This is the second complaint about ODF. The first was that it wasn't feature-rich enough. I also predict more gripes about ODF coming forward soon, including that it made Steve bald and made Bill obnoxious.
I just spent a week at my parents-in-law's place. 56K Modem. No way is this site workable. Much easier to have OO on my laptop....
Re:weird perspective for a conflict... and wrong!
on
Sun's Open Source DRM
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· Score: 1
In one sense, this is what Apple does with iTMS music, in that I can put a purchased song on any number of iPods that I've registered as mine.
Completely false. iTunes is completely locked down and PROHIBITS EVERYTHING, everything other than playing the files using the predefinded and restricted software on the predefined and restricted players in the predefined and restricted manner.
They cannot be played on any other mp3 player. They cannot be played in WinAmp or any other music software. They cannot be run through any visulization software. They cannot be played backwards. They cannot be linked up with a lyrics text file for synchronized playback/lyrics display. You can't do ANYTHING except play it in the most basic manner, and only on a restricted Apple iPod or in the restricted Apple PC player.
Um, I think you're a little behind the times. You can burn an iTunes song onto a CD or DVD, and then infringe the heck out of it, copy the song or the disk, load it up as an MP3, put it on the web, onsell it on the black market.
I agree with your other points about magic fairy dust DRM though, just iTunes is a bit odd in that it tries to stop you from doing all the things above, but provides a mechanism whereby you can do all of the above and more.
Simple. Hack the cute girl down the hall's online address book, find out her boyfriend's name, hack his calendar regularly to see if he puts in the entry "break up with girlfriend," and show up just after the break up to offer a shoulder to cry on.
(Offer her a shoulder to cry on. Unless you're otherwise inclined. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
When the trading desk has a problem with your software system and you're bleeding money, it's battle stations.
There is, unfotunately, no desk system that can compensate for coders who skip the test and UAT stages and move code directly from dev to live, then wonder why it doesn't work...
Dude, you're only considering one aspect of disks when you analyse their speed - their rotation. That's not all there is to disks. The bit density has inceased 1,000-fold, and this is represented by the data transfer rates. I'd expect about 5MB/sec coming from a 9GB 7200RPM Disk in '95 or '96. Maybe a touch faster. Nowadays I can get sustained throughput of 100MB/sec from a 15000RPM 181GB Disk. It's a lot faster.
Also, flash or NVRAM has improved drastically since the old days, and it's more useable, but remember that it doesn't compare to SDRAM - it's not even close. Looking at Corsair's web site (http://www.corsair.com/corsair/flash_memory.html) they're only looking at 19MB/s read and 9MB/sec write time. I can get a sustained 60MB/s write on my PC at home.
Finally, while NVRAM will catch up, the current flash technology probably won't. They'll find a new NVRAM technology which doesn't use the current limitations of cell deletes and multiple writes to imprint the new data over the old data.
Okay, so 10 yrs I had a 7,200rpm drive. And today...I still have a 7,200rpm drive. (Er, actually 5,400rpm laptop drive). So the bus has gotten wider, but the truth...the drive can seldom push the data fast enough to fill these new FAST busses.
Um, 10 years ago I had a 1 or 2GB hard disk. Now I've got a 500GB one. That's a 250 to 500-fold increase in data density. That helps a bit in terms of data transfer. Did you really have a 7,200 RPM drive? They were cutting edge Sun disks back then. I only had a 4800RPM one in my PC. But now I've got dual 10,000RPM drives, and I can buy (but can't afford) 15000RPM ones.
what speed was your RAM 10 yrs ago? what speed is it today?
You're mixing RAM and Flash in together, but I'll byte. RAM 10 years ago? No idea. RAM in 2000? Cutting edge speed was about 133MHz. In 2006 it's only gotten to 667MHz, a 5-fold increase over 6 years. Project back and it's a 10-fold increase over 10 years.
Yes, mod the parent up. Similar interviews with the sercurity chiefs at Apple and Sun Microsystems would be good - Apple for the client/end user perspective, Sun for the server perspective.
yea but once you have access to the source, they can come after you for copying their implementation.
