Maybe if you were raised by wolves in wilderness you could claim that everything you think of you own soley and completely, otherwise have some humility and remember everyone and everything that has ever inspired you.
Actually, even in the case of being raised by wolves, you would owe some intellectual heritage to the wolves. But anyhow....
If I create something, I should be able to do what I will with it, for as long as I see fit. And if you don't approve of the fact that I'm not willing to give it away, then you don't have to support me, by giving me money.
The problem with this standpoint is, that you CAN do what you want with it. But copyright laws prevent other people from doing what THEY want with it, and threaten them with prosecution if they do so.
The reason that copyrights have a limited period is because freedom of information is necessary for free thought. Free thought is absolutely necessary for mental progress of our society, and the common good of humanity. It keeps someone from having a stupid idea, hiding the truth from the public through intellectual property laws, and having the copyrights last forever. Public domain is an important concept for sharing of ideas, and is essential for climbing past the status quo into the next realm of human thought.
There's a lot more to ideas, writing, art, and music than money. If you choose not to share something, purely out of greed, then why should the resources of the public and the laws of the land be utilitized until the end of time to back up your greed? And even after you are dead and rotting, should your greed feed your grandchildren, at the cost of the public enforcing laws?
The government was created by the people, given certain duties and rights by the people, and held under a set of rules - The Constitution - by the people. They can't just make laws about whatever the hell they want, or they've violated the terms under which they were created, and should no longer be able to operate outside those terms. Everything they do must be under a closely guarded and limited scope, or they will inevitably abuse their power. And you'll foot the bill.
I have recently been working on a project that uses Motif widgets to do process control displays. We have experienced many problems that seem to stem with compatibility between Motif and Gnome, particularly in the area of colormaps. We have also seen problems with network bandwidth being almost continual while running Gnome, which seems to make it unusable over slow X-term connections.
Though this isn't a proper forum for solving a specific problem, I would like to know the following: How big of a development priority does Gnome put on support for legacy applications and legacy APIs, such as Motif? Also, what about support for slower connections and machines? Is the development priority more forward looking (new machines, new applications), or regression based (old machines, old applications), or do you strive for a balance between the two?
Actually, the Pro Tools hardware works on the PC, as well as the Mac. They have NT Software for it, though it's still not as nice as the Mac stuff. Actually, I don't believe NT is robust enough in general to use for music production. 95 is actually better for this type of thing.
I have a side job as the computer tech for a small recording studio. I'd love to use something other than Windows, but unfortunately, multitrack audio support is very difficult to find on other platforms. BeOS probably has the most potential, because of its real time scheduling and large file size capability. BeOS handles large files really well. I've heard that its limitation is somewhere around 5 pentabytes or so, which should be sufficient for quite a long time.
If there was a Linux distribution with a different filesystem (Ext2 doesn't like large files, by large files I mean multiple gigabytes), hardware support for 4 and 8 track audio cards (I've got an Antex Studiocard and a Gadget Labs 8/24 card), and some software that musicians can use comfortably (my brother, who runs the studio, is a drummer, not a computer person) we'd be set. Unfortunately, we're not even close to there yet. P.S. Cool edit pro for Linux would be really cool. But without all the other pieces to support it, Syntrillium would be wasting their time.
I agree with people's right to like the Backstreet Boys, N' Sync, or whoever. However, I also believe that making laws against sharing is generally a bad thing.
