I'd happily pay, if you guys would promise to use the money to buy some English as a Second Language courses. Maybe a spell checker.
What you have to realize is that Slashdot isn't a service. When you pay for a subscription, you're not paying for a service. If that's the way you look at it, you'd be a fool to donate, because the quality of the reporting and the discussions on this site really, really stinks.
You have to think of Slashdot as a charity, like the church or the homeless shelter. By giving to Slashdot, you're helping to keep a bunch of dot-com refugees off the streets and out of the gutters. That's all there is to it.
Why should you care about Yahoo's privacy policy? You didn't give them any real information, did you? I thought every Yahoo user lived on 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Beverly Hills, CA, 90210 and had the phone number 212-555-1212.
No, you're misinterpreting. Linux, as a desktop operating system, won't be worth using until:
1. It's stable. The nightmare that was the 2.4 release family must never be repeated.
2. It's documented. There must be no more "coming soon!" pages in the documentation.
3. It's easy to use. KDE and Gnome need to be scrapped and replaced with a consistent, intuitive desktop environment.
4. It includes key features like color space management, intelligent typography, unified audio and video frameworks, a unified printing model, and some sort of display list rendering technology like PostScript or PDF.
That's just the short list; I didn't spend any time on it, so I'm quite certain it's not exhaustive. Until Linux has these, and other, critical features, there's simply no reason to even consider using it.
The hobbyists of the world will probably never understand that people don't want to use an operating system that's incomplete and inconsistent. Since the community has a terrible track record for completeness and consistency, Linux will never be more than a niche operating system.
It just doesn't offer anything at all to compel one to use it.
Linux works for me, and I only have a couple of computers. So much for the "economy of scale" theory.
How much time are you willing to invest in setting up, maintaining, troubleshooting (when necessary), and just generally fiddling with your computers? If you're an average person, or a business, the amount is zero, modulo whatever maintenance and overhead might be unavoidable.
I'll bet you're willing to spend a heck of a lot more time fiddling with your computers than zero.
That doesn't seem to make a whole lotta sense, though. The ATAT blurb compares the 217 GFLOPS attained by JPL on 33 Xserves with the 233 GFLOPS reported by USC on 152 Power Macs, and then concludes that the Power Macs take up more room. If JPL were to add a few more Xserves, they could top the 233 GLOPS figure handily, all inside a single rack. USC's Power Macs took up a lot more space because they were older, and there were a hell of a lot more of them.
I guess what this really tells us is that 33 XServes working together achieves nearly the same performance as almost five times that number of 450 and 533 MHz machines. Seems like the Xserves are providing raw FLOPS scalability superlinearly to their clock speed.
I thought a lot of gig-e cards implemented a good deal of packet processing in hardware to deal with this very problem. Am I mistaken? I remember that the first PCI gig-e card I ever saw was installed in an SGI Origin, and when running full-out it pegged an entire CPU with interrupt handlers. Later versions of the card-- or perhaps an entirely different card, but sold by SGI and used with the same Origin servers-- had hardly any interrupt activity at all, even when moving data at rates exceeding 50 MB/s.
First of all: remember my last post. I said that the use of a tool in visual effects means nothing. There's so much work going on that every tool will be used by some group of people in the industry.
Second: desktop Linux at places like Dreamworks and ILM is based on the "economy of scale" model. The first Linux workstation they deployed at ILM cost them a fortune; none of the graphics drivers worked properly, there were NFS bugs out the wazoo, the list goes on. They spent a ton of money sorting out those problems, so the first Linux workstation deployed at ILM cost them dearly even before you figure in the man-years spent trying to find, port, or build tools that worked worth a damn. But the hundredth Linux workstations is cheap, because the software is free and the hardware is commodity. Linux on the desktop at places like DD, Dreamworks, ILM, Pixar, Disney is an economic choice, nothing more.
To put it another way, Linux is cheap enough, being free, to justify the vast amount of work those places had to put into it. But the numbers don't start making sense until you get up into the hundreds of instances.
Please. There's so much work going on in visual effects these days that you can find a few examples of every tool, no matter how shabby, being used on some major feature film. Seriously, somebody out there used Corel Draw or Paint Shop Pro on FOTR. That doesn't mean anything.
When Gimp has replaced After Effects, Photoshop, Shake, Inferno, or any the other high-end tools for compositing, we'll have something to talk about. Until then, this example is just plain meaningless.
Once the InterTrust server goes down, the "access rights" the consumer thought they "bought" are going to be worthless!
Nope. The only time you have to interact with any servers is during a transaction. You buy an authorization certificate and download that from the vendor's e-commerce server. The you download the content package (if you don't already have it), and use your authorization cert to get a rights package corresponding to whatever rights you bought. Once you've done that, your interaction with Internet servers is over. From that point on, everything is done within the Intertrust client built in to your device. If you press the "play" button, the built-in Intertrust client checks the rights package to see, for example, if your license has expired. If it hasn't, you're good to go. All the business rule logic is handled inside the device itself.
A well-written rights package will include an expiration date beyond which the rules will no longer apply. In fact, sellers might be required to include this provision or be in civil violation of Title 17. So after the copyright on a work expires-- after the work enters the public domain-- its Intertrust package will allow the user to do whatever he wants with the content.
Of course, this goes back to what I initially said. In order to work properly, Intertrust requires a lot of very complex infrastructure. Well-written, correct, and complete rights packages are a part of that infrastructure. Can we, as a society, pull it off? I don't know. I'd say the chances of deploying this system on a large scale in such a way that it works perfectly are somewhat less than 50/50. On a limited scale-- say, as part of an HDTV VOD-to-the-home system-- the odds go up sharply.
In reality, the government monopoly is only supposed to give them certain rights...
That's not true, though. Read Title 17. It grants the copyright holder absolute rights over his work and the use and distribution thereof until such time as the copyright expires. It then sets out certain exceptions to those absolute rights, such as what's commonly called "fair use." If you're the copyright holder, you get to call the shots, subject only to a narrow and clearly defined set of exceptions.
A good DRM system-- and Intertrust looks like a good DRM system to me, at least on paper-- simply allows the copyright holder to enforce his rights, granted under law, with technology. It's conceptually no different than putting a lock on your door. (Yes, it's actually quite different from that. But at the most basic level, that's pretty much what it is: using technology to make sure people don't do something that they're not allowed to do.)
