I just think you are hampering free speech by making limits.
This point bugs me. Whenever people talk about campaign finance reform, or just campaign finance, someone always tries to equate political donations with free speech. Honestly - I don't follow. Do they mean to imply that any political action, or for that matter any non-political action, is "equivalent to free speech"? If not, how is giving money to someone the same as making an utterance?
I say, bully for free speech - everyone should have it. And certainly "speech" can take many forms - written English, spoken Lingala, obfuscated C, abstract art, disco music. What I don't see is how "giving money to a politician" is at all similar to any of the above. If you have a political point to make, let me hear it, not count it.
I suppose someone will say political contributions are one way of "making a statement". Well, guess what - so is arson. That doesn't mean arson is considered free speech, or indeed speech at all.
On the other hand, when I buy a DVD, I know that it will work in essentially any DVD player. The
copy-protected CD's won't work in computer CDs, and some other CDs, such as car players.
There is that, and I hope it's sufficient to convince Joe Consumer that enough is enough. I hope it generates sufficient backlash to actually make the labels sit up and take note. I guess I'm just more pessimistic than you - I figure most people still are listening to CDs on real CD decks (including I'm guessing all but the really high-end car stereos).
There are any number of sociology studies that demonstrate the social stratification of the US. The
common-sense wisdom of a classless society and increased social mobility within the US
(compared with European countries) is just pure ideology
Evidently you have studied more sociology than I have (or you're just a better karma whore:), but my own micro version of common-sense wisdom says that social mobility and stratification are not mutually exclusive. I believe it is possible, in this country [the US], to rely on your own wits, ambition and hard work and get basically anywhere you want to go, subject to your own God-given talents. It is also possible to piss away any advantages you may start with.
I know two guys, middle-age. Brothers, a few years apart. They grew up middle class, a little on the upper side. One went to a small unprestigious college, excelled, got a scholarship to that Ivy League medical school in Cambridge, Mass (no, the family couldn't have afforded it on their own), became a doctor. The other dropped out of a similar college, tried the army but couldn't hack it, drifted around for the next 25 years, never able to hold down a job for more than a year or two, is basically still minimum-wage, and evidently has kind of burned his bridges in quite a few towns.
Any theory of social stratification should take the above case (which seems almost too black-and-white, but trust me, it was not made up) into account. These guys have the same cultural background, the same social class - but the one had what it takes to make it in this world and come out higher up the economic food chain than he started, the other apparently didn't, and ended up on the bottom.
Yes I believe we have social classes in this country, but that doesn't mean you can't escape them if you try hard enough.
My other theory about escaping social class has to do with upbringing, i.e. the education you get a little of in school but mostly at home. As they say, I have come up with an elegant proof for the above, but...
This is not really on-topic, but I can see a horrible potential problem with the scheme of
self-sabotaging software you're talking about. Two people working on the same files, without time
synchronization between the machines (eg ntp).
Mind this is just hearsay. A couple days ago someone told me about some package that "stopped working and we had to reinstall it" when they set the clock. I don't know for sure that the software did this intentionally as a way to punish the would-be cheater. I don't even remember the program name. Wasn't in my department.
Frankly, I think software like this is dangereous to my data. I'd kind of feel obiliged to crack the
software just to protect myself, rather than for any motives of piracy.
I support that sentiment. Time/node-based licensing is a PITA around here; a few cracked software releases would make my job much easier. But not enough easier to justify the time it would take me to do it....
But, I know that when I stop buying CDs because of copy protection - it will hurt them so much, they
will cry uncle - not because of me in particular, but because many people will be doing the same as me,
a great many people.
Just like so many people only buy unencrypted DVDs? The DVD standard does not require CSS encryption... and yet... how many unencrypted DVDs do you know about? Any movies you would want to buy?
Yeah, I know, some people do boycott buying DVDs because of the decss flap. I don't buy DVDs, but mostly because I don't have a player, so I haven't had to make that moral decision yet. All I'm saying is that most people won't care, as long as there is some way to play their CDs, or whatever you want to call them, in the players they own. I honestly don't think the consumer backlash will be nearly as big as you and I are both hoping for.
If the latter, then someone is replacing my scratched disks, providing CD media versions of my old
cassette tapes etc. I've PAID the license, I've the right to different media, the same as software
companies would provide floppy disk versions of software on request, replace damaged media, or allow you
to generate back-up copies if you so desired.
