Yes, contrary to some of the posts here that suggest Cohen is trying to create the next Napster and doing a poor job of it, he has already stated long ago that he has little sympathy for the warez crowd. He even considers them technically foolish as BT lacks anonymity.
Bittorrent is a great idea and this might make it even better. Those of you who want the latest America's Army or *nix ISO stand up and clap. Those of you with hacked Steam clients that work under cedega, uh... could we talk on IRC?
Here's a link to an NPR show about Erdos and a few others with commentary by someone who worked with him for a spell. Apparently, some of his prolific output can be attributed to amphetamines.
The intent is apparently nuclear weapons testing and design. Civilian fusion research is simply a pleasand side effect.
This is the first time I've heard this notion and must confess that it makes sense. There is something Goldberg-esque about dropping deuterium pellets into a chamber and sniping them with lasers to make power. The other line of fusion reactor research I've heard of that uses magnetic bottles would be a more elegant solution -- like the difference between internal combustion and electric motors.
Hmmm, well now I'm doubly confused as LLNL already had the worlds most powerfull laser (SHIVA?) back in the late 70's or early 80's for the same type of fusion research NIF is ostensibly for. How does making it bigger change any of the principles involved?
Any "relentless abuse" has been invited by George Lucas himself by emphasising the Star Wars franchise over any impulse to write or direct anything else worth knowing about. Spare us the poor George routine.
No one has stood in line for "More American Graffiti", "The Ewok Adventure", "Ewoks", "Droids", "Ewoks: The Battle for Endor", "Captain EO", "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", "Indiana Jed", "Star Wars: Rebel Assault", "Radioland Murders", "Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen", "Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock's Eye", "Star Wars: Yoda Stories", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: The Trenches of Hell", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Spring Break Adventure" (no doubt this one is underappreciated), "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Masks of Evil", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Adventures in the Secret Service", "Star Wars: Obi-Wan", "R2-D2: Beneath the Dome", and "Star Wars: Clone Wars".
Lucas invites a certain type of derision because the difference between American Graffiti and Star Wars left us thinking he was versatile like Wilder or Speilberg, but he has the resume of an anonymous hack.
They hate us because we won't submit to their bloody, violent, backwards, worthless piece of crap religion. Islam has the goal of world domination and we are the targets because we won't submit to enslavement.
Bullshit. They hate us because they don't want us stopping them from making Muslims submit to Wahabbism -- or at least what Wahabbists want for government.
I didn't see anything in the photos or videos that's revolutionary.
I suppose it's not revolutionary, but I think that screenshot showing a translucent mplayer window is pretty impressive. The story a while back showcasing Luminosity had a video demonstrating Xv stuff showing up in a pager. That was on a laptop with Intel integrated graphics. As it stands right now I can see the Xv colorkey on the inner edges of a xine window if I move it around too fast. That's on a Geforce.
Then they should put their money where their mouth is and compensate someone to maintain a value-added source tree that they're willing to stand behind.
If they have to spend extra time just to take out the bloat and re-QA - well, it's just gonna cost more to use Linux.
That's their problem, not OSDL's. If Linus wants to hardcode "Fuck You" into printk it's up to them to patch it out if they don't like it. If Redhat or SUSE think "screw this shit" and decide to fork a BSD then that's their perogative too. Perhaps, that would mean that, Torvalds, Morton, Cox, Viro, et al would end up with jobs that leave less time for Linux, but I don't think they would care about the loss of prestige for long. Those that could continue refining the kernel would.
And it's not like you can "roll your own" - you change the kernel, you have to re-certify or else you're running an unsupported config, son.
Re-certify with who? Any sort of stamp of approval in any field is founded on trust, whether it's Good Housekeeping or the Supreme Court. Being able to "roll your own" and stand behind it is the keystone of a Guarantee
It's all great but I just don't see how Gentoo, without h/w and s/w certifications, can replace enterprise distros and help solve this problem.
Huh? What "problem"? What's Gentoo got to do with anything? Greg K-H, the author of udev is a Gentoo developer and has space on kernel.org IIRC so why complain? Who said OSDL owes Gentoo Inc. a free kernel they can capitalize on without further effort? And why does it matter?
This guy Greenblatt is full of shit anyway. I don't see how sysfs, epoll, inotify, udev, "early user-space", the myriad new crypographic modules, and alternate "security models" diminish a server oriented *nix at all. Read Kernel Traffic and you may see a general trend towards pushing functionality out of the kernel into small programs that rely on more simplified interfaces. Look at the difference between devfs and udev. Check out how things changed when modutils gave way to module-init-tools. Ioctls are deprecated where they can be, and on the hotplug list there are speculators who wonder how hardcoded major-minor device numbering schemes can be retired. Check out Felix Von Leitner's benchmarks of epoll vs poll. Look at the way one can choose a scheduler. It's not hard to find interesting developments in post-2.4.x Linux have every thing to do with taking up where classical Unix left off and nothing to do with DirectX or iTunes.
IIRC, the claim was that the free client was costing $500,000 worth of revenue or some such thing, not that there had been a $500,000 donation to OSDL. The number is still propoganda as it presumes a lost sale for every free client in use. I can't help counter-speculating about the business value of having your (then brand new) commercial RCS/SCM put to use by a software project with Linux's public profile.
But where did he show us the critical difference between an "OS" and a "platform"? And if it actually matters then what is it that could keep Linux from making that quantum leap?
I'm not buying this guy's argument at all because he's hardly trying to make it. He outlines a distinction that might support his thesis (an OS is not a "platform") and then talks his way near it without actually putting it to use.
The closest he seems to get is this: "An operating system is a rack into which device drivers and APIs are inserted. A platform is a rack into which applications are inserted." If we're to nod along with the cadence of his polemic we must assume that APIs like those provided by Windows are not analogous to those provided in GNOME and KDE, or that there is some other technical factor at play that Linux could never aquire which he doesn't mention.
Those who haven't read the article are perfect subjects for the following quiz:
"You can code with the tools of your choice and in the programming language of your choice......and everything you create will interoperate with everything others write...
Well, to have a little perspective, that question is answered in detail on the X Strike Force web page and even ends up on your hard drive under '/usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/FAQ.gz'.
Edit: Well, that's how I began this post before the parent got remodded with a bit of, uh... moderation.
IIRC, the ULV Pentium-M consumes 7 Watts and has a higher IPC than the G4. At 1.1 GHz it will outperform the G4 in computation and power consumption. The benchmarks I've seen rank flagship Dothans alongside A64 4000+ with an Achilles Heel only on applications that bottleneck on memory bandwith before anything else. They do this with a TDP of 25 Watts. The PM has already sounded a death knell for Transmeta (if it isn't dead already) and will kill off the P4 once Intel decides it can retire that beast quietly.
Everything I've been able to gather from official specs and anecdotal reports makes the grandparent's claim about battery life shaky at best.
Apple laptops are excellent. I'm posting this from one right now. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking they're hand crafted by geniuses too sublime for pedestrian consumers unworthy of membership in Apple's Magic Circle. They're built by the same ODM that makes lappies for IBM.
No doubt. I see no reason to limit the argument to practicality though. How about streamlining the (post-lilo/grub/yaboot) boot process just because it's the right thing to do? The pre-bootloader BIOS crap is really the hang up here, but once vmlinuz is unpacking itself do we have an excuse for not making it elegant? I was looking at the scripts supplied with Debian's dhcp3-client earlier tonight and noticed that they include conditionals for 2.2.x kernels. This sort of blunt robustness is strewn throughout the (SysV) init system (for admirable motivations), but at what point does making everything work unfailably become makinging everything work like spaghetti?
IIRC, Debian's X maintainers had two factors to consider when discussing the move to x.org. There is an impending release of the stable branch and x.org's future code base is migrating to an autotooled build system. It seemed likely that porting the current x.org "under" everything they've already wrapped around their last xfree snapshot would delay the release of Sarge until the autotooled x.org would be "just around the corner". So they could either rush two significant changes, or wait and do one major one after Sarge is out the door. In other words, it's logistics. X.org actually is already being worked on by a Debian maintainer, but it's the non-monolithic code that will be packaged in a more granular fashion.
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Bittorrent is a great idea and this might make it even better. Those of you who want the latest America's Army or *nix ISO stand up and clap. Those of you with hacked Steam clients that work under cedega, uh... could we talk on IRC?
Here's a link to an NPR show about Erdos and a few others with commentary by someone who worked with him for a spell. Apparently, some of his prolific output can be attributed to amphetamines.
That is the funniest one-liner I've read here all year.
This is the first time I've heard this notion and must confess that it makes sense. There is something Goldberg-esque about dropping deuterium pellets into a chamber and sniping them with lasers to make power. The other line of fusion reactor research I've heard of that uses magnetic bottles would be a more elegant solution -- like the difference between internal combustion and electric motors.
Hmmm, well now I'm doubly confused as LLNL already had the worlds most powerfull laser (SHIVA?) back in the late 70's or early 80's for the same type of fusion research NIF is ostensibly for. How does making it bigger change any of the principles involved?
Oh totally, I know...
He wasn't calling the A64 a power hog. He was saying they're more CPU than the rest of the computer (and it's user) knows what to do with.
No one has stood in line for "More American Graffiti", "The Ewok Adventure", "Ewoks", "Droids", "Ewoks: The Battle for Endor", "Captain EO", "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", "Indiana Jed", "Star Wars: Rebel Assault", "Radioland Murders", "Young Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Hawkmen", "Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock's Eye", "Star Wars: Yoda Stories", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: The Trenches of Hell", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Spring Break Adventure" (no doubt this one is underappreciated), "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Masks of Evil", "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Adventures in the Secret Service", "Star Wars: Obi-Wan", "R2-D2: Beneath the Dome", and "Star Wars: Clone Wars".
Lucas invites a certain type of derision because the difference between American Graffiti and Star Wars left us thinking he was versatile like Wilder or Speilberg, but he has the resume of an anonymous hack.
James M. Kilts has new plans.
Bullshit. They hate us because they don't want us stopping them from making Muslims submit to Wahabbism -- or at least what Wahabbists want for government.
Isn't it just to differentiate removable storage from other mountpoint types like NFS?
I suppose it's not revolutionary, but I think that screenshot showing a translucent mplayer window is pretty impressive. The story a while back showcasing Luminosity had a video demonstrating Xv stuff showing up in a pager. That was on a laptop with Intel integrated graphics. As it stands right now I can see the Xv colorkey on the inner edges of a xine window if I move it around too fast. That's on a Geforce.
Then they should put their money where their mouth is and compensate someone to maintain a value-added source tree that they're willing to stand behind.
If they have to spend extra time just to take out the bloat and re-QA - well, it's just gonna cost more to use Linux.
That's their problem, not OSDL's. If Linus wants to hardcode "Fuck You" into printk it's up to them to patch it out if they don't like it. If Redhat or SUSE think "screw this shit" and decide to fork a BSD then that's their perogative too. Perhaps, that would mean that, Torvalds, Morton, Cox, Viro, et al would end up with jobs that leave less time for Linux, but I don't think they would care about the loss of prestige for long. Those that could continue refining the kernel would.
And it's not like you can "roll your own" - you change the kernel, you have to re-certify or else you're running an unsupported config, son.
Re-certify with who? Any sort of stamp of approval in any field is founded on trust, whether it's Good Housekeeping or the Supreme Court. Being able to "roll your own" and stand behind it is the keystone of a Guarantee
It's all great but I just don't see how Gentoo, without h/w and s/w certifications, can replace enterprise distros and help solve this problem.
Huh? What "problem"? What's Gentoo got to do with anything? Greg K-H, the author of udev is a Gentoo developer and has space on kernel.org IIRC so why complain? Who said OSDL owes Gentoo Inc. a free kernel they can capitalize on without further effort? And why does it matter?
This guy Greenblatt is full of shit anyway. I don't see how sysfs, epoll, inotify, udev, "early user-space", the myriad new crypographic modules, and alternate "security models" diminish a server oriented *nix at all. Read Kernel Traffic and you may see a general trend towards pushing functionality out of the kernel into small programs that rely on more simplified interfaces. Look at the difference between devfs and udev. Check out how things changed when modutils gave way to module-init-tools. Ioctls are deprecated where they can be, and on the hotplug list there are speculators who wonder how hardcoded major-minor device numbering schemes can be retired. Check out Felix Von Leitner's benchmarks of epoll vs poll. Look at the way one can choose a scheduler. It's not hard to find interesting developments in post-2.4.x Linux have every thing to do with taking up where classical Unix left off and nothing to do with DirectX or iTunes.
IIRC, the claim was that the free client was costing $500,000 worth of revenue or some such thing, not that there had been a $500,000 donation to OSDL. The number is still propoganda as it presumes a lost sale for every free client in use. I can't help counter-speculating about the business value of having your (then brand new) commercial RCS/SCM put to use by a software project with Linux's public profile.
I'm not buying this guy's argument at all because he's hardly trying to make it. He outlines a distinction that might support his thesis (an OS is not a "platform") and then talks his way near it without actually putting it to use.
The closest he seems to get is this: "An operating system is a rack into which device drivers and APIs are inserted. A platform is a rack into which applications are inserted." If we're to nod along with the cadence of his polemic we must assume that APIs like those provided by Windows are not analogous to those provided in GNOME and KDE, or that there is some other technical factor at play that Linux could never aquire which he doesn't mention.
Those who haven't read the article are perfect subjects for the following quiz:
"You can code with the tools of your choice and in the programming language of your choice... ...and everything you create will interoperate with everything others write...
What operating system is he talking about?
I don't understand why you would think this is a bad thing.
Well, to have a little perspective, that question is answered in detail on the X Strike Force web page and even ends up on your hard drive under '/usr/share/doc/xfree86-common/FAQ.gz'.
Your observations make me pine for drive shaped more like a skyscraper than an Altoid tin with 50 1" platters on one long spindle.
Edit: Well, that's how I began this post before the parent got remodded with a bit of, uh... moderation.
IIRC, the ULV Pentium-M consumes 7 Watts and has a higher IPC than the G4. At 1.1 GHz it will outperform the G4 in computation and power consumption. The benchmarks I've seen rank flagship Dothans alongside A64 4000+ with an Achilles Heel only on applications that bottleneck on memory bandwith before anything else. They do this with a TDP of 25 Watts. The PM has already sounded a death knell for Transmeta (if it isn't dead already) and will kill off the P4 once Intel decides it can retire that beast quietly.
Everything I've been able to gather from official specs and anecdotal reports makes the grandparent's claim about battery life shaky at best.
Apple laptops are excellent. I'm posting this from one right now. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking they're hand crafted by geniuses too sublime for pedestrian consumers unworthy of membership in Apple's Magic Circle. They're built by the same ODM that makes lappies for IBM.
No doubt. I see no reason to limit the argument to practicality though. How about streamlining the (post-lilo/grub/yaboot) boot process just because it's the right thing to do? The pre-bootloader BIOS crap is really the hang up here, but once vmlinuz is unpacking itself do we have an excuse for not making it elegant? I was looking at the scripts supplied with Debian's dhcp3-client earlier tonight and noticed that they include conditionals for 2.2.x kernels. This sort of blunt robustness is strewn throughout the (SysV) init system (for admirable motivations), but at what point does making everything work unfailably become makinging everything work like spaghetti?
IIRC, Debian's X maintainers had two factors to consider when discussing the move to x.org. There is an impending release of the stable branch and x.org's future code base is migrating to an autotooled build system. It seemed likely that porting the current x.org "under" everything they've already wrapped around their last xfree snapshot would delay the release of Sarge until the autotooled x.org would be "just around the corner". So they could either rush two significant changes, or wait and do one major one after Sarge is out the door. In other words, it's logistics. X.org actually is already being worked on by a Debian maintainer, but it's the non-monolithic code that will be packaged in a more granular fashion.
IIRC, D3 was written in C++.
That's why it's such a shame that Graham's invitation was recinded. The article betrays none of the sins you've named.
It literally drives me up a wall.
Gerrit Pape's runit -- an enhanced, GPL'd workalike of DJB's daemontools might be worth a gander if you haven't noticed it already.