As an aside, one of the areas where they're really, really interested in this kind of system is in broadcast TV. Let's use the example of a small TV station. There's no network programming on a Sunday afternoon, so the station has to go out and buy some programming to fill that airtime. They buy a syndicated movie package. The license that they buy-- which costs what you or I would consider to be a small fortune-- says that the station is entitled to air "Two Mules for Sister Sarah" six times in a 12-month period. They can show it any time of day, any day of the week, or any week of the year that they want, but only up to a maximum of six times.
What happens if that small TV station accidentally programs that movie to air 7 times in one year? They have to pay a massive fine to the syndication company, that's what. And if the movie package cost a small fortune, wait 'til you see how the fines can add up.
This happens all the time. It's hard to keep track of what programming has been aired and when, and syndication broadcast licenses are always much, much more complex than the example I gave. (The license will tell the broadcaster that they can only run the movie on a weeknight after 11:00 PM and with no more than three commercial interruptions per hour, except for the last hour and then only on days with an L in them... and so on.) So TV stations are fascinated by the idea of some kind of system that will help them keep tabs on what rights they bought and what rights they've exercised, and help them prevent accidental license violations. It'll save them a lot of money over the course of a year or two, so they're willing-- even eager-- to invest in it.
That's just one example of how DRM is a bigger issue than most Slashdotters think it is. There are many examples like it that most people have simply never heard of before.
Okay, end of aside.
The access rights can change based on the DRM controller's whims.
Again, no. Once you've bought a rights package, you're done interacting with the seller. The rights that you've bought can't be changed or revoked through technical means. And I don't mean "can't" in the sense of "it's prohibited." I mean it literally is not possible; there's no communication between the licensor and the licensees at all except for the actual licensing transactions themselves.
What happens when you find your "forever viewing" access blocked because....
Again, because the Intertrust client is completely self-contained, these things you talk about can't happen. At least not through technical means within the Intertrust framework.
Just to make sure I'm clear, the key insight here is that Intertrust calls for a self-contained DRM system embedded into whatever media devices are chosen to implement it. During a licensing transaction, the user downloads-- through whatever connection is appropriate for the device in question-- the encrypted media content itself and a rights package that defines the complete set of rules for that content's use. The rights package will codify what the user is allowed to do within the license, what he's allowed to do under fair use, and what he's not allowed to do. It will also include an expiration date, after which the DRM system will simply stop saying "no;" that date corresponds to the point at which the work is no longer protected by copyright. The big advantage here is that all of these rules will be set out in the rights package itself, and available for scrutiny. If you think a rights package infringes on your fair use rights, sue the licensor under Title 17 and let a court decide if you're right.
Gimp is just as good as photoshop from what i've seen, though im not a graphix guy.
Obviously not.
No offense intended to anybody who worked on it or anything, but Gimp is an incredibly weak imitation of Photoshop. It's not suitable for any real work.
you can run that demo standalone [one machine] but you must have a G4.
I don't think that's true. I have a G4 (x2), but the program gives me the option of disabling multiprocessor support and AltiVec at run-time. It looks like the program will check for multiple CPUs and AltiVec capability at launch and run accordingly, but I can't confirm that myself right now.
No, I don't know, but my uninformed opinion would be that there's no measurable difference in latency between gigabit and 100BASE-T. The vast majority of the latency happens in the TCP stack inside the computer and in the NIC, as packets are generated and whatnot. Actual transmission latency will be so tiny as to make no meaningful difference.
I realise it's totally off topic to the original story, but why not buy only the "hard" produced foie gras and charge a premium?
Yeah, that's originally what I did. But in so doing, I was helping to increase the size of the market for foie gras, which in turn will increase the size of the market for inhumanely produced foie gras. Most people don't know what foie gras is, or how it's produced, so if they come to the restaurant and enjoy a dish with foie gras in it, they're likely to go out and have foie gras again, possibly at a restaurant that buys theirs from less humane farms. I felt like I was doing more harm than good in the long run.
Again, I'm not a big moralist on this sort of thing. I just feel like it's a person's responsibility to follow his conscience. And my conscience is telling me to drop the pan-seared foie gras appetizer and replace it with a black truffle flan. Nobody complains about the inhumane treatment of the truffle.;-)
I was going to respond to your post, but upon reading something else you wrote, I realize that there would be no point. You said:
I consider it [the trading of music] neither illegal nor immoral.
That tells me everything I need to know about you. Only the copyright holder of a work has the right to determine how that work is distributed. This most basic principle is embodied in both national and international laws. Your arrogant denial of this fact says to me that you're not interested in accepting the principles of copyright law. Therefore, your opinion on all such matters-- especially matters concerning rights management and license enforcement-- is of no value to me whatsoever.
If you should change your opinions and decide to start living within the boundaries defined by the law, let me know. I'd like to have an intelligent discussion on this matter with you. But as long as you reject the fundamental principles on which copyright is based, I really have nothing at all to say to you.
You said the word "innovation" about a hundred times. Let me just say this about that.
You're trying to use what you call a "but-for" argument. "But for Microsoft's monopolies on key areas of technology, things would be better than they are right now." That's a fundamentally specious argument. The whole point basically equates to, "If it weren't for Union Carbide, we'd all have pet unicorns. Since we don't have pet unicorns, Union Carbide is a bad company!"
It's true that IE hasn't changed much in the last umpty-bump months. But browsers in general haven't changed much since Netscape Navigator 1.0. It's been incremental ever since. In fact, in my opinion, browsers have gotten considerably worse since those days: slower, less compatible, more buggy. So that's probably a bad example.
Browsers aside, though, I think your point about Microsoft sitting on their laurels is worse than flawed; I think it's just plain broken. See, if we lived in a world where there were 30 different operating systems-- or even just 3-- Microsoft's primary goal would be to sell the one that's just slightly better than everybody else's. Why? Because that's where the profits are. Spend as little on R&D as possible, but capture as much of the market as possible. That's the way all the successful software companies would be doing things. Compete for customers by convincing them to abandon product X for your product, but don't spend a fortune to do it.
