movies:
Same reasons as music, basically.
It also gives me someone to bitch at if the disc turns out to have a real, physical defect (as opposed to an artificial defect, like copy protection).
In the case of software:
So I can have the manual. Online help systems still suck rocks in most cases (although forward strides are being made in this area in, curiously enough, free (and Free) software).
So I can have original, trusted media from which to reinstall when Windows trashes the disk/trashes the registry/runs the latest virus/etc.
So I can have someone to bitch at if the software itself trashes my work.
Being a software engineer myself, to show my appreciation for work well done.
Any such system should be designed to not run anything unexpected, whether it is "signed" or not. And that is easy to enforce by not letting people who might be interested in running unwanted programs from touching the machine.
But that is not always possible to enforce.
Consider your average bank branch. The machines are owned and administrated by the bank, but in daily use by employees, who are of variable trustworthiness. 99.9% of bank employees can be trusted, but for that 0.1%, you need mechanisms in place to thwart attempts to introduce foreign software that hasn't been vetted by the site administrator (N.B: the site administrator vets the software, not Micros~1 or the {MP,RI}AA).
For instances where the software needs to be updated, the site administrator has the digital certificate for all the machines under his/her control. After verifying that the software does what is expected, s/he signs the binaries with the certificate and ships them off to be installed site-wide. So legitimate installations happen without incident, and unauthorized installations are made NP-hard.
We can no longer afford the luxury of being apolitical. We must stand up for our principles, not only in word, but in deed as well. That means refusing to create the tools by which we, our families, and our friends will be subjugated.
I trust that all persons with even the slightest shred of honor or dignity will stay well away from this invitation to sell out the rest of their community.
Actually TCPA is not pallidium and is fully open and supported by a large consorturium who are interested in secure e-commerce and computing. Not drm and electronic enforcement of compulsive [sic] licensing.
...Except that the employer is a Japanese entertainment conglomerate with offices in San Jose (the popular guess is Sony), and the target platform is hinted at being a digital media device. So TCPA, at least in this instance, will be used precisely for compulsory licensing and screwing the user.
TCPA devices have their place -- in banks, brokerages, power plants, and other establishements where you don't want random code introduced without a red flag popping up. And its use and proliferation should be confined to precisely those areas. TCPA has no business being in consumer-level devices.
If anyone from Tom's is looking in, perhaps they may want to try out this test rig we developed for testing power supplies.
Back when I was working for NTG (later acquired by 3DO), our chief hardware designer, Dave Needle, assigned one of the engineers to test power supplies. It had to supply 5V at some large number of Amps, absolutely flat, and do it on continuous duty. Dave informed me -- to my utter, youthfully naive astonishment -- that the specs on power supplies couldn't be trusted.
The test rig the engineer came up with was several low-Ohm high-wattage resistors wired in parallel, submerged in a pan of distilled water. He then turned on the juice and watched the output on a 'scope. The room where these tests were carried out came to be known as The Steam Room.
I think he went through about a dozen prospective supplies before he found one that was acceptable.
Lesson to be learned:
Never, Never, Never let a software engineer touch the hardware.
The software guys at NTG -- myself included -- had this habit of wandering into the hardware lab and taking up space just to kill time and/or clear their thoughts, sometimes idly frobbing tools. Drove the HW guys mad.
Actual overheard statement, delivered to wandering SW guy from head HW lab tech in police officer-voice: "DROP THE SCREWDRIVER! PUT DOWN THE SCREWDRIVER AND WALK AWAY!"
Yet, there has yet to be a single artist who has achieved wide-spread popularity or fame through these channels.
Counterexample: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park. Their fame was earned by a single, badly-digitized QuickTime movie called The Spirit of Christmas that got copied all over the Internet. In the span of a few months, Comedy Central offered them a deal.
It's probably also worth pointing out that Parker and Stone didn't digitize or upload the QuickTime file themselves. One of the recipients of their original VHS tape did it. So Parker and Stone's wild success proceeded from a massive case of unsanctioned copying (or, to use the misleading slang term, "piracy").
Slashdot Mirror
The entire script used to be online, but I can't seem to find it anymore. A shame, because it had some funny lines in it.
If you've read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, you already have a vague idea of Shada's premise. Adams re-used some characters in Shada to create DGHDA.
Anyway, check out the detailed plot summary. A fun story.
Schwab
Does this new chip have support for Digital Restrictions Mechanisms? Does it still have the universally reviled serial number feature? Can it still be shut off?
Schwab
Um, didn't you see the CVS update?
$MiniPAX: quotes/franklin/benjamin,v 1.1 2001/09/11 11:53:22 jashcroft Exp $
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties to obtain a little temporary safety are the first among patriots."
Schwab
From reading the USENET commentary on Google Groups, it seems like RedSheriff only works on Microsoft's broken virtual machine that ships with Windows. It appears that, if you install Sun's JVM, the problem doesn't arise (or at least alerts the user). This would also seem to suggest that Mozilla is immune, since they have their own JVM, yes?
Yet another reason to avoid IE, I suppose.
Schwab
Forgive me, but do you have the vaguest idea what you're talking about?
This is the whole point of OpenGL. It also pre-dates DirectMess by ten years or so.
Silicon Graphics, the creators of OpenGL, originally wrote APIs for their workstations that were more or less hardware-specific. Every time they came out with a new machine, a new version of the API would come out, and all the apps would have to be re-written. After the fifth time or so, SGI got enough flak from both internal and external developers that they decided to write an abstract API such that the client software wouldn't know or care about the underlying implementation. This gave SGI the freedom to take features previously implemented in software and drop them into hardware, and the application would work without recompiliation.
The same principle applies to this day. Back when the first version of GLQuake was released, 3D-accelerated cards had one -- perhaps two -- texturing units. They also didn't have hardware transform and/or lighting. Now, graphics cards typically have four texture units, hardware transform and lighting, vertex shaders, full-scene anti-aliasing, etc. etc. etc. But that old copy of GLQuake id Software released five years ago still works. Heck, it even works better now. Which is the whole point.
What you describe already exists. It's called OpenGL, and it works.
Schwab
It also has never worked.
Fire up Mechwarrior 4, which uses DirectPlay. Try to connect to an Internet server. Can't connect? You must be running an unsupported network configuration, such as being behind a firewall running NAT. Oh, sure, there's a technote on how to gouge holes in your NAT gateway to let Microsoft's broken protocol through, but why should you be bothered when Quake, Unreal Tournament, HalfLife, and nearly every other DirectPlay-less game Just Plain Work?
DirectPlay typically causes enough grief for developers that nearly everyone ends up rolling their own network code (since the Berkeley socket API is so straightforward).
Schwab
It was because of recurring problems with IBM drives that I ended up replacing them with Fujitsus about six months ago.
My system is all SCSI, all the time. As a result, I end up paying in the neighborhood of $200 for an 18G drive. With prices like that, failure is simply not acceptable. Some people say that all hard drives are crud and are going to fail, so one should simply plan for it. Well, then why are the hard drives in my 12-year-old Amiga still working fine?
After enduring my most spectacular failure to date, I resolved to change drive brands. A couple of years prior, I upgraded the drive in my laptop computer. The first drive I tried was an IBM Travelstar, and it made the most gawd-awful racket. I could hear the thing two rooms away over the fans in my main rig. So I sent it back and took a Fujitsu instead. It's been perfectly quiet and reliable ever since.
After this happy experience, I decided to put a couple of Fujitsu MAN3184MP SCSI drives in my main rig. So far, they have given me no trouble at all.
I can't imagine what the heck's going on in the hard drive industry to cause so many failures. I can only hope one of the manufacturers will spill the beans at some point.
Schwab
Now that the RSA patent has expired, why does anyone bother with RSA Security, Inc. anymore? RSA, Inc's crypto software was widely regarded to be poorly implemented and slow. According to my (limited) understanding, nearly everyone serious about crypto purchased their suite but never actually used it; they considered it the cost of a patent license and used widely available Open Source implementations, which were almost universally better.
Schwab
Did anyone else notice that the URL given for the owner's manual points to maxpoweraero.com?
Schwab
Nah, not a problem. Tornadoes are only attracted to mobile home parks.
Schwab
Lowest score: Zero.
Pitch: 89.90 degrees.
Heading: 180.00.
Force: 1 bar.
Apply to neck.
The fellow will land on his can, flop back, and not move any further. Sometimes it looks like he'll start to ooze down the stairs, but the game usually decides he's not going to take any further damage and cuts out before anything more happens.
Schwab
It's unclear whether you're laying claim to human forms falling down stairs, or any object falling down stairs, but I was watching stuff fall down stairs at SIGGRAPH in 1987, ten years earlier.
I'm pretty sure the research was peformed by MIT. I saw renderings of a vase, a toy car, and a park bench fall down stairs. I also saw a bunch of rigid soccer balls bouncing against each other and the environment. The techniques were published in the proceedings that year.
Schwab
You're missing one of the chief points: There is now pointed and conspicuous dissent among the several states concerning the Federal Government's drug policy. While Federal statutes may override state laws in many cases, the fact that State legislatures and electorates are breaking ranks is itself significant.
Although there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest it's so, cannabis may or may not have medicinal value. We don't know for sure because, by unconditionally criminalizing pot, research into the subject has been forbidden by the Feds. Now, by passing these referenda, the States are calling the Feds on the carpet and demanding changes. Unthinkable just a decade ago.
Schwab
Really? What if the court said this:
"It is the order of this court that Microsoft's copyrights on all versions of Windows, and all software normally accompanying Windows, are hereby revoked."
Microsoft's abuses against citizens the world over proceed from a government-sanctioned monopoly in the form of copyright. Therefore, the government need only rescind its sanction and let the much-vaunted Free Market take over. Implementation and enforcement costs to the government would be nil.
Schwab
This is Old News.
In the late 1980's, one of the Amiga luminaries, Dale Luck, got his hands on a Commodore SX-64 (when they were slightly less rare), hollowed it out, and stuck an Amiga 500 in it.
Apparently one of the toughest parts of the hack was getting the keyboard to work as the C-64 keyboard layout and electronics are completely different from everything else. Fitting the motherboard was also a bit of a squeeze. All in all, it was an amusing hack, but because the SX-64's color monitor was of such low resolution, it was a struggle to read, even at 640 * 200 pixels. So it was cute but, alas, not useful.
As others have already observered, gutting one of these rarities to stick a PC in it is just sacrelige.
Schwab
I realize it's disingenuous of me to select but a single remark as a basis for a lengthy Windows bash, but:
No, it has something to do with having an absolute shitpile OS.
Extremely responsive user interfaces were developed over fifteen years ago on machines that had a 7 or 8 MHz MC68000 as their CPU. Maybe they had blitting hardware, maybe not. The definitely didn't have floating-point math HW. I'm referring of course to the Amiga and the Mac. (Atari ST owners can chime in on their own.)
Here we are fifteen years later, and what have we got? A slow, poorly responsive user interface. Well, the pixels have gotten deeper, from two to 32 bits in some cases. So the machine needs to be 16 times faster to compensate, right? 16 * 7 MHz == 112MHz. National Semiconductor Geodes -- widely regarded as the cheapest pieces of crud currently available -- start at around 180MHz. Moreover, all machines these days have some kind of blitter, with anything from a 32- to a 256-bit bus. So the machine should be every bit as fast, if not faster, right?
Since it's slower, this illustrates that the software is, as you say, an absolute shitpile. And don't try to hand me any rubbish about, "Oh, the OS has to do so much more than Amiga or MacOS did back then." There's only so much that could possibly need to happen between a mouse click and deploying a menu and, unless you're a complete muppet of a software programmer, there's no way those operations are going to perceptibly eat up a 180MHz CPU.
Schwab
Only for greedy, shrill children who lack imagination. To wit:
In the case of music:
In the case of movies:
In the case of software:
Schwab
But that is not always possible to enforce.
Consider your average bank branch. The machines are owned and administrated by the bank, but in daily use by employees, who are of variable trustworthiness. 99.9% of bank employees can be trusted, but for that 0.1%, you need mechanisms in place to thwart attempts to introduce foreign software that hasn't been vetted by the site administrator (N.B: the site administrator vets the software, not Micros~1 or the {MP,RI}AA).
For instances where the software needs to be updated, the site administrator has the digital certificate for all the machines under his/her control. After verifying that the software does what is expected, s/he signs the binaries with the certificate and ships them off to be installed site-wide. So legitimate installations happen without incident, and unauthorized installations are made NP-hard.
Schwab
We can no longer afford the luxury of being apolitical. We must stand up for our principles, not only in word, but in deed as well. That means refusing to create the tools by which we, our families, and our friends will be subjugated.
I trust that all persons with even the slightest shred of honor or dignity will stay well away from this invitation to sell out the rest of their community.
Schwab
...Except that the employer is a Japanese entertainment conglomerate with offices in San Jose (the popular guess is Sony), and the target platform is hinted at being a digital media device. So TCPA, at least in this instance, will be used precisely for compulsory licensing and screwing the user.
TCPA devices have their place -- in banks, brokerages, power plants, and other establishements where you don't want random code introduced without a red flag popping up. And its use and proliferation should be confined to precisely those areas. TCPA has no business being in consumer-level devices.
Schwab
Two words for you, dude: Staggered spinup. All SCSI drives have it as a jumpered option these days.
...Unless, of course, you're using IDE drives, in which case you're screwed.
Schwab
If anyone from Tom's is looking in, perhaps they may want to try out this test rig we developed for testing power supplies.
Back when I was working for NTG (later acquired by 3DO), our chief hardware designer, Dave Needle, assigned one of the engineers to test power supplies. It had to supply 5V at some large number of Amps, absolutely flat, and do it on continuous duty. Dave informed me -- to my utter, youthfully naive astonishment -- that the specs on power supplies couldn't be trusted.
The test rig the engineer came up with was several low-Ohm high-wattage resistors wired in parallel, submerged in a pan of distilled water. He then turned on the juice and watched the output on a 'scope. The room where these tests were carried out came to be known as The Steam Room.
I think he went through about a dozen prospective supplies before he found one that was acceptable.
Schwab
The software guys at NTG -- myself included -- had this habit of wandering into the hardware lab and taking up space just to kill time and/or clear their thoughts, sometimes idly frobbing tools. Drove the HW guys mad.
Actual overheard statement, delivered to wandering SW guy from head HW lab tech in police officer-voice: "DROP THE SCREWDRIVER! PUT DOWN THE SCREWDRIVER AND WALK AWAY!"
Schwab
For insulting questionable auto styling, I prefer beaterz.com.
Schwab
Counterexample: Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park. Their fame was earned by a single, badly-digitized QuickTime movie called The Spirit of Christmas that got copied all over the Internet. In the span of a few months, Comedy Central offered them a deal.
It's probably also worth pointing out that Parker and Stone didn't digitize or upload the QuickTime file themselves. One of the recipients of their original VHS tape did it. So Parker and Stone's wild success proceeded from a massive case of unsanctioned copying (or, to use the misleading slang term, "piracy").
Schwab