They would have to prove you copied it. If you were stupid enough to cut and paste their block of code into yours, you will get done. If not, say you already had some code written and just needed to know a few things, you could tweak your code according to what actually happens in the protocol, rather than what microsoft has documented incorrectly. There is a catch, which I will get to below.
We need proper documentation not source code, if something is broken we can point to the manual and have it corrected
Why would microsoft ever do such a thing? Why would MS ever release real documentation?
instead of following the broken implementation in the source only to find it "fixed" in another version of the os and breaking compatibility
Compatibility is a two-edged sword. If they break compatibility, it hurts their users too. Some of them might care, and some of them might be big enough to demand a fix. If Microsoft have to release their updatd source code then that's a win for everyone except microsoft.
Where this might fall down is if MS cheat, and instead of releasing current code release something a few years old and broken, something I believe has already happened once...
Anyway, on to the catch, this from the samba developer's page:
Important: In order to avoid any potential licensing issues we require that anyone who has signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty Free Agreement not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced specification. We require, too, that patches submitted to Samba not infringe on any known patents. Finally, as with all GPL work, the submitter should ensure that submitted patches do not conflict with any third-party copyright.
Step 1: Make outrageous promise Step 2: Make sure the media pick it up and spread it around Step 3: Do nothing Step 4: Redefine what you meant 2 years on Step 5: Profit!
A bit more complicated than the underwear gnomes' business plan, but much more profitable.
To get around this, Apple should have popped up a dialog box the first time which says something along the lines of "iTunes can recommend new music based on what you are currently playing. This feature requires that the songs you play are sent to the server. Would you like to turn this feature on?" to which the customer clicks on "yes" or "no".
I'm not sure a dialog box would have stopped the accusations of spying. Some people seem to see "Big Brother" everywhere.
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
Maybe you can hide the name and link for a period of time - to generate enough discussion on the forum that if or when the hostility comes out it is drowned out at the bottom of the discussion. Do it for all submitters, not just the problem ones. When a certain threshold of posts is reached, reveal the name.
Sooner or later there will be a subscription model that will reduce the up-front costs of the reader, provided you sign up to a newspaper or a book club. Wow, my wife will really love this.
Er, does anyone have a link to the sourceforge linux/ebook project yet?
Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle, but cheap hardware and programmer productivity are irrelevant. What is relevant is keeping the cluster up and getting it to finish. The Linux clusters I'm seeing replacing Solaris processing boxes tend to be almost as expensive, simply because they're much larger. They have to have enough processing power to finish everything even if two or three nodes crash or fail. Considering how much less reliable the hardware and the OS are (no, this is not a troll or flamebait, this is years of experience talking), this happens surprisingly often. Most days the clusters finish hours ahead of Sun. The extra nodes ensure that when a bad day happens, they don't finish too late in the day.
Just a small point: RBAC came in with Solaris 8 or 9. Solaris 10's security contribution is Process Priviledges (or however the heck you spell it). Much more fine-grained control compared to RBAC, and without selinux's headaches.
I'm sorry, but on what planet is Microsoft a reputable company? It produces substandard products with prices that are the highest of any in the business bar the mainframe world, and it has been proven guilty of illegal business practices often enough that even the average Joe on the street knows that they're sharks when it comes to business practices.
As for the rest - "modern concepts in operating systems?" DOS? You've got to be joking. DOS in the 1990 was like CP/M in the 1980s, but without a lot of the functionality. Are you perchance referring to windows 3.0? Windows NT, the well known VMS kernel with a GUI, that wasn't 100% microsoft compatible?
As soon as enough people in the Linux community, including Linus, can eat humble pie, admit they were wrong, and start working on it.
I believe Linus called it a joke. Shame it was on him...
Slashdot Mirror
You mean:
:)
(Obligatory gripe about apple-bashers:)
and
Didn't tip you off?
That was irony, dude. Are you English or something?
(Obligatory gripe about apple-bashers:)
:)
If this had been a Microsoft store, the elevator would have had to kill a dozen people before they got any bad press...