But that's not how things are done. Microsoft basically doesn't compete with anybody... except themselves. Every time Microsoft releases a new OS, they're depending on a bunch of people abandoning Windows N to use Windows N+1, and in order to do that, they have to produce a Windows N+1 that's demonstrably better, to the users, than Windows N was. Microsoft succeeded like gangbusters in doing this with Windows 2000; Windows 2000 basically kicked both NT's and 98's ass, and millions of people-- literally!-- spent good money to upgrade.
Then, as you point out, came XP. I can't talk about XP. Never seen it. Never used it. But it seems clear that the mass appeal of XP doesn't really match the mass appeal that 2000 had. People who bought new computers with XP are using it, and a bunch of people have upgraded, but virtually everybody I've talked to who was using 2000 before and who didn't buy a new computer are still using 2000. Windows XP just isn't innovative-- yeah, there's that word again-- enough for them to upgrade to it.
So Microsoft's not selling XP like they hoped they would. They kinda dropped the ball there, similarly to the way they kinda dropped the ball with Windows ME. What if we threw an OS and nobody came?
I think this demonstrates that Microsoft is under more pressure to innovate than you give them credit for. It may be true that they're not under any particular pressure to innovate in the ways that you'd like; Microsoft's idea of innovation is giving the customer what they want, which is typically easier, simpler, prettier, more fun. But that's the only kind of innovation that really counts: market-based innovation. Everything else is just masturbation.
Now, I want to address something specifically. It's a small thing, but I think it's worth talking about:
Computers are the new pencil and paper. They are a part of everyday life, and our development as an advanced technological civilization (or so we think ourselves) depends directly, in very large part, upon computers.
I think you're overestimating the importance of personal computers. They're just not that big a deal, Jess. Seriously. If every personal computer in the world were to disappear tomorrow, life wouldn't change all that much. The phone company would have to come up with a new excuse to replace, "Our computers are down right now," but I'm sure they're up to the challenge.
The places where computers have become truly critical to our way of life are in large-scale areas like banking and air traffic control, and small-scale areas like embedded systems for cell phones and TVs. These are the things we would miss if we lost them, and they are not effected at all by whether you use Windows or Linux on your PC. The medium-scale stuff-- desktops, laptops, and so on-- are really incidental. Parenthetical. Superfluous.
At my last job-- the failing software company where I worked before getting laid off and going into the whole restaurant thing-- we had a policy. I guess it's more accurate to say that I had a policy, but since I was the policy-making guy, it amounts to the same thing. You've heard of "casual Friday?" We had what I called "analog Friday." The use of computers was strictly prohibited on Fridays, except for situations in which it was unavoidable. We didn't send our programmers home, but I did make our sales guys get off the email and the IM and make phone calls instead. If you were using a computer for something that you could have done without one on an analog Friday, you were subject to ridicule and mockery by your peers, and particularly by me.
Know what? Our productivity skyrocketed. We started actually talking to each other and to our customers, instead of emailing everybody all the time. Our phone bill rose a bit, but it was a small price to pay for the improved relationships with our customers and between employees and groups inside the company.
Consider spending a day away from your computer. No email, no surfing, no word processor. Get reacquainted with what really is the new pencil and paper: a pencil, and some paper.
Why do you think we don't have an AIDS cure yet? Simple... the drug companies researching HIV have snapped up quick-n-easy US patents on key technologies, genes, compounds, and the like.
There goes that but-for argument again. We don't have an AIDS cure yet because HIV is a complex and aggressive Lentivirus-type retrovirus, and we don't know how to treat retroviruses yet. Heck, retroviruses were completely unknown only 30 years ago. HIV, human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV), human spumavirus (HSRV)... none of these viruses can be treated medically right now.
But it's quite certain that we would not have an AIDS cure if there were no biomedical industry, so your "but-for" argument kinda falls flat.
Incidentally, it always amuses or depresses me-- depending on the context-- when people hold up a cure for AIDS as the next big medical milestone to shoot for. AIDS is horrible, a tragedy. But in terms of the number of people it affects, it's not even on the radar. Heart disease, cancer (technically, "malignant neoplasms"), stroke, respiratory disease, trauma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, Alzheimer's, kidney disease, and sepsis are the most common causes of death in the United States. Worldwide the list isn't terribly different; malaria and other diarrheal diseases rank high, and lung and respiratory diseases take the #1 spot. (Smoking kills.) But AIDS doesn't even crack the top 10. Measles kills more people every year than AIDS, but you don't see protests in the streets calling for a cure to measles that often. It's just funny-- or sad-- to see people's lack of a sense of proportion.
To sum it all up, you can't say with any shred of accuracy what things would be like without Microsoft, so saying that Microsoft stifles innovation is an unfounded and absurd accusation. Personal computers are an interesting novelty and a nice luxury, but they don't make the world go around. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter what operating system you use, so Microsoft isn't really helping or hurting anybody either way. And finally, if you really want to affect change in the world in some meaningful way, go give a pint of blood.
I admire you for wanting to take a stand. I wish you were taking a stand on an issue that mattered to your family, or your friends, or to the world at large, but what you're doing is better than nothing. "The unexamined life," and all that.
At one point, in the distant, distant past, I thought SlashDot was a gathering for Unix/Linux/Be/Mac/NON MSFT geeks.
God, I hope not. I'm no fan of Microsoft's, exactly, but some of the opinions voiced around here about that particular entity give me chills. Some threads get eerily close to torches and pitchforks and a march on Redmond, and I don't care for that. If Slashdot were an anti-Microsoft club only, I'd have to find someplace else to hang out.
See, my thing is this: I do not care about computer politics. I've taken a good, hard look around and concluded that all the issues that get some computer aficionados up in arms-- the DMCA, DRM, Microsoft, the FSF-- just aren't very important at all, in comparison to the other stuff that's going on in the world. I just don't care about those issues most of the time.
Consequently, I choose things like what software or operating system I'm going to use based on different criteria from the average (pardon me) zealot. I pick what works best for a given job. My personal, none-of-your-business-so-shut-up-about-it opinion is that Linux is rarely the operating system that's going to work best for a given job. Most stuff that you could do with Linux I prefer to do with Windows, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X. Not for any reason other than that those are the tools that have worked best for me in the past.