The reason Phish, The Grateful Dead, and many similar bands allow their fans to share their live music has more to do with just a financial model. It has a lot more to do with what they believe in as people. The whole point to Phish's music is that they stand for freewill and the freedom to enjoy life. This comes through in their music, as much as it does how they live the rest of their lives. The same was true of The Grateful Dead. One of the reasons their music is so powerful, to the people that relate to it, is because they really believe the things they are saying, and they aren't just out there for the money. Also, I buy more CD's when I am able to access music on the internet, not less. It's because I'm thinking more about music in general, so I'm more likely to be interested in seeking it out. Now, I may not buy the music from the bands I was listening to on the Internet, but I probably wouldn't have bought that music anyway. Everytime a new technology comes around that allows for people to distribute music, the industry freaks out and goes into a tizzy fit. They did it with cassettes, they basically kept DAT from existing in its true form, and they definitely aren't fond of CD burners. But when it comes down to it, CD's are still better quality than MP3's (even if many people haven't noticed yet), and you don't get all the cool stuff with them you do with the real CD. If artists really want to make a living selling music, all they need to do is provide their fans with quality music, and a quality product to back it up. Another point I have to make is that in much of "Eastern" society, such as Taiwan, thought and expression are considered to be public domain by default, and there are still great movies and music in their society. In conclusion, if I like music enough, I WILL buy it. But not because I couldn't get it elsewhere, and not because I will ever feel the slightest bit guilty about freedom of expression, even if that expression originated from someone else. It's because I want the best possible quality, and that usually comes from the most direct source. If at any time it doesn't, the only way that musicians are going to make money selling music is to improve their quality. If this means distributing music at 96Khz/24bit on a DVD, or including cool holograms in the box with the CD, or giving discounts on concert tickets to loyal fans, they are going to have to do it to survive. They can spend the same money on lawyers, but the best of them would be violating what they believe in by doing so.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. Maybe I just resent the comment, since I am a self taught programmer who deals all of the concepts you mentioned - maybe not the buzzwords, but definitely the concepts. I also spent many months of my life fixing a badly written C++ program from someone with lots of education, but no real world experience. So it really goes both ways. Neither education or experience is complete all by itself, and neither is worth anything if you walk around with your head up your butt. But to imply that there isn't any good self taught programmers is pure bull. Someone had to teach themselves this stuff before they could teach it to anyone else. [RANT COMPLETE]
I agree with you pretty wholeheartedly on this comment. But I also believe that learning to be a good thinker, which is the key to learning how to program, is usually self taught.
I chose a different route than you did. I also learned BASIC at 7, and was a pretty proficient programmer and computer tech when I left high school. I chose the the "work straight out" of high school route, worked building computers for a couple of years, and then got Novell certified and did networking for a couple more. I'm now a Software Design Engineer, working with a team of mostly degreed programmers, and my employer is paying my tuition to finally get that fancy piece of paper.
Where I work, we have a heck of a time finding competent Software Engineers. Most applicants just don't have the proper problem solving skills. I think the main skill you need on a programming team is the ability to learn quickly. And I agree that knowing how to program is more important than knowing the syntax of a particular language. When I started my current position two years ago, my main language was C (though I'd played with about 5 other languages). Now I mainly work in Perl, Java, and C++, none of which I knew when I started. I feel as comfortable in Perl and Java as I do C, even though I've known C since 1990.
No it doesn't. The windows video toaster is essentially an Amiga on a card, it runs on a PC, at the same time as Windows, but it doesn't run ON Windows. You're better off having the whole Amiga box.
1. Actually, the Athlon is selling better on the high-end than the low end. Last I heard, the Athlon had over 40% of certain high-end markets. The exception to this may be corporate IT departments, which are a little too set in their ways - i.e. Run windoze on an Intel processor or we'll have "compatibility" problems. Compatible with what? Windoze on an Intel processor, that's what.
2. The X-Box thing was mostly AMD's decision. AMD said that they could have gotten the X-Box, but they would have been "giving away their processors to do it." Which they weren't willing to do. I don't think they hold bad feelings toward Microsoft because of it. Actually, other recent interviews have indicated that Microsoft and AMD are still the best of buds.
I think it will be VERY similar to an Alpha chip. It will probably use an EV-7 Alpha bus, and may even be pin compatible. I saw a quote from AMD once that said something like this:
"Someday, when designing a system, the very last decision you will have to make will be whether to use an AMD or Alpha CPU."