Agreed, 100% - but unfortunately you'd never actually get them to send you new media for free. IBM will ship us anything we want (within our software contract) for a $50 media charge. Believe you me, if you actually had a license rather than a product, the "media handling fee" for getting a new CD would be very very close to (or higher than) your replacement purchase price.
People (and the courts) can say what they want, but I already treat music as a license. I feel no remorse at all about borrowing a CD I used to own before it mine was stolen, and burning myself a copy. I paid for the CD; if someone is stealing from The Cure, or from the RIAA, it's the guy who took my CD, not me. (I've taken a lot of crap for doing the above and still being opposed to napster-style copyright infringement. Shrug.)
If a law like this is passed, I predict a new standard audio format will appear in no time. An audio DVD
for instance, with remixes, videos, and a bunch of other stuff-- and devices ranging from simple audio
players for the audio tracks to portable players that have a little video screen to whatever. As long as
people buy what they are selling, the law is going to always be a step behind.
Agreed - this is one of my problems with this bill. It is too specific. It reminds me of the city council in my former hometown. They passed an ordinance that rollerblading was not allowed on downtown sidewalks. Of course they used the trademark, "Rollerblades". Presumably you were still allowed to skate on sidewalks if you wore a different brand of in-line skates.
Fair use is a defense to a charge of copyright infringement. You do not have an entitlement to access
copyrighted information in any manner you want to.
No, but to me, saying on the one hand "xxx use is not copyright infringement" and on the other hand "you may not buy or sell a device which allows you to do xxx use" are logically incompatible statements. If it's not illegal to perform the action, how can it be illegal to buy the equipment necessary to do it?
Yet that is exactly what the DMCA, and to a much greater extent the SSSCA, do say.
The DMCA is a big complex law (aren't they all) and only small bits of it are actually offensive to civil rights. If they would just remove the bit that says you aren't allowed to circumvent access control measures, maybe change it to say you aren't allowed to circumvent access control measures in order to violate copyright law, which is of course redundant since violating copyright law is already illegal, I think the law is salvageable. Last I heard, it sounded like Rep. Boucher wanted to do exactly this. Here's hoping he does, and Congress gets a sudden attack of sanity.
As to this latest proposal - sorry, I can't get into it. Noble intentions, bad concept. It shouldn't be illegal to produce a Cactus CD... WTF? BMG and Geffen should be allowed to market whatever silver colored shiny crap they want to. We just shouldn't be prohibited from circumventing it as necessary. Let the copy protection arms race occur in userspace, as it always has. Oh, and Phillips can worry about making sure the CD Digital Audio trademark isn't abused - there's our warning labels.
(Looking back over this post, it's approximately -4 Redundant, as it echoes years of slashdot party line....)
How would you enforce this. The work around could be as simple as changing the date on your computer?
A lot of software is licensed for thousands of dollars per seat per year. Naturally, some people try to cheat by setting back their clocks. So some software keeps track of when it was last run, and if current time is before that date it knows you've been screwing with it. CATIA, for example, refuses to open a CAD model whose internal timestamp [not the FS mtime / ctime] is in the future. I heard of one package that actually sabotages itself when it detects time-tampering, so you have to reinstall it.
These sorts of checks would be annoying enough to deter casual region-code hacking. (Yes, I realise that setting the clock too far into the future is harder to detect / prevent, but there are ways.) The more serious "violators" (and I use that term loosely, since I see no moral problem with circumventing region coding) aren't deterred by the current scheme anyway, so what's the difference..
The vast majority of wealthy people either lucked into their money or were born into it.
Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything. If you're lazy, or you lack the imagination / ambition to do anything other than work in the same steel mill your father does - well, that will obviously limit your potential somewhat.
Maybe you want to define "luck" as "having parents who care enough to make sure you get a good education" (no I'm not talking about which school you attend! there is much more to education than schooling!), but that is really still self-determination, one generation removed. Then there are corner cases like "lucky enough not to have got the severe-learning-difficulties part of the gene pool" - but that is indeed a corner case.
It's funny, but I bet a lot of the same people who don't see a problem with movie & music piracy are the
same people who complain bitterly about GPL violations in software.
