> GigaSamplesPerSecond equiv. IMHO, this means that for *periodic* signals, the time resolution is 5GSPS. This "equivalent" rating works only for periodic signals. You sample a well-triggered periodic signal with, say, 100MSPS but each sampling step, you shift the trigger point by a few ns. By combining all the traces (done by the software in your scope/PC), you can get a high virtual resolution.
But for me, these "equivalent" ratings sound like "interpolated Pixel" ratings - marketing speak.
> Stallman is a Marxist. Probably right in a sense. Stallman is somehwat of a visionary. He forethought many things now happening in the software world, and with his analysis, he is IMHO fairly correct. Now Marx, surely a visionary, forethought many of the problems inherent in unrestrained capitalism.
Both of them searched (or are still searching) for solutions to the problems they discovered. From the purely scientifc analysis they got to the merely political task of proposing solutions. Their solutions are radical.
Most people (me included) furtunately disagree about their radical solutions for more or less obvious reasons. But the problems are still not solved.
So instead of abandoning both the solution *and* the analysis, one should IMHO still think about the analysis and criticize it. But the need is still there to invent other, better, moderate ways of coping with the problems.
I don't know about the McBridge speak, but here (in germany), Microsoft came to my university a month or so ago to speak about their security program - a "Microsoft Security Roadshow".
Because there were several interesting things stated on the announcement, such topics as DRM, TCPA etc., I did of course attend their show. Overall, it was a bit dull (and followed by a very boring marketing campaign for their firewall products), but I did not expect more. I was just curious how microsoft speaks to the university people, who are generally more pro-linux.
I think you should know your "enemy", and, yes, If I had been in the appropiate region, I had attended McBride's speak.lecture.
> tortured and ugly Java Virtual Machine I did not want to be that explicit since I am no *expert* in the JVM, but it seems to be not really well implemented. I have found an interesting thing, an alleged internal java memo from sun:
http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.p hp ?memo_id=1321
Well, you're right, but there tools that do profiling for C/C++. This thread should rather be named "(JIT) Bytecode vs native code" Java".
The front-end languages C++ or java don't really do much about the perfomance (except that you can manually optimize things you can't do in java because of missing pointers etc.) (*)
IMHO, java bytecode suffers from the following things (and so do the users of java programs) - [they are the reasons,I think, why all java programs I've seen so far (and all the not-for-java-crafted benchmarks) are running considerably slower than C/C++]:
Technical: - Java bytecode is low level enough to lose certain optimizations (JITs have to apply decompilation techniques) which you can do in C/C++. You can of course compile Java natively (e.g. with gcj), yes. But then, you lose portability.
- Java bytecode is not low-level enough that you can take advantage of the features of the particular hardware. Java's ints are 32 bit. What if you run your numerical java code on 64 bit machines?
Political: - The java bytecode format is so specific that it is impossible or rather hard (there was once a java backend for egcs, admitted) to get other languages like C/C++ to run on it. Why does one have to chose the platform java with the language java? I don't know.NET, but from what I heard, multiple frontends for arbitrary languages are possible.
I'd like to have a VM for C++ *and* Java. That would surely rock and end some of the flamewars.
(*)- The often stated security argument (java has no pointers and is therefore inherently more secure than C++) would fall with C++ on a VM.
- Consumer loses control over *his*/*her* hardware. Like a poster up in this thread said "policeman in every device". You let foreigners control substantial parts (for many people) of your living room.
- Thought-control. DRM relies on laws which ensure that the DRM schemes remain effective. AFAIK, these laws already forbid you to hack your DRM chip to get the private keys. But they also forbid you to reverse engineer software-DRM-schemes. What is that?? You may not look at and/or tinker with things that you own.
- OSS/FS lockout. Try to write OSS software that decodes DRM and can't be used to "break" DRM. Decoding is breaking in essence. In the case of TCPA-like systems, you'll never have truly OSS systems, the core will remain commercial software. This point, is of course, only relevant to those interested in running as much OSS/FS as they can on their PC.
