Yeah great, except your first paragraph doesn't fly. Linux was useful almost from the first moment it was posted on usenet. The GNU toolchain was already hanging around, and the kernel booted and ran on certain hardware. A few months later, it was quite feature complete. Within a few years, it was the best thing going in Unixes.
If Berlin "takes off", I'll eat my hat. It is a nice academic project, but just doesn't have the development speed to ever get anywhere. Berlin has been around since at least 1998, and before that as Fresco (in essence). Lo these many years later, you still can't use Berlin for anything other than developing Berlin.
Linux doesn't need to hibernate if the machine's BIOS supports it. My vaio ran Slackware Linux for almost a year and I used the hibernate feature all the time. I simply invoked the key combo for suspend-to-disk and all was well.
Beyond that, there is a patch for the 2.2 kernel called "swsusp" IIRC. It allows the kernel to suspend itself to disk by flushing all its buffers and writing process memory out to the swap file. When the machine reboots, the kernel recognizes a special signature on the swap file and reinitializes from where it was suspended. Last I checked, this hadn't been ported to 2.4 yet.
Of all the components in Microsoft Office, Access is the only one that is outclassed by its free software counterparts. Go grab a copy of PostgreSQL or MySQL and go to town. They don't have graphical SQL statement builders (that I am aware of), but they also don't have Access' tendency to distribute your data randomly about on the disk. These are "real" databases.
Okay, you burned your +1 bonus posting this drivel, so I guess I'll respond.
You are a moron.
When you jump past a tax bracket boundary, there is NO FUCKING WAY you are going to make less. You see, only the income above the boundary is taxed at the higher rate. Thus you will always get some portion of every marginal dollar regardless if your income is 10,000/year or 250,000/year.
Example: You make $50,000 and pay $10,000 in taxes (a 20% rate). You get a one-dollar raise which brings you to $50,001, putting you in the 50% bracket. Your new tax bill is $10,000.50.
This is just another example of why you should never believe anything that starts with "I had a friend in college that..."
Gee wally, I dunno how much prior art I can come up with on this one.
Open Market Web Server was using URL rewriting at least as far back as 1996, and this technique was in use at PathFinder at the time.
Critical Path's web mail was using URL rewriting for exactly the same thing that TumbleWeed got their patent on since ever. I'm not sure exactly when their first web mail revision hit the wire, but it was in 1997 sometime.
On the modperl mailing list, the debate used to flare up between people who preferred URL rewriting and people who preferred cookies, all through 1997 and 1998. So, in 1997, there were at least enough people using both techniques to field an argument. Fertile ground for prior art there.
People used to think the world was flat. As it turned out, the best way to teach people the world was round was not mass re-education, but by showing them that if you kept sailing, you wouldn't fall off. Nobody (except a scarce few) believes the world is flat anymore.
There are very, very few examples of societies, regardless of how ancient, that believed the world to be flat. Humans have known the world was round pretty well since they started writing such things down. The idea of people who thought the world was flat was actually circulated during the 19th century, as the result of an ignorant schoolbook publisher.
This is an interesting idea, and Hatch has some serious nerve to propose things like this, but I, like the record companies, am vehemently opposed to this idea. In a free society, compulsion should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances. The military draft, for example, has been accepted as necessary to defend the freedom. But I can't see how music distribution qualifies. (I am aware that American law is filled with frivolous compulsory things, but we should be focusing on reducing those, not adding to them.)
Bottom line: copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations. The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work. To resolve the current problems with the music industry, the government should concentrate on enforcing the doctrines of first sale and fair use, and destroying the concept of "licensing" material to unaware buyers.
Is there any strong evidence that Bin Laden really exists, and is really the mastermind of a global anti-American plot? Sometimes I get the feeling that he is just the generic evil guy that the US drags out whenever it needs to push some agenda.
All my apps are already available from any web browser in the world. It's called VNC, and the VNC java applet viewer. Without the general-purpose operating system, this wouldn't be possible.
Oh, and I've been doing this since 1998 on backwards Unix systems.
You're right that the problems I describe aren't really problems with maildir. They are problems in other products taht are tickled by maildir. But if you are trying to run a large operation, you quickly decide that maildir is the problem since you don't have the ability to change Solaris or WAFL:)
I have experience working for a company that hosted millions of users with a maildir format. There are some problems with it. First, some filesystems are just not built for having zillions of inodes and tiny files. WAFL, used by Network Appliance, can fail under this sort of load. Secondly, maildir file names can be quite long. There was a bug in a version of Solaris where the operating system would not cache file contents of an NFS-mounted file whose name was longer than 31 characters. This can result in very poor performance.
CSS is not "core" to DVD. You can make perfectly good DVDs without CSS. In fact, many major movies, even those from large American studios, are sold on DVD without CSS. These movies can be played in any player without any illegal-according-to-the-mpaa software. And certainly any movies you make on your own will not be encumbered by CSS unless you choose to inflict it upon yourself.
The core technologies of DVD are the disc and player itself, MPEG-2 video compression, various audio encodings including AC3, and a file system with chapters, menus, and branching.