Hmmm, maybe there are a few people who fit both descriptions, but from what I can tell, those who actually create GPL software (i.e. those who have any right to complain bitterly about GPL violations) are not lame enough to hold those two conflicting views.
It certainly seems to me that there are two distinct groups of "free software" people: those who believe in free software for its freedom, and those who see it as basically equivalent to pirated software or download-for-no-charge software like Adobe Acrobat Reader.
(If you haven't guessed by now, I am in one of these camps and have a certain amount of contempt for the other.)
The MPAA prevents R-rated movies from selling by rating them R! If there were no movie-rating
bullshit then studios won't have to work so hard and remove quite innocent scenes to get a PG-13 rating.
In my opinion it is the opposite. I can't back this up with any facts, but haven't you ever seen a movie with gratuitous nudity? I mean where it doesn't add anything to the plot, and would "lift off as easily as a scab" (Florence King, in the highly-recommended Florence King Reader, commenting on deleting a sex scene while editing her novel for republication).
I get the strong feeling the directors often include these scenes solely to bump the movie up to an R rating, and thus gain attention from audiences for whom lesser-rated movies fall under the radar. Why would audiences react to ratings that way? Ya got me.
What happens if someone's found an old copy on Google's cache or something?
That's fine. If it's an old version, it's in the public domain. That was deliberate. If you want to use a newer version of my code, you'll have to comply with my licensing terms (currently GPLv2 across the board).
I think a 10-year limit on copyright for source code is more than sensible. If a company (or me) has been modifying said code for the past 10 years, I doubt the 10-year-old version of the code is going to help their competitors very much. If that particular code module has remained unchanged for that time, well, ditto. Either way it's clearly not cutting-edge tech, or a competitive advantage.
Not true. Copyright is a property that can be bought, sold, traded. It's a commodity, and as such, can
be passed via the will; you know, that thing you pass your private property down to.
Not according to the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't talk about IP. It talks about copyright for the creator. The P part of IP is just one of those "well surely that's what they must have meant" things. (Response: Maybe and maybe not. And don't call me 'surely'.)
I am seriously thinking of putting my IP where my mouth is: adding a line to each source file I create, right below the copyright and the GPL blurb: "In ten years this work will automatically revert to the public domain. That is, if the latest copyright date listed above is from at least ten years ago, the copyright has been abandoned." Does anyone have a better way to express this?
Hey now. That's also "Sun Fag", "IBM Fag", "MIPS Fag", "Alpha Fag" and even "Cray Fag" mode.
MIPS can be either little- or big-endian, and Alpha is little-endian. You are right about Sun and IBM - SPARC, PowerPC and S/390 are all big-endian. (Actually the PPC spec also describes a little-endian mode, but I have no idea if it's ever even implemented.) I'll have to take your word for it on Cray.
This is of course assuming that you are trying to
recover from a memory allocation error. Generally
if realloc fails, it means that your program isn't going to execute very far before it totally pukes
anyway.
Many things which are excusable in production should not be tolerated in education. If the author of the C book you are looking at actually teaches you to leak memory... burn it! You can't trust an author with such sloppy technique to teach good technique.
I've seen "void main()" in some C books. Same thing. Obviously in some environments it doesn't matter, but bad habits are bad habits..
in response to the carnivore comment. The weight is now put on me to hide what i am saying so the govt cant read it? yes what a free society we live in. There shouldnt be ways around it, simply because there should be no NEED for it.
As may be, but since when did we have a right to privacy? Grep the Constitution, you won't find it. It can vaguely be related to property rights ("those are my IP datagrams") or search-and-seizure ("tapping a line between me and the phone company is equivalent to breaking into my home"), but I (-ANAL, natch) would consider either one to be quite a leap of logic. You really only have a "right to privacy" if a legislature decides to give you one. It's not in the "endowed by their Creator" category.
I don't like Carnivore any better than the next guy, but are our rights really being violated?
The idea is that your insulating the entire earth so that it can trap heat more effectively. But should the heat escape, it will mean that it will also be harder to heat up.
Uhhhhh... no. The earth gains heat by radiation and loses it by induction (as well as a little radiation). There's a difference: radiation is not affected by carbon dioxide.
Perhaps you are confusing "global warming" with "ozone depletion". Ozone does indeed inhibit incoming radiation. But I've never heard anyone claim that the effects of a thinning ozone layer (to the extent that it is thinning at all) are supposed to include global warming.