This is the second complaint about ODF. The first was that it wasn't feature-rich enough. I also predict more gripes about ODF coming forward soon, including that it made Steve bald and made Bill obnoxious.
Finally, something big enough to handle world of warcraft....
I just spent a week at my parents-in-law's place. 56K Modem. No way is this site workable. Much easier to have OO on my laptop....
In one sense, this is what Apple does with iTMS music, in that I can put a purchased song on any number of iPods that I've registered as mine.
Completely false. iTunes is completely locked down and PROHIBITS EVERYTHING, everything other than playing the files using the predefinded and restricted software on the predefined and restricted players in the predefined and restricted manner.
They cannot be played on any other mp3 player. They cannot be played in WinAmp or any other music software. They cannot be run through any visulization software. They cannot be played backwards. They cannot be linked up with a lyrics text file for synchronized playback/lyrics display. You can't do ANYTHING except play it in the most basic manner, and only on a restricted Apple iPod or in the restricted Apple PC player.
Um, I think you're a little behind the times. You can burn an iTunes song onto a CD or DVD, and then infringe the heck out of it, copy the song or the disk, load it up as an MP3, put it on the web, onsell it on the black market. I agree with your other points about magic fairy dust DRM though, just iTunes is a bit odd in that it tries to stop you from doing all the things above, but provides a mechanism whereby you can do all of the above and more.
"How will this software get my users laid?"
Simple. Hack the cute girl down the hall's online address book, find out her boyfriend's name, hack his calendar regularly to see if he puts in the entry "break up with girlfriend," and show up just after the break up to offer a shoulder to cry on.
(Offer her a shoulder to cry on. Unless you're otherwise inclined. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
When the trading desk has a problem with your software system and you're bleeding money, it's battle stations.
There is, unfotunately, no desk system that can compensate for coders who skip the test and UAT stages and move code directly from dev to live, then wonder why it doesn't work...
Dude, you're only considering one aspect of disks when you analyse their speed - their rotation. That's not all there is to disks. The bit density has inceased 1,000-fold, and this is represented by the data transfer rates. I'd expect about 5MB/sec coming from a 9GB 7200RPM Disk in '95 or '96. Maybe a touch faster. Nowadays I can get sustained throughput of 100MB/sec from a 15000RPM 181GB Disk. It's a lot faster.
) they're only looking at 19MB/s read and 9MB/sec write time. I can get a sustained 60MB/s write on my PC at home.
Also, flash or NVRAM has improved drastically since the old days, and it's more useable, but remember that it doesn't compare to SDRAM - it's not even close. Looking at Corsair's web site (http://www.corsair.com/corsair/flash_memory.html
Finally, while NVRAM will catch up, the current flash technology probably won't. They'll find a new NVRAM technology which doesn't use the current limitations of cell deletes and multiple writes to imprint the new data over the old data.
Okay, so 10 yrs I had a 7,200rpm drive. And today...I still have a 7,200rpm drive. (Er, actually 5,400rpm laptop drive). So the bus has gotten wider, but the truth...the drive can seldom push the data fast enough to fill these new FAST busses.
Um, 10 years ago I had a 1 or 2GB hard disk. Now I've got a 500GB one. That's a 250 to 500-fold increase in data density. That helps a bit in terms of data transfer. Did you really have a 7,200 RPM drive? They were cutting edge Sun disks back then. I only had a 4800RPM one in my PC. But now I've got dual 10,000RPM drives, and I can buy (but can't afford) 15000RPM ones.
what speed was your RAM 10 yrs ago? what speed is it today?
You're mixing RAM and Flash in together, but I'll byte. RAM 10 years ago? No idea. RAM in 2000? Cutting edge speed was about 133MHz. In 2006 it's only gotten to 667MHz, a 5-fold increase over 6 years. Project back and it's a 10-fold increase over 10 years.
Yes, mod the parent up. Similar interviews with the sercurity chiefs at Apple and Sun Microsystems would be good - Apple for the client/end user perspective, Sun for the server perspective.
That was exactly my point - they have much to gain from ignoring the courts and releasing flawed, incomplete documentation.