I believe it was Jerry Sanders that said this. The sledgehammer and the new Alphas will be cousins. I'm pretty sure Compaq/Alpha and AMD are sharing lots of ideas.
Actually, a complete Ku-band satellite, including parts, assembly, and launch, is about 250 million. This goes for NASA, or the French, or the Russians. So a quarter of a billion dollars for startup costs is not that much money in perspective. Telecom satellites are cheaper, but they're also in a much lower orbit - a few hundred miles up as opposed to 23,000 miles up. But they are launched in clusters, because they are not geostationary. So the payload is generally larger than the weight of 1 satellite. I am a strong believer in unmanned satellite launches. They are safer, just as accurate (because once you're in the ballpark, you fly satellites with telemetry anyway), and in the long run, are cheaper. As far as satellite recovery, it almost never happens. If a satellite doesn't deploy properly, you sell it to the insurance company that insured the launch. The insurance company doesn't have any repo men for satellites, so dead satellites generally become space junk. It may not be the utopian approach, but that's the way it works in real life.
Yes, the Athlon does support Multiprocessing. It's a point to point protocol of the EV6 bus, which gives each processor in a multiprocessor setup full bandwidth, as opposed to Intel's GTL+/SMP, which shares the same bus for multiple processors, giving diminishing returns on more than a couple of processors.
Hopefully the chipsets for this should be out soon. Tyan was talking first quarter at the end of last year, but I think it will more likely be second quarter, since there's only 3 weeks left in the first quarter.
A pet peeve: People refer to the new Athlon chipsets as "SMP". They're not. That's Symetrical MultiProcessing. They're Point to Point Multiprocessing, which I guess would be PTPMP or something.
There's three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
But anyhow, on the benchmarks you linked to, the Athlon's cache only affected it on games and synthetic 3D benchmarks. On professional level applications, the Athlon 600 was faster than the P3-800.
I mean, who would want these for games, anyway? On demanding games, it only got 98 frames per second! Seriously, at the $1299 price point, the main purchases of these things should be professional apps. If you're playing games, either get a slower Athlon with an overclocking card, or wait for the Thunderbird with full speed L2. Or get a 1 Ghz Athlon, so you brag to your friends, and put up with that painfully slow 98 frames per second.
They sell a serial/ethernet gateway for the cards in this article. It's $349.00. Maybe worth it if the machine you are sacrificing is worth more than that.
You're right. There is code in this compiler that Intel contributed to Borland, that is under an NDA, because it reveals things about P6 architecture Intel doesn't want you (the general public) to know. There may be other IP issues, but this is definitely one of them. For details, check out the 6th generation processor rundown here: http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/cpuwar.html
I realize that you like to avoid comparing C++ to other languages. However, how do you feel about the Eiffel language, and more specifically, what is your reaction to the negativity the Eiffel community seems to show towards C++? Have you ever met any of the founding fathers of other languages, such as Bertrand Meyer of Eiffel or the Sun Java people? If so, was it a positive experience?
Besides all that, I don't see any real market for this stuff outside of the DOD or DOE. You can pick out the target market because they have aluminium foil around their heads to keep out the alien mind control.
The market for this is people who aren't aware that they even have it. All they know is that they bought a computer with a kickass movie player (It was only 599.00 at Sam's Club...) and there's this funny looking cable between the monitor and computer. This keeps their friend the techie from buying the same cheap computer and copying movies.
I think this whole thing is a completely stupid idea. If you can watch it with your eyes, you can copy it. Period. They transfer old films to videotape that way, and then you can digitally remaster them and make them look really good. So what's the point? There really is none, other than keeping low level Joe-Bob-Suzy consumer copying to a minimum.
Essentially what I'm saying is that the urge for control would be much less a problem if the people who were attempting to gain that control were really educated as to what's going on.