- Privacy issues. Every feasible DRM system seems to be based on an internet connection and the authentication of the users before downloading content (in ecrypted form, of course). As an example: Do you want that the distributors know your sexual preferences?! Or your political preferences? (In a not-so-nice world, this information may well flow to the government - there are enough examples of that)
Are you from the U.S.? I have a question. No rhetorical question, a real question I did non find out via google yet:
How got book-writers paid for copies made by xeroxing them? Here in germany, the owner of every copy shop pays a certain amount back to the authors (via a central instance called VGWort). How is/was that handled in the U.S.?
Just to mention it, back in the 386/486 time, I soldered my own RAM with 9 chips (1mbit if I recall correctly) on each side. This was really tedious work.
Some years back I and a friend of mine attached the fly wheel of an old tape recorder (about 0.5kg) to a really strong r/c motor with 18000rpm under load.
This became a selfmade battery. You could spin it up (that took some minutes) and then extract energy for minutes by attaching another motor to the wires, light bulbs etc.
The only problem was that the connection between the fly wheel's shaft and the motor shaft was... soldered. And, of course it broke. That thing spinning at probably >10000rpm on my carpet was really scary and destructive.
Being a physics student, I really don't understand the heat death argument. The heat death argument relies on the 2nd law of thermodynamics -i.e. there can't be an entropy loss.
But this is not exactly true. It is unbelievable improbable that an entropy loss occurs. If one supposes that time goes one after a heat death, there can and will be a restructuring(*) of the universe.
The probability that a restructuring happens is unbelievable small. But as time approaches infinity, the probability that this happens will approach one.
Of course, for us, that doesn't really matter much because we'll all dead before.
(*) - restructuring here: Formation of stars a solar-system and something like an earth.
If your statement is really true, isn't that quite a bit constraining to linux kernel development? This should not be a anti-BK-rant (I never used BK and can't say anything about it's qualities), but I think this would be a good argument against it. In the M$/SCO world, one expects such NDAs. But not in the Linux world.
Is there a filesystem that uses subversion as it's underlying "device"? For linux? Some time ago I worked with Rational ClearCase and the filesystem integration was really nice.
The problem is that you not measure the speed of light but the wavelength of microwaves. To get to the speed of light, you'll have to know the frequency of the microwaves.
> Anton Piller orders are currently only available in the UK and France ("saisi-contrefacon"). These secret court authorisations of raids for evidence carried out by the plaintiff's own agents are not available in any of the other states of the EU.
This is the thing most people fear the most IMHO. And they're right. C'mon. This can't be true. You (allegedly) did a bit of file-swapping and "they" come and do a house search?! WTF?! Politics for the citizens? For whom? Many, many many do file-sharing. Just about everyone I know did it or does it.
Here in germany, we have a system called GEMA that reimburses artists for their work by fees you pay on every copying-device (casette-player, cd-burner etc.). This principle is of course not 100% fair, but it worked for several decades and everyone was happy. Now we have the situation where we have the GEMA and we have the law that forbids us to circumvent copy protections... i.e. you pay for copies, but you must not copy copy-protected material. Soon we'll have seizures, people in jail for copying etc. And that is progress??
I would put it this way: The brand "Intel" should be less important for the buying decision than a GPLed driver for the hardware. I think there are several, real benefits for using GPLed drivers:
- fix bugs/do workarounds for the hardware the manufacturer doesn't care about - tweak the driver to your needs (this is not a joke: I'm glad that the tmscsim-driver for Tekram SCSI cards could be tweaked by me to work seamlessly with my old SCSI scanner!) - have support for the hardware as long as YOU wish
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> GigaSamplesPerSecond equiv.
IMHO, this means that for *periodic* signals, the time resolution is 5GSPS. This "equivalent" rating works only for periodic signals. You sample a well-triggered periodic signal with, say, 100MSPS but each sampling step, you shift the trigger point by a few ns. By combining all the traces (done by the software in your scope/PC), you can get a high virtual resolution.
But for me, these "equivalent" ratings sound like "interpolated Pixel" ratings - marketing speak.
Does it matter if he said that or does it not?
One should give people the chance to change their opinions, and I agree/disagree about what RMS says *now*.
