Note these machines had no level 2 cache - as clock speed increased, this would have throttled a x86 style processor, but the ARM has fairly light memory usage as it has 13 general purpose registers, a fairly orthogonal (and small) instruction set and a load/store architecture minimising the need to go to memory for information.
The ARM instruction set is great. It is a joy to program in ARM assembler. I especially like the possibility to add conditions to every instruction.
Nitpick: it has 16 basic registers, all of which are interchangeable. Only R15 has specific semantics (program counter).
BTW, the lack of L2 cache was (is) not a good thing. It was just never developed because at the time they couldn't get a foothold in the desktop market with the Wintel monopoly.
That's why development towards more speed was stopped in favour of extending its already amazing MIPS/Watt. They went the low-power way because the desktops weren't going anywhere -- an ARM doesn't run Windoze, after all.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about Active Directory other than that Micros~1 claims it can speak LDAP.
My point is that if you don't have any control over a 'central' Directory Server, you have a problem no matter what the type or brand of the server.software.
I assume that AD gives the administrator control over the schema. If AD doesn't support an RFC2307-compatible schema, the administrator can always implement it for you.
RISC OS used to have (or still has, I haven't checked it recently) something like this:
To applications, a standard (very large) resolution is presented. Eg, as an application writer you can simply assume the desktop is 1048576x768000. Then, the GUI 'translates' this to the actual screen resolution when the windows are drawn.
This is an oversimplification, but you get the general idea. It works great to make applications run on all sorts of desktops - the app writer doesn't need to worry about it, (s)he knows that on higher resolutions, it will just look sharper but the size will be the same.
What browsers should be doing (if the host GUI isn't... remember RISC OS?) is provide a "zoom" button.
You know, so you can actually read those web sites designed for 800x600 on larger screens, the browser would be aware of its window size and have a button that says "Scale as if res was 800x600"
Then it resizes your fonts and the images accordingly. That would be a very cool feature, IMHO.
[please don't bother to reply saying 'shut up and go code it yourself' - I know...]
2600's intent could not be PROVEN to be to help people steal DVD movies. It is entirely possible (though maybe not probable) that 2600's only intent was to help LinDVD along.
Copying isn't stealing. Whether you think unauthorized copying is good or bad is another issue, but it definitely isn't stealing - it is potentially causing a small decrease in earnings to a third party.
2600's intent was neither to aid copying DVDs or to "help along" a Linux DVD player. 2600 is a magazine. It was just reporting a story. To someone who knows how to read it, source code is a story. This is one of the main points.
This statement is so clueless, this guy should be an IT analyst! Oh, wait... he is!
The car analogy is once again attractive. What he's saying is, no business should buy any cars with hoods that can be opened, because that enables mechanics to make mistakes when fixing stuff.
Besides, to think you need source code to make undocumented changes to systems is naive to say the least.
I'm amazed at the amount of US Americans angrily remarking that any UN-related organization should be ignored because they have nothing to say over them because they're US Citizens, so there, ha ha.
Ever heard of treaties, guys? Sometimes even the USA has to agree to those, and for the things to make any sense at all, they should have the force of law (after an elected parliament has agreed, of course).
Now I dislike intellectual property as much as the next right-thinking person, but clearly if it's decided we're going to have it anyway, it's not that unreasonable to have a global body arbitrating any conflicts, or is it?
After all, it is the internet. It has been for a while now, you know.
Or are you saying, along with the DVD-CCA, that we should all just shut the hell up and let you US Americans decide for us? I couldn't argue with that, of course.
So who gets the domain name ford.com? Ford Motor Company? Ford Musical Instruments? Betty Ford? Joe Ford, the guy down the street?
Now this may be a wacky idea, but why not use the branches of the tree that DNS was designed to be? I mean, if there is an argument, split the thing into sub-zones, like cars.ford.com and music.ford.com.
They might even jointly fund a nice page to appear on www.ford.com directing the user to the right place.
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
If you think progress was decided in the past by democratic means instead of by the development of technology you are (at least partially) wrong.
There was never a government body that decided to start printing books. Someone just invented the printing press.
Funnily enough, the closest thing to a technological revolution initiated by a government is the internet. And now that it's here, we start to find, for example, that we don't need copyright anymore.
There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.
The COMMAND.COM has been changed to protect the MBR
Really? That sucks. What's their excuse for disallowing changes to the MBR?
I can understand dropping DOS mode, but stopping people from changing the MBR? Why?
I find it hard to believe they're doing this for anticompetitive reasons (i.e. make dual-boot harder), at a time like this. That would be extremely arrogant, even for Micros~1. But maybe I'm just naive...
Have they also dropped the "rescue" floppies? AFAIK Win9x allows you to make a floppy containing COMMAND.COM and some basic utilities.
Maybe WinME can boot completely from CD. That would be cool, then I wouldn't have to waste a partition on Windoze any more for the approx. one time a month I need it.
The ARM was not designed for embedded applications - it was made for desktop machines (the Acorn Archimedes). But since it's so well-designed it uses very little power and has a great code density and "performance per MHz", it was able to move into the embedded niche instead of being crushed by x86 like everyone else.
The sad part is that now everyone thinks that it wouldn't make sense to put an ARM into a desktop machine. It would, if it weren't for the fact that no-one has made a high-speed version without being too concerned about power consumption.
If someone were to make an ARM that could run at 800MHz it would beat the hell out of any one of those horrible, kludgy, gigantic 8086 simulators we're all buying 'cause Windows won't run on anything else.
Intel could take the StrongARM there. But they don't. Guess why.
As a dedicated Linux user what I want is CHOICE. I want the choice to choose Linux over Windows. I also want the freedom to choose the applications that I run on Linux, whether they are open or closed source.
Licensed, closed-source DVD players limit choice. They limit your fair use rights to their content. They support the MPAA. The MPAA threatens the right to reverse-engineer. Without this right, there would be no Linux.
A closed-source DVD player does not give you more choice.
If you're serious about choice, you should NOT support organizations that threaten your freedom. And buying stuff from them, or paying them license fees, means supporting them.
But how about some evil-minded hacker (yes, you read it right: hacker, not cracker), who contributes for example to the kernel effort, and installs somewhere in an obscure driver a nice backdoor, and waits till a new major stable version of Linux comes out?
I'm a bit skeptical about this backdoor possibility in official versions of the kernel (or gcc or some other important piece of free s/w). People have been suggesting it for years, but it's never actually happened.
How hard would it be to do this without any of the other developers noticing, and (important for virus authors) remaining anonymous? Too hard, I guess.
I think that backdoors in proprietary software are a much bigger danger. It's much harder to tell whether there is one, and if so, where it comes from.
Where's the trash can in the GNOME interface? Why are there no keyboard modifiers for copy, move, or link mouse operations in KDE? Why is it that when I use a marquee to select and move icons on the GNOME desktop, that it only displays the top-most icon? Why is copying files using the KDE file manager harder typing "cp -Rf" on the command line? What's up with all the flicker and redraw with X, anyway?
Because you (among others) failed to fix it...
Don't you guys hate that? You should!
You should hate it enough to help fix it.
Time complaining about free software is time wasted. Because you can help. That's what's so great about it. And that's why it will get there.
And what about Active Directory? Another brilliant innovation that's actually a standard technology with some unnecessary (IMHO) changes, so that a Windoze box can access a directory with LDAP but existing LDAP-clients can't easily use a Micros~1 directory server 'cause the schema is wrong.
Would they really still be working like this, even with the way their trial is going? I know they're not stupid, but maybe they just can't help themselves...
"all the os is probally going to be on a rom somewhere leaving you with no customization maybe meaning that you are stuck running KDE, Gnome or what ever they want you to."
If they would port KDE or Gnome to ARM/Linux, that would be cool.
AFAIK neither of these have been ported yet.:-(
But, of course, these aren't the kind of heavy-duty systems you'd want to run on this kind of device.
Although a 200MHz ARM easily outruns a 200MHz x86 (I have one of each), both KDE and Gnome eat far too much memory for handhelds.
Under the DMCA in the US, circumventing the region code system would be illegal, since it "effectively controls access to a copyrighted work". In Europe, we can still do this.
<SARCASM> Well, at least you guys are free to own guns. </SARCASM>
Valenti just does not understand. iCrave T.V. won't put the television STATIONS out of business, it will put the Sony television manufacturing division out of business.
It'll not even do that. We still need screens.
What I gather from the interview is that they're really concerned about losing the per-country licensing system, which I guess is really lucrative.
Shame they don't realize they're going to lose it whatever they do. They're just doing damage to themselves and to others in a fierce attempt to hold off the inevitable.
I'm getting less and less angry about this (not to the point where I'll stop mirroring DeCSS, obviously:-). They *are* clueless, and it'll be interesting to see whether they'll wake up and see what's going on in time or whether they are going to crash asleep at the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
He seems to be writing 'open-source' when using it as an adjective ("open-source software") but writing "open source" as a noun.
Note these machines had no level 2 cache - as clock speed increased, this would have throttled a x86 style processor, but the ARM has fairly light memory usage as it has 13 general purpose registers, a fairly orthogonal (and small) instruction set and a load/store architecture minimising the need to go to memory for information.
The ARM instruction set is great. It is a joy to program in ARM assembler. I especially like the possibility to add conditions to every instruction.
Nitpick: it has 16 basic registers, all of which are interchangeable. Only R15 has specific semantics (program counter).
BTW, the lack of L2 cache was (is) not a good thing. It was just never developed because at the time they couldn't get a foothold in the desktop market with the Wintel monopoly.
That's why development towards more speed was stopped in favour of extending its already amazing MIPS/Watt. They went the low-power way because the desktops weren't going anywhere -- an ARM doesn't run Windoze, after all.
Make their own flavour of UNIX just for these machines (a la IRIX), and target these machines towards the SGI users.
They had something like this around 1990. It was called RISCiX.
Disclaimer: I don't know much about Active Directory other than that Micros~1 claims it can speak LDAP.
My point is that if you don't have any control over a 'central' Directory Server, you have a problem no matter what the type or brand of the server.software.
I assume that AD gives the administrator control over the schema. If AD doesn't support an RFC2307-compatible schema, the administrator can always implement it for you.
RISC OS used to have (or still has, I haven't checked it recently) something like this:
To applications, a standard (very large) resolution is presented. Eg, as an application writer you can simply assume the desktop is 1048576x768000. Then, the GUI 'translates' this to the actual screen resolution when the windows are drawn.
This is an oversimplification, but you get the general idea. It works great to make applications run on all sorts of desktops - the app writer doesn't need to worry about it, (s)he knows that on higher resolutions, it will just look sharper but the size will be the same.
What browsers should be doing (if the host GUI isn't... remember RISC OS?) is provide a "zoom" button.
You know, so you can actually read those web sites designed for 800x600 on larger screens, the browser would be aware of its window size and have a button that says "Scale as if res was 800x600"
Then it resizes your fonts and the images accordingly. That would be a very cool feature, IMHO.
[please don't bother to reply saying 'shut up and go code it yourself' - I know...]
2600's intent could not be PROVEN to be to help people steal DVD movies. It is entirely possible (though maybe not probable) that 2600's only intent was to help LinDVD along.
This statement is so clueless, this guy should be an IT analyst! Oh, wait... he is!
The car analogy is once again attractive. What he's saying is, no business should buy any cars with hoods that can be opened, because that enables mechanics to make mistakes when fixing stuff.
Besides, to think you need source code to make undocumented changes to systems is naive to say the least.
I'm amazed at the amount of US Americans angrily remarking that any UN-related organization should be ignored because they have nothing to say over them because they're US Citizens, so there, ha ha.
Ever heard of treaties, guys? Sometimes even the USA has to agree to those, and for the things to make any sense at all, they should have the force of law (after an elected parliament has agreed, of course).
Now I dislike intellectual property as much as the next right-thinking person, but clearly if it's decided we're going to have it anyway, it's not that unreasonable to have a global body arbitrating any conflicts, or is it?
After all, it is the internet. It has been for a while now, you know.
Or are you saying, along with the DVD-CCA, that we should all just shut the hell up and let you US Americans decide for us? I couldn't argue with that, of course.
So who gets the domain name ford.com? Ford Motor Company? Ford Musical Instruments? Betty Ford? Joe Ford, the guy down the street?
Now this may be a wacky idea, but why not use the branches of the tree that DNS was designed to be? I mean, if there is an argument, split the thing into sub-zones, like cars.ford.com and music.ford.com.
They might even jointly fund a nice page to appear on www.ford.com directing the user to the right place.
I'm being hopelessly optimistic, I know...
The big challenge here is to respond to Freenet's antagonism of copyright in a way that lays the groundwork for responding to similar technological threats. To set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
If you think progress was decided in the past by democratic means instead of by the development of technology you are (at least partially) wrong.
There was never a government body that decided to start printing books. Someone just invented the printing press.
Funnily enough, the closest thing to a technological revolution initiated by a government is the internet. And now that it's here, we start to find, for example, that we don't need copyright anymore.
There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree and call it freedom.
The COMMAND.COM has been changed to protect the MBR
Really? That sucks. What's their excuse for disallowing changes to the MBR?
I can understand dropping DOS mode, but stopping people from changing the MBR? Why?
I find it hard to believe they're doing this for anticompetitive reasons (i.e. make dual-boot harder), at a time like this. That would be extremely arrogant, even for Micros~1. But maybe I'm just naive...
Have they also dropped the "rescue" floppies? AFAIK Win9x allows you to make a floppy containing COMMAND.COM and some basic utilities.
Maybe WinME can boot completely from CD. That would be cool, then I wouldn't have to waste a partition on Windoze any more for the approx. one time a month I need it.
The ARM was not designed for embedded applications - it was made for desktop machines (the Acorn Archimedes). But since it's so well-designed it uses very little power and has a great code density and "performance per MHz", it was able to move into the embedded niche instead of being crushed by x86 like everyone else.
The sad part is that now everyone thinks that it wouldn't make sense to put an ARM into a desktop machine. It would, if it weren't for the fact that no-one has made a high-speed version without being too concerned about power consumption.
If someone were to make an ARM that could run at 800MHz it would beat the hell out of any one of those horrible, kludgy, gigantic 8086 simulators we're all buying 'cause Windows won't run on anything else.
Intel could take the StrongARM there. But they don't. Guess why.
Somehow I see this as a much more serious crime than copying a DVD.
Don't go along with the abuse of the word "piracy" to mean "copying something made by A Very Big And Important Company, Inc."
If you do, you're helping their mind control strategy, to get people to see the sharing of information as a horrendous crime.
Also, I'm not a nazi. Not even a fscking one.
Nazis wouldn't like open source, for the same reason the MPAA doesn't like it - no central, iron-grip control!
Licensed, closed-source DVD players limit choice. They limit your fair use rights to their content. They support the MPAA. The MPAA threatens the right to reverse-engineer. Without this right, there would be no Linux.
A closed-source DVD player does not give you more choice.
If you're serious about choice, you should NOT support organizations that threaten your freedom. And buying stuff from them, or paying them license fees, means supporting them.
So there.
I'm a bit skeptical about this backdoor possibility in official versions of the kernel (or gcc or some other important piece of free s/w). People have been suggesting it for years, but it's never actually happened.
How hard would it be to do this without any of the other developers noticing, and (important for virus authors) remaining anonymous? Too hard, I guess.
I think that backdoors in proprietary software are a much bigger danger. It's much harder to tell whether there is one, and if so, where it comes from.
Can it? Never noticed it. Just enter the standard stuff in Kppp's config dialogs and go. Did this on several different setups without problems.<P>
Because you (among others) failed to fix it...
Don't you guys hate that? You should!
You should hate it enough to help fix it.
Time complaining about free software is time wasted. Because you can help. That's what's so great about it. And that's why it will get there.
Would they really still be working like this, even with the way their trial is going? I know they're not stupid, but maybe they just can't help themselves...
Occasionally meeting people in person does actually have some additional value, you know.
So what does flying to far off places give you, (other than fun/travel)? Is there any point/value to these things?
It's not far! Only about 3 hours by car or train. ;-P
If they would port KDE or Gnome to ARM/Linux, that would be cool.
AFAIK neither of these have been ported yet. :-(
But, of course, these aren't the kind of heavy-duty systems you'd want to run on this kind of device.
Although a 200MHz ARM easily outruns a 200MHz x86 (I have one of each), both KDE and Gnome eat far too much memory for handhelds.
<SARCASM>
Well, at least you guys are free to own guns.
</SARCASM>
It'll not even do that. We still need screens.
What I gather from the interview is that they're really concerned about losing the per-country licensing system, which I guess is really lucrative.
Shame they don't realize they're going to lose it whatever they do. They're just doing damage to themselves and to others in a fierce attempt to hold off the inevitable.
I'm getting less and less angry about this (not to the point where I'll stop mirroring DeCSS, obviously :-). They *are* clueless, and it'll be interesting to see whether they'll wake up and see what's going on in time or whether they are going to crash asleep at the wheel.
Evolution at work.