It's possible, though, that if these people knew what was really going on, they'd gain a sense of personal responsibility, and they'd lose the urge to gain control of other people. So essentially what I'm saying is, if they weren't ignorant, they wouldn't be the people they are in the first place.
I say we throw in the towel on the concept of promoting change from within the system and focus on civil disobedience. The hacker ethic is antitheical to this New World Order of information control... this is the real war - it's not one of politics or mimes.. it's about the right to the truth.. the freedom of information, and the right to be left alone.
I agree with you on this, however it goes even deeper than that. It's about free thought, and freewill. The first thing each of us needs to focus on is achieving personal awareness, free thought, and free will - i.e. liberty - the ability to get up each morning (or night), do what you believe in all day (or night), and go to bed at night (or morning) knowing you did what you believed in.
The second thing to do is to help other people do what they believe in. Of course this is a personal thing, and if you try to change people's views too much from the direction they are naturally inclined, what you get is divided loyalties. The last thing you want in a tense situation is people questioning their loyalties. So with five billion people on the earth, and the mass of communications, the goal should be to connect people who naturally believe in freewill and liberty. After this happens, the "system" will never be able to get these people back on their side, so the only option they'll have is to try to keep our ideas from spreading to the sheep.
This is the information age. The greatest tool of the status quo is ignorance of any other way of going about things. So they will continue to try to keep their ideas flowing to those people who they think they can control. But awareness is usually a one way journey - once you've seen it, you won't just give in to ignorance.
Actually, Linus has mentioned his views on fragmentation in his last two public interviews. One of them is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/09/042824 0 So, please don't accuse someone of making up something which is actually a current event.
I do agree with you on Metcalfe, though. Every article I've read of his in the last year or so has been equally as clueless.
As far as non-proprietary software, there are more and more companies doing it. I think what many companies are learning, is that programs that are mainly written for internal benefit - i.e. performing a task inside their company - can be released as open source, with more good effects thatn bad ones. I am working on a project right now that is mainly for my employer, but is also open source. Unless a company's main income was built on proprietary software, it makes sense to open source internal projects. However, sometimes the "value added" part of a product depends on the software, such is the case with Transmeta, and maintaining a closed product can have a sink-or-swim effect on the company. I don't blame them, in this case, for keeping the lid on their software, at least in the short term.
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit. I assume the same will be true with gigabit. You probably won't get full speed out of a crossover cable.
I believe the top speed for the firewire spec is 400 Mbit. I'm not sure if all devices, or ports, support 400 Mbit, but that's what's in the spec.
Also, the EV6 bus for the Athlon is 200 Mhz, with separate switching for RAM and PCI. I wonder if that might be a good solution.
I know you're playing the devil, but I'm going to respond anyway....
If you're planning "wide" distribution of your movies, paying a small licensing/royalty for the priveledge shouldn't break the bank.
The problem is, that even if you pay this fee, the DVDCA/MPAA can say "NO. We won't let you produce content." They don't HAVE TO grant you a license. That gives them a monopoly on content and player production.
Yesterday, in the decision for the Connectix/Sony case, regarding reverse engineering of the Sony Playstation, the court said this:
"Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."
The same should be true for DVD's, or any other media. A company should not automatically get a monopoly just because they chose the format.
With open source players, the "certificates that state you own the right to watch such and such" issue is mute. You simply take out the part of the code that looks for the certificate. Actually, since the creators of the program knew this, it probably isn't there to start with. In open source, if you have something, you have the right to watch it. That's the whole idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if you were raised by wolves in wilderness you could claim that everything you think of you own soley and completely, otherwise have some humility and remember everyone and everything that has ever inspired you.
Actually, even in the case of being raised by wolves, you would owe some intellectual heritage to the wolves. But anyhow....
If I create something, I should be able to do what I will with it, for as long as I see fit. And if you don't approve of the fact that I'm not willing to give it away, then you don't have to support me, by giving me money.
