Is wanting other people to enjoy the same rights under a liberal democracy that we in the USA have cultural chauvinism?
Where the fuck do you live in a "liberal democracy?" Surely not here in the US - where tolerance is only lip service and "liberal" means you only espouse a more agnostic fascism...
I think that people are reluctant to build dependencies on others, but that will change over time. After all, when was the last time somebody stapled their own wires to a phone pole because they didn't trust the telephone network?
The guy who runs a server company (the oldest, most brittle computing model around) says the peer to peer model of networking is dead. Gee, who would have ever seen that one coming?
The incentive to put users first comes when I have to earn a buck. If I can't present *my* client with a better solution than the other guy then I lose the sale.
THAT is where the user enters the picture. Open source software gives developers a box of quality tools that developers can then offer to their customers.
If you are using redhat and redhat's support team then you are using redhat's version of firefox - NOT the version of firefox you download from firefox.com. if you are using ubuntu and ubuntu's updates, then you are using ubuntu's version of firefox - NOT the version of firefox you download from firefox.com.
And if you are writing a website that requires special features unique to any specific browser then you should count your lucky stars to have found a boss stupid enough to give you work.
What are you talking about? The fact you HAD the source code to the firefox browser allowed you to solve the problem within your company with no dependance upon anyone else. Whether or not the Firefox developers moved your patch into the distribution, you still had the problem solved within your infrastructure because you were able to patch Firefox yourself.
Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking. Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.
You DO need realtime responsiveness as soon as you start doing mulitmedia OUTSIDE THE STUDIO. Sitting on your ass in your bedroom ripping DVDs doesn't require realtime response, but processing video LIVE does.
So does mixing audio. Because high or unpredicatble interrrupt latency leads directly to longer buffer times needed to overcome jitter, which is a pain in the ass when you are laying down tracks. Every new track based on the previous tracks gets just a little more skewed, which you have to stop and correct.
Actually, they are in bed with the reds. But they're in bed with the reds in the US, too - just look up keywords like "candyman" and "pedophile arrests" and see how many times Yahoo's name gets mentioned.
Corporations acting at the whims of the governments that host them is nothing new. Not even if you're Google. The obvious solution here is you never trust corporations. This is what proxy servers and anonymous remailers are for.
Nvidia DESIGNED that badly designed piece of hardware. Nvidia refuses to supply adequate documentation that might allow the open source community to overcome their equally BADLY DESIGNED SOFTWARE.
The motherboard has problems, but Shuttle is not to blame for Nvidia's bad drivers, Nvidia's refusal to provide proper documentation, or Nvidia's silicon.
Therefore it is much safer for Nvidia to design hardware that processes audio directly.
Actually, it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if they won't give any documentation on the things in the first place.
I looked for WEEKS for an MN31N - note the extra "N" - because I STUPIDLY bought into the hype about the MCP-T chipset. What I got is a computer with the shiitiest sound EVER - even worse than the e-machines we filled the offices of our startup with back in '99. It has a constant "whistle" only about 70db down that drives me up the fucking wall.
Because there are no open source drivers for the sound the "whistle" (due to resampling coefficients in the DSP and an inability to stop it from resampling everything) cannot be got rid of, nor can anyone try to "innovate" new uses or even just make the damn thing work as advertised.
Long story short: at least with intel I know what I am buying. I knew better than to believe the hype in the press and yet I did because I wanted to believe there was a good motherboard integrated sound solution. But whatever merit this chipset may have had has been lost due to the refusal by Nvidia to allow the open source community to make meaningful use of it.
Fuck "Soundstorm" - and fuck Nvidia and all that other crap. My next PC will have an intel chipset, a Matrox or S3 video card, and an M-audio sound card.
How is this any different than car makers setting up speedtraps outside small towns that may not have the "resources" to buy the equipment and pay the officers?
Hell, why don't we just turn all security over to the corporations? Look what a great job the rentacops have done for those in New Orleans!
Not only is he an asshole, he's a stupid asshole who deserves to starve. He COULD have taken the opportunity to write the company and attempt to work out a LICENSE for his work - since they were obviously making commercial use of his work, he could argue he was entitled to some hard cash compensation for it.
