You have a nice graphics card and a nice monitor, and a Linux distro that is barely 2 weeks old.. I'm fairly sure it's going to work.
Try it with a GNR monitor (never heard of them? EXACTLY!) or a graphics card that is brand new with decent drivers either in the "few" or "proprietary" categories (nVidia or XGI for example) for X support.
A proposed solution would be to ditch all modes, stop guessing, and 800x600@60Hz it as and when you lose the ability to detect monitor capability reliably. This is what Windows does (it's actually part of the WHQL testing regime, all cards and modern monitors must support that exact mode in order to allow the fallback).
There are fixes, changes that could be made, but none of them are going to be part of a distro for a long long time..
Yes, for those people who are cheap-asses who buy graphics cards and 3rd-rate Korean TFTs with absolutely dire or broken DDC support.
It should be noted that X.org balks particularly well on these too, and the framebuffer drivers don't even check to see if a mode is available before blindly switching to it.
Parody is one thing, but.. this isn't parody, it's just sniping.
"But it will also mean that information contained in the British cards can be accessed across the Atlantic"
Uhh.. so why is that a "but"? If it means I have to carry one card instead of two. If it means I can fly through customs and not be hassled. I guess it would REALLY suck if you were wanted by the police or intelligence services in the UK and all US customs had to do was scan your card.
But hey that's not me. And why would anyone think it was a problem?:)
I'm not sure how they'd do it with biometrics but there must be a fairly reliable way to link some biometric data (iris pattern, fingerprint, DNA sequence?:) to a cryptographic key.
Said cryptographic key can then be used to decode the music or movie. With smartcards this works REALLY well and is the BEST authentication because there really is only one smartcard for you, and you had to plug it into the system to get logged in to even read the filesystem with your music on.
Getting everyone to buy a $60 smartcard reader, a $10 card, get it written with their data etc. and so on is probably a little much. This is why I like the idea of biometrics; IBM are doing it, Microsoft sell two keyboards with fingerprint pads on them. It's taking off in a way that smartcards aren't, because you don't need anything except the device (which comes with an essential component of your PC) and your index finger.
Therefore I guess.. imagine you have iTunes. At the moment it uses your Apple ID to authenticate 6 machines. Forget that - let's use your Apple ID to store the cryptographic key which can be retrieved on ANY NUMBER of machines as long as you ask for it biometrically?
That makes the DRM less intrusive to use and therefore more acceptable, and at the same time a thousand times more reliable unless people start chopping fingers off.
The extra features it provides (the user interface) are used by the game. So for the constant 20MB being sucked away from your machine, each game doesn't need to load 20MB of custom user interface code full of it's own unique bugs (it just inherits Steam's - and whatever skin you applied).
Steam's GUI is used as part of the Source Engine, basically.
By the way if you can think of better DRM I am sure Valve would love to hear it. There is nothing as reliable as handshaking with an internet server, besides of course requiring physical media in the drive. Since you can always get NoCD patches these days, even that isn't reliable.
About the only reasonable way to DRM software is going to be biometrics (nobody is going to be stealing your iris or left pinky) or smartcards and the public key cryptography that implies. Someone could steal your smartcard but that is not any less blockable and reissuable than a CD key..
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have ways of getting you to develop for their console - all of which include some kind of "developer console". The black original Playstation, Microsoft's big XNA kit, Nintendo's "Dolphin" boxes etc. with Codewarrior, DivX, Musyx with Dolby licenses and so on. and all this stuff costs hundreds of thousands of dollars BEFORE you start coding the game on it.
Maybe Nintendo are going to drop the price of entry into the console market? Given the easier production of their new media (DVD + DRM) compared to cartridges and so on, perhaps they will lower the licensing/production fees too, and the VERY strange system of forcing developers to predict sales, and pay Nintendo for every copy unsold.
After everyone finishes watching Revenge of the Sith, go watch Shattered Glass. Hayden Christiansen does a great job in it, and it's a great movie (and true story/book too..)
Hmm. The documentation on their website says they still run Terminal Server.
How did they get around the licensing there? It soaks a license for every MAC address accessing the server. If you have 1000 thin clients running Linux and an RDP client, you still need 1000 licenses. While a little cheaper than a whole copy of Windows, it's not MUCH cheaper.