The problem with this standpoint is, that you CAN do what you want with it. But copyright laws prevent other people from doing what THEY want with it, and threaten them with prosecution if they do so.
The reason that copyrights have a limited period is because freedom of information is necessary for free thought. Free thought is absolutely necessary for mental progress of our society, and the common good of humanity. It keeps someone from having a stupid idea, hiding the truth from the public through intellectual property laws, and having the copyrights last forever. Public domain is an important concept for sharing of ideas, and is essential for climbing past the status quo into the next realm of human thought.
There's a lot more to ideas, writing, art, and music than money. If you choose not to share something, purely out of greed, then why should the resources of the public and the laws of the land be utilitized until the end of time to back up your greed? And even after you are dead and rotting, should your greed feed your grandchildren, at the cost of the public enforcing laws?
The government was created by the people, given certain duties and rights by the people, and held under a set of rules - The Constitution - by the people. They can't just make laws about whatever the hell they want, or they've violated the terms under which they were created, and should no longer be able to operate outside those terms. Everything they do must be under a closely guarded and limited scope, or they will inevitably abuse their power. And you'll foot the bill.
I have recently been working on a project that uses Motif widgets to do process control displays. We have experienced many problems that seem to stem with compatibility between Motif and Gnome, particularly in the area of colormaps. We have also seen problems with network bandwidth being almost continual while running Gnome, which seems to make it unusable over slow X-term connections.
Though this isn't a proper forum for solving a specific problem, I would like to know the following: How big of a development priority does Gnome put on support for legacy applications and legacy APIs, such as Motif? Also, what about support for slower connections and machines? Is the development priority more forward looking (new machines, new applications), or regression based (old machines, old applications), or do you strive for a balance between the two?
Actually, the Pro Tools hardware works on the PC, as well as the Mac. They have NT Software for it, though it's still not as nice as the Mac stuff. Actually, I don't believe NT is robust enough in general to use for music production. 95 is actually better for this type of thing.
I have a side job as the computer tech for a small recording studio. I'd love to use something other than Windows, but unfortunately, multitrack audio support is very difficult to find on other platforms. BeOS probably has the most potential, because of its real time scheduling and large file size capability. BeOS handles large files really well. I've heard that its limitation is somewhere around 5 pentabytes or so, which should be sufficient for quite a long time.
If there was a Linux distribution with a different filesystem (Ext2 doesn't like large files, by large files I mean multiple gigabytes), hardware support for 4 and 8 track audio cards (I've got an Antex Studiocard and a Gadget Labs 8/24 card), and some software that musicians can use comfortably (my brother, who runs the studio, is a drummer, not a computer person) we'd be set. Unfortunately, we're not even close to there yet.
P.S. Cool edit pro for Linux would be really cool. But without all the other pieces to support it, Syntrillium would be wasting their time.
I agree with people's right to like the Backstreet Boys, N' Sync, or whoever. However, I also believe that making laws against sharing is generally a bad thing.
The reason Phish, The Grateful Dead, and many similar bands allow their fans to share their live music has more to do with just a financial model. It has a lot more to do with what they believe in as people. The whole point to Phish's music is that they stand for freewill and the freedom to enjoy life. This comes through in their music, as much as it does how they live the rest of their lives. The same was true of The Grateful Dead. One of the reasons their music is so powerful, to the people that relate to it, is because they really believe the things they are saying, and they aren't just out there for the money.
Also, I buy more CD's when I am able to access music on the internet, not less. It's because I'm thinking more about music in general, so I'm more likely to be interested in seeking it out. Now, I may not buy the music from the bands I was listening to on the Internet, but I probably wouldn't have bought that music anyway.
Everytime a new technology comes around that allows for people to distribute music, the industry freaks out and goes into a tizzy fit. They did it with cassettes, they basically kept DAT from existing in its true form, and they definitely aren't fond of CD burners. But when it comes down to it, CD's are still better quality than MP3's (even if many people haven't noticed yet), and you don't get all the cool stuff with them you do with the real CD. If artists really want to make a living selling music, all they need to do is provide their fans with quality music, and a quality product to back it up.