Gee, I wonder how open they would be to such an offer after this little prank?
Because computers are too stupid to know if that file you dropped into your MP3 folder from your "protected" folder was supposed to be there or if the file got dropped there because you sneezed and accidentally jerked your mouse across the screen.
If you encrypt just one folder then you might as well not encrypt anything. Your swap space, temp space, usr data (since we're talking about browsers) - all that can give things away. Even those application MRU entries will direct a snoop straight to your "protected" data. Once that's done a quick bash script and a little patience will reveal all.
Actually, it's just as fast as a RAID 0 (I clocked it) and it DOES have merit. When a hard drive fails (every one I have ever had fail, anyway) it doesn't just go all at once - it starts losing clusters in some fixed part of the disc.
I had a friend who ran a p2p hub in his dorm room who "backed up" his system by creating gigabytes of PARs. He had about half a TB back when 80GB drives were still pretty pricey. So instead of backing up everything he would back up half of it onto other drives in the form of PARs. When a drive started failing he was able to copy what he could to a new drive and then let the system recover the rest of what was lost from these PARs.
It's no different here. Having error recovery information in a different part of the disc is better than having none at all. I don't have to screw with making PARs myself and it's still much, much faster than a single drive.
I used to think my laptop was dogshit slow - it's a 400MHz system and it felt more like a 200MHz desktop. turned out it was just a slow hard drive. $200 fixed the problem and if I want I can move the drives to a new, faster machine and still see a similar improvement in speed.
Actually, I did this long ago in my thinkpad. It has two drives that are split up as four. One partition is the boot and the other three are a RAID5. It's as fast as a RAID 0 (this is true on my desktop system as well where I actually have multiple drives) and the two drives in my laptop take up no more space than the one drive used to. If you look at the new 1.8" drives you will see they are as "long" as a 2.5" drive is wide and half as wide as a 2.5" drive is long. The two drives sit side by side in the old slot where the 2.5" drive sat.
Two 20GB drives provides 20GB of raid 5 storage and 10GB for boot, swap, and "extra" stuff. Once the system is booted it runs mostly off the 20GB RAID and it's noticeably faster than using a single molasses slow notebook drive.
No matter how annoyed I get with the US sheeple it is always the stories about Australia and the UK that remind me just how screwed up things could really get if only the politicos and the church ladies and the feminazis could once and for all strike down that pesky Bill of Rights in our Constitution. There are other places I often think I would rather live, but australi and the UK for me rank right up there with perhaps Singapore or Saudi Arabia...
...Symantec ThreatCon as a part of global DeepSight Threat Management System saying Increased alertness and Internet Security Systems X-Force with Increased vigilance at AlertCon."
WTF is this supposed to mean? Is there anyone in the office who took a grammar course in the last two decades who could translate this?
My argument is with the word "because", and the suggestion that the primary reason for opposing software patents is because it stops people using other people's ideas.
You have no "argument" because I did not make a statement, I asked a question.
Obtuse? It ain't me - and I'm not yet sure you're actually pretending...
Umm... says who? It's not a claim I ever heard before.
Then this must be your first time at/., or even into the world of open source. Do you even know how patents work? A patent holder is not obligated to license it to anyone else. That means if Microsoft doesn't want apple (or redhat) using technology covered in one of its patents, no amount of money is going to buy you that "right."
Mercedes has been developing the automotive airbag system since, at least, the sixties. Many well respected engineers have said, during all this time, that airbag systems were impractical, dangerous, or that they jut couldn't work at all. In spite of that Mercedes went on with developing the system and today they hold many patents. Did they "develop the market" for them? No, Congress did that.
I don't know who "invented" MP3 players. They were around a LONG time before the ipod and before itunes, yet somehow because they happen to make the most popular mp3 player on the market this somehow entitles them to all the patents? Or makes them immune from fair enforcement of those patents?
This is nonsense. "Creating the market" is the reward for marketing innovation and that reward brings with it its own financial benefits - but innovative marketing has nothing at all to do with technical innovation.