I just recently upgraded from a noname soundcard to an Aureal Vortex2
You can still get those? I thought Aureal went out of business. Which probably implies that Linux will never be supported by the Vortex2 card..
and from a realtek 8029 to Linksys LNE100TX
Good call - the 8029 seems to ask the question "how bad can a PCI network card possibly get". The Tulip (aka DEC 2114x, of which the Linksys is a clone) is a much saner design. It lacks some of the whiz-bang features of the latest 3Com offerings, but then again, unlike 3Com cards, Linksys cards have never in my experience refused to talk to our 3Com switch....
Nice try, but Windows 2000 is already running on Hammer test systems.
So, if we're intent on "competing with Microsoft", the issue then becomes quality of implementation. In the Linux case, most userspace utilities will probably not be taking advantage of 64-bit - but the pieces are in place in case a particular app could benefit from them, in which case it's probably no more than a recompile.
The kernel, OTOH, is 64-bit, I believe.
I bring this up because Windows NT supported the Alpha CPU for years - but essentially treated it as a 32-bit CPU, for greater compatibility with their original and most popular port. Microsoft didn't have an actual 64-bit OS, I understand, until NT5 for ia64. Linux has been basically "pure 64-bit" on Alpha (and UltraSPARC, and more recently others) from the beginning - somewhere around '93 or '94.
So... OK, Windows 2000 runs on x86-64 - but is it actually using 64-bit instructions where appropriate, or is it treating the x86-64 as a mere Athlon? Your guess is as good as mine.
(What am I saying? "Mere Athlon"? I'd love to have a "mere Athlon".)
I also have an OPL3SA chip in my 2 1/2 yr. old laptop, and MIDI sounds just fine.
Are you sure it's an OPL3SA (aka YMF-701)? I ask because there is also a newer family of chips called the OPL3SA2, OPL3SA3, and OPL3SAx (aka YMF-715 and YMF-719). I'm not sure but I think these chips feature a wavetable synthesizer called the OPL4, as opposed to the crufty AdLib-compatible OPL3.
I don't know if OSS or ALSA support the OPL4, but if so, and if that's what you have, that could explain why your MIDI sounds decent and mine doesn't.
Well, my workaround is to use timidity for MIDI playback. It does wavetable synthesis completely in software, thus not using the OPL3 at all. Of course, this doesn't help for other applications, though as someone else pointed out, with alsalib there's a hook for user-space software synthesizers.
You forgot new input device layer. If we get the matching new console layer, multi-head will be pretty much built in. (Yes, I know XFree86 supports multiple displays - I'm talking about multiple sets of keyboard+mouse+video running independently of each other. SGI has sold dual-console workstations for a long time - why can't I do this with Linux, y'know?)
Oh yeah, there's also USB 2.0, but that's more of a driver update than a whole new thing.
...And x86-64 (also in 2.5.5pre1), so we're ready for the Hammer when it comes out.
...And better filesystem threading. The unstoppable Al Viro just added fine-grained locking to a couple more VFS calls in 2.5.5pre1. I guess it isn't really news, more of a work in progress; he has been improving VFS scalability since mid-to-late 2.3.
Good to see an advancement in the multimedia capabilities of a reliable system.
Yeah. And this dovetails nicely with the recent/. story on the open source Direct3D v8. Maybe someone will write a DirectSound implementation using alsalib now, and do the rest of DirectX based on the new input layer (merged in 2.5.3 or so)... then eventually game companies will be able to say, like Oracle did years ago, "we just typed make".
Slashdot Mirror
This point bugs me. Whenever people talk about campaign finance reform, or just campaign finance, someone always tries to equate political donations with free speech. Honestly - I don't follow. Do they mean to imply that any political action, or for that matter any non-political action, is "equivalent to free speech"? If not, how is giving money to someone the same as making an utterance?
I say, bully for free speech - everyone should have it. And certainly "speech" can take many forms - written English, spoken Lingala, obfuscated C, abstract art, disco music. What I don't see is how "giving money to a politician" is at all similar to any of the above. If you have a political point to make, let me hear it, not count it.
I suppose someone will say political contributions are one way of "making a statement". Well, guess what - so is arson. That doesn't mean arson is considered free speech, or indeed speech at all.