They would have to prove you copied it. If you were stupid enough to cut and paste their block of code into yours, you will get done. If not, say you already had some code written and just needed to know a few things, you could tweak your code according to what actually happens in the protocol, rather than what microsoft has documented incorrectly. There is a catch, which I will get to below.
We need proper documentation not source code, if something is broken we can point to the manual and have it corrected
Why would microsoft ever do such a thing? Why would MS ever release real documentation?
instead of following the broken implementation in the source only to find it "fixed" in another version of the os and breaking compatibility
Compatibility is a two-edged sword. If they break compatibility, it hurts their users too. Some of them might care, and some of them might be big enough to demand a fix. If Microsoft have to release their updatd source code then that's a win for everyone except microsoft.
Where this might fall down is if MS cheat, and instead of releasing current code release something a few years old and broken, something I believe has already happened once...
Anyway, on to the catch, this from the samba developer's page:
Step 1: Make outrageous promise
Step 2: Make sure the media pick it up and spread it around
Step 3: Do nothing
Step 4: Redefine what you meant 2 years on
Step 5: Profit!
A bit more complicated than the underwear gnomes' business plan, but much more profitable.
Uncertainty principle: You either know what speed your computer runs at, or where it is, but never both at the same time.
Ah... ahh.... ahhh choooo!
Hey, were did my CPU upgrade go?
To get around this, Apple should have popped up a dialog box the first time which says something along the lines of "iTunes can recommend new music based on what you are currently playing. This feature requires that the songs you play are sent to the server. Would you like to turn this feature on?" to which the customer clicks on "yes" or "no".
I'm not sure a dialog box would have stopped the accusations of spying. Some people seem to see "Big Brother" everywhere.
Forget the media. Why the sudden slashdot fascination with Apple?
Now the real problem with this is what it does to the discussion. Last night a nice story was posted. It came from one of our "Problem" users. And dozens of comments were posted about this user. The conspiracy theories. The hostility. Now a lot of this is normal Slashdot Forum Faire. Thats fine. But the problem is that often when this occurs, it swamps out the real discussion. The messenger becomes the story.
I think this sucks.
Maybe you can hide the name and link for a period of time - to generate enough discussion on the forum that if or when the hostility comes out it is drowned out at the bottom of the discussion. Do it for all submitters, not just the problem ones. When a certain threshold of posts is reached, reveal the name.
Sooner or later there will be a subscription model that will reduce the up-front costs of the reader, provided you sign up to a newspaper or a book club. Wow, my wife will really love this. Er, does anyone have a link to the sourceforge linux/ebook project yet?
Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle, but cheap hardware and programmer productivity are irrelevant. What is relevant is keeping the cluster up and getting it to finish. The Linux clusters I'm seeing replacing Solaris processing boxes tend to be almost as expensive, simply because they're much larger. They have to have enough processing power to finish everything even if two or three nodes crash or fail. Considering how much less reliable the hardware and the OS are (no, this is not a troll or flamebait, this is years of experience talking), this happens surprisingly often. Most days the clusters finish hours ahead of Sun. The extra nodes ensure that when a bad day happens, they don't finish too late in the day.
Just a small point: RBAC came in with Solaris 8 or 9. Solaris 10's security contribution is Process Priviledges (or however the heck you spell it). Much more fine-grained control compared to RBAC, and without selinux's headaches.
I'm sorry, but on what planet is Microsoft a reputable company? It produces substandard products with prices that are the highest of any in the business bar the mainframe world, and it has been proven guilty of illegal business practices often enough that even the average Joe on the street knows that they're sharks when it comes to business practices. As for the rest - "modern concepts in operating systems?" DOS? You've got to be joking. DOS in the 1990 was like CP/M in the 1980s, but without a lot of the functionality. Are you perchance referring to windows 3.0? Windows NT, the well known VMS kernel with a GUI, that wasn't 100% microsoft compatible?
As soon as enough people in the Linux community, including Linus, can eat humble pie, admit they were wrong, and start working on it. I believe Linus called it a joke. Shame it was on him...