> Stallman is a Marxist.
Probably right in a sense. Stallman is somehwat of a visionary. He forethought many things now happening in the software world, and with his analysis, he is IMHO fairly correct.
Now Marx, surely a visionary, forethought many of the problems inherent in unrestrained capitalism.
Both of them searched (or are still searching) for solutions to the problems they discovered. From the purely scientifc analysis they got to the merely political task of proposing solutions. Their solutions are radical.
Most people (me included) furtunately disagree about their radical solutions for more or less obvious reasons. But the problems are still not solved.
So instead of abandoning both the solution *and* the analysis, one should IMHO still think about the analysis and criticize it. But the need is still there to invent other, better, moderate ways of coping with the problems.
I don't know about the McBridge speak, but here (in germany), Microsoft came to my university a month or so ago to speak about their security program - a "Microsoft Security Roadshow".
Because there were several interesting things stated on the announcement, such topics as DRM, TCPA etc., I did of course attend their show. Overall, it was a bit dull (and followed by a very boring marketing campaign for their firewall products), but I did not expect more. I was just curious how microsoft speaks to
the university people, who are generally more pro-linux.
I think you should know your "enemy", and, yes, If I had been in the appropiate region, I had attended McBride's speak.lecture.
> tortured and ugly Java Virtual Machine
p hp ?memo_id=1321
I did not want to be that explicit since I am no *expert* in the JVM, but it seems to be not really well implemented.
I have found an interesting thing, an alleged internal java memo from sun:
http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.
Here in europe with not-so-recently privatized post companies, I would rather happy to send mail at .50EUR!
Yes, but pointers and similar stuff is hard to implement on the JVM.
Well, you're right, but there tools that do profiling for C/C++. This thread should rather be named "(JIT) Bytecode vs native code"
.NET, but from what I heard, multiple frontends for arbitrary languages are possible.
Java".
The front-end languages C++ or java don't really do much about the perfomance (except that you can manually optimize things you can't do in java because of missing pointers etc.) (*)
IMHO, java bytecode suffers from the following things (and so do the users of java programs) - [they are the reasons,I think, why all java programs I've seen so far (and all the not-for-java-crafted benchmarks) are running considerably slower than C/C++]:
Technical:
- Java bytecode is low level enough to lose certain optimizations (JITs have to apply decompilation techniques) which you can do in C/C++. You can of course compile Java natively (e.g. with gcj), yes. But then, you lose portability.
- Java bytecode is not low-level enough that you can take advantage of the features of the particular hardware. Java's ints are 32 bit. What if you run your numerical java code on 64 bit machines?
Political:
- The java bytecode format is so specific that it is impossible or rather hard (there was once a java backend for egcs, admitted) to get other languages like C/C++ to run on it. Why does one have to chose the platform java with the language java? I don't know
I'd like to have a VM for C++ *and* Java. That would surely rock and end some of the flamewars.
(*)- The often stated security argument (java has no pointers and is therefore inherently more secure than C++) would fall with C++ on a VM.
IMHO, there are several things wrong with DRM:
- Consumer loses control over *his*/*her* hardware. Like a poster up in this thread said "policeman in every device". You let foreigners control substantial parts (for many people) of your living room.
- Thought-control. DRM relies on laws which ensure that the DRM schemes remain effective. AFAIK, these laws already forbid you to hack your DRM chip to get the private keys. But they also forbid you to reverse engineer software-DRM-schemes. What is that?? You may not look at and/or tinker with things that you own.
- OSS/FS lockout. Try to write OSS software that decodes DRM and can't be used to "break" DRM. Decoding is breaking in essence. In the case of TCPA-like systems, you'll never have truly OSS systems, the core will remain commercial software. This point, is of course, only relevant to those interested in running as much OSS/FS as they can on their PC.
- Privacy issues. Every feasible DRM system seems to be based on an internet connection and the authentication of the users before downloading content (in ecrypted form, of course). As an example: Do you want that the distributors know your sexual preferences?! Or your political preferences? (In a not-so-nice world, this information may well flow to the government - there are enough examples of that)
Are you from the U.S.? I have a question. No rhetorical question, a real question I did non find out via google yet:
How got book-writers paid for copies made by xeroxing them?