Another point I have to make is that in much of "Eastern" society, such as Taiwan, thought and expression are considered to be public domain by default, and there are still great movies and music in their society.
In conclusion, if I like music enough, I WILL buy it. But not because I couldn't get it elsewhere, and not because I will ever feel the slightest bit guilty about freedom of expression, even if that expression originated from someone else. It's because I want the best possible quality, and that usually comes from the most direct source. If at any time it doesn't, the only way that musicians are going to make money selling music is to improve their quality. If this means distributing music at 96Khz/24bit on a DVD, or including cool holograms in the box with the CD, or giving discounts on concert tickets to loyal fans, they are going to have to do it to survive. They can spend the same money on lawyers, but the best of them would be violating what they believe in by doing so.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. Maybe I just resent the comment, since I am a self taught programmer who deals all of the concepts you mentioned - maybe not the buzzwords, but definitely the concepts. I also spent many months of my life fixing a badly written C++ program from someone with lots of education, but no real world experience. So it really goes both ways. Neither education or experience is complete all by itself, and neither is worth anything if you walk around with your head up your butt. But to imply that there isn't any good self taught programmers is pure bull. Someone had to teach themselves this stuff before they could teach it to anyone else. [RANT COMPLETE]
I agree with you pretty wholeheartedly on this comment. But I also believe that learning to be a good thinker, which is the key to learning how to program, is usually self taught.
I chose a different route than you did. I also learned BASIC at 7, and was a pretty proficient programmer and computer tech when I left high school. I chose the the "work straight out" of high school route, worked building computers for a couple of years, and then got Novell certified and did networking for a couple more. I'm now a Software Design Engineer, working with a team of mostly degreed programmers, and my employer is paying my tuition to finally get that fancy piece of paper.
Where I work, we have a heck of a time finding competent Software Engineers. Most applicants just don't have the proper problem solving skills. I think the main skill you need on a programming team is the ability to learn quickly. And I agree that knowing how to program is more important than knowing the syntax of a particular language. When I started my current position two years ago, my main language was C (though I'd played with about 5 other languages). Now I mainly work in Perl, Java, and C++, none of which I knew when I started. I feel as comfortable in Perl and Java as I do C, even though I've known C since 1990.
No it doesn't. The windows video toaster is essentially an Amiga on a card, it runs on a PC, at the same time as Windows, but it doesn't run ON Windows. You're better off having the whole Amiga box.
1. Actually, the Athlon is selling better on the high-end than the low end. Last I heard, the Athlon had over 40% of certain high-end markets. The exception to this may be corporate IT departments, which are a little too set in their ways - i.e. Run windoze on an Intel processor or we'll have "compatibility" problems. Compatible with what? Windoze on an Intel processor, that's what.
2. The X-Box thing was mostly AMD's decision. AMD said that they could have gotten the X-Box, but they would have been "giving away their processors to do it." Which they weren't willing to do. I don't think they hold bad feelings toward Microsoft because of it. Actually, other recent interviews have indicated that Microsoft and AMD are still the best of buds.
I think it will be VERY similar to an Alpha chip. It will probably use an EV-7 Alpha bus, and may even be pin compatible. I saw a quote from AMD once that said something like this:
"Someday, when designing a system, the very last decision you will have to make will be whether to use an AMD or Alpha CPU."
I believe it was Jerry Sanders that said this. The sledgehammer and the new Alphas will be cousins. I'm pretty sure Compaq/Alpha and AMD are sharing lots of ideas.
Actually, a complete Ku-band satellite, including parts, assembly, and launch, is about 250 million. This goes for NASA, or the French, or the Russians. So a quarter of a billion dollars for startup costs is not that much money in perspective.