In the days of DOS, it was easy to give kids a shell prompt, tell them to run TurboPascal and teach them some rudimentary programming, even if it's an infinite loop of "Mr. Dennet is gay!" and so on.
Nowadays if you give a 14 year old a shell prompt and say "hey run pico and then quit it, and here is how you compile the app, and here is how to write Makefiles.." then I think you are going to get a "what the fuck?" response.
Way too far at that age.
At A-level grade, you can start doing that kind of crap, but it's still less desirable than a full GUI solution; perhaps schools will have to start buying Codewarrior in order to get the IDE (easy fix), or perhaps each individual school will need to investigate, validate and construct a lesson plan around a specific version of Eclipse, KDevelop or so on.
The idea would be to teach them on how to develop applications (theory to practise) rather than how to step around a development environment. Be it KDevelop or a shell with GCC, that is the choice of the teacher at the time, but the emphasis should be I think on getting them past the esoteric features of what environment they are in (because no doubt at Uni it will be different, or even in a job it will be different) and get the fundamentals of software development down.
I've watched and worked with people who have learned to use a compiler expertly before they learned the project lifecycle or how to do adequate testing and so on. The less time they are dicking with the specifics of compiling, the more they can learn this. This applies equally so to the teachers in their lesson plans as it does to the students. I hope schools DON'T ditch Windows until they are sure it isn't going to produce 3-5 years of complete idiots because of an in-progress restructuring of the lesson plans. Using your students as your guinea pigs is bad.
They may save 24% per PC, but do they save that 24% on every technician and IT manager, CS lecturer etc.? As far as I know they teach programming in schools on Windows because it's an easy environment (VisualBasic and so on) to introduce kids to it. And it's useful in the real world, still. Did the consider the effect of having to reimplement every lesson plan around a new OS and new applications which may be wholly different? The trouble of having 3 years somewhere with 3 different groups of kids all on a different OS, application, and curriculum?
It looks to me (having BEEN that technician and IT manager at a school, and had to discuss lesson plans with teachers) that this 24% saved is going to be spent for the first 5 years in finding suitable replacements for Windows, and not on saving money at all.
Nice to see Tux is still developed, but these days does it do much more than khttpd now in the kernel?
The content acceleration on 2K3 seems to work with dynamic content too and they SEEM to have some pretty decent caching (a bit like how we're stuck with Turck or Zend). All of this is stuff you need to go out and get on Linux, but just check a checkbox on 2K3 if it's not enabled by default. This is probably inflating the benchmarks a LOT on the 2K3 side too.
2003 has kernel-level webserver acceleration and offloads a lot of the processing there, the same was as the Tux webserver (also RedHat?) beat the shit out of Apache. It's essentially zero-copy-networking with zero-copy-webserving too.
There may be some truth in it, therefore. Aren't there some patches these days to hook Apache directly into the Linux kernel too, since Tux is obselete? I doubt they ship with RedHat's stock system though even if they exist.
What you just said isn't what the OpenRAW site says at all.
Basically;
Most cameras output TIFF if they are not too whacked out.
DNG is just TIFF with some extra chunks and explanations of what should BE in those chunks etc.
The goal would be to have camera manufacturers support DNG direct from the camera side of the equation the same way they standardise on JPEG or MJPEG/MPEG4 for movies.
The OpenRAW site STINKS of a bunch of opensource hippies seeing a hole that doesn't exist, and frantically looking for sand to fill it. Hole got dug by camera manufacturers YEARS ago, Adobe already filled the hole, what these guys see is just a dark patch of sand which will be gone tomorrow and make their efforts redundant (yet again).
Instead of OpenRAW, why not a "DNG Appreciation Society", where everyone can contribute to badgering camera manufacturers into supporting this great new file format?
I understand that there is a need for PAST raw camera formats to be documented for interoperability, but we should force the camera manufacturers by sheer weight of public/customer need/opinion to use DNG first, and possibly provide their own "RAW to DNG" converters. If Nikon makes a Nikon-DCX-to-DNG converter, who really gives a shit anymore?
I find it stupid that there is a website crying out for open raw format documentation, as if it didn't exist, when uhh.. Adobe took an already Open image format, which is already well used for RAW images anyway, and added "standardised" versions of those extra TIFF chunks, so that nobody needs to add proprietary ones anymore.
Adobe have a LOVELY website with full documentation of the format, reasons why they did it, code, tools and so on.
What is OpenRAW going to do? Make another standard RAW format? What, really, is the point?
We're having the same kind of switchovers in the UK of course. Now that you can get a "special converter box" for less than $60, and get all the free to air channels with very little hassle at all, is it really a worry that the analog signal will fade off overnight, considering how easy and cheap it is to get the new technology?
They could always delay it by a year, and make it not New Years 2006 but December 31st 2006, and use the time this year and next to really really push it. The BBC and partners did wonders in the last two years with digital uptake - especially considering that in the last two years they had article after article dissing the switch-off, saying that millions would be without television and the world would end; the UK date of 2007 doesn't seem a problem around here at all anymore for anyone involved.
What I wonder is; the BBC obviously plugs ad advert for digital TV in between most programmes it cares to, what entity in the USA would have to take up this challenge? Does the FCC get free ad space on FOX affiliates?:)
Some of these "designers" should look at what nearly destroyed the BBC a couple years back, concerning "design" of important documents to make them stand out to officials and/or the public.
Maybe some effort should be made in explaining terrorist threats to politicians, rather than writing 1000-page dossiers, short-feed snippets like you'd get in a magazine. Having people talk to people is much more likely to get the point home than a bit of paper which can be whisked from INBOX to TRASHCAN.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a nice graphics card and a nice monitor, and a Linux distro that is
barely 2 weeks old.. I'm fairly sure it's going to work.
Try it with a GNR monitor (never heard of them? EXACTLY!) or a graphics card
that is brand new with decent drivers either in the "few" or "proprietary"
categories (nVidia or XGI for example) for X support.
A proposed solution would be to ditch all modes, stop guessing, and 800x600@60Hz
it as and when you lose the ability to detect monitor capability reliably. This is
what Windows does (it's actually part of the WHQL testing regime, all cards and
modern monitors must support that exact mode in order to allow the fallback).
There are fixes, changes that could be made, but none of them are going to be
part of a distro for a long long time..
Yes, for those people who are cheap-asses who buy graphics cards and 3rd-rate Korean TFTs with absolutely dire or broken DDC support.
It should be noted that X.org balks particularly well on these too, and the
framebuffer drivers don't even check to see if a mode is available before
blindly switching to it.
Parody is one thing, but.. this isn't parody, it's just sniping.
"But it will also mean that information contained in the British cards can be accessed across the Atlantic"
:)
Uhh.. so why is that a "but"? If it means I have to carry one card instead of
two. If it means I can fly through customs and not be hassled. I guess it would
REALLY suck if you were wanted by the police or intelligence services in the UK
and all US customs had to do was scan your card.
But hey that's not me. And why would anyone think it was a problem?
Does it come with Doc Ock-style robot arms to control the fusion?
32, 32bit integer or 64bit integer
32, 64bit floating point
32, 128bit vector
More than AMD64, basically.
Did they finish anything useful before the tree hit?
I'm not sure how they'd do it with biometrics but there must be a fairly
reliable way to link some biometric data (iris pattern, fingerprint, DNA
sequence?
Said cryptographic key can then be used to decode the music or movie. With
smartcards this works REALLY well and is the BEST authentication because
there really is only one smartcard for you, and you had to plug it into the
system to get logged in to even read the filesystem with your music on.
Getting everyone to buy a $60 smartcard reader, a $10 card, get it written
with their data etc. and so on is probably a little much. This is why I like
the idea of biometrics; IBM are doing it, Microsoft sell two keyboards with
fingerprint pads on them. It's taking off in a way that smartcards aren't,
because you don't need anything except the device (which comes with an
essential component of your PC) and your index finger.
Therefore I guess.. imagine you have iTunes. At the moment it uses your
Apple ID to authenticate 6 machines. Forget that - let's use your Apple ID
to store the cryptographic key which can be retrieved on ANY NUMBER of
machines as long as you ask for it biometrically?
