Well, them's the breaks. Supporting old hardware with new software can hold you back. Sometimes you have to make a conscious decision to let go. Mandrake won't run on anything less than a Pentium. Getting it do so, while technically possible, would probably compromise other aspects of its usefulness. You have to make a decision: keep your feet on the ground, or spread your wings and soar. Nobody will actively disrespect you for your decision if you choose not to Get Higher, but you might find it a little lonely down there.
On the other hand, it's Free software which means the old versions really never went away. You're Free to take the source code for drivers for old cards and port them to the new system. {Unlike proprietary software, where old versions simply are not available -- not legally, at any rate}. Same with the music industry; bands release an album that sounds different from their earlier stuff, fans whinge and say it's not as good as their older stuff, as though somehow something was stopping them listening to their old CDs. Um, best shut up NOW lest I give the BPI / RIAA any evil ideas.
You basically have three choices. Pay for a ride, walk, or keep standing there with your thumb out and hope someone takes pity on you -- but nobody's ever going to feel sorry for you if they think you're doing the job for them. It's still more choice than you get with Closed Source {pay us for a ride, or stay at home}.
This is a wonderful piece of news. Somebody is actually biting the bullet and trying to pass a law that might make the Internet useful again.
Heavy-handed seems about the only way to do it. Sending e-mail to people who did not ask for it is wrong whichever way you look at it.
I can see that there is a potential for abuse. For instance, person A fancies person B, and sends B an e-mail suggesting something innocuous. B takes this the wrong way and A ends up a criminal. But hey..... that's what we have courts for, right? To get a clear decision on whether A's one little e-mail was really as bad as fifty adverts a day for VP-RX pills and counterfeit Viagra.
I for one am watching with bated breath. I don't expect Oz necessarily to get it right first time, but it will be interesting to see whether or not this has any beneficial effect and where improvements need to be made if similar laws are implemented elsewhere.
What we don't need is a bunch of people forcing others to do something, just because they believe in it.
Riiiiiight..... so murder laws are unjust because, hey, some people enjoy getting killed and if people like doing that, they have a right to? Racism and sexism laws are unjust because, hey some people enjoy being treated as inferiors and if people like doing that, they have a right to? Environmental protection laws are unjust because hey, some people enjoy living on a polluted planet and if people like doing that, they have a right to? Rape laws are unjust because hey, some people enjoy having sex without being asked and if people like doing that, they have a right to? Get with the plot. Some things are just plain wrong. Hindering the development of the human race for your own benefit is one of them, and I just happen to believe that holding people to ransom over computer software hinders our collective development.
BTW, The actual quote used in my sig was translated freehand by me from "Le progres ne vaut que s'il est partage par tous", which I saw printed on SNCF timetable leaflets in 1994. Nobody has corrected me over it, so I'm assuming I got it right:-) I think it's a damn good slogan, actually. So what if it "sounds like socialism"? It sounds to me like you have a phobia.
At the moment, the Public Domain is not legally protected. This means that anyone can "mine" the public domain for something they like, then start restricting access to it, by making a small change and claiming copyright on the derivative work. Some even have the gall to claim that the "PD" original infringes their newly-bought copyright! That can't be at all right. People put things deliberately in the public domain for a reason, i.e. to stop all the "intellectual property" nonsense and to prevent other people making money out of their blood, sweat and tears. Unfortunately, such abuse makes a mockery of that. You spend hours of your time working on a project that you want everyone to have gratis, but then someone takes it and starts selling it, then they go after you for giving it away!
If works that had entered the public domain were subject to the same legal privilege as copyright works {with the obvious difference that, since there is no copyright holder, no-one can arbitrarily restrict their availability} then the GPL would not be necessary.
I see the GPL as a kind of jiu-jitsu - using the copyright system's strength and weight against itself, ultimately to defeat it. A Privileged Public Domain would be an alternative solution, but I don't think this is going to become the norm for some time yet. Until the time is ready, and the law of the land states that all the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity, then the GPL will just have to do.
You need a DC coupled amplifier, otherwise the series capacitors found on one or both ends of an AC coupled amplifier tends to mess things up. You also need to couple this energy into the air.
Some stage amps are already DC coupled, others can be modded to DC couple them. Thanks to inherent close thermal matching, DC coupled amps built as ICs really do work. Think TDA2030 and bigger cousins - basically just an op-amp with a slew rate good enough for audio. Valve amps, however, almost invariably rely on transformer coupling somewhere and therefore are AC coupled. Same goes for older tranny amps where a transformer could provide the necessary phase-splitting for driving a push-pull output stage {nb, in those days they were invariably PNP-PNP..... Germanium was harder to make in N-type flavour, so germanium trannies were mainly PNP. Even when silicon took over from germanium, output stages typically were NPN-NPN. Complementary symmetric output stages - at least ones that work properly and don't give lots of even harmonic distortion - are a much later development} more cheaply than a circuit with one or more transistors..... but that was a looooong time ago.
My old employer used a modified 1kW stage amp, a signal generator and a box of tricks I built with some op-amps and resistors, to apply weirdy DC+AC / DC+rectified AC waveforms to automotive kit they were testing for operation with a noisy supply. {a vehicle alternator gives out unsmoothed rectified AC; the battery acts like a massive smoothing capacitor but sometimes the lead inductance is too much for this to happen, and what if the battery becomes disconnected after the engine has started?}
As for the problem of getting air to move..... you need to make sure that the air moving away from the cone as it travels forward, doesn't simply travel around to the back of the speaker. If the cone moves slowly then this is more likely. Ideally you want to place the speaker in a heavy, sealed box. An exponential horn on the front might help too - it's the most efficient pattern for coupling a pressure wave into air. You can also use a tuned port to catch reflected sound from the rear of the cone, invert its phase by 1/2 wavelength, and then when the cone pushes at the front, the tuned port also pushes so you get reinforcement rather than cancellation.