"The physics involved" haven't changed, only what was practical has changed. LOW VOLTAGE DC requires large conductors to avoid high losses and there was no efficient way of converting it from one level to another a century ago. AC has the huge advantage in being easily transformed via.. er, transformers.
That's no longer exclusively true. And power loss is directly proportional to resistance but proportional to the square of the current, so doubling the voltage in a circuit cuts those losses much larger than half.
Meanwhile, low frequency AC transmission has all sorts of losses over long hauls due to reactive coupling to earth and to the atmosphere, and these losses vary even depending on the weather.
Rectifiers and inverters can be made very efficient these days, and long haul powerlines increasingly may carry 750KVDC or more on them... that's direct current, not alternating.
The higher voltage DC transport is more efficient, you see... but now we have the technology to exploit it.
let me see if I get this: it's ok to say Microsoft "ripped off" something or that Apple "ripped off" the GUI from xerox, but software patents are bad because they disallow the sharing of ideas?
If Apple and MS "ripped off" Xerox (and each other) then didn't Miguel and all those KDE devs rip them off too?
Grow up, already. Comments like this make you (and anyone else who makes them - including the eds at/.) sound like a second grader "Mommy, Johnny copied the man in my painting!"
Because, as I said, that's what I did when I got my own drives "upgraded" under warranty. I was going to ebay the 160g drives but since I got 250G drives I decided to keep them until the warranty runs out.
So, I got 300GB of RAID5 and 180GB of RAID0. I'll put music and video work on the RAID0 and use the RAID5 for stuff I need to keep.
But if you're going to make a TB of RAID5 from 300G drives you're going to need more than 4 of them. That means a decent case to house all those drives with a decent power supply and an extra controller card. Five 300GB drives is $750 plus you need the controller and the case - we're still up to nearly a grand.
Given the difference between $750 for the Maxtors and $850 for the same array in a Seagate flavor you'll still come out ahead by leaving the Maxtors on the shelf and going the "expensive" route - you'll have significantly less heat dumped into the case (and into the room) and you won't have to worry about how many weeks you're going to get this time before you have to shut the system down and rebuild the array with (yet another) new disk. Given the failure rate I've had in system with only one or two maxtors I would expect someone with FIVE of them in a case to be popping drives on a bimonthly basis.
It's not $500 for a TB because you are adding a second hard drive to the mix. what you describe is basically a RAID1 with the "redundant drive" stored on a shelf. If you are going to back up a 1TB 3 disc RAID on those portable drives then you need three of them, too or you need a redundant computer to house your redudnant RAID.
Any of that stuff costs a lot more than 500 bucks.
What are you going to use to back it up? Because I'll just about guarantee you that if you are counting on three Maxtors to provide that TB you ain't gonna have it for long.
You could use four and a dedicated controller card and be under a thousand dollars for 900GB and you might actually have that data past the first disc failure... or you could buy three Seagates for about a hundred bucks more than the Maxtors and have a much better chance of keeping your data around until the next upgrade.
I have owned five in the last three years or so and every last one of them has died while under warranty. The two most recent failures were the very fashionable two platter 6Y160 drives (which I, like a fool, explicitly sought out) and the first one died within six months. At the time they didn't have a bootable ISO of their software on the site, either, it was "run windows and do this test or no RMA for you" so the damn thing sat on the shelf until about a month ago when the SECOND "new" drive started losing data and I was forced to act.
The one upside is they returned to me 250GB drives (it seems the only difference in the 2 platter 120-250 drives is software) and they actually seem a little quieter than when they were new. I bit the bullet and put them into a RAID5 wih a newish Seagate 160 so now I have about a half TB of "protected" storage and a warranty that begins expiring about a year from next December. Will these two actually make it past that date without going back yet again? I don't expect them to.
I added a 7 volt fan in front of them and that dropped the temp about ten degrees, but the Maxtors still output about twice the heat of the (slightly quieter) Seagate (even with the fan the temp difference is ~5 degrees). If these drives had not been "free" (of course I paid >$200 for them) I would be running three Seagates now... and as the Maxtors die (again) that's what will replace them. I'll never buy another Maxtor.
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Is wanting other people to enjoy the same rights under a liberal democracy that we in the USA have cultural chauvinism?