You make an excellent and important point, but miss an equally excellent one. Motion video display, cature, and editing on Linux is immature and could use some work. The work put into mpeg2dec and the XVideo extension directly impacts people who want to use free software to make and watch movies.
Look at the recent Apple product announcements. New Macs are shipping with the ability to capture video to MPEG-2 streams and burn it to DVDs, watchable on regular DVD players. The MPAA is already out of the loop. Free DVD software is just a way for free software users and developers to participate. You don't want the Mac people having all the fun, do you?:)
Anyway, my point is that free DVD software makes independent (non-MPAA) movie making even cheaper than it ever was before. Soone you won't even need an expensive video tape deck: you can do everything in the digital domain with free software, everyday computers, and cheap DVD-R media.
The last paragraph really trashes Judge Dickhole's original opinion in this case. The authors leave no doubt that they consider the judge to be a puppet for the entertainment industry, instead of a sworn defender of the Constitution:
We leave this Court with these disturbing ideas, because we suggest that the lower court's note evinces an attitude that Appellees' economic interests must be protected at all costs. The "functionality" of code was, we think, a means to an end, not a legal basis for decision. If code is to be proscribed at all, it must be only after the attempt has withstood strict judicial scrutiny.
Re:Small niggle with the article
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 1
It's kind of weird to read your argument, where you basically say that IDE is faster than SCSI if you ignore fast SCSI hardware. Seagate X15 will embarrass any IDE drive. Yeah it is expensive. Yes a fast SCSI bus is faster than a normal PCI bus. That alone tells us a lot about SCSI performance: SCSI can sustain better transfer rates over several meters of cable than 32/33 PCI can over a few centimeters of a PCB.
Anyway you are right that a modern IDE drive could swamp an ATA-33 bus (just: 37MB max sequential transfer rate on today's fastest IDE disk). But the fact is that most transfers are not sequential in nature, and for random access modern SCSI drives have 2 to 3 times the performance of modern IDE drives.
Hell, even the aging Seagate Barracuda 9LP is faster in every StorageReview benchmark than the IBM Deskstar 75 GXP, which is the fastest IDE drive you can buy today. The Seagate Cheetah 18XL really creams the IBM (for only ~$225, mind you), while the Seagate Cheetah X15 (~$425) positively destroys any other drive available.
You are misinformed. No consumer television display technoloy uses digital transmission between the video source and the video display. This is certainly true of television. Today's most advanced telelvision sets use either YPbPr component inputs, or RGBHV component inputs. The latter is likely the technology you use to connect your computer and your computer monitor.
Analog does not equate to poor quality. Given the bandwidth required for a video component, and the distance needed between the source and the display, it is easy to make that connection in the analog domain with everyday cables. 1080i and 720p look stupendous using analog connections.
The only people that have digital video technology today are those that are playing DVDs on their computer and running the signal out via a DVI connector to a digital LCD flat panel like this Apple Studio Display. These people have spent significantly more than $3000 just to watch movies on a digital display that can't even display a proper black.
Last point: any CRT-type television with digital inputs will not have any significantly better performance than an analog model. All the digital model will do is move the video DACs closer to the guns, and allow a longer run between the source and the display. Big deal.
That method of sales is just so backwards, though. I don't want to have to wade through their list of resellers, trying to find one I want to deal with. Look at their list of resellers on their web site. Some of the links are broken. There is no differentiation between resellers that sell Alpha machines and those that don't. There is no guidance as to which one might be in my area. None of the linked-to resellers sell equipment directly from their web site.
In my business, the last thing I need is to spend time dealing with an opaque sales process. Show me the configurations and the prices, let me pick the one I want, and ship it to me. That's all I want! Every other manufacturer gives me that, except maybe NCR and Unisys. Guess what: I don't buy anything from NCR or Unisys either.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah great, except your first paragraph doesn't fly. Linux was useful almost from the first moment it was posted on usenet. The GNU toolchain was already hanging around, and the kernel booted and ran on certain hardware. A few months later, it was quite feature complete. Within a few years, it was the best thing going in Unixes.
If Berlin "takes off", I'll eat my hat. It is a nice academic project, but just doesn't have the development speed to ever get anywhere. Berlin has been around since at least 1998, and before that as Fresco (in essence). Lo these many years later, you still can't use Berlin for anything other than developing Berlin.
[jwb ~] echo nuclear | wc 1 1 8
Nuclear. The world's cleanest power source, and the only one which can account for the whereabouts of 100% of its emissions.
Beyond that, there is a patch for the 2.2 kernel called "swsusp" IIRC. It allows the kernel to suspend itself to disk by flushing all its buffers and writing process memory out to the swap file. When the machine reboots, the kernel recognizes a special signature on the swap file and reinitializes from where it was suspended. Last I checked, this hadn't been ported to 2.4 yet.
Of all the components in Microsoft Office, Access is the only one that is outclassed by its free software counterparts. Go grab a copy of PostgreSQL or MySQL and go to town. They don't have graphical SQL statement builders (that I am aware of), but they also don't have Access' tendency to distribute your data randomly about on the disk. These are "real" databases.
You are a moron.