Telecom satellites are cheaper, but they're also in a much lower orbit - a few hundred miles up as opposed to 23,000 miles up. But they are launched in clusters, because they are not geostationary. So the payload is generally larger than the weight of 1 satellite.
I am a strong believer in unmanned satellite launches. They are safer, just as accurate (because once you're in the ballpark, you fly satellites with telemetry anyway), and in the long run, are cheaper.
As far as satellite recovery, it almost never happens. If a satellite doesn't deploy properly, you sell it to the insurance company that insured the launch. The insurance company doesn't have any repo men for satellites, so dead satellites generally become space junk. It may not be the utopian approach, but that's the way it works in real life.
Yes, the Athlon does support Multiprocessing. It's a point to point protocol of the EV6 bus, which gives each processor in a multiprocessor setup full bandwidth, as opposed to Intel's GTL+/SMP, which shares the same bus for multiple processors, giving diminishing returns on more than a couple of processors.
Hopefully the chipsets for this should be out soon. Tyan was talking first quarter at the end of last year, but I think it will more likely be second quarter, since there's only 3 weeks left in the first quarter.
A pet peeve: People refer to the new Athlon chipsets as "SMP". They're not. That's Symetrical MultiProcessing. They're Point to Point Multiprocessing, which I guess would be PTPMP or something.
There's three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
But anyhow, on the benchmarks you linked to, the Athlon's cache only affected it on games and synthetic 3D benchmarks. On professional level applications, the Athlon 600 was faster than the P3-800.
I mean, who would want these for games, anyway? On demanding games, it only got 98 frames per second! Seriously, at the $1299 price point, the main purchases of these things should be professional apps. If you're playing games, either get a slower Athlon with an overclocking card, or wait for the Thunderbird with full speed L2. Or get a 1 Ghz Athlon, so you brag to your friends, and put up with that painfully slow 98 frames per second.
Would this mean that lawyers suck ass?
I think Cartman said they do, in the "Sexual Harrassment Panda" episode of South Park. I think you've proven he's right.
I think this poster's native language is Spanish. And I bet his English is better than your Spanish. Anyhow, grammar flames suck. Get a life.
They sell a serial/ethernet gateway for the cards in this article. It's $349.00. Maybe worth it if the machine you are sacrificing is worth more than that.
You're right. There is code in this compiler that Intel contributed to Borland, that is under an NDA, because it reveals things about P6 architecture Intel doesn't want you (the general public) to know. There may be other IP issues, but this is definitely one of them. For details, check out the 6th generation processor rundown here: http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/cpuwar.html
I realize that you like to avoid comparing C++ to other languages. However, how do you feel about the Eiffel language, and more specifically, what is your reaction to the negativity the Eiffel community seems to show towards C++? Have you ever met any of the founding fathers of other languages, such as Bertrand Meyer of Eiffel or the Sun Java people? If so, was it a positive experience?
Besides all that, I don't see any real market for this stuff outside of the DOD or DOE. You can pick out the target market because they have aluminium foil around their heads to keep out the alien mind control.
The market for this is people who aren't aware that they even have it. All they know is that they bought a computer with a kickass movie player (It was only 599.00 at Sam's Club...) and there's this funny looking cable between the monitor and computer. This keeps their friend the techie from buying the same cheap computer and copying movies.
I think this whole thing is a completely stupid idea. If you can watch it with your eyes, you can copy it. Period. They transfer old films to videotape that way, and then you can digitally remaster them and make them look really good. So what's the point? There really is none, other than keeping low level Joe-Bob-Suzy consumer copying to a minimum.
Essentially what I'm saying is that the urge for control would be much less a problem if the people who were attempting to gain that control were really educated as to what's going on.
It's possible, though, that if these people knew what was really going on, they'd gain a sense of personal responsibility, and they'd lose the urge to gain control of other people. So essentially what I'm saying is, if they weren't ignorant, they wouldn't be the people they are in the first place.