Where the fuck do you live in a "liberal democracy?" Surely not here in the US - where tolerance is only lip service and "liberal" means you only espouse a more agnostic fascism...
I think that people are reluctant to build dependencies on others, but that will change over time. After all, when was the last time somebody stapled their own wires to a phone pole because they didn't trust the telephone network?
Ummm... people do that more now than ever - we just don't use wires.
The guy who runs a server company (the oldest, most brittle computing model around) says the peer to peer model of networking is dead. Gee, who would have ever seen that one coming?
The incentive to put users first comes when I have to earn a buck. If I can't present *my* client with a better solution than the other guy then I lose the sale.
THAT is where the user enters the picture. Open source software gives developers a box of quality tools that developers can then offer to their customers.
If you are using redhat and redhat's support team then you are using redhat's version of firefox - NOT the version of firefox you download from firefox.com. if you are using ubuntu and ubuntu's updates, then you are using ubuntu's version of firefox - NOT the version of firefox you download from firefox.com.
And if you are writing a website that requires special features unique to any specific browser then you should count your lucky stars to have found a boss stupid enough to give you work.
What are you talking about? The fact you HAD the source code to the firefox browser allowed you to solve the problem within your company with no dependance upon anyone else. Whether or not the Firefox developers moved your patch into the distribution, you still had the problem solved within your infrastructure because you were able to patch Firefox yourself.
Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking. Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.
You DO need realtime responsiveness as soon as you start doing mulitmedia OUTSIDE THE STUDIO. Sitting on your ass in your bedroom ripping DVDs doesn't require realtime response, but processing video LIVE does.
So does mixing audio. Because high or unpredicatble interrrupt latency leads directly to longer buffer times needed to overcome jitter, which is a pain in the ass when you are laying down tracks. Every new track based on the previous tracks gets just a little more skewed, which you have to stop and correct.
Actually, they are in bed with the reds. But they're in bed with the reds in the US, too - just look up keywords like "candyman" and "pedophile arrests" and see how many times Yahoo's name gets mentioned.
Corporations acting at the whims of the governments that host them is nothing new. Not even if you're Google. The obvious solution here is you never trust corporations. This is what proxy servers and anonymous remailers are for.
Nvidia DESIGNED that badly designed piece of hardware. Nvidia refuses to supply adequate documentation that might allow the open source community to overcome their equally BADLY DESIGNED SOFTWARE.
The motherboard has problems, but Shuttle is not to blame for Nvidia's bad drivers, Nvidia's refusal to provide proper documentation, or Nvidia's silicon.
Therefore it is much safer for Nvidia to design hardware that processes audio directly.
Actually, it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference if they won't give any documentation on the things in the first place.
I looked for WEEKS for an MN31N - note the extra "N" - because I STUPIDLY bought into the hype about the MCP-T chipset. What I got is a computer with the shiitiest sound EVER - even worse than the e-machines we filled the offices of our startup with back in '99. It has a constant "whistle" only about 70db down that drives me up the fucking wall.
Because there are no open source drivers for the sound the "whistle" (due to resampling coefficients in the DSP and an inability to stop it from resampling everything) cannot be got rid of, nor can anyone try to "innovate" new uses or even just make the damn thing work as advertised.
Long story short: at least with intel I know what I am buying. I knew better than to believe the hype in the press and yet I did because I wanted to believe there was a good motherboard integrated sound solution. But whatever merit this chipset may have had has been lost due to the refusal by Nvidia to allow the open source community to make meaningful use of it.
Fuck "Soundstorm" - and fuck Nvidia and all that other crap. My next PC will have an intel chipset, a Matrox or S3 video card, and an M-audio sound card.
How is this any different than car makers setting up speedtraps outside small towns that may not have the "resources" to buy the equipment and pay the officers?
Hell, why don't we just turn all security over to the corporations? Look what a great job the rentacops have done for those in New Orleans!
Not only is he an asshole, he's a stupid asshole who deserves to starve. He COULD have taken the opportunity to write the company and attempt to work out a LICENSE for his work - since they were obviously making commercial use of his work, he could argue he was entitled to some hard cash compensation for it.