Here in germany, the owner of every copy shop pays a certain amount back to the authors (via a central instance called VGWort).
How is/was that handled in the U.S.?
Further thought it is the "freedom of the corporations" to pay 0 taxes and go offshore whilst the majority of the population has to pay.
This is not intended as a pro/con tax argument, just to illustrate the usage of "freedom" in weird ways.
Ahh, this is slashdot thread is nice.
Just to mention it, back in the 386/486 time, I soldered my own RAM with 9 chips (1mbit if I recall correctly) on each side. This was really tedious work.
Some years back I and a friend of mine attached the fly wheel of an old tape recorder (about 0.5kg) to a really strong r/c motor with 18000rpm under load.
... soldered. And, of course it broke. That thing spinning at probably >10000rpm on my carpet was really scary and destructive.
This became a selfmade battery. You could spin it up (that took some minutes) and then extract energy for minutes by attaching another motor to the wires, light bulbs etc.
The only problem was that the connection between the fly wheel's shaft and the motor shaft was
The problem is that you need some reference which says "this is spam and this is ham".
And who edits this reference?
This should be no problem technically. Simple give the possibility to register an IP (or range of IPs) that are "at home".
Being a physics student, I really don't understand the heat death argument. The heat death argument relies on the 2nd law of thermodynamics -i.e. there can't be an entropy loss. But this is not exactly true. It is unbelievable improbable that an entropy loss occurs. If one supposes that time goes one after a heat death, there can and will be a restructuring(*) of the universe. The probability that a restructuring happens is unbelievable small. But as time approaches infinity, the probability that this happens will approach one. Of course, for us, that doesn't really matter much because we'll all dead before. (*) - restructuring here: Formation of stars a solar-system and something like an earth.
If your statement is really true, isn't that quite a bit constraining to linux kernel development?
This should not be a anti-BK-rant (I never used BK and can't say anything about it's qualities), but I think this would be a good argument against it. In the M$/SCO world, one expects such NDAs. But not in the Linux world.
Thanks for this link (and for all the other links)! This looks like if it matches my needs.
According to their website, Subversion also supports a standalone server mode, much like cvs pserver/ssh.
Is there a filesystem that uses subversion as it's underlying "device"? For linux?
Some time ago I worked with Rational ClearCase and the filesystem integration was really nice.
And you're still a bit wrong :) Try putting 0 into the equation. Depending on your architecture it will (and should) return 1.
> [...] incorrect opinions get modded up [...]
Hey, can you tell me what an *incorrect opinion* is?
The problem is that you not measure the speed of light but the wavelength of microwaves. To get to the speed of light, you'll have to know the frequency of the microwaves.
> Anton Piller orders are currently only available in the UK and France ("saisi-contrefacon"). These secret court authorisations of raids for evidence carried out by the plaintiff's own agents are not available in any of the other states of the EU.
This is the thing most people fear the most IMHO. And they're right. C'mon. This can't be true. You (allegedly) did a bit of file-swapping and "they" come and do a house search?! WTF?! Politics for the citizens? For whom? Many, many many do file-sharing. Just about everyone I know did it or does it.
Here in germany, we have a system called GEMA that reimburses artists for their work by fees you pay on every copying-device (casette-player, cd-burner etc.). This principle is of course not 100% fair, but it worked for several decades and everyone was happy. Now we have the situation where we have the GEMA and we have the law that forbids us to circumvent copy protections... i.e. you pay for copies, but you must not copy copy-protected material.
Soon we'll have seizures, people in jail for copying etc. And that is progress??
Sorry for this rant.
I would put it this way: The brand "Intel" should be less important for the buying decision than a GPLed driver for the hardware. I think there are several, real benefits for using GPLed drivers:
- fix bugs/do workarounds for the hardware the manufacturer doesn't care about
- tweak the driver to your needs (this is not a joke: I'm glad that the tmscsim-driver for Tekram SCSI cards could be tweaked by me to work seamlessly with my old SCSI scanner!)
- have support for the hardware as long as YOU wish