It's better to know the ugly truth than believe a beautiful lie. And false hopes deserve to be crushed, otherwise people cling to them and waste their lives instead of getting on with stuff.
Sooner or later, science will almost certainly prove either the outright non-existence of god, or that the existence of a god is neither provable nor relevant. {Relativity didn't actually disprove the existence of the Ether, just proved that it would never be detectable even if it did exist. Even phlogiston actually sort-of exists, if you think of it as being chemical potential energy. It doesn't have measurable mass in its own right, which is what confused the alchemists: depending on whether the oxide is a solid or a gas, burned matter may be heavier or lighter than the unburned form.} I can't see that Organised Religion is going to take kindly to this..... but once there is a reproducible experiment, there will be nothing anyone can do about it.
The GPL is no more restrictive than the thirteenth amendment. When are people going to realise that the prohibitions it imposes are there for a reason?
Lest anyone forget, this was the same Homebrew Computer Club where a certain Bill Gates got a little upset by the way some people were sharing software. RMS was just 23 years old then and hadn't had his Vision by then. That would take another nine years.....
I wonder what would have happened if the others at the HCC had decided to beat the whining nerd senseless with suitably-sized pieces of constructional timber instead of capitulating to his ridiculous assertions of ownership?
BT Openwoe have a proxy on port 25 outgoing. If you try to send SMTP through any server that isn't their own, it won't get there.
My broadband is with NTL. They don't block any ports, TTBOMK. Not even 135, and they definitely don't block 80 judging by the number of people looking for a file called "cmd.exe" in my access log. Unfortunately, their webspace is broken as their Apache server is misconfigured. It ignores PHP scripting and tries to serve it up to the browser as-is. So it's a bloody good job they don't block port 80.....
Even if you do manage to make it awkward for Joe User to copy an original disc, somebody somewhere will find a way to do it, even if only for the sense of satisfaction they get from "beating the system". And there are people that would do it. Hell, I would. The sense of "hey, I just did something they said I couldn't" is one of the driving instincts behind human evolution. Apes would never have started walking upright if they hadn't got some sort of a kick out of it. Once somebody has copied a protected disc and released a non-protected version, the protection is lost forever..... and if, as a publisher, you paid good money to protect your content and still ended up losing sales through copying, there comes a point where it would have been cheaper just to let the pirates get away with it.
There are two distinct forms of illegal copying. Type one, organised counterfeiting for profit, relies on selling copies of CDs, purporting to be the genuine article. The people who buy these CDs probably would have bought the genuine article. Type two includes casual copying and sharing. The people who copy CDs as a favour might have been less likely to buy the genuine article, but may do so later if they feel the cost is justified for the extras - booklet, artwork, lyrics, promotional items &c. After all, if your friend buys a CD, even if you were unable to make a copy for yourself, you could still listen to it if you went round to your friend's house, or they brought it around to your house. Easy copiability just makes it more convenient for all parties.
Releasing cheaper legitimate CDs would lower the margins on type-one bootleg CDs and also increase the attractiveness of the "real" product to type-two copiers. Copying just for the buzz of cracking protection schemes might be a third type.
I still dispute the ability to apply an inaudible watermark to an analogue signal that can be faithfully recovered after lossy compression. It just smells of snake oil. I can see that someone would try to make a buck selling useless "copy prevention" technology to a paranoid music industry. It might even ease their conscience to know their products won't actually go far to stop the latter-day Robin Hoods who bring down the cost of popular albums for the working classes.
And when the record companies do finally discover they got ripped off, it will be too late. The thing is, there are a vast number of consumers who simply don't get that this huge scam is going down. They prefer to pay the inflated prices rather than break the law. These people cannot stay ignorant forever. When the whole copy-prevention scam - and that is what it is; it is nothing more than a scam at every level, with confidence tricksters selling shoddy copy-prevention technologies to tat-peddling sharks who rip off hardworking musicians and treat their loyal customers, who lest we forget pay their wages, like theiving scum - is exposed, and it will be soon, then the law-abiding citizens will know they have been ripped off, and they'll be angry.
I was thinking of something similar myself. Only I would have done it with KDE as a frontend and MySQL as a backend. Or even right at the filing system level, with a bunch of extended attribute tags. Beyond that, it's the same thing. No confusing directory/file hierarchy; files arranged thematically. So every mp3 file would have its "audio" attribute set, for instance. Now when you want to look for mp3 files you don't have to remember "did I put it in/home/ajs318/files/music/mp3/levellers_the/hello_p ig/ or in/home/ajs318/songs/rock_pop_indie/levellers/albums/hello_pig/" kind of stuff. Because all files would be in ONE directory, and the mechanism for isolating you from files you aren't bothered about and would get in the way doesn't depend on putting them somewhere else.
I guess the real-life analogy would be a collection of clutter-resistant spectacles that blank out objects not of the type you want to find. So when looking for clean underwear, I need only put on some glasses through which I can see only items of clothing in order to narrow my search, rather than looking in a specific place for specific items. Hmm. Actually those would rock bells.....
It just means you've got a missing library. That is not as fatal as the error messages may lead you to believe. See, the error messages don't just say "it's broken" and the more messages you see, the worse broken it is. In fact, the messages actually tell you how to fix the problem, if you have achieved a sufficient degree of oneness with the hardware.