For sake of perspective-- and as a little aside-- let me give you an example of an issue that I do think is worth concerning myself with. It's not earth-shattering, but it qualifies, in my book. I'm a chef, and one of the most prized ingredients in French cooking is foie gras: the hypertrophied liver of a duck or a goose. It's delicious. Scrumptious. Insanely expensive, and worth it. Love the stuff.
The thing is, though, that there are two ways to produce foie gras: an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way to produce foie gras is to shove a steel tube down a duck's or a goose's throat and force-feed it a mush made primarily of corn three or four times a day. After a month of this, the duck or goose is slaughtered and the liver-- up to a pound and a half of it-- is harvested. When producing foie gras by the easy way, up to one duck or goose in ten is lost to feeding accidents; the birds are over-fed until their stomachs literally burst. A loss of 10% is considered acceptable when using the "easy" method of production.
The hard method of production is to treat the birds humanely, feeding them a diet primarily made of corn but omitting the force-feedings, and stretching the production cycle for a single liver out over months instead of weeks. I call this "hard" because it makes it very difficult for the farmer to produce foie gras profitably, but there are farms that do it. They charge a premium, too, for humanely raised foie gras.
So there's my quandary. It's possible to produce foie gras humanely, but it's not easy, and most farms don't do it that way. Instead, most farms do it the easy way to maximize profits at the expense of the birds' welfare.
As a chef, it's pretty much impossible for me to be an animal rights activist. I believe that eating animals is right and good, and that there's nothing wrong with raising animals just for their meat. But unnecessary cruelty... that gives me pause.
The net result is that I no longer cook with foie gras. That's a challenge, because I have had to eliminate some recipes from my menu that were really selling well. But to me, it seems that this is the right thing to do.
That big, long digression served to demonstrate what I consider to be an issue that is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but that I consider to be important enough to act on. This is in contrast to issues like whether or not I use Windows; I consider that to be an issue that's so trivial it's practically non-existent, and therefore I do not consider it to be important enough to act on.
regardless of OS, I think it only fair for hardware manufacturers to disclose their APIs/protocols to everyone (not just MS)-- so we can all use their products
Yup. That would be fair. Unfortunately, commerce has nothing to do with fairness. If you would prefer companies to make their APIs public, then I'd encourage you to act on that. Just like me with the liver thing, you should follow your conscience when you think the issue is important enough. But don't jump to the conclusion that companies that use closed APIs are somehow doing something bad or wrong. What they're doing is perfectly okay, even if it's not what you'd prefer.
I do respect capitalism when properly executed-- but forcing me to use Windows in order to use a simple mouse (e.g. my aforementioned Win-Only Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box USB) is just short of insane.
First, nobody's forcing you to use Windows for anything. There's no law that says you have to use Windows. You don't have to use a computer at all if you don't want to. You might want to think about being more careful with the word "forcing," because it carries a weight and a connotation that's disproportionate, I think, to the context in this situation.
With that said, though, making a mouse that only works under Windows is anything but insane. If I were making mice, and it were for some reason easier or more cost-effective for me to make my mice work only with Windows as opposed to with any operating system, then I would make my mice work with Windows only. Because something like 93% of my potential customers-- people with computers-- use Windows. If I can sell to 93% of my market for $X, but it would cost me $X+Y to sell to 6 of the remaining 7%-- for some nontrivial value of Y-- you bet I would make my product Windows-only. That's just smart business.
Now, the bit about it being "highly irritating," I can't argue with. But if you're going to take the road less traveled, you have to expect that you're going to encounter a few bumps.
If I recall, I did specifically disclaim at the outset that I was talking about NTSC, and that the numbers would be slightly different under PAL but that the key concepts would be the same.
If I left out that disclaimer, then I thought I'd disclaimed it, and I deserve your correction. But all in all, I'm just too damned lazy to go sifting through my posts looking for it.
(plugs a very common brand of USB mouse into her computer. It won't work) "Here's one reason why." (plugs a very common brand of USB scanner into her computer. It won't work, and SANE lists its driver as not being available at all, or as being "experimental") "Here's another reason."
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but these problems are due to your choice of operating system or software. They don't justify making things kludgey for the end-user with compact flash.
You're damning the entire USB world just because you can't get your mouse to work on your (in my opinion, perverse) choice of operating system. That seems wacky to me.
In short, universal programmable remote control with USB connection to the computer: good. Vast majority of potential customers happy. Universal programmable remote control with compact flash card that requires adapter for your computer (sold separately): bad. Vast majority of potential customers unhappy, even though one girl (to use your term) happy. Vast majority of potential customers either don't buy, or buy and return upon discovery of the kludgey compact flash thing. Company goes out of business. CEO snaps main spring, goes on rampage. Blood everywhere. Even in the grouting.
But the point is that everybody will have to have some kind of adapter. That means, chances are, that the manufacturer will be under an unduly amount of pressure to just include the damn adapters in the box, which defeats the whole purpose of using compact flash in the first place.
Every computer produced for the past umpty-bump years has at least one USB port. No adapters necessary at all. Just plug it in and go. They could even, if they so desired, implement the remote control as a USB mass storage device, and have the configuration software read from and write to it like it was a disk. That implementation would be functionally identical to your compact flash idea, only without all the compact flash mess.
(Not that I think that would be a good or suitable way to do it; I'm just pointing out that compact flash is, at best, unnecessary in this instance.)
So explain again, please, why compact flash would be a good way to go at all?
Okay, so both this remote and the Sony one are similar, while the Pronto is different from both of them.
(I have one of the original Sony Remote Commanders here someplace. I don't remember unpacking it after I moved into the new house this past summer. Strange that I never thought of it until now. I guess that's a sign that I never really needed it. What a waste of money that was.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd happily pay, if you guys would promise to use the money to buy some English as a Second Language courses. Maybe a spell checker.
What you have to realize is that Slashdot isn't a service. When you pay for a subscription, you're not paying for a service. If that's the way you look at it, you'd be a fool to donate, because the quality of the reporting and the discussions on this site really, really stinks.