When you jump past a tax bracket boundary, there is NO FUCKING WAY you are going to make less. You see, only the income above the boundary is taxed at the higher rate. Thus you will always get some portion of every marginal dollar regardless if your income is 10,000/year or 250,000/year.
Example: You make $50,000 and pay $10,000 in taxes (a 20% rate). You get a one-dollar raise which brings you to $50,001, putting you in the 50% bracket. Your new tax bill is $10,000.50.
This is just another example of why you should never believe anything that starts with "I had a friend in college that..."
Slashdot looks a lot better if you go to your preferences and turn on the "simple HTML", which I think is meant for Lynx and friends.
No way. I squandered months at a time playing XCOM: Terror from the Deep. Still play it sometimes, actually.
Open Market Web Server was using URL rewriting at least as far back as 1996, and this technique was in use at PathFinder at the time.
Critical Path's web mail was using URL rewriting for exactly the same thing that TumbleWeed got their patent on since ever. I'm not sure exactly when their first web mail revision hit the wire, but it was in 1997 sometime.
On the modperl mailing list, the debate used to flare up between people who preferred URL rewriting and people who preferred cookies, all through 1997 and 1998. So, in 1997, there were at least enough people using both techniques to field an argument. Fertile ground for prior art there.
There are very, very few examples of societies, regardless of how ancient, that believed the world to be flat. Humans have known the world was round pretty well since they started writing such things down. The idea of people who thought the world was flat was actually circulated during the 19th century, as the result of an ignorant schoolbook publisher.
You don't have to take my word for it. Go to your library and read Jeffrey B. Russell's "Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians"
Bottom line: copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations. The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work. To resolve the current problems with the music industry, the government should concentrate on enforcing the doctrines of first sale and fair use, and destroying the concept of "licensing" material to unaware buyers.
Is the average American really vieweing their TV 50 hours per week? Got a reference on that?
Is there any strong evidence that Bin Laden really exists, and is really the mastermind of a global anti-American plot? Sometimes I get the feeling that he is just the generic evil guy that the US drags out whenever it needs to push some agenda.
All you need to use VNC is a browser with a Java VM and network access.
Oh, and I've been doing this since 1998 on backwards Unix systems.
You're right that the problems I describe aren't really problems with maildir. They are problems in other products taht are tickled by maildir. But if you are trying to run a large operation, you quickly decide that maildir is the problem since you don't have the ability to change Solaris or WAFL :)
I have experience working for a company that hosted millions of users with a maildir format. There are some problems with it. First, some filesystems are just not built for having zillions of inodes and tiny files. WAFL, used by Network Appliance, can fail under this sort of load. Secondly, maildir file names can be quite long. There was a bug in a version of Solaris where the operating system would not cache file contents of an NFS-mounted file whose name was longer than 31 characters. This can result in very poor performance.
The core technologies of DVD are the disc and player itself, MPEG-2 video compression, various audio encodings including AC3, and a file system with chapters, menus, and branching.
Look at the recent Apple product announcements. New Macs are shipping with the ability to capture video to MPEG-2 streams and burn it to DVDs, watchable on regular DVD players. The MPAA is already out of the loop. Free DVD software is just a way for free software users and developers to participate. You don't want the Mac people having all the fun, do you? :)
Anyway, my point is that free DVD software makes independent (non-MPAA) movie making even cheaper than it ever was before. Soone you won't even need an expensive video tape deck: you can do everything in the digital domain with free software, everyday computers, and cheap DVD-R media.
If you are willing to ditch W2K, Xine with the Captain CSS plug-in makes watching DVDs in linux a joy.
Anyway you are right that a modern IDE drive could swamp an ATA-33 bus (just: 37MB max sequential transfer rate on today's fastest IDE disk). But the fact is that most transfers are not sequential in nature, and for random access modern SCSI drives have 2 to 3 times the performance of modern IDE drives.
Hell, even the aging Seagate Barracuda 9LP is faster in every StorageReview benchmark than the IBM Deskstar 75 GXP, which is the fastest IDE drive you can buy today. The Seagate Cheetah 18XL really creams the IBM (for only ~$225, mind you), while the Seagate Cheetah X15 (~$425) positively destroys any other drive available.
Analog does not equate to poor quality. Given the bandwidth required for a video component, and the distance needed between the source and the display, it is easy to make that connection in the analog domain with everyday cables. 1080i and 720p look stupendous using analog connections.
The only people that have digital video technology today are those that are playing DVDs on their computer and running the signal out via a DVI connector to a digital LCD flat panel like this Apple Studio Display. These people have spent significantly more than $3000 just to watch movies on a digital display that can't even display a proper black.
Last point: any CRT-type television with digital inputs will not have any significantly better performance than an analog model. All the digital model will do is move the video DACs closer to the guns, and allow a longer run between the source and the display. Big deal.
In my business, the last thing I need is to spend time dealing with an opaque sales process. Show me the configurations and the prices, let me pick the one I want, and ship it to me. That's all I want! Every other manufacturer gives me that, except maybe NCR and Unisys. Guess what: I don't buy anything from NCR or Unisys either.