It was all going fine up to the point where we saw storage-item.c:7:44: libpq-fe.h: No such file or directory. Beyond there, the errors are going to mount up and up unavoidably.
In my experience, any package that wasn't put together by the distribution maintainers {and not a few that were} is likely to be a little problematic. Simply because it's not easy to remember what programme referenced what header files when you were compiling it. When the project reaches maturity and is released as a standard package, then the dependencies can be checked in earnest, so any library you need will be installed for you by the package manager; and probably everything that can be precompiled before building up the package will be. Only stuff that absolutely has to be compiled in-situ will be. In fact, many packages contain only binaries.
You haven't stated what distribution you're using, so I can't say for certain, but try to find a package called libpq-devel or something like that. In general, if there are two packages with the same name but one ends in -devel or -dev, that's the "extra stuff" likely to be needed by developers {and it will have a dependency to automatically install the other one anyway}. These packages contain the header files {*.h} for the pre-compiled binaries in the main package. {The.h forms part of the source code, and is needed when you are trying to link one programme to use functions declared in another programme.}
It took me a few evenings of hair-tearing to work this one out, but you just have to remember the computer hasn't got an initiative to use, so it relies on yours. Now I install the -devel version of anything just on general principle.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say, NO, the bar can never be raised high enough, and anyone who thinks it can is -- to trot out the tired old cliche -- probably smoking crack. [in Soviet Russia, tired old cliche trots YOU out..... oh, never mind] In fact, I'm not sure the bar is capable of being raised at all. There is simply (a) too much legitimate need for recording ability and (b) too many reasons why it is hard to make it harder.
Even if they complete the move to get rid of all line-ins on "consumer" sound cards, there will be plenty of old sound cards with workable line-ins. They won't all stop working at once. There is also a need for a line-in on professional sound card and, of course, it's entirely possible for a determined person to build a sound card with off-the-shelf parts. And no need to worry about drivers either, since you can write your own driver for your own home-made hardware. The old 16-bit bus was easier to develop for than the current 32-bit bus. All you need to do is take 88200 sixteen-bit samples a second, using a bilateral switch to toggle between the left and right channels with each alternate sample. This gives you 44100 samples a second on each channel, which is the CD standard.
As for the "watermark detection", I fail to see how this could be taken seriously. Analogue signals are not susceptible to such "watermarking". The only way would be to add another analogue signal which would interfere with the original. If the watermark signal falls within the audible band, it will manifest itself audibly. This will make the recording unfit for its intended purpose, and hence unsaleable. If the watermark falls outside the audible band, it can be filtered away.
ADC and DAC circuits are NOT just used for copying digital media. They have many valid applications in every field of industry where electronics are found {i.e. all of them}.
Also, watermark-free DAC and ADC circuits are extremely simple to implement on breadboard using op-amps and precision matched resistors. In fact, for the world's simplest 4-bit D-to-A you can just use five resistors. The matching A-to-D uses seventeen resistors and sixteen op-amps {in the analogue domain; more digital electronics are required to change the sixteen sequentially-energised outputs to a four-bit code, but we like to pretend digital stuff is cheap}.
And whatever protection they are using need only be broken once. As soon as one person has one listenable copy, every penny that has ever been spent on the protection scheme is wasted, because indefinitely-copiable copies can be made from that. The only scheme which has the ghost of a chance of being uncopiable for more than a week, is one where the final decryption is done inside the listener's body. Any takers on that?
In this country, your employer has already taken the tax off your pay cheque before it gets credited to your bank account. It's called "pay as you earn" and it makes it practically impossible for the working classes to defraud the taxman. Unfortunately, employers are still allowed to advertise the wage before deductions. So even if they tell you that you're earning 12000, it's actually more like 10000. You never see the rest, except as a figure labelled "DEDUCTIONS". And certainly not as pound notes!
If and when our staff start bringing in unsanitised laptops on a regular basis, I am going to buy a separate switch just for them {actually for everything except regular machines known not to have malware such as Windoze on them} and put a simple firewall between it and the "main" switch. This way, if anyone gets a virus on their laptop, it'll only ever affect other laptops. Of course if we ever get one of those horrible wireless thingies, it'll also be heavily firewalled.
In the meantime, I've decided to pull patch leads for any sockets that don't always have a machine in them. If someone wants to plug in a laptop, they'll need mine or my boss's sayso. They can try unplugging something else, but then they will feel the force of the Blessed +1 ClueBat.....
I still want to know what is there to stop me from using a logic analyser to probe the bus that goes to the sound card, and capturing the zeros and ones that make up the music after they have been decrypted, but before they get munged by the DAC and DUX. Even if the decryption is done on the sound card, the key must get sent to the card; unless every card has a different key programmed into it from day one, which would be impractical from a distributor's point of view though by no means inconceivable.
But, if analogue copying is the only way that works, it's what people will do. As long as you make your analogue copy in a recopiable form, you have annihilated the DRM. And then you can share it yourself, using/usr/sbin/httpd.....
Lightbulbs- NO. You GOTTA be joking here. Thomas Edison was NOT British...
No, but Joseph Swan, who invented the electric light bulb, was. {He was a Wearsider - so I bet Newcastle avoided electric light on general principles for a loooong time.....}
Sir Frank Whittle and John Logie Baird also were British last time I checked.
Just find some kind of jetty and reverse it {so the driven wheels stay in contact with something solid as long as possible} into the water. Similarly, you could drive it up onto a beach, assuming you have good enough clutch control.....