There is that, and I hope it's sufficient to convince Joe Consumer that enough is enough. I hope it generates sufficient backlash to actually make the labels sit up and take note. I guess I'm just more pessimistic than you - I figure most people still are listening to CDs on real CD decks (including I'm guessing all but the really high-end car stereos).
Who knows - maybe there is hope in the proles.
Evidently you have studied more sociology than I have (or you're just a better karma whore :), but my own micro version of common-sense wisdom says that social mobility and stratification are not mutually exclusive. I believe it is possible, in this country [the US], to rely on your own wits, ambition and hard work and get basically anywhere you want to go, subject to your own God-given talents. It is also possible to piss away any advantages you may start with.
I know two guys, middle-age. Brothers, a few years apart. They grew up middle class, a little on the upper side. One went to a small unprestigious college, excelled, got a scholarship to that Ivy League medical school in Cambridge, Mass (no, the family couldn't have afforded it on their own), became a doctor. The other dropped out of a similar college, tried the army but couldn't hack it, drifted around for the next 25 years, never able to hold down a job for more than a year or two, is basically still minimum-wage, and evidently has kind of burned his bridges in quite a few towns.
Any theory of social stratification should take the above case (which seems almost too black-and-white, but trust me, it was not made up) into account. These guys have the same cultural background, the same social class - but the one had what it takes to make it in this world and come out higher up the economic food chain than he started, the other apparently didn't, and ended up on the bottom.
Yes I believe we have social classes in this country, but that doesn't mean you can't escape them if you try hard enough.
My other theory about escaping social class has to do with upbringing, i.e. the education you get a little of in school but mostly at home. As they say, I have come up with an elegant proof for the above, but...
Mind this is just hearsay. A couple days ago someone told me about some package that "stopped working and we had to reinstall it" when they set the clock. I don't know for sure that the software did this intentionally as a way to punish the would-be cheater. I don't even remember the program name. Wasn't in my department.
I support that sentiment. Time/node-based licensing is a PITA around here; a few cracked software releases would make my job much easier. But not enough easier to justify the time it would take me to do it....
Just like so many people only buy unencrypted DVDs? The DVD standard does not require CSS encryption ... and yet ... how many unencrypted DVDs do you know about? Any movies you would want to buy?
Yeah, I know, some people do boycott buying DVDs because of the decss flap. I don't buy DVDs, but mostly because I don't have a player, so I haven't had to make that moral decision yet. All I'm saying is that most people won't care, as long as there is some way to play their CDs, or whatever you want to call them, in the players they own. I honestly don't think the consumer backlash will be nearly as big as you and I are both hoping for.
Agreed, 100% - but unfortunately you'd never actually get them to send you new media for free. IBM will ship us anything we want (within our software contract) for a $50 media charge. Believe you me, if you actually had a license rather than a product, the "media handling fee" for getting a new CD would be very very close to (or higher than) your replacement purchase price.
People (and the courts) can say what they want, but I already treat music as a license. I feel no remorse at all about borrowing a CD I used to own before it mine was stolen, and burning myself a copy. I paid for the CD; if someone is stealing from The Cure, or from the RIAA, it's the guy who took my CD, not me. (I've taken a lot of crap for doing the above and still being opposed to napster-style copyright infringement. Shrug.)
Agreed - this is one of my problems with this bill. It is too specific. It reminds me of the city council in my former hometown. They passed an ordinance that rollerblading was not allowed on downtown sidewalks. Of course they used the trademark, "Rollerblades". Presumably you were still allowed to skate on sidewalks if you wore a different brand of in-line skates.
Just a VA customer, or at least a user of their web log.
Oh, you meant Virginia. (:
No, but to me, saying on the one hand "xxx use is not copyright infringement" and on the other hand "you may not buy or sell a device which allows you to do xxx use" are logically incompatible statements. If it's not illegal to perform the action, how can it be illegal to buy the equipment necessary to do it?
Yet that is exactly what the DMCA, and to a much greater extent the SSSCA, do say.
The DMCA is a big complex law (aren't they all) and only small bits of it are actually offensive to civil rights. If they would just remove the bit that says you aren't allowed to circumvent access control measures, maybe change it to say you aren't allowed to circumvent access control measures in order to violate copyright law, which is of course redundant since violating copyright law is already illegal, I think the law is salvageable. Last I heard, it sounded like Rep. Boucher wanted to do exactly this. Here's hoping he does, and Congress gets a sudden attack of sanity.