I say we throw in the towel on the concept of promoting change from within the system and focus on civil disobedience. The hacker ethic is antitheical to this New World Order of information control... this is the real war - it's not one of politics or mimes.. it's about the right to the truth.. the freedom of information, and the right to be left alone.
I agree with you on this, however it goes even deeper than that. It's about free thought, and freewill. The first thing each of us needs to focus on is achieving personal awareness, free thought, and free will - i.e. liberty - the ability to get up each morning (or night), do what you believe in all day (or night), and go to bed at night (or morning) knowing you did what you believed in.
The second thing to do is to help other people do what they believe in. Of course this is a personal thing, and if you try to change people's views too much from the direction they are naturally inclined, what you get is divided loyalties. The last thing you want in a tense situation is people questioning their loyalties. So with five billion people on the earth, and the mass of communications, the goal should be to connect people who naturally believe in freewill and liberty. After this happens, the "system" will never be able to get these people back on their side, so the only option they'll have is to try to keep our ideas from spreading to the sheep.
This is the information age. The greatest tool of the status quo is ignorance of any other way of going about things. So they will continue to try to keep their ideas flowing to those people who they think they can control. But awareness is usually a one way journey - once you've seen it, you won't just give in to ignorance.
But anyhow.....
Actually, Linus has mentioned his views on fragmentation in his last two public interviews. One of them is here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/02/09/042824 0
So, please don't accuse someone of making up something which is actually a current event.
I do agree with you on Metcalfe, though. Every article I've read of his in the last year or so has been equally as clueless.
As far as non-proprietary software, there are more and more companies doing it. I think what many companies are learning, is that programs that are mainly written for internal benefit - i.e. performing a task inside their company - can be released as open source, with more good effects thatn bad ones. I am working on a project right now that is mainly for my employer, but is also open source. Unless a company's main income was built on proprietary software, it makes sense to open source internal projects. However, sometimes the "value added" part of a product depends on the software, such is the case with Transmeta, and maintaining a closed product can have a sink-or-swim effect on the company. I don't blame them, in this case, for keeping the lid on their software, at least in the short term.
I know exactly how to make a crossover cable. From memory:
:-)
Brown - Brown White, Green, Blue White - Blue, Green White, Orange - Orange White
Other Side:
Green - Green White, Brown, Blue White - Blue, Brown White, Orange - Orange White.
Splitting the center pair, and keeping the blue in the middle reduces crosstalk, and the pairs are matched with transmit and recieve.
I still sometimes only 10 Mbit. Maybe some of the ethernet cards I've used are crap. I'll take your word for it and try a little harder next time.
On 100 Mbit ethernet, a crossover cable will usually only give you 10Mbit. I assume the same will be true with gigabit. You probably won't get full speed out of a crossover cable.
I believe the top speed for the firewire spec is 400 Mbit. I'm not sure if all devices, or ports, support 400 Mbit, but that's what's in the spec.
Also, the EV6 bus for the Athlon is 200 Mhz, with separate switching for RAM and PCI. I wonder if that might be a good solution.
I know you're playing the devil, but I'm going to respond anyway....
If you're planning "wide" distribution of your movies, paying a small licensing/royalty for the priveledge shouldn't break the bank.
The problem is, that even if you pay this fee, the DVDCA/MPAA can say "NO. We won't let you produce content." They don't HAVE TO grant you a license. That gives them a monopoly on content and player production.
Yesterday, in the decision for the Connectix/Sony case, regarding reverse engineering of the Sony Playstation, the court said this:
"Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."
The same should be true for DVD's, or any other media. A company should not automatically get a monopoly just because they chose the format.
With open source players, the "certificates that state you own the right to watch such and such" issue is mute. You simply take out the part of the code that looks for the certificate. Actually, since the creators of the program knew this, it probably isn't there to start with. In open source, if you have something, you have the right to watch it. That's the whole idea.