I can't think of any open source project that isn't regularly patched, and because of this constant progression, I can't see a CD library being up to date, ever.
Since the free software that the library would be dealing out would be for the average user (once said free software is suitable for use by an average user), they would probably not want bleeding-edge betas, and so the library could just carry the latest stable versions of applications/distros. Ideally, crucial security patches (we would hope security vulnerabilities would be few and far between) would be applied to the software in the library whenever really necessary.
As for regular patching and keeping up to date, small patches could be applied by the user at home (perhaps a bit like windows update done properly), through distro tools, or the application itself.
A poster in the linked article suggests that they may be under pressure from the MPAA and alike.. Would any sensible business like this *intentionally* upset their customers (monopolies and back-door-funding not included)?
Your website (ftp.abs.net) has recently come to our attention. We appreciate your enthusiasm for the TiVo(R) DVR and we have some specific requests regarding your website.
We request that you cease hosting backup images of TiVo's proprietary software. The software represents valuable intellectual property of TiVo's, and making it available for copying and distribution is a violation of TiVo's copyrights. Such use is without our consent and is illegal under US federal copyright law. In particular, we are requesting that all of the files and directories located at ftp://ftp.abs.net/tivo/Backups/ be removed.
If they are correct in their statements, then this does indeed suggest that there is some proprietary code in addition to the GPL'd kernel in there. I suppose the best thing to do here is verify what can be distributed (under the GPL) and what can't, from the TiVo package.. (But I don't own a TiVo, so that may not be possible)
If you purchase a card that can do hardware encoding/decoding (a Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 or 350, for example), that is well-supported under Linux, the rest of the system won't have to be too powerful, and a MiniITX board would work brilliantly. However, if you want to encode things in software (to XViD, for instance), you might need a meatier processor, as a VIA processor might choke.
I currently don't have any gripes about X, but that's because I've already got it set up and working.
The only thing I can find to complain about is that it was particularly difficult to get it working in the beginning - just a case of setting it up. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to set up a 7-button mouse, and get the forward/back buttons working properly, or to get the multimedia keys on my keyboard to do what they're supposed to?
I got my hands on an extra TFT monitor last week - god knows how difficult that'll be to get a dual-head setup working.. I'll cross my fingers.
And as a conclusion: Bring on our Y window overlords.
I have had an old P200 with a 250MB (so not a web cache then) box running the Mallard beta of this for a good while now, and before that I ran a 1.X version... It's been getting a good 100+ days of uptime, and is rock-steady.
In fact, I think there's only feature I could ask for: automatically erasing the logs after they fill up the entire/var partition.. It only dedicates 100MB or so to/var, and it quickly fills..
Otherwise, Smoothwall definitely gets my two-thumbs-fresh. I used it share dialup among my home LAN, and now cable. This story has given me a good interest to donate to this fantastic company.. (Oh, and no, I don't work for them)
An obvious use for steganography is reliable digital watermarking, but does anyone know how well current techniques last against hefty sessions of image cropping, audio/video transcoding, and all those other things one would commonly do with such files..?
If a DVD-screener, for example, contained a watermarked serial number, would the number still be there and be readable after ripping, cropping, rendering subtitles on top, and transcoding?
It's a nice idea, but I'm still on the side that believes that multimedia data should not be altered (and hence quality thrown away), even if the loss of quality in human perception is supposedly unnoticable.
*Who* doesn't particularly matter that much - even though there was sorry news at first, I (and I'm sure the kernel team too) are happier to hear another exploit has been found and nailed. It's just annoying that this time round there was a compromise involved.
But if you are a company, hopefully what you profit from is the *addition* of your own work alongside other GPL'ed code, rather than someone else's GPL'ed work alone, which of course they (if anyone) should ideally be profiting from.
I believe the easiest way to sum up the GPL for the layman (and hence the company PHB, or whatever) is to describe it as the legal manifestation of the opinion that it is morally wrong to profit from the works of others*.
* Unless explicitly stated that you can, e.g. by a BSD license.
Yes, the grandparent's point would be very much laughable if there was only one company holding a monopoly on cell phones, however there are a good few companies around providing mobile telecommunications.. If there's competition, then it's quite likely that fobbing the incurred cost onto customers won't sit too happily.
Afterthought: This is of course assuming that they don't form a cartel.
Ahh, I had a friend in much the same situation as you last year.. for an entire room, he had only two sockets in the wall. So he promptly daisy-chained together a couple of extension cables to accomodate his desktop computer (with 400W PSU, I might add), monitor, lamps, toaster, kettle, blender, laptop, 150W stereo hifi amp.. The room actually hummed, and similarly to you, the lights in the room would dim whenever he switched on too many things.
I have 6 plugs to work with (compared to 4 this year), which is just about ample for me with a few extension cables. I had a rather worrying incident last year when my computer would randomly lose power and go off whenever somebody switched on too many appliances downstairs.. But the one time that I switched my computer on in the morning and heard a loud *BANG* (had to replace the PSU after that), I thought again about the power situation.
Certainly in my case, there really should be more power in rooms.. and not only that but perhaps some safer wiring too - there are a lot of old buildings here that have electrical wiring that's just as old!
I guess that the simplest answer to this would be: 'Yes, everything is quantized.' However, unfortunately this is one of the biggest problems in modern physics. No-one is really sure how it should be quantized but the idea of quantized time as well as quantized space and quantized gravity is part of the elusive theory of quantum gravity.
Some of the best minds in the world have been tackling the problem for years now. Einstein failed to united quantum theory with his own relativity, Richard Feynman couldn't do it (although QED was a definite step forwards) and even today some of our most famous physicists such as Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose are still unable to unite quantum theory and relativity.
In answer to your question then. Yes, time is theoretically quantized and in an ultimate field theory it would be a quantized field much the same as the particle fields that we can already see in unified field theories. However, no-one has yet been able to come up with a consistent theory of space, time, fields and matter which shows exactly how time is quantized.
Answered by: Edward Rayne, Physics Undergraduate Student, Cambridge UK
In that case, it looks like another word that has been propagated through popular use. In this case I can see why though, as 'quotation' is significantly more to say/spell compared to the one-syllable 'quote'.
You may not like virii, but if enough people use it, it is a word.
This is in fact a very bad and ignorant attitude to take. Popularity breeds new words, and we often invent new words (email, etc.) when we need an entirely new term.
However, it isn't right (no, really, it isn't) to change words for marginal gain of convenience (I wonder whether the intellectuals of the past weren't too happy with the "olde" to "old" change either), and especially when it is delibarate misuse of regular grammar and an introduction of yet another irregular word into a language that already has plenty.
Likewise, "Quote" is NOT A NOUN, "a lot" is two words, and anybody who says "you" instead of "your" (it does happen) really is bending the rules. If a new word that only came about through laziness and propagated through popularity, without necessarily being correct (olde -> old, for example), then I think that only represents how a lack of grammatical knowledge in the average person can drown out the minority (and correct) version of the word.
Is there any reason why you would say virii over viruses? I personally think not.
Would an IPv6 internet make it more difficult for these kind of DDoS attacks to come about?
A good whitehat wouldn't be able to do much against thousands of incoming packets from randomly forged IP addresses, but is it (as) possible to do this if every computer had a direct connection via an IPv6 address to the internet?
A few quotations: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein "Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple." -C. W. Ceram Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. - Albert Einstein
The last one being my particular favourite (more here). It does look a whole lot like these proposed modifications, while temporarily giving us what we want, are going to cause big headaches in the future when we all think "Ugh, what an ugly hack" as we try to implement the next big thing.
I think the implementation and design of X is in need of some of the 'neat-n-tidy' treatment. For every issue or teething problem I've had using X, I've nearly always been able to solve it, but hardly ever in a neat and consistent way.
If we can't tidy everything up, then maybe it's time to take a step back and start again, and then say 'may the best project win'. I am particularly looking out for the Y Windowing System, which seems to have all the right ideas, and looks to be very flexible for years to come.
These dirty hacks to put in the features we want might tempt us, but please let us steer clear of digging holes for ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't think of any open source project that isn't regularly patched, and because of this constant progression, I can't see a CD library being up to date, ever.
Since the free software that the library would be dealing out would be for the average user (once said free software is suitable for use by an average user), they would probably not want bleeding-edge betas, and so the library could just carry the latest stable versions of applications/distros. Ideally, crucial security patches (we would hope security vulnerabilities would be few and far between) would be applied to the software in the library whenever really necessary.
As for regular patching and keeping up to date, small patches could be applied by the user at home (perhaps a bit like windows update done properly), through distro tools, or the application itself.
Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Of course whether you can get that working with Linux or not is another matter
Apparently it's reasonably stable.. From mythtv.org's front page: Support for the PVR-350 MPEG decoder / TV out.
Lucky us then!
A poster in the linked article suggests that they may be under pressure from the MPAA and alike.. Would any sensible business like this *intentionally* upset their customers (monopolies and back-door-funding not included)?
(I await posts consisting of "yes").
The email from TiVo itself:
Your website (ftp.abs.net) has recently come to our attention. We appreciate your enthusiasm for the TiVo(R) DVR and we have some specific requests regarding your website.
We request that you cease hosting backup images of TiVo's proprietary software. The software represents valuable intellectual property of TiVo's, and making it available for copying and distribution is a violation of TiVo's copyrights. Such use is without our consent and is illegal under US federal copyright law. In particular, we are requesting that all of the files and directories located at ftp://ftp.abs.net/tivo/Backups/ be removed.
If they are correct in their statements, then this does indeed suggest that there is some proprietary code in addition to the GPL'd kernel in there. I suppose the best thing to do here is verify what can be distributed (under the GPL) and what can't, from the TiVo package.. (But I don't own a TiVo, so that may not be possible)
If you purchase a card that can do hardware encoding/decoding (a Hauppage WinTV PVR 250 or 350, for example), that is well-supported under Linux, the rest of the system won't have to be too powerful, and a MiniITX board would work brilliantly. However, if you want to encode things in software (to XViD, for instance), you might need a meatier processor, as a VIA processor might choke.
Some useful links:
MythTV requirements
And for Freevo
PVR Database
Hope that helps.
Forking: Simultaneously Open Source's greatest strength and weakness, it seems.
I personally think the strength of it outweighs it as a weakness.
I currently don't have any gripes about X, but that's because I've already got it set up and working.
The only thing I can find to complain about is that it was particularly difficult to get it working in the beginning - just a case of setting it up. Who would have thought it would be so difficult to set up a 7-button mouse, and get the forward/back buttons working properly, or to get the multimedia keys on my keyboard to do what they're supposed to?
I got my hands on an extra TFT monitor last week - god knows how difficult that'll be to get a dual-head setup working.. I'll cross my fingers.
And as a conclusion: Bring on our Y window overlords.
I have had an old P200 with a 250MB (so not a web cache then) box running the Mallard beta of this for a good while now, and before that I ran a 1.X version... It's been getting a good 100+ days of uptime, and is rock-steady.
/var partition.. It only dedicates 100MB or so to /var, and it quickly fills..
In fact, I think there's only feature I could ask for: automatically erasing the logs after they fill up the entire
Otherwise, Smoothwall definitely gets my two-thumbs-fresh. I used it share dialup among my home LAN, and now cable. This story has given me a good interest to donate to this fantastic company.. (Oh, and no, I don't work for them)
An obvious use for steganography is reliable digital watermarking, but does anyone know how well current techniques last against hefty sessions of image cropping, audio/video transcoding, and all those other things one would commonly do with such files..?
If a DVD-screener, for example, contained a watermarked serial number, would the number still be there and be readable after ripping, cropping, rendering subtitles on top, and transcoding?
It's a nice idea, but I'm still on the side that believes that multimedia data should not be altered (and hence quality thrown away), even if the loss of quality in human perception is supposedly unnoticable.
*Who* doesn't particularly matter that much - even though there was sorry news at first, I (and I'm sure the kernel team too) are happier to hear another exploit has been found and nailed. It's just annoying that this time round there was a compromise involved.
But if you are a company, hopefully what you profit from is the *addition* of your own work alongside other GPL'ed code, rather than someone else's GPL'ed work alone, which of course they (if anyone) should ideally be profiting from.
I believe the easiest way to sum up the GPL for the layman (and hence the company PHB, or whatever) is to describe it as the legal manifestation of the opinion that it is morally wrong to profit from the works of others*.
* Unless explicitly stated that you can, e.g. by a BSD license.
*Chortles* Right... [microsoft.com]
Yes, the grandparent's point would be very much laughable if there was only one company holding a monopoly on cell phones, however there are a good few companies around providing mobile telecommunications.. If there's competition, then it's quite likely that fobbing the incurred cost onto customers won't sit too happily.
Afterthought: This is of course assuming that they don't form a cartel.
Ahh, I had a friend in much the same situation as you last year.. for an entire room, he had only two sockets in the wall. So he promptly daisy-chained together a couple of extension cables to accomodate his desktop computer (with 400W PSU, I might add), monitor, lamps, toaster, kettle, blender, laptop, 150W stereo hifi amp.. The room actually hummed, and similarly to you, the lights in the room would dim whenever he switched on too many things.
I have 6 plugs to work with (compared to 4 this year), which is just about ample for me with a few extension cables. I had a rather worrying incident last year when my computer would randomly lose power and go off whenever somebody switched on too many appliances downstairs.. But the one time that I switched my computer on in the morning and heard a loud *BANG* (had to replace the PSU after that), I thought again about the power situation.
Certainly in my case, there really should be more power in rooms.. and not only that but perhaps some safer wiring too - there are a lot of old buildings here that have electrical wiring that's just as old!
Wow, I've learnt how to answer my own questions..
Question
Is time quantized?
Asked by: Chris Ingram
Answer
I guess that the simplest answer to this would be: 'Yes, everything is quantized.' However, unfortunately this is one of the biggest problems in modern physics. No-one is really sure how it should be quantized but the idea of quantized time as well as quantized space and quantized gravity is part of the elusive theory of quantum gravity.
Some of the best minds in the world have been tackling the problem for years now. Einstein failed to united quantum theory with his own relativity, Richard Feynman couldn't do it (although QED was a definite step forwards) and even today some of our most famous physicists such as Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose are still unable to unite quantum theory and relativity.
In answer to your question then. Yes, time is theoretically quantized and in an ultimate field theory it would be a quantized field much the same as the particle fields that we can already see in unified field theories. However, no-one has yet been able to come up with a consistent theory of space, time, fields and matter which shows exactly how time is quantized.
Answered by: Edward Rayne, Physics Undergraduate Student, Cambridge UK
exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second
Bah, I've seen quicker..
But seriously, is time quantized? If so, what's the smallest unit?
Ooh, ooh.. is SCO the architect, creator of the Matrix?
In that case, it looks like another word that has been propagated through popular use. In this case I can see why though, as 'quotation' is significantly more to say/spell compared to the one-syllable 'quote'.
'Quote' was certainly not originally a noun.
Now I have a 110" projector on my living room wall
Wow, that's enormous.. how big is the image it projects?
You may not like virii, but if enough people use it, it is a word.
This is in fact a very bad and ignorant attitude to take. Popularity breeds new words, and we often invent new words (email, etc.) when we need an entirely new term.
However, it isn't right (no, really, it isn't) to change words for marginal gain of convenience (I wonder whether the intellectuals of the past weren't too happy with the "olde" to "old" change either), and especially when it is delibarate misuse of regular grammar and an introduction of yet another irregular word into a language that already has plenty.
Likewise, "Quote" is NOT A NOUN, "a lot" is two words, and anybody who says "you" instead of "your" (it does happen) really is bending the rules. If a new word that only came about through laziness and propagated through popularity, without necessarily being correct (olde -> old, for example), then I think that only represents how a lack of grammatical knowledge in the average person can drown out the minority (and correct) version of the word.
Is there any reason why you would say virii over viruses? I personally think not.
Would an IPv6 internet make it more difficult for these kind of DDoS attacks to come about?
A good whitehat wouldn't be able to do much against thousands of incoming packets from randomly forged IP addresses, but is it (as) possible to do this if every computer had a direct connection via an IPv6 address to the internet?
At LA screenings of the third matrix installment, customers are being handed CD-ROMS shaped like a Red Pill or a Blue Pill.
More worringly, I hope these "pill-shaped" CD-ROMS are still circular! hmm.. I can't imagine something pill-shaped spinning particularly well.
Thats like the government requiring all theives to respect a "please do not steal" sticker on any car that has one.
I wouldn't say it was an amazing idea to compare clued techies to car thieves..
A few quotations:
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein
"Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple." -C. W. Ceram
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. - Albert Einstein
The last one being my particular favourite (more here). It does look a whole lot like these proposed modifications, while temporarily giving us what we want, are going to cause big headaches in the future when we all think "Ugh, what an ugly hack" as we try to implement the next big thing.
I think the implementation and design of X is in need of some of the 'neat-n-tidy' treatment. For every issue or teething problem I've had using X, I've nearly always been able to solve it, but hardly ever in a neat and consistent way.
If we can't tidy everything up, then maybe it's time to take a step back and start again, and then say 'may the best project win'. I am particularly looking out for the Y Windowing System, which seems to have all the right ideas, and looks to be very flexible for years to come.
These dirty hacks to put in the features we want might tempt us, but please let us steer clear of digging holes for ourselves.
Just my humble opinion.
SuperCrack(tm) is nothing compared to the FSF's new baby, GNU/OpenCrack.
No double entendres here..