Screen resolution = 80 * 80 = 6400 pixels
Bits per pixel = 4
Bits per screen = 6400 * 4 = 25600
16 bit words per screen = 1600
16 bit words per second per channel of CD audio = 44100
Therefore, regular CD audio carries enough data for 44100/1600 = 441/16 = 27.5625 frames a second at this resolution. And TV only uses 25 frames a second. But this thing is reckoned to give 15 frames a second; hence there is plenty of spare space for timing information, insurance against lost bits from D-A-D conversion {they may be using a player head with only analogue outputs} and so forth.
Colour would need some form of compression, but this thing is capable of working uncompresed.
As long as there have been products on the market, people have been wanting to do things they were never designed for. Finding new uses is just a way of paying tribute to those products. Why did Hilary and Tensing climb Everest? Because it was there. They couldn't create a mountain of their own, but they could pay tribute to the mountain by climbing it.
For instance, someone actually turned the original GameBoy into a DSO. Now that was cool. Underneath it was still a GameBoy, so Nintendo still got their cut; they sold a GameBoy and maybe some games to someone who wouldn't otherwise have bought it. If anybody should have been worried by that stunt, Philips/Fluke and Tektronix should have been:-) Not Nintendo!
I hope you bought that crack you're smoking ready-prepared. If you freebased it yourself at home, you would have been harming some dealer's ability to make a profit. Arsewipe.
Yeah..... high ideals are all very well, but they have this nasty habit of getting in the way of you doing what you were originally trying to do. {memo to self: extract and purify high heels/high ideals/walk/run pun in time for next posting with similar message} It's just that practical considerations kind of force you into compromising some of your ideals..... and then, if you aren't careful, you can end up losing the lot. {For instance, many GNU projects have ended up having to emulate brokennesses in non-free software just because they were there and people were used to them.}
And file formats tie you down, because they lock you into the way the original author was thinking -- and thereby lock you into a feature set and, quite probably, a particular way of using those features.
I must remind you that every type of audio media is susceptible to the kind of copying you refer to.
I know; which is why it would be utterly without merit even to bother with any sort of digital protection. Copy protection is like a perpetual motion machine - the laws of physics clearly say why it will not work. Therefore, there is no point trying. In the best case, all the time, money {which, lest you forget, came in the first place from customers} and effort you put into it are wasted. In the worst case, some of the time, money and effort you put into it actually annoyed those customers, who are the source of that money. Or used to have been, till you pissed them off.
Face facts. The record industry is like someone who won the lottery the day they were supposed to get a real job, has been living off their winnings ever since, and now the money is beginning to run out. Record companies only ever existed at all because recording equipment was not available to everyone at the time. If every phonograph ever made had been a recording model, things might well have been quite different. Technology has since arrived that alters the balance -- nowadays, almost every "phonograph" can be a recording model. The record companies are no longer the only kids in the neighbourhood with pools, and they are upset.
Whilst I accept that artists deserve to get paid something for what they were, after all, originally doing for the money, I cannot accept the ridiculously over-inflated price of CDs. Especially not in the light that CDs cost less to manufacture than walkman cassettes, yet are sold at higher prices. If the companies did not manufacture cassettes at all, CDs would be cheaper. If CDs were cheaper, copying would be less worthwhile. {A blank CD is not significantly cheaper to produce than a pre-recorded one. The stampers still have a finite lifetime and the materials used in CD-Rs are more expensive. In a pre-recorded CD, there is an additional cost for the source material, but it's a one-off.} And copying a CD is a hassle. Well..... I have to open an xterm and type two commands, and can't do any heavy-duty disk accessing activity for about five minutes. I'd gladly pay a few pounds to avoid that, but not what the record companies are asking - it's just silly money.
What next? If the record industry get their way, maybe the Guild of Master Bakers will go after users of electric bread machines, and there will be calls for a special tax on flour.
Or, we can put an end to the nonsense. You want to buy an album? Stop. Find out how much the band would get from the sale of each album. Double it if you want to be generous. Copy that album by fair means or foul, and send the lead singer a postal order for what you owe them with a nice letter explaining how you are simply missing out the middleman. You get your album, the artist gets paid. And hey, the record racketeers are always going on about how it's the poor musicians that get hurt, so you'd think they'd be happy about it.
I was advised to sell the Windows XP that came with my laptop, when I asked if the store would give me a refund. They couldn't tell me how this would be accomplished. The only way I can think is to tell someone the licence code so they could enter it when installing a "pirated" copy. Now, the law says the onus is upon the prosecution to prove guilt, i.e. they would have to prove I was misusing it, which I wouldn't be; somebody else would be using it, nobody would ever be able to know that somebody was not me. At least, that's the theory, but I'm sure that it might not work exactly like that in practice.
Also, the phraseology of the licence mentioned above says it can be transferred, and the recipient has to agree to be bound by the same agreement. So surely the recipient is agreeing to the same right to transfer as the transferrer originally had?
{ADVANCE WARNING: You'll have to excuse the French} Because, dickhead, such a copy protection system is fucking impossible. At some point in the process, there sill be some form of identifiable music signal. Even if you have to do it by pointing a fucking mic at the speaker, you can copy anything you can hear. It's that simple. Now, you certainly get some imperfections, but these can be minimised. After all, those audio signals were recorded in the studio in the first place using microphones. So you point a studio grade mic at the crippled, monolithic audio player, whose only output is acoustic, and the sounds it is recording are already at the maximum quality anyone is ever going to hear them. The analogue bit only happens once. Well, maybe more than once, if you could do some fancy filtering over as many successive recordings as possible..... The first person to catch that signal via an A-to-D converter has already won. From then on, every copy ever made will be digital-perfect compared to that first analogue copy; and, assuming you have acccess to good enough equipent, indistinguishable from the original.