Gee, I wonder how open they would be to such an offer after this little prank?
What a maroon!
Because computers are too stupid to know if that file you dropped into your MP3 folder from your "protected" folder was supposed to be there or if the file got dropped there because you sneezed and accidentally jerked your mouse across the screen.
If you encrypt just one folder then you might as well not encrypt anything. Your swap space, temp space, usr data (since we're talking about browsers) - all that can give things away. Even those application MRU entries will direct a snoop straight to your "protected" data. Once that's done a quick bash script and a little patience will reveal all.
Actually, it's just as fast as a RAID 0 (I clocked it) and it DOES have merit. When a hard drive fails (every one I have ever had fail, anyway) it doesn't just go all at once - it starts losing clusters in some fixed part of the disc.
I had a friend who ran a p2p hub in his dorm room who "backed up" his system by creating gigabytes of PARs. He had about half a TB back when 80GB drives were still pretty pricey. So instead of backing up everything he would back up half of it onto other drives in the form of PARs. When a drive started failing he was able to copy what he could to a new drive and then let the system recover the rest of what was lost from these PARs.
It's no different here. Having error recovery information in a different part of the disc is better than having none at all. I don't have to screw with making PARs myself and it's still much, much faster than a single drive.
I used to think my laptop was dogshit slow - it's a 400MHz system and it felt more like a 200MHz desktop. turned out it was just a slow hard drive. $200 fixed the problem and if I want I can move the drives to a new, faster machine and still see a similar improvement in speed.
Actually, I did this long ago in my thinkpad. It has two drives that are split up as four. One partition is the boot and the other three are a RAID5. It's as fast as a RAID 0 (this is true on my desktop system as well where I actually have multiple drives) and the two drives in my laptop take up no more space than the one drive used to. If you look at the new 1.8" drives you will see they are as "long" as a 2.5" drive is wide and half as wide as a 2.5" drive is long. The two drives sit side by side in the old slot where the 2.5" drive sat. Two 20GB drives provides 20GB of raid 5 storage and 10GB for boot, swap, and "extra" stuff. Once the system is booted it runs mostly off the 20GB RAID and it's noticeably faster than using a single molasses slow notebook drive.
No matter how annoyed I get with the US sheeple it is always the stories about Australia and the UK that remind me just how screwed up things could really get if only the politicos and the church ladies and the feminazis could once and for all strike down that pesky Bill of Rights in our Constitution. There are other places I often think I would rather live, but australi and the UK for me rank right up there with perhaps Singapore or Saudi Arabia...
...Symantec ThreatCon as a part of global DeepSight Threat Management System saying Increased alertness and Internet Security Systems X-Force with Increased vigilance at AlertCon."
WTF is this supposed to mean? Is there anyone in the office who took a grammar course in the last two decades who could translate this?
My argument is with the word "because", and the suggestion that the primary reason for opposing software patents is because it stops people using other people's ideas.
You have no "argument" because I did not make a statement, I asked a question.
Obtuse? It ain't me - and I'm not yet sure you're actually pretending...
..because they disallow the sharing of ideas?
/., or even into the world of open source. Do you even know how patents work? A patent holder is not obligated to license it to anyone else. That means if Microsoft doesn't want apple (or redhat) using technology covered in one of its patents, no amount of money is going to buy you that "right."
Umm... says who? It's not a claim I ever heard before.
Then this must be your first time at
Straw man? Not one I constructed...
Mercedes has been developing the automotive airbag system since, at least, the sixties. Many well respected engineers have said, during all this time, that airbag systems were impractical, dangerous, or that they jut couldn't work at all. In spite of that Mercedes went on with developing the system and today they hold many patents. Did they "develop the market" for them? No, Congress did that.
I don't know who "invented" MP3 players. They were around a LONG time before the ipod and before itunes, yet somehow because they happen to make the most popular mp3 player on the market this somehow entitles them to all the patents? Or makes them immune from fair enforcement of those patents?
This is nonsense. "Creating the market" is the reward for marketing innovation and that reward brings with it its own financial benefits - but innovative marketing has nothing at all to do with technical innovation.