That makes the DRM less intrusive to use and therefore more acceptable, and
at the same time a thousand times more reliable unless people start chopping
fingers off.
The extra features it provides (the user interface) are used by the game. So for
the constant 20MB being sucked away from your machine, each game doesn't need to
load 20MB of custom user interface code full of it's own unique bugs (it just
inherits Steam's - and whatever skin you applied).
Steam's GUI is used as part of the Source Engine, basically.
By the way if you can think of better DRM I am sure Valve would love to hear it.
There is nothing as reliable as handshaking with an internet server, besides of
course requiring physical media in the drive. Since you can always get NoCD
patches these days, even that isn't reliable.
About the only reasonable way to DRM software is going to be biometrics (nobody
is going to be stealing your iris or left pinky) or smartcards and the public key
cryptography that implies. Someone could steal your smartcard but that is not any
less blockable and reissuable than a CD key..
Neko
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all have ways of getting you to develop for their
console - all of which include some kind of "developer console". The black
original Playstation, Microsoft's big XNA kit, Nintendo's "Dolphin" boxes etc.
with Codewarrior, DivX, Musyx with Dolby licenses and so on. and all this stuff
costs hundreds of thousands of dollars BEFORE you start coding the game on it.
Maybe Nintendo are going to drop the price of entry into the console market? Given
the easier production of their new media (DVD + DRM) compared to cartridges and
so on, perhaps they will lower the licensing/production fees too, and the VERY
strange system of forcing developers to predict sales, and pay Nintendo for every
copy unsold.
After everyone finishes watching Revenge of the Sith, go watch Shattered Glass.
Hayden Christiansen does a great job in it, and it's a great movie (and true
story/book too..)
Hmm. The documentation on their website says they still run Terminal Server.
How did they get around the licensing there? It soaks a license for every MAC
address accessing the server. If you have 1000 thin clients running Linux and an
RDP client, you still need 1000 licenses. While a little cheaper than a whole copy
of Windows, it's not MUCH cheaper.
Neko
Thanks for the info.
I do feel sorry for the technician. How did this affect teaching?
Neko
This is not as easy as it sounds
In the days of DOS, it was easy to give kids a shell prompt, tell them to run
TurboPascal and teach them some rudimentary programming, even if it's an infinite
loop of "Mr. Dennet is gay!" and so on.
Nowadays if you give a 14 year old a shell prompt and say "hey run pico and
then quit it, and here is how you compile the app, and here is how to write
Makefiles.." then I think you are going to get a "what the fuck?" response.
Way too far at that age.
At A-level grade, you can start doing that kind of crap, but it's still less
desirable than a full GUI solution; perhaps schools will have to start buying
Codewarrior in order to get the IDE (easy fix), or perhaps each individual school
will need to investigate, validate and construct a lesson plan around a specific
version of Eclipse, KDevelop or so on.
The idea would be to teach them on how to develop applications (theory to
practise) rather than how to step around a development environment. Be it
KDevelop or a shell with GCC, that is the choice of the teacher at the time, but
the emphasis should be I think on getting them past the esoteric features of what
environment they are in (because no doubt at Uni it will be different, or even in
a job it will be different) and get the fundamentals of software development
down.
I've watched and worked with people who have learned to use a compiler expertly
before they learned the project lifecycle or how to do adequate testing and so
on. The less time they are dicking with the specifics of compiling, the more they
can learn this. This applies equally so to the teachers in their lesson plans as
it does to the students. I hope schools DON'T ditch Windows until they are sure
it isn't going to produce 3-5 years of complete idiots because of an in-progress
restructuring of the lesson plans. Using your students as your guinea pigs is bad.
Neko
They may save 24% per PC, but do they save that 24% on every technician and IT
manager, CS lecturer etc.? As far as I know they teach programming in schools on
Windows because it's an easy environment (VisualBasic and so on) to introduce
kids to it. And it's useful in the real world, still. Did the consider the effect
of having to reimplement every lesson plan around a new OS and new applications
which may be wholly different? The trouble of having 3 years somewhere with 3
different groups of kids all on a different OS, application, and curriculum?
It looks to me (having BