1. Why would you think that the linux softupdates implementation would be any better? If there is a significant difference, it'd be in favor of FreeBSD, as McKusick is a FreeBSD developer and all.
2. Sure, you could take major parts of the FreeBSD (or any BSD) kernel and start from there, but at what point would it just be easier to take BSD and add what Linux does better?
X is a protocol: it's at version 11R6, not 4.0. You're complaint is with XFree86; it's been progressing in the speed department, it depends heavily on what video card you're using the performance you'll get.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; the protocol has its flaws but it also has its strengths (networking support)
Five of your past six posts have been nothing but criticizing posts. Stop whining and start contributing.
As for the mistake issue, I do admit that I don't need it pointed out to me by everyone on slashdot that CmdrTaco fouled up, but the easier solution would be for the slashdot editors to do some minor proofreading; mistakes like this could be made much more rare; if you don't want posters posting without at least reading the article, then you shouldn't want editiors doing the same.
This is extremely obvious, but 'Gnu-Compliant' most likely refers
If it's so obvious, why does it only "most likely refer" to GPL-Compatible?
Secondly, plently of "free" code that's free enough to allow anyone to make contributions aren't "GPL-Compatible" - so it's pretty irrelevant what license is used. There are plently of routes that benefit from having available source..
Yes, I was specifically thinking about your project when I mentioned the STA013 as one of the DSPs that the hobbyist projects use. I'm a huge "fan" of your project, I guess you could say:)
I know you're gonna call me crazy, but I _swear_ I've seen the TI DSP.. TMS320VC549 as cheap as $15 in individual units. I had found the match on findchips.com, and I think it was FAI that had the match (but there isn't one now)
As for the license rights, how much is it per unit? I hadn't taken that into consideration, and didn't take the flash into consideration either; not knowing how large the program would be, I can't judge on how much would be needed.
So, you're probably right, at least for hobbyist projects. (As in, not done in massively large quantities)
Then why does the MAS3507d require the user to have no program or any other data sent to it on the I2C bus, and it'll just start decoding when the frames arrive on its input? And why does the STA013 require only configuration registers to be sent to it beforehand- not an entire program?
These are the DSPs I'm talking about, and while I'm sure they have a general purpose core deep inside, there's no way to access it directly.
Exactly what is this "GNU-compliant" that everyone is talking about? What does that even mean?
I think you're trying to say "if the source wasn't freely redistributable.." - please don't mix the terms up; free and open source code predates the GNU project and the FSF by years.
Freely redistributable (in original and modified forms) source != GNU.
But if they're having a dedicated DSP do the decoding, then the BIOS will only control things like the user interface and the addressing of the media, not the method of the decoding.
It seems that many projects, especially the hobby ones floating online, are using a specific-purpose DSP designed for mp3 decoding- the MAS3507d, the STA013, etc. I'd argue in a heartbeat that this is a mistake, and that a general purpose DSP can be significantly cheaper with still enough power to do mp3, and can be updated by software to decode other formats (limited by the power of the DSP, of ocurse). Of interest, I know that the RCA Lyra uses this approach.
I too own a $99 MP3/CD player, the CM-415, and am quite happy with it.
Re:I hope that Linux becomes more popular...
on
LinuxPPC 2000 Update
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· Score: 2
I am not an expert in these matters, so I ask you, is this possible? Could we have completely unique hardware setups that cater for Linux specifically? I hope so, I think it would be very liberating.
Yes, there's nothing as liberating as having a hardware platform tied to your OS.
It should also be noted that with any decent open source system, portability for the kernel is basically limited to finding someone to write the (hopefully small) portion of code in the OS that must be platform-specific. The 4.4BSD book talks about writing a portable OS in detail in the beginning of the book.
As for userland, you're only tied down by what the kernel runs on (duh) and your compiler (you won't have the kernel running on the architecture without compiler support for it in the real world, too). So, what's so special about Linux here? You could make the argument for anything, given modern BSD tends to be easier to do things from source (make world, ports, etc.) then if anything, the argument would be more in BSD's favor.
Also, your logic is flawed. The x86 line maintaing compatibility back down to 8086 has nothing to do with Windows; Windows won't run on an 8086 and an 8088, and only in a limited manner on the 80286. Intel could drop 8086-80286 compatiblity without much of a fight. But why would they?
The problem with the x86 line is not maintaining backwards compatiblity, but rather that it's outdated. There's really no "wasted" silicon by having an 80686 be compatible- the 8086 instruction set is a subset of the 8086 instruction set, etc. What needs to be done is a full redesign, getting around all of the issues that causes x86 to be hated by so many people (how interrupts are handled, etc.) and going from ground-up. For as long as we make super-fast 8086s, throwing a handful of new instructions on every generation or so, you still have an 8086 at the core- and that's the problem.
Think twice before mindless x86-bashing or mindless Linux-advocacy.
The programming is different, but it's certainly as valid. I'd argue in a heartbeat that the EE or ECE doing heavy DSP or embedded microcontroller work is doing much more advanced work than the CS major working on his PC; while the length of the code may be smaller, it requires a more indepth knoweldge of the hardware that you're working on (considering more often than not, you built it).
It's true, clean, ultimate, complicated, advanced programming either way, but the goals and methods are different.
(The following is added as per full disclosure of the factors that influence my point of view)
As a student painfully close to the end of the college decision process (sigh, where have the years gone?) I'm planning on becoming an EE.
Key point in the article: Linus "says he is trying to roll out the next major Linux release, version 2.4, by this fall." That was written in June of 1999.
Of course there's no definite promises, but we're definetly over a year past the first timeframe he mentioned..
Dru writes: "This is an article about a hardware technology that is largely unknown in the new Unix community.
Perhaps in the UNREAD (which I guess is fairly large, hurmf) portion of the community. Chapter 8, section 2 of The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System talks about this idea on page 284. It referrs to research done by Moran et al, 1990. The references at the back of the chapter refer to "Breaking Through the NFS Performance Barrier," Proveedings of the Spring 1990 European UNIX Users Group Conference, pages 199-206.
So there you go, there's TWO ways that we could have heard about this. I doubt anyone here got that first hand, but the 4.4BSD book is a fairly common book to have for those who are interested in the innards of an OS.
Oh, guess I'm wrong- I was always under the impression that only the orbital probe was a success, and that the lander failed really early on. Guess I'm wrong; time to go read up on the subject.
"even tried the Kennedyesque mission to mars push but he never got either one through"
I don't remember this being an issue he campaigned on, but you have to remember we got our first probe on the surface of Mars under the Clinton administration.
Not that Clinton could take any more credit for that than Gore can take for the internet, but it's not as if that NASA keeled over and died during the Clinton administration.
Mozilla uses GTK+, which in turn needs to use Xrender, no?
According to the Xrender document on slashdot a couple days ago, there's no need for support above the toolkit level. In which case, the GTK+ changes just need to be completed and merged with the stable branch- something that the Mozilla developers are not directly responsible for.
Considering word size is different, there's obviously some sort of emulation going on.
I couldn't give you the details, but if it was all that simple, Linux/MS would not NEED to release a new version for it, would they? They'd get around to an optimized version later.
If you've wandered onto their property to "inspect the windows", you're trespassing.
Portscanning, the way I see it, is a form of trespassing- if I don't want you doing something with my computer, then you shouldn't be allowed to do it. Period. Those are the common-sense laws that we need.
If you'd like to learn about the services I'm running, ask nicely. That's the only ethical way, as far as I'm concerned, to gather that information remotely.
I don't know about you, but if I some guy I don't know (and didn't give permission to) walking around my house with a clipboard inspecting the windows, I'm calling the police.
Go research antenna design. Random wire antennas, as they are called, tend to be in the domain of reception only. For (good) transmission you won't generally get away with anything less than a yagi. Another response to my original post brought up cell phones; the cell phone scenario is different as cell towers are much closer. If you had a directional antenna on your cell phone, and aimed it at a tower, you'd get much better range.
I use a random wire antenna for SWL, but I wouldn't dare use it for serious broadcasting work. It's much harder to radiate a signal well with a random wire antenna.
Much more importantly, you can attempt to use the headphone cord for reception but NOT FOR TRANSMISSION! That's an easy way to fry out the earpiece! You would have to add a lowpass filter before the earpiece, and filtering on signals amplified to antenna level, it's just well... icky.
The right to have an abortion falls under the right to privacy, as ruled in the infamous Roe v. Wade case. Any such legislation to ban abortions would be in violation of the 4th amendment; so for this law to be legal it would require either a supreme court ruling in its favor or (unlikely) a constitutional amendment.
I doubt that Roe v. Wade would be overturned; it would be such a PR nightmare that I would suspect it would bring about the demise of the GOP.
I think when the _portable_ CD players have a 6 foot antenna coming off of it, then you can be suspicious. Until then, there's no reason to go and think that there is some magical way to send the playlists; unless of course you want to go the whole 9 yards and suspect that winamp is trying to contact and RIAA server with your playlist.
You're reading the "Playback Compatiblity Specification for CD and DVD Consumer Devices" which merely discusses how a player will be tested before it gains the seal. The format of the disk is not in the scope of that PDF; look for another.
By some DJ in the midwest? That's by
Bob Rivers & Twisted Radio!:) That's no doubt my favorite christmas CD. I think they came out with a second, but I've had the first for a few years and I believe you should be able to find either at a music store.
The poster you replied to has a point; but this slavery analogy doesn't really work. But if you'd like to continue it, the more "free" choice would have been to give each slave the power to decide for himself if he wanted to be freed.
That would be "true" freedom; but for obvious reasons (everyone would go one way) it doesn't work in the software world.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Why would you think that the linux softupdates implementation would be any better? If there is a significant difference, it'd be in favor of FreeBSD, as McKusick is a FreeBSD developer and all.
2. Sure, you could take major parts of the FreeBSD (or any BSD) kernel and start from there, but at what point would it just be easier to take BSD and add what Linux does better?
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater; the protocol has its flaws but it also has its strengths (networking support)
As for the mistake issue, I do admit that I don't need it pointed out to me by everyone on slashdot that CmdrTaco fouled up, but the easier solution would be for the slashdot editors to do some minor proofreading; mistakes like this could be made much more rare; if you don't want posters posting without at least reading the article, then you shouldn't want editiors doing the same.
If it's so obvious, why does it only "most likely refer" to GPL-Compatible?
Secondly, plently of "free" code that's free enough to allow anyone to make contributions aren't "GPL-Compatible" - so it's pretty irrelevant what license is used. There are plently of routes that benefit from having available source..
I know you're gonna call me crazy, but I _swear_ I've seen the TI DSP.. TMS320VC549 as cheap as $15 in individual units. I had found the match on findchips.com, and I think it was FAI that had the match (but there isn't one now)
As for the license rights, how much is it per unit? I hadn't taken that into consideration, and didn't take the flash into consideration either; not knowing how large the program would be, I can't judge on how much would be needed.
So, you're probably right, at least for hobbyist projects. (As in, not done in massively large quantities)
These are the DSPs I'm talking about, and while I'm sure they have a general purpose core deep inside, there's no way to access it directly.
I think you're trying to say "if the source wasn't freely redistributable.." - please don't mix the terms up; free and open source code predates the GNU project and the FSF by years.
Freely redistributable (in original and modified forms) source != GNU.
But if they're having a dedicated DSP do the decoding, then the BIOS will only control things like the user interface and the addressing of the media, not the method of the decoding.
It seems that many projects, especially the hobby ones floating online, are using a specific-purpose DSP designed for mp3 decoding- the MAS3507d, the STA013, etc. I'd argue in a heartbeat that this is a mistake, and that a general purpose DSP can be significantly cheaper with still enough power to do mp3, and can be updated by software to decode other formats (limited by the power of the DSP, of ocurse). Of interest, I know that the RCA Lyra uses this approach.
I too own a $99 MP3/CD player, the CM-415, and am quite happy with it.
Yes, there's nothing as liberating as having a hardware platform tied to your OS.
It should also be noted that with any decent open source system, portability for the kernel is basically limited to finding someone to write the (hopefully small) portion of code in the OS that must be platform-specific. The 4.4BSD book talks about writing a portable OS in detail in the beginning of the book.
As for userland, you're only tied down by what the kernel runs on (duh) and your compiler (you won't have the kernel running on the architecture without compiler support for it in the real world, too). So, what's so special about Linux here? You could make the argument for anything, given modern BSD tends to be easier to do things from source (make world, ports, etc.) then if anything, the argument would be more in BSD's favor.
Also, your logic is flawed. The x86 line maintaing compatibility back down to 8086 has nothing to do with Windows; Windows won't run on an 8086 and an 8088, and only in a limited manner on the 80286. Intel could drop 8086-80286 compatiblity without much of a fight. But why would they?
The problem with the x86 line is not maintaining backwards compatiblity, but rather that it's outdated. There's really no "wasted" silicon by having an 80686 be compatible- the 8086 instruction set is a subset of the 8086 instruction set, etc. What needs to be done is a full redesign, getting around all of the issues that causes x86 to be hated by so many people (how interrupts are handled, etc.) and going from ground-up. For as long as we make super-fast 8086s, throwing a handful of new instructions on every generation or so, you still have an 8086 at the core- and that's the problem.
Think twice before mindless x86-bashing or mindless Linux-advocacy.
It's true, clean, ultimate, complicated, advanced programming either way, but the goals and methods are different.
(The following is added as per full disclosure of the factors that influence my point of view) As a student painfully close to the end of the college decision process (sigh, where have the years gone?) I'm planning on becoming an EE.
Key point in the article: Linus "says he is trying to roll out the next major Linux release, version 2.4, by this fall." That was written in June of 1999.
Of course there's no definite promises, but we're definetly over a year past the first timeframe he mentioned..
Perhaps in the UNREAD (which I guess is fairly large, hurmf) portion of the community. Chapter 8, section 2 of The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System talks about this idea on page 284. It referrs to research done by Moran et al, 1990. The references at the back of the chapter refer to "Breaking Through the NFS Performance Barrier," Proveedings of the Spring 1990 European UNIX Users Group Conference, pages 199-206.
So there you go, there's TWO ways that we could have heard about this. I doubt anyone here got that first hand, but the 4.4BSD book is a fairly common book to have for those who are interested in the innards of an OS.
I think he's saying that Ballmer (two Ls?) is full of hydrogen. Just like the Hindenburg: Big, slow, and flaming.
Oh, guess I'm wrong- I was always under the impression that only the orbital probe was a success, and that the lander failed really early on. Guess I'm wrong; time to go read up on the subject.
I don't remember this being an issue he campaigned on, but you have to remember we got our first probe on the surface of Mars under the Clinton administration.
Not that Clinton could take any more credit for that than Gore can take for the internet, but it's not as if that NASA keeled over and died during the Clinton administration.
According to the Xrender document on slashdot a couple days ago, there's no need for support above the toolkit level. In which case, the GTK+ changes just need to be completed and merged with the stable branch- something that the Mozilla developers are not directly responsible for.
I couldn't give you the details, but if it was all that simple, Linux/MS would not NEED to release a new version for it, would they? They'd get around to an optimized version later.
Portscanning, the way I see it, is a form of trespassing- if I don't want you doing something with my computer, then you shouldn't be allowed to do it. Period. Those are the common-sense laws that we need.
If you'd like to learn about the services I'm running, ask nicely. That's the only ethical way, as far as I'm concerned, to gather that information remotely.
I don't know about you, but if I some guy I don't know (and didn't give permission to) walking around my house with a clipboard inspecting the windows, I'm calling the police.
I use a random wire antenna for SWL, but I wouldn't dare use it for serious broadcasting work. It's much harder to radiate a signal well with a random wire antenna.
Much more importantly, you can attempt to use the headphone cord for reception but NOT FOR TRANSMISSION! That's an easy way to fry out the earpiece! You would have to add a lowpass filter before the earpiece, and filtering on signals amplified to antenna level, it's just well... icky.
I doubt that Roe v. Wade would be overturned; it would be such a PR nightmare that I would suspect it would bring about the demise of the GOP.
I think when the _portable_ CD players have a 6 foot antenna coming off of it, then you can be suspicious. Until then, there's no reason to go and think that there is some magical way to send the playlists; unless of course you want to go the whole 9 yards and suspect that winamp is trying to contact and RIAA server with your playlist.
You're reading the "Playback Compatiblity Specification for CD and DVD Consumer Devices" which merely discusses how a player will be tested before it gains the seal. The format of the disk is not in the scope of that PDF; look for another.
By some DJ in the midwest? That's by Bob Rivers & Twisted Radio! :) That's no doubt my favorite christmas CD. I think they came out with a second, but I've had the first for a few years and I believe you should be able to find either at a music store.
That would be "true" freedom; but for obvious reasons (everyone would go one way) it doesn't work in the software world.