"The physics involved" haven't changed, only what was practical has changed. LOW VOLTAGE DC requires large conductors to avoid high losses and there was no efficient way of converting it from one level to another a century ago. AC has the huge advantage in being easily transformed via.. er, transformers.
That's no longer exclusively true. And power loss is directly proportional to resistance but proportional to the square of the current, so doubling the voltage in a circuit cuts those losses much larger than half.
Meanwhile, low frequency AC transmission has all sorts of losses over long hauls due to reactive coupling to earth and to the atmosphere, and these losses vary even depending on the weather.
Rectifiers and inverters can be made very efficient these days, and long haul powerlines increasingly may carry 750KVDC or more on them... that's direct current, not alternating.
The higher voltage DC transport is more efficient, you see... but now we have the technology to exploit it.
let me see if I get this: it's ok to say Microsoft "ripped off" something or that Apple "ripped off" the GUI from xerox, but software patents are bad because they disallow the sharing of ideas?
/.) sound like a second grader "Mommy, Johnny copied the man in my painting!"
If Apple and MS "ripped off" Xerox (and each other) then didn't Miguel and all those KDE devs rip them off too?
Grow up, already. Comments like this make you (and anyone else who makes them - including the eds at
Because, as I said, that's what I did when I got my own drives "upgraded" under warranty. I was going to ebay the 160g drives but since I got 250G drives I decided to keep them until the warranty runs out.
So, I got 300GB of RAID5 and 180GB of RAID0. I'll put music and video work on the RAID0 and use the RAID5 for stuff I need to keep.
But if you're going to make a TB of RAID5 from 300G drives you're going to need more than 4 of them. That means a decent case to house all those drives with a decent power supply and an extra controller card. Five 300GB drives is $750 plus you need the controller and the case - we're still up to nearly a grand.
Given the difference between $750 for the Maxtors and $850 for the same array in a Seagate flavor you'll still come out ahead by leaving the Maxtors on the shelf and going the "expensive" route - you'll have significantly less heat dumped into the case (and into the room) and you won't have to worry about how many weeks you're going to get this time before you have to shut the system down and rebuild the array with (yet another) new disk. Given the failure rate I've had in system with only one or two maxtors I would expect someone with FIVE of them in a case to be popping drives on a bimonthly basis.
It's not $500 for a TB because you are adding a second hard drive to the mix. what you describe is basically a RAID1 with the "redundant drive" stored on a shelf. If you are going to back up a 1TB 3 disc RAID on those portable drives then you need three of them, too or you need a redundant computer to house your redudnant RAID.
Any of that stuff costs a lot more than 500 bucks.
What are you going to use to back it up? Because I'll just about guarantee you that if you are counting on three Maxtors to provide that TB you ain't gonna have it for long.
You could use four and a dedicated controller card and be under a thousand dollars for 900GB and you might actually have that data past the first disc failure... or you could buy three Seagates for about a hundred bucks more than the Maxtors and have a much better chance of keeping your data around until the next upgrade.
I have owned five in the last three years or so and every last one of them has died while under warranty. The two most recent failures were the very fashionable two platter 6Y160 drives (which I, like a fool, explicitly sought out) and the first one died within six months. At the time they didn't have a bootable ISO of their software on the site, either, it was "run windows and do this test or no RMA for you" so the damn thing sat on the shelf until about a month ago when the SECOND "new" drive started losing data and I was forced to act.
The one upside is they returned to me 250GB drives (it seems the only difference in the 2 platter 120-250 drives is software) and they actually seem a little quieter than when they were new. I bit the bullet and put them into a RAID5 wih a newish Seagate 160 so now I have about a half TB of "protected" storage and a warranty that begins expiring about a year from next December. Will these two actually make it past that date without going back yet again? I don't expect them to.
I added a 7 volt fan in front of them and that dropped the temp about ten degrees, but the Maxtors still output about twice the heat of the (slightly quieter) Seagate (even with the fan the temp difference is ~5 degrees). If these drives had not been "free" (of course I paid >$200 for them) I would be running three Seagates now... and as the Maxtors die (again) that's what will replace them. I'll never buy another Maxtor.
You really think this is a troll?
Obviously you are not a webmaster...