You have to think of Slashdot as a charity, like the church or the homeless shelter. By giving to Slashdot, you're helping to keep a bunch of dot-com refugees off the streets and out of the gutters. That's all there is to it.
Which is why nobody subscribes. Charity sucks.
Why should you care about Yahoo's privacy policy? You didn't give them any real information, did you? I thought every Yahoo user lived on 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Beverly Hills, CA, 90210 and had the phone number 212-555-1212.
No, you're misinterpreting. Linux, as a desktop operating system, won't be worth using until:
1. It's stable. The nightmare that was the 2.4 release family must never be repeated.
2. It's documented. There must be no more "coming soon!" pages in the documentation.
3. It's easy to use. KDE and Gnome need to be scrapped and replaced with a consistent, intuitive desktop environment.
4. It includes key features like color space management, intelligent typography, unified audio and video frameworks, a unified printing model, and some sort of display list rendering technology like PostScript or PDF.
That's just the short list; I didn't spend any time on it, so I'm quite certain it's not exhaustive. Until Linux has these, and other, critical features, there's simply no reason to even consider using it.
The hobbyists of the world will probably never understand that people don't want to use an operating system that's incomplete and inconsistent. Since the community has a terrible track record for completeness and consistency, Linux will never be more than a niche operating system.
It just doesn't offer anything at all to compel one to use it.
Linux works for me, and I only have a couple of computers. So much for the "economy of scale" theory.
How much time are you willing to invest in setting up, maintaining, troubleshooting (when necessary), and just generally fiddling with your computers? If you're an average person, or a business, the amount is zero, modulo whatever maintenance and overhead might be unavoidable.
I'll bet you're willing to spend a heck of a lot more time fiddling with your computers than zero.
That doesn't seem to make a whole lotta sense, though. The ATAT blurb compares the 217 GFLOPS attained by JPL on 33 Xserves with the 233 GFLOPS reported by USC on 152 Power Macs, and then concludes that the Power Macs take up more room. If JPL were to add a few more Xserves, they could top the 233 GLOPS figure handily, all inside a single rack. USC's Power Macs took up a lot more space because they were older, and there were a hell of a lot more of them.
I guess what this really tells us is that 33 XServes working together achieves nearly the same performance as almost five times that number of 450 and 533 MHz machines. Seems like the Xserves are providing raw FLOPS scalability superlinearly to their clock speed.
I thought a lot of gig-e cards implemented a good deal of packet processing in hardware to deal with this very problem. Am I mistaken? I remember that the first PCI gig-e card I ever saw was installed in an SGI Origin, and when running full-out it pegged an entire CPU with interrupt handlers. Later versions of the card-- or perhaps an entirely different card, but sold by SGI and used with the same Origin servers-- had hardly any interrupt activity at all, even when moving data at rates exceeding 50 MB/s.
First of all: remember my last post. I said that the use of a tool in visual effects means nothing. There's so much work going on that every tool will be used by some group of people in the industry.
Second: desktop Linux at places like Dreamworks and ILM is based on the "economy of scale" model. The first Linux workstation they deployed at ILM cost them a fortune; none of the graphics drivers worked properly, there were NFS bugs out the wazoo, the list goes on. They spent a ton of money sorting out those problems, so the first Linux workstation deployed at ILM cost them dearly even before you figure in the man-years spent trying to find, port, or build tools that worked worth a damn. But the hundredth Linux workstations is cheap, because the software is free and the hardware is commodity. Linux on the desktop at places like DD, Dreamworks, ILM, Pixar, Disney is an economic choice, nothing more.
To put it another way, Linux is cheap enough, being free, to justify the vast amount of work those places had to put into it. But the numbers don't start making sense until you get up into the hundreds of instances.
Please. There's so much work going on in visual effects these days that you can find a few examples of every tool, no matter how shabby, being used on some major feature film. Seriously, somebody out there used Corel Draw or Paint Shop Pro on FOTR. That doesn't mean anything.
When Gimp has replaced After Effects, Photoshop, Shake, Inferno, or any the other high-end tools for compositing, we'll have something to talk about. Until then, this example is just plain meaningless.
Once the InterTrust server goes down, the "access rights" the consumer thought they "bought" are going to be worthless!
Nope. The only time you have to interact with any servers is during a transaction. You buy an authorization certificate and download that from the vendor's e-commerce server. The you download the content package (if you don't already have it), and use your authorization cert to get a rights package corresponding to whatever rights you bought. Once you've done that, your interaction with Internet servers is over. From that point on, everything is done within the Intertrust client built in to your device. If you press the "play" button, the built-in Intertrust client checks the rights package to see, for example, if your license has expired. If it hasn't, you're good to go. All the business rule logic is handled inside the device itself.
A well-written rights package will include an expiration date beyond which the rules will no longer apply. In fact, sellers might be required to include this provision or be in civil violation of Title 17. So after the copyright on a work expires-- after the work enters the public domain-- its Intertrust package will allow the user to do whatever he wants with the content.
Of course, this goes back to what I initially said. In order to work properly, Intertrust requires a lot of very complex infrastructure. Well-written, correct, and complete rights packages are a part of that infrastructure. Can we, as a society, pull it off? I don't know. I'd say the chances of deploying this system on a large scale in such a way that it works perfectly are somewhat less than 50/50. On a limited scale-- say, as part of an HDTV VOD-to-the-home system-- the odds go up sharply.
In reality, the government monopoly is only supposed to give them certain rights...
That's not true, though. Read Title 17. It grants the copyright holder absolute rights over his work and the use and distribution thereof until such time as the copyright expires. It then sets out certain exceptions to those absolute rights, such as what's commonly called "fair use." If you're the copyright holder, you get to call the shots, subject only to a narrow and clearly defined set of exceptions.
A good DRM system-- and Intertrust looks like a good DRM system to me, at least on paper-- simply allows the copyright holder to enforce his rights, granted under law, with technology. It's conceptually no different than putting a lock on your door. (Yes, it's actually quite different from that. But at the most basic level, that's pretty much what it is: using technology to make sure people don't do something that they're not allowed to do.)
As an aside, one of the areas where they're really, really interested in this kind of system is in broadcast TV. Let's use the example of a small TV station. There's no network programming on a Sunday afternoon, so the station has to go out and buy some programming to fill that airtime. They buy a syndicated movie package. The license that they buy-- which costs what you or I would consider to be a small fortune-- says that the station is entitled to air "Two Mules for Sister Sarah" six times in a 12-month period. They can show it any time of day, any day of the week, or any week of the year that they want, but only up to a maximum of six times.
What happens if that small TV station accidentally programs that movie to air 7 times in one year? They have to pay a massive fine to the syndication company, that's what. And if the movie package cost a small fortune, wait 'til you see how the fines can add up.
This happens all the time. It's hard to keep track of what programming has been aired and when, and syndication broadcast licenses are always much, much more complex than the example I gave. (The license will tell the broadcaster that they can only run the movie on a weeknight after 11:00 PM and with no more than three commercial interruptions per hour, except for the last hour and then only on days with an L in them... and so on.) So TV stations are fascinated by the idea of some kind of system that will help them keep tabs on what rights they bought and what rights they've exercised, and help them prevent accidental license violations. It'll save them a lot of money over the course of a year or two, so they're willing-- even eager-- to invest in it.
That's just one example of how DRM is a bigger issue than most Slashdotters think it is. There are many examples like it that most people have simply never heard of before.
Okay, end of aside.
The access rights can change based on the DRM controller's whims.
Again, no. Once you've bought a rights package, you're done interacting with the seller. The rights that you've bought can't be changed or revoked through technical means. And I don't mean "can't" in the sense of "it's prohibited." I mean it literally is not possible; there's no communication between the licensor and the licensees at all except for the actual licensing transactions themselves.
What happens when you find your "forever viewing" access blocked because....
Again, because the Intertrust client is completely self-contained, these things you talk about can't happen. At least not through technical means within the Intertrust framework.
Just to make sure I'm clear, the key insight here is that Intertrust calls for a self-contained DRM system embedded into whatever media devices are chosen to implement it. During a licensing transaction, the user downloads-- through whatever connection is appropriate for the device in question-- the encrypted media content itself and a rights package that defines the complete set of rules for that content's use. The rights package will codify what the user is allowed to do within the license, what he's allowed to do under fair use, and what he's not allowed to do. It will also include an expiration date, after which the DRM system will simply stop saying "no;" that date corresponds to the point at which the work is no longer protected by copyright. The big advantage here is that all of these rules will be set out in the rights package itself, and available for scrutiny. If you think a rights package infringes on your fair use rights, sue the licensor under Title 17 and let a court decide if you're right.
Gimp is just as good as photoshop from what i've seen, though im not a graphix guy.
Obviously not.
No offense intended to anybody who worked on it or anything, but Gimp is an incredibly weak imitation of Photoshop. It's not suitable for any real work.
you can run that demo standalone [one machine] but you must have a G4.
I don't think that's true. I have a G4 (x2), but the program gives me the option of disabling multiprocessor support and AltiVec at run-time. It looks like the program will check for multiple CPUs and AltiVec capability at launch and run accordingly, but I can't confirm that myself right now.
You can download the program here.
No, I don't know, but my uninformed opinion would be that there's no measurable difference in latency between gigabit and 100BASE-T. The vast majority of the latency happens in the TCP stack inside the computer and in the NIC, as packets are generated and whatnot. Actual transmission latency will be so tiny as to make no meaningful difference.
Hello, Vienna University? Some guy named Heisenberg called for you. He didn't leave a message, but boy did he sound pissed...
Oh, and next time, don't be quoting me out of context.
If you're so concerned about being quoted, perhaps you'd best watch what you say.
Can I come to your Restaurant please? I'm feeling hungry now :-)
Please do. We could use the business.
I realise it's totally off topic to the original story, but why not buy only the "hard" produced foie gras and charge a premium?
;-)
Yeah, that's originally what I did. But in so doing, I was helping to increase the size of the market for foie gras, which in turn will increase the size of the market for inhumanely produced foie gras. Most people don't know what foie gras is, or how it's produced, so if they come to the restaurant and enjoy a dish with foie gras in it, they're likely to go out and have foie gras again, possibly at a restaurant that buys theirs from less humane farms. I felt like I was doing more harm than good in the long run.
Again, I'm not a big moralist on this sort of thing. I just feel like it's a person's responsibility to follow his conscience. And my conscience is telling me to drop the pan-seared foie gras appetizer and replace it with a black truffle flan. Nobody complains about the inhumane treatment of the truffle.
I was going to respond to your post, but upon reading something else you wrote, I realize that there would be no point. You said:
I consider it [the trading of music] neither illegal nor immoral.
That tells me everything I need to know about you. Only the copyright holder of a work has the right to determine how that work is distributed. This most basic principle is embodied in both national and international laws. Your arrogant denial of this fact says to me that you're not interested in accepting the principles of copyright law. Therefore, your opinion on all such matters-- especially matters concerning rights management and license enforcement-- is of no value to me whatsoever.
If you should change your opinions and decide to start living within the boundaries defined by the law, let me know. I'd like to have an intelligent discussion on this matter with you. But as long as you reject the fundamental principles on which copyright is based, I really have nothing at all to say to you.
You said the word "innovation" about a hundred times. Let me just say this about that.
You're trying to use what you call a "but-for" argument. "But for Microsoft's monopolies on key areas of technology, things would be better than they are right now." That's a fundamentally specious argument. The whole point basically equates to, "If it weren't for Union Carbide, we'd all have pet unicorns. Since we don't have pet unicorns, Union Carbide is a bad company!"
It's true that IE hasn't changed much in the last umpty-bump months. But browsers in general haven't changed much since Netscape Navigator 1.0. It's been incremental ever since. In fact, in my opinion, browsers have gotten considerably worse since those days: slower, less compatible, more buggy. So that's probably a bad example.
Browsers aside, though, I think your point about Microsoft sitting on their laurels is worse than flawed; I think it's just plain broken. See, if we lived in a world where there were 30 different operating systems-- or even just 3-- Microsoft's primary goal would be to sell the one that's just slightly better than everybody else's. Why? Because that's where the profits are. Spend as little on R&D as possible, but capture as much of the market as possible. That's the way all the successful software companies would be doing things. Compete for customers by convincing them to abandon product X for your product, but don't spend a fortune to do it.
But that's not how things are done. Microsoft basically doesn't compete with anybody... except themselves. Every time Microsoft releases a new OS, they're depending on a bunch of people abandoning Windows N to use Windows N+1, and in order to do that, they have to produce a Windows N+1 that's demonstrably better, to the users, than Windows N was. Microsoft succeeded like gangbusters in doing this with Windows 2000; Windows 2000 basically kicked both NT's and 98's ass, and millions of people-- literally!-- spent good money to upgrade.
Then, as you point out, came XP. I can't talk about XP. Never seen it. Never used it. But it seems clear that the mass appeal of XP doesn't really match the mass appeal that 2000 had. People who bought new computers with XP are using it, and a bunch of people have upgraded, but virtually everybody I've talked to who was using 2000 before and who didn't buy a new computer are still using 2000. Windows XP just isn't innovative-- yeah, there's that word again-- enough for them to upgrade to it.
So Microsoft's not selling XP like they hoped they would. They kinda dropped the ball there, similarly to the way they kinda dropped the ball with Windows ME. What if we threw an OS and nobody came?
I think this demonstrates that Microsoft is under more pressure to innovate than you give them credit for. It may be true that they're not under any particular pressure to innovate in the ways that you'd like; Microsoft's idea of innovation is giving the customer what they want, which is typically easier, simpler, prettier, more fun. But that's the only kind of innovation that really counts: market-based innovation. Everything else is just masturbation.
Now, I want to address something specifically. It's a small thing, but I think it's worth talking about:
Computers are the new pencil and paper. They are a part of everyday life, and our development as an advanced technological civilization (or so we think ourselves) depends directly, in very large part, upon computers.
I think you're overestimating the importance of personal computers. They're just not that big a deal, Jess. Seriously. If every personal computer in the world were to disappear tomorrow, life wouldn't change all that much. The phone company would have to come up with a new excuse to replace, "Our computers are down right now," but I'm sure they're up to the challenge.
The places where computers have become truly critical to our way of life are in large-scale areas like banking and air traffic control, and small-scale areas like embedded systems for cell phones and TVs. These are the things we would miss if we lost them, and they are not effected at all by whether you use Windows or Linux on your PC. The medium-scale stuff-- desktops, laptops, and so on-- are really incidental. Parenthetical. Superfluous.
At my last job-- the failing software company where I worked before getting laid off and going into the whole restaurant thing-- we had a policy. I guess it's more accurate to say that I had a policy, but since I was the policy-making guy, it amounts to the same thing. You've heard of "casual Friday?" We had what I called "analog Friday." The use of computers was strictly prohibited on Fridays, except for situations in which it was unavoidable. We didn't send our programmers home, but I did make our sales guys get off the email and the IM and make phone calls instead. If you were using a computer for something that you could have done without one on an analog Friday, you were subject to ridicule and mockery by your peers, and particularly by me.
Know what? Our productivity skyrocketed. We started actually talking to each other and to our customers, instead of emailing everybody all the time. Our phone bill rose a bit, but it was a small price to pay for the improved relationships with our customers and between employees and groups inside the company.
Consider spending a day away from your computer. No email, no surfing, no word processor. Get reacquainted with what really is the new pencil and paper: a pencil, and some paper.
Why do you think we don't have an AIDS cure yet? Simple... the drug companies researching HIV have snapped up quick-n-easy US patents on key technologies, genes, compounds, and the like.
There goes that but-for argument again. We don't have an AIDS cure yet because HIV is a complex and aggressive Lentivirus-type retrovirus, and we don't know how to treat retroviruses yet. Heck, retroviruses were completely unknown only 30 years ago. HIV, human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV), human spumavirus (HSRV)... none of these viruses can be treated medically right now.
But it's quite certain that we would not have an AIDS cure if there were no biomedical industry, so your "but-for" argument kinda falls flat.
Incidentally, it always amuses or depresses me-- depending on the context-- when people hold up a cure for AIDS as the next big medical milestone to shoot for. AIDS is horrible, a tragedy. But in terms of the number of people it affects, it's not even on the radar. Heart disease, cancer (technically, "malignant neoplasms"), stroke, respiratory disease, trauma, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, Alzheimer's, kidney disease, and sepsis are the most common causes of death in the United States. Worldwide the list isn't terribly different; malaria and other diarrheal diseases rank high, and lung and respiratory diseases take the #1 spot. (Smoking kills.) But AIDS doesn't even crack the top 10. Measles kills more people every year than AIDS, but you don't see protests in the streets calling for a cure to measles that often. It's just funny-- or sad-- to see people's lack of a sense of proportion.
To sum it all up, you can't say with any shred of accuracy what things would be like without Microsoft, so saying that Microsoft stifles innovation is an unfounded and absurd accusation. Personal computers are an interesting novelty and a nice luxury, but they don't make the world go around. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter what operating system you use, so Microsoft isn't really helping or hurting anybody either way. And finally, if you really want to affect change in the world in some meaningful way, go give a pint of blood.
I admire you for wanting to take a stand. I wish you were taking a stand on an issue that mattered to your family, or your friends, or to the world at large, but what you're doing is better than nothing. "The unexamined life," and all that.
There was a BBC strike in 1979. The script was complete, but it never went into production due to the stoppage.
At one point, in the distant, distant past, I thought SlashDot was a gathering for Unix/Linux/Be/Mac/NON MSFT geeks.
God, I hope not. I'm no fan of Microsoft's, exactly, but some of the opinions voiced around here about that particular entity give me chills. Some threads get eerily close to torches and pitchforks and a march on Redmond, and I don't care for that. If Slashdot were an anti-Microsoft club only, I'd have to find someplace else to hang out.
See, my thing is this: I do not care about computer politics. I've taken a good, hard look around and concluded that all the issues that get some computer aficionados up in arms-- the DMCA, DRM, Microsoft, the FSF-- just aren't very important at all, in comparison to the other stuff that's going on in the world. I just don't care about those issues most of the time.
Consequently, I choose things like what software or operating system I'm going to use based on different criteria from the average (pardon me) zealot. I pick what works best for a given job. My personal, none-of-your-business-so-shut-up-about-it opinion is that Linux is rarely the operating system that's going to work best for a given job. Most stuff that you could do with Linux I prefer to do with Windows, FreeBSD, or Mac OS X. Not for any reason other than that those are the tools that have worked best for me in the past.
For sake of perspective-- and as a little aside-- let me give you an example of an issue that I do think is worth concerning myself with. It's not earth-shattering, but it qualifies, in my book. I'm a chef, and one of the most prized ingredients in French cooking is foie gras: the hypertrophied liver of a duck or a goose. It's delicious. Scrumptious. Insanely expensive, and worth it. Love the stuff.
The thing is, though, that there are two ways to produce foie gras: an easy way, and a hard way. The easy way to produce foie gras is to shove a steel tube down a duck's or a goose's throat and force-feed it a mush made primarily of corn three or four times a day. After a month of this, the duck or goose is slaughtered and the liver-- up to a pound and a half of it-- is harvested. When producing foie gras by the easy way, up to one duck or goose in ten is lost to feeding accidents; the birds are over-fed until their stomachs literally burst. A loss of 10% is considered acceptable when using the "easy" method of production.
The hard method of production is to treat the birds humanely, feeding them a diet primarily made of corn but omitting the force-feedings, and stretching the production cycle for a single liver out over months instead of weeks. I call this "hard" because it makes it very difficult for the farmer to produce foie gras profitably, but there are farms that do it. They charge a premium, too, for humanely raised foie gras.
So there's my quandary. It's possible to produce foie gras humanely, but it's not easy, and most farms don't do it that way. Instead, most farms do it the easy way to maximize profits at the expense of the birds' welfare.
As a chef, it's pretty much impossible for me to be an animal rights activist. I believe that eating animals is right and good, and that there's nothing wrong with raising animals just for their meat. But unnecessary cruelty... that gives me pause.
The net result is that I no longer cook with foie gras. That's a challenge, because I have had to eliminate some recipes from my menu that were really selling well. But to me, it seems that this is the right thing to do.
That big, long digression served to demonstrate what I consider to be an issue that is fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but that I consider to be important enough to act on. This is in contrast to issues like whether or not I use Windows; I consider that to be an issue that's so trivial it's practically non-existent, and therefore I do not consider it to be important enough to act on.
regardless of OS, I think it only fair for hardware manufacturers to disclose their APIs/protocols to everyone (not just MS)-- so we can all use their products
Yup. That would be fair. Unfortunately, commerce has nothing to do with fairness. If you would prefer companies to make their APIs public, then I'd encourage you to act on that. Just like me with the liver thing, you should follow your conscience when you think the issue is important enough. But don't jump to the conclusion that companies that use closed APIs are somehow doing something bad or wrong. What they're doing is perfectly okay, even if it's not what you'd prefer.
I do respect capitalism when properly executed-- but forcing me to use Windows in order to use a simple mouse (e.g. my aforementioned Win-Only Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box USB) is just short of insane.
First, nobody's forcing you to use Windows for anything. There's no law that says you have to use Windows. You don't have to use a computer at all if you don't want to. You might want to think about being more careful with the word "forcing," because it carries a weight and a connotation that's disproportionate, I think, to the context in this situation.
With that said, though, making a mouse that only works under Windows is anything but insane. If I were making mice, and it were for some reason easier or more cost-effective for me to make my mice work only with Windows as opposed to with any operating system, then I would make my mice work with Windows only. Because something like 93% of my potential customers-- people with computers-- use Windows. If I can sell to 93% of my market for $X, but it would cost me $X+Y to sell to 6 of the remaining 7%-- for some nontrivial value of Y-- you bet I would make my product Windows-only. That's just smart business.
Now, the bit about it being "highly irritating," I can't argue with. But if you're going to take the road less traveled, you have to expect that you're going to encounter a few bumps.
If I recall, I did specifically disclaim at the outset that I was talking about NTSC, and that the numbers would be slightly different under PAL but that the key concepts would be the same.
If I left out that disclaimer, then I thought I'd disclaimed it, and I deserve your correction. But all in all, I'm just too damned lazy to go sifting through my posts looking for it.
(plugs a very common brand of USB mouse into her computer. It won't work) "Here's one reason why." (plugs a very common brand of USB scanner into her computer. It won't work, and SANE lists its driver as not being available at all, or as being "experimental") "Here's another reason."
I don't want to sound like an asshole, but these problems are due to your choice of operating system or software. They don't justify making things kludgey for the end-user with compact flash.
You're damning the entire USB world just because you can't get your mouse to work on your (in my opinion, perverse) choice of operating system. That seems wacky to me.
In short, universal programmable remote control with USB connection to the computer: good. Vast majority of potential customers happy. Universal programmable remote control with compact flash card that requires adapter for your computer (sold separately): bad. Vast majority of potential customers unhappy, even though one girl (to use your term) happy. Vast majority of potential customers either don't buy, or buy and return upon discovery of the kludgey compact flash thing. Company goes out of business. CEO snaps main spring, goes on rampage. Blood everywhere. Even in the grouting.
Just my opinion, of course.
But the point is that everybody will have to have some kind of adapter. That means, chances are, that the manufacturer will be under an unduly amount of pressure to just include the damn adapters in the box, which defeats the whole purpose of using compact flash in the first place.
Every computer produced for the past umpty-bump years has at least one USB port. No adapters necessary at all. Just plug it in and go. They could even, if they so desired, implement the remote control as a USB mass storage device, and have the configuration software read from and write to it like it was a disk. That implementation would be functionally identical to your compact flash idea, only without all the compact flash mess.
(Not that I think that would be a good or suitable way to do it; I'm just pointing out that compact flash is, at best, unnecessary in this instance.)
So explain again, please, why compact flash would be a good way to go at all?
why is /. all yippie about this device?
Are you new here? Slashdot is often all yippie about things for no good reason.
Or, to put it another way, "slow news day."
Okay, so both this remote and the Sony one are similar, while the Pronto is different from both of them.
(I have one of the original Sony Remote Commanders here someplace. I don't remember unpacking it after I moved into the new house this past summer. Strange that I never thought of it until now. I guess that's a sign that I never really needed it. What a waste of money that was.)