As to this latest proposal - sorry, I can't get into it. Noble intentions, bad concept. It shouldn't be illegal to produce a Cactus CD ... WTF? BMG and Geffen should be allowed to market whatever silver colored shiny crap they want to. We just shouldn't be prohibited from circumventing it as necessary. Let the copy protection arms race occur in userspace, as it always has. Oh, and Phillips can worry about making sure the CD Digital Audio trademark isn't abused - there's our warning labels.
(Looking back over this post, it's approximately -4 Redundant, as it echoes years of slashdot party line....)
A lot of software is licensed for thousands of dollars per seat per year. Naturally, some people try to cheat by setting back their clocks. So some software keeps track of when it was last run, and if current time is before that date it knows you've been screwing with it. CATIA, for example, refuses to open a CAD model whose internal timestamp [not the FS mtime / ctime] is in the future. I heard of one package that actually sabotages itself when it detects time-tampering, so you have to reinstall it.
These sorts of checks would be annoying enough to deter casual region-code hacking. (Yes, I realise that setting the clock too far into the future is harder to detect / prevent, but there are ways.) The more serious "violators" (and I use that term loosely, since I see no moral problem with circumventing region coding) aren't deterred by the current scheme anyway, so what's the difference..
Source? Specifics? That may be true in some places, but they don't call the US the "Land of Opportunity" for nothing. Obviously there is such a thing as inherited wealth, and such a thing as good luck or bad luck, but honestly - if you have talent, ambition, imagination, and hard work - you really can do anything. If you're lazy, or you lack the imagination / ambition to do anything other than work in the same steel mill your father does - well, that will obviously limit your potential somewhat.
Maybe you want to define "luck" as "having parents who care enough to make sure you get a good education" (no I'm not talking about which school you attend! there is much more to education than schooling!), but that is really still self-determination, one generation removed. Then there are corner cases like "lucky enough not to have got the severe-learning-difficulties part of the gene pool" - but that is indeed a corner case.
Hmmm, maybe there are a few people who fit both descriptions, but from what I can tell, those who actually create GPL software (i.e. those who have any right to complain bitterly about GPL violations) are not lame enough to hold those two conflicting views.
It certainly seems to me that there are two distinct groups of "free software" people: those who believe in free software for its freedom, and those who see it as basically equivalent to pirated software or download-for-no-charge software like Adobe Acrobat Reader.
(If you haven't guessed by now, I am in one of these camps and have a certain amount of contempt for the other.)
In my opinion it is the opposite. I can't back this up with any facts, but haven't you ever seen a movie with gratuitous nudity? I mean where it doesn't add anything to the plot, and would "lift off as easily as a scab" (Florence King, in the highly-recommended Florence King Reader, commenting on deleting a sex scene while editing her novel for republication).
I get the strong feeling the directors often include these scenes solely to bump the movie up to an R rating, and thus gain attention from audiences for whom lesser-rated movies fall under the radar. Why would audiences react to ratings that way? Ya got me.
That's fine. If it's an old version, it's in the public domain. That was deliberate. If you want to use a newer version of my code, you'll have to comply with my licensing terms (currently GPLv2 across the board).
I think a 10-year limit on copyright for source code is more than sensible. If a company (or me) has been modifying said code for the past 10 years, I doubt the 10-year-old version of the code is going to help their competitors very much. If that particular code module has remained unchanged for that time, well, ditto. Either way it's clearly not cutting-edge tech, or a competitive advantage.
Not according to the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't talk about IP. It talks about copyright for the creator. The P part of IP is just one of those "well surely that's what they must have meant" things. (Response: Maybe and maybe not. And don't call me 'surely'.)
I am seriously thinking of putting my IP where my mouth is: adding a line to each source file I create, right below the copyright and the GPL blurb: "In ten years this work will automatically revert to the public domain. That is, if the latest copyright date listed above is from at least ten years ago, the copyright has been abandoned." Does anyone have a better way to express this?
MIPS can be either little- or big-endian, and Alpha is little-endian. You are right about Sun and IBM - SPARC, PowerPC and S/390 are all big-endian. (Actually the PPC spec also describes a little-endian mode, but I have no idea if it's ever even implemented.) I'll have to take your word for it on Cray.
Many things which are excusable in production should not be tolerated in education. If the author of the C book you are looking at actually teaches you to leak memory ... burn it! You can't trust an author with such sloppy technique to teach good technique.
I've seen "void main()" in some C books. Same thing. Obviously in some environments it doesn't matter, but bad habits are bad habits..
Hey, at least keep it on topic: "Stuff that Hz."
As may be, but since when did we have a right to privacy? Grep the Constitution, you won't find it. It can vaguely be related to property rights ("those are my IP datagrams") or search-and-seizure ("tapping a line between me and the phone company is equivalent to breaking into my home"), but I (-ANAL, natch) would consider either one to be quite a leap of logic. You really only have a "right to privacy" if a legislature decides to give you one. It's not in the "endowed by their Creator" category.
I don't like Carnivore any better than the next guy, but are our rights really being violated?
Uhhhhh ... no. The earth gains heat by radiation and loses it by induction (as well as a little radiation). There's a difference: radiation is not affected by carbon dioxide.
Perhaps you are confusing "global warming" with "ozone depletion". Ozone does indeed inhibit incoming radiation. But I've never heard anyone claim that the effects of a thinning ozone layer (to the extent that it is thinning at all) are supposed to include global warming.
You can still get those? I thought Aureal went out of business. Which probably implies that Linux will never be supported by the Vortex2 card..
Good call - the 8029 seems to ask the question "how bad can a PCI network card possibly get". The Tulip (aka DEC 2114x, of which the Linksys is a clone) is a much saner design. It lacks some of the whiz-bang features of the latest 3Com offerings, but then again, unlike 3Com cards, Linksys cards have never in my experience refused to talk to our 3Com switch....
So, if we're intent on "competing with Microsoft", the issue then becomes quality of implementation. In the Linux case, most userspace utilities will probably not be taking advantage of 64-bit - but the pieces are in place in case a particular app could benefit from them, in which case it's probably no more than a recompile.
The kernel, OTOH, is 64-bit, I believe.
I bring this up because Windows NT supported the Alpha CPU for years - but essentially treated it as a 32-bit CPU, for greater compatibility with their original and most popular port. Microsoft didn't have an actual 64-bit OS, I understand, until NT5 for ia64. Linux has been basically "pure 64-bit" on Alpha (and UltraSPARC, and more recently others) from the beginning - somewhere around '93 or '94.
So ... OK, Windows 2000 runs on x86-64 - but is it actually using 64-bit instructions where appropriate, or is it treating the x86-64 as a mere Athlon? Your guess is as good as mine.
(What am I saying? "Mere Athlon"? I'd love to have a "mere Athlon".)
Are you sure it's an OPL3SA (aka YMF-701)? I ask because there is also a newer family of chips called the OPL3SA2, OPL3SA3, and OPL3SAx (aka YMF-715 and YMF-719). I'm not sure but I think these chips feature a wavetable synthesizer called the OPL4, as opposed to the crufty AdLib-compatible OPL3.
I don't know if OSS or ALSA support the OPL4, but if so, and if that's what you have, that could explain why your MIDI sounds decent and mine doesn't.
Well, my workaround is to use timidity for MIDI playback. It does wavetable synthesis completely in software, thus not using the OPL3 at all. Of course, this doesn't help for other applications, though as someone else pointed out, with alsalib there's a hook for user-space software synthesizers.
You forgot new input device layer. If we get the matching new console layer, multi-head will be pretty much built in. (Yes, I know XFree86 supports multiple displays - I'm talking about multiple sets of keyboard+mouse+video running independently of each other. SGI has sold dual-console workstations for a long time - why can't I do this with Linux, y'know?)
Oh yeah, there's also USB 2.0, but that's more of a driver update than a whole new thing.
...And x86-64 (also in 2.5.5pre1), so we're ready for the Hammer when it comes out.
...And better filesystem threading. The unstoppable Al Viro just added fine-grained locking to a couple more VFS calls in 2.5.5pre1. I guess it isn't really news, more of a work in progress; he has been improving VFS scalability since mid-to-late 2.3.
Yeah. And this dovetails nicely with the recent /. story on the open source Direct3D v8. Maybe someone will write a DirectSound implementation using alsalib now, and do the rest of DirectX based on the new input layer (merged in 2.5.3 or so) ... then eventually game companies will be able to say, like Oracle did years ago, "we just typed make".