I wrote an order forms management system that has the same problem. Its calculations would sometimes miss the invoice total by a penny up or down, dependent upon the supplier. I tried and tried various things to fix it, but all that happened was I fixed it for one supplier and broke it for another. Evidently they are all using ever so slightly different rounding algorithms. {VAT in this country is fixed at 17.5%, so there are potentially 5 decimal places on any cash amount. Double precision can easily represent this accurately. The smallest denomination coin in circulation, however, is a penny; so the amount needs rounding to 2 places.} So now we have to add an extra line for the "missing" or "extra" penny, if it happens. It's annoying, but it's due to other people's inconsistencies over which we have no control and therefore not worth getting het-up over.
Did your boss ever use his warped logic to try to get a baby in one month by having sex with nine women?
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Well, them's the breaks. Supporting old hardware with new software can hold you back. Sometimes you have to make a conscious decision to let go. Mandrake won't run on anything less than a Pentium. Getting it do so, while technically possible, would probably compromise other aspects of its usefulness. You have to make a decision: keep your feet on the ground, or spread your wings and soar. Nobody will actively disrespect you for your decision if you choose not to Get Higher, but you might find it a little lonely down there.
On the other hand, it's Free software which means the old versions really never went away. You're Free to take the source code for drivers for old cards and port them to the new system. {Unlike proprietary software, where old versions simply are not available -- not legally, at any rate}. Same with the music industry; bands release an album that sounds different from their earlier stuff, fans whinge and say it's not as good as their older stuff, as though somehow something was stopping them listening to their old CDs. Um, best shut up NOW lest I give the BPI / RIAA any evil ideas.
You basically have three choices. Pay for a ride, walk, or keep standing there with your thumb out and hope someone takes pity on you -- but nobody's ever going to feel sorry for you if they think you're doing the job for them. It's still more choice than you get with Closed Source {pay us for a ride, or stay at home}.
This is a wonderful piece of news. Somebody is actually biting the bullet and trying to pass a law that might make the Internet useful again.
..... that's what we have courts for, right? To get a clear decision on whether A's one little e-mail was really as bad as fifty adverts a day for VP-RX pills and counterfeit Viagra.
Heavy-handed seems about the only way to do it. Sending e-mail to people who did not ask for it is wrong whichever way you look at it.
I can see that there is a potential for abuse. For instance, person A fancies person B, and sends B an e-mail suggesting something innocuous. B takes this the wrong way and A ends up a criminal. But hey
I for one am watching with bated breath. I don't expect Oz necessarily to get it right first time, but it will be interesting to see whether or not this has any beneficial effect and where improvements need to be made if similar laws are implemented elsewhere.
BTW, The actual quote used in my sig was translated freehand by me from "Le progres ne vaut que s'il est partage par tous", which I saw printed on SNCF timetable leaflets in 1994. Nobody has corrected me over it, so I'm assuming I got it right
At the moment, the Public Domain is not legally protected. This means that anyone can "mine" the public domain for something they like, then start restricting access to it, by making a small change and claiming copyright on the derivative work. Some even have the gall to claim that the "PD" original infringes their newly-bought copyright! That can't be at all right. People put things deliberately in the public domain for a reason, i.e. to stop all the "intellectual property" nonsense and to prevent other people making money out of their blood, sweat and tears. Unfortunately, such abuse makes a mockery of that. You spend hours of your time working on a project that you want everyone to have gratis, but then someone takes it and starts selling it, then they go after you for giving it away!
If works that had entered the public domain were subject to the same legal privilege as copyright works {with the obvious difference that, since there is no copyright holder, no-one can arbitrarily restrict their availability} then the GPL would not be necessary.
I see the GPL as a kind of jiu-jitsu - using the copyright system's strength and weight against itself, ultimately to defeat it. A Privileged Public Domain would be an alternative solution, but I don't think this is going to become the norm for some time yet. Until the time is ready, and the law of the land states that all the benefits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity, then the GPL will just have to do.
You need a DC coupled amplifier, otherwise the series capacitors found on one or both ends of an AC coupled amplifier tends to mess things up. You also need to couple this energy into the air.
..... Germanium was harder to make in N-type flavour, so germanium trannies were mainly PNP. Even when silicon took over from germanium, output stages typically were NPN-NPN. Complementary symmetric output stages - at least ones that work properly and don't give lots of even harmonic distortion - are a much later development} more cheaply than a circuit with one or more transistors ..... but that was a looooong time ago.
..... you need to make sure that the air moving away from the cone as it travels forward, doesn't simply travel around to the back of the speaker. If the cone moves slowly then this is more likely. Ideally you want to place the speaker in a heavy, sealed box. An exponential horn on the front might help too - it's the most efficient pattern for coupling a pressure wave into air. You can also use a tuned port to catch reflected sound from the rear of the cone, invert its phase by 1/2 wavelength, and then when the cone pushes at the front, the tuned port also pushes so you get reinforcement rather than cancellation.
Some stage amps are already DC coupled, others can be modded to DC couple them. Thanks to inherent close thermal matching, DC coupled amps built as ICs really do work. Think TDA2030 and bigger cousins - basically just an op-amp with a slew rate good enough for audio. Valve amps, however, almost invariably rely on transformer coupling somewhere and therefore are AC coupled. Same goes for older tranny amps where a transformer could provide the necessary phase-splitting for driving a push-pull output stage {nb, in those days they were invariably PNP-PNP
My old employer used a modified 1kW stage amp, a signal generator and a box of tricks I built with some op-amps and resistors, to apply weirdy DC+AC / DC+rectified AC waveforms to automotive kit they were testing for operation with a noisy supply. {a vehicle alternator gives out unsmoothed rectified AC; the battery acts like a massive smoothing capacitor but sometimes the lead inductance is too much for this to happen, and what if the battery becomes disconnected after the engine has started?}
As for the problem of getting air to move
It's better to know the ugly truth than believe a beautiful lie. And false hopes deserve to be crushed, otherwise people cling to them and waste their lives instead of getting on with stuff.
..... but once there is a reproducible experiment, there will be nothing anyone can do about it.
Sooner or later, science will almost certainly prove either the outright non-existence of god, or that the existence of a god is neither provable nor relevant. {Relativity didn't actually disprove the existence of the Ether, just proved that it would never be detectable even if it did exist. Even phlogiston actually sort-of exists, if you think of it as being chemical potential energy. It doesn't have measurable mass in its own right, which is what confused the alchemists: depending on whether the oxide is a solid or a gas, burned matter may be heavier or lighter than the unburned form.} I can't see that Organised Religion is going to take kindly to this
Lest anyone forget, this was the same Homebrew Computer Club where a certain Bill Gates got a little upset by the way some people were sharing software. RMS was just 23 years old then and hadn't had his Vision by then. That would take another nine years .....
I wonder what would have happened if the others at the HCC had decided to beat the whining nerd senseless with suitably-sized pieces of constructional timber instead of capitulating to his ridiculous assertions of ownership?
BT Openwoe have a proxy on port 25 outgoing. If you try to send SMTP through any server that isn't their own, it won't get there.
.....
My broadband is with NTL. They don't block any ports, TTBOMK. Not even 135, and they definitely don't block 80 judging by the number of people looking for a file called "cmd.exe" in my access log. Unfortunately, their webspace is broken as their Apache server is misconfigured. It ignores PHP scripting and tries to serve it up to the browser as-is. So it's a bloody good job they don't block port 80
Even if you do manage to make it awkward for Joe User to copy an original disc, somebody somewhere will find a way to do it, even if only for the sense of satisfaction they get from "beating the system". And there are people that would do it. Hell, I would. The sense of "hey, I just did something they said I couldn't" is one of the driving instincts behind human evolution. Apes would never have started walking upright if they hadn't got some sort of a kick out of it. Once somebody has copied a protected disc and released a non-protected version, the protection is lost forever ..... and if, as a publisher, you paid good money to protect your content and still ended up losing sales through copying, there comes a point where it would have been cheaper just to let the pirates get away with it.
There are two distinct forms of illegal copying. Type one, organised counterfeiting for profit, relies on selling copies of CDs, purporting to be the genuine article. The people who buy these CDs probably would have bought the genuine article. Type two includes casual copying and sharing. The people who copy CDs as a favour might have been less likely to buy the genuine article, but may do so later if they feel the cost is justified for the extras - booklet, artwork, lyrics, promotional items &c. After all, if your friend buys a CD, even if you were unable to make a copy for yourself, you could still listen to it if you went round to your friend's house, or they brought it around to your house. Easy copiability just makes it more convenient for all parties.
Releasing cheaper legitimate CDs would lower the margins on type-one bootleg CDs and also increase the attractiveness of the "real" product to type-two copiers. Copying just for the buzz of cracking protection schemes might be a third type.
I still dispute the ability to apply an inaudible watermark to an analogue signal that can be faithfully recovered after lossy compression. It just smells of snake oil. I can see that someone would try to make a buck selling useless "copy prevention" technology to a paranoid music industry. It might even ease their conscience to know their products won't actually go far to stop the latter-day Robin Hoods who bring down the cost of popular albums for the working classes.
And when the record companies do finally discover they got ripped off, it will be too late. The thing is, there are a vast number of consumers who simply don't get that this huge scam is going down. They prefer to pay the inflated prices rather than break the law. These people cannot stay ignorant forever. When the whole copy-prevention scam - and that is what it is; it is nothing more than a scam at every level, with confidence tricksters selling shoddy copy-prevention technologies to tat-peddling sharks who rip off hardworking musicians and treat their loyal customers, who lest we forget pay their wages, like theiving scum - is exposed, and it will be soon, then the law-abiding citizens will know they have been ripped off, and they'll be angry.
I was thinking of something similar myself. Only I would have done it with KDE as a frontend and MySQL as a backend. Or even right at the filing system level, with a bunch of extended attribute tags. Beyond that, it's the same thing. No confusing directory/file hierarchy; files arranged thematically. So every mp3 file would have its "audio" attribute set, for instance. Now when you want to look for mp3 files you don't have to remember "did I put it in /home/ajs318/files/music/mp3/levellers_the/hello_p ig/ or in /home/ajs318/songs/rock_pop_indie/levellers/albums /hello_pig/" kind of stuff. Because all files would be in ONE directory, and the mechanism for isolating you from files you aren't bothered about and would get in the way doesn't depend on putting them somewhere else.
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I guess the real-life analogy would be a collection of clutter-resistant spectacles that blank out objects not of the type you want to find. So when looking for clean underwear, I need only put on some glasses through which I can see only items of clothing in order to narrow my search, rather than looking in a specific place for specific items. Hmm. Actually those would rock bells
It just means you've got a missing library. That is not as fatal as the error messages may lead you to believe. See, the error messages don't just say "it's broken" and the more messages you see, the worse broken it is. In fact, the messages actually tell you how to fix the problem, if you have achieved a sufficient degree of oneness with the hardware.
.h forms part of the source code, and is needed when you are trying to link one programme to use functions declared in another programme.}
It was all going fine up to the point where we saw storage-item.c:7:44: libpq-fe.h: No such file or directory. Beyond there, the errors are going to mount up and up unavoidably.
In my experience, any package that wasn't put together by the distribution maintainers {and not a few that were} is likely to be a little problematic. Simply because it's not easy to remember what programme referenced what header files when you were compiling it. When the project reaches maturity and is released as a standard package, then the dependencies can be checked in earnest, so any library you need will be installed for you by the package manager; and probably everything that can be precompiled before building up the package will be. Only stuff that absolutely has to be compiled in-situ will be. In fact, many packages contain only binaries.
You haven't stated what distribution you're using, so I can't say for certain, but try to find a package called libpq-devel or something like that. In general, if there are two packages with the same name but one ends in -devel or -dev, that's the "extra stuff" likely to be needed by developers {and it will have a dependency to automatically install the other one anyway}. These packages contain the header files {*.h} for the pre-compiled binaries in the main package. {The
It took me a few evenings of hair-tearing to work this one out, but you just have to remember the computer hasn't got an initiative to use, so it relies on yours. Now I install the -devel version of anything just on general principle.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say, NO, the bar can never be raised high enough, and anyone who thinks it can is -- to trot out the tired old cliche -- probably smoking crack. [in Soviet Russia, tired old cliche trots YOU out ..... oh, never mind] In fact, I'm not sure the bar is capable of being raised at all. There is simply (a) too much legitimate need for recording ability and (b) too many reasons why it is hard to make it harder.
Even if they complete the move to get rid of all line-ins on "consumer" sound cards, there will be plenty of old sound cards with workable line-ins. They won't all stop working at once. There is also a need for a line-in on professional sound card and, of course, it's entirely possible for a determined person to build a sound card with off-the-shelf parts. And no need to worry about drivers either, since you can write your own driver for your own home-made hardware. The old 16-bit bus was easier to develop for than the current 32-bit bus. All you need to do is take 88200 sixteen-bit samples a second, using a bilateral switch to toggle between the left and right channels with each alternate sample. This gives you 44100 samples a second on each channel, which is the CD standard.
As for the "watermark detection", I fail to see how this could be taken seriously. Analogue signals are not susceptible to such "watermarking". The only way would be to add another analogue signal which would interfere with the original. If the watermark signal falls within the audible band, it will manifest itself audibly. This will make the recording unfit for its intended purpose, and hence unsaleable. If the watermark falls outside the audible band, it can be filtered away.
ADC and DAC circuits are NOT just used for copying digital media. They have many valid applications in every field of industry where electronics are found {i.e. all of them}.
Also, watermark-free DAC and ADC circuits are extremely simple to implement on breadboard using op-amps and precision matched resistors. In fact, for the world's simplest 4-bit D-to-A you can just use five resistors. The matching A-to-D uses seventeen resistors and sixteen op-amps {in the analogue domain; more digital electronics are required to change the sixteen sequentially-energised outputs to a four-bit code, but we like to pretend digital stuff is cheap}.
And whatever protection they are using need only be broken once. As soon as one person has one listenable copy, every penny that has ever been spent on the protection scheme is wasted, because indefinitely-copiable copies can be made from that. The only scheme which has the ghost of a chance of being uncopiable for more than a week, is one where the final decryption is done inside the listener's body. Any takers on that?
Tax return? In England? You are kidding, right?
In this country, your employer has already taken the tax off your pay cheque before it gets credited to your bank account. It's called "pay as you earn" and it makes it practically impossible for the working classes to defraud the taxman. Unfortunately, employers are still allowed to advertise the wage before deductions. So even if they tell you that you're earning 12000, it's actually more like 10000. You never see the rest, except as a figure labelled "DEDUCTIONS". And certainly not as pound notes!
If and when our staff start bringing in unsanitised laptops on a regular basis, I am going to buy a separate switch just for them {actually for everything except regular machines known not to have malware such as Windoze on them} and put a simple firewall between it and the "main" switch. This way, if anyone gets a virus on their laptop, it'll only ever affect other laptops. Of course if we ever get one of those horrible wireless thingies, it'll also be heavily firewalled.
.....
In the meantime, I've decided to pull patch leads for any sockets that don't always have a machine in them. If someone wants to plug in a laptop, they'll need mine or my boss's sayso. They can try unplugging something else, but then they will feel the force of the Blessed +1 ClueBat
I still want to know what is there to stop me from using a logic analyser to probe the bus that goes to the sound card, and capturing the zeros and ones that make up the music after they have been decrypted, but before they get munged by the DAC and DUX. Even if the decryption is done on the sound card, the key must get sent to the card; unless every card has a different key programmed into it from day one, which would be impractical from a distributor's point of view though by no means inconceivable.
/usr/sbin/httpd .....
But, if analogue copying is the only way that works, it's what people will do. As long as you make your analogue copy in a recopiable form, you have annihilated the DRM. And then you can share it yourself, using
Sir Frank Whittle and John Logie Baird also were British last time I checked.
Just find some kind of jetty and reverse it {so the driven wheels stay in contact with something solid as long as possible} into the water. Similarly, you could drive it up onto a beach, assuming you have good enough clutch control .....
Reality check: maths time.
:-) Not Nintendo!
Screen resolution = 80 * 80 = 6400 pixels
Bits per pixel = 4
Bits per screen = 6400 * 4 = 25600
16 bit words per screen = 1600
16 bit words per second per channel of CD audio = 44100
Therefore, regular CD audio carries enough data for 44100/1600 = 441/16 = 27.5625 frames a second at this resolution. And TV only uses 25 frames a second. But this thing is reckoned to give 15 frames a second; hence there is plenty of spare space for timing information, insurance against lost bits from D-A-D conversion {they may be using a player head with only analogue outputs} and so forth.
Colour would need some form of compression, but this thing is capable of working uncompresed.
As long as there have been products on the market, people have been wanting to do things they were never designed for. Finding new uses is just a way of paying tribute to those products. Why did Hilary and Tensing climb Everest? Because it was there. They couldn't create a mountain of their own, but they could pay tribute to the mountain by climbing it.
For instance, someone actually turned the original GameBoy into a DSO. Now that was cool. Underneath it was still a GameBoy, so Nintendo still got their cut; they sold a GameBoy and maybe some games to someone who wouldn't otherwise have bought it. If anybody should have been worried by that stunt, Philips/Fluke and Tektronix should have been
I hope you bought that crack you're smoking ready-prepared. If you freebased it yourself at home, you would have been harming some dealer's ability to make a profit. Arsewipe.
Yeah ..... high ideals are all very well, but they have this nasty habit of getting in the way of you doing what you were originally trying to do. {memo to self: extract and purify high heels/high ideals/walk/run pun in time for next posting with similar message} It's just that practical considerations kind of force you into compromising some of your ideals ..... and then, if you aren't careful, you can end up losing the lot. {For instance, many GNU projects have ended up having to emulate brokennesses in non-free software just because they were there and people were used to them.}
And file formats tie you down, because they lock you into the way the original author was thinking -- and thereby lock you into a feature set and, quite probably, a particular way of using those features.
Face facts. The record industry is like someone who won the lottery the day they were supposed to get a real job, has been living off their winnings ever since, and now the money is beginning to run out. Record companies only ever existed at all because recording equipment was not available to everyone at the time. If every phonograph ever made had been a recording model, things might well have been quite different. Technology has since arrived that alters the balance -- nowadays, almost every "phonograph" can be a recording model. The record companies are no longer the only kids in the neighbourhood with pools, and they are upset.
Whilst I accept that artists deserve to get paid something for what they were, after all, originally doing for the money, I cannot accept the ridiculously over-inflated price of CDs. Especially not in the light that CDs cost less to manufacture than walkman cassettes, yet are sold at higher prices. If the companies did not manufacture cassettes at all, CDs would be cheaper. If CDs were cheaper, copying would be less worthwhile. {A blank CD is not significantly cheaper to produce than a pre-recorded one. The stampers still have a finite lifetime and the materials used in CD-Rs are more expensive. In a pre-recorded CD, there is an additional cost for the source material, but it's a one-off.} And copying a CD is a hassle. Well
What next? If the record industry get their way, maybe the Guild of Master Bakers will go after users of electric bread machines, and there will be calls for a special tax on flour.
Or, we can put an end to the nonsense. You want to buy an album? Stop. Find out how much the band would get from the sale of each album. Double it if you want to be generous. Copy that album by fair means or foul, and send the lead singer a postal order for what you owe them with a nice letter explaining how you are simply missing out the middleman. You get your album, the artist gets paid. And hey, the record racketeers are always going on about how it's the poor musicians that get hurt, so you'd think they'd be happy about it.
I was advised to sell the Windows XP that came with my laptop, when I asked if the store would give me a refund. They couldn't tell me how this would be accomplished. The only way I can think is to tell someone the licence code so they could enter it when installing a "pirated" copy. Now, the law says the onus is upon the prosecution to prove guilt, i.e. they would have to prove I was misusing it, which I wouldn't be; somebody else would be using it, nobody would ever be able to know that somebody was not me. At least, that's the theory, but I'm sure that it might not work exactly like that in practice.
Also, the phraseology of the licence mentioned above says it can be transferred, and the recipient has to agree to be bound by the same agreement. So surely the recipient is agreeing to the same right to transfer as the transferrer originally had?
{ADVANCE WARNING: You'll have to excuse the French} Because, dickhead, such a copy protection system is fucking impossible. At some point in the process, there sill be some form of identifiable music signal. Even if you have to do it by pointing a fucking mic at the speaker, you can copy anything you can hear. It's that simple. Now, you certainly get some imperfections, but these can be minimised. After all, those audio signals were recorded in the studio in the first place using microphones. So you point a studio grade mic at the crippled, monolithic audio player, whose only output is acoustic, and the sounds it is recording are already at the maximum quality anyone is ever going to hear them. The analogue bit only happens once. Well, maybe more than once, if you could do some fancy filtering over as many successive recordings as possible ..... The first person to catch that signal via an A-to-D converter has already won. From then on, every copy ever made will be digital-perfect compared to that first analogue copy; and, assuming you have acccess to good enough equipent, indistinguishable from the original.
I wrote an order forms management system that has the same problem. Its calculations would sometimes miss the invoice total by a penny up or down, dependent upon the supplier. I tried and tried various things to fix it, but all that happened was I fixed it for one supplier and broke it for another. Evidently they are all using ever so slightly different rounding algorithms. {VAT in this country is fixed at 17.5%, so there are potentially 5 decimal places on any cash amount. Double precision can easily represent this accurately. The smallest denomination coin in circulation, however, is a penny; so the amount needs rounding to 2 places.} So now we have to add an extra line for the "missing" or "extra" penny, if it happens. It's annoying, but it's due to other people's inconsistencies over which we have no control and therefore not worth getting het-up over.
Did your boss ever use his warped logic to try to get a baby in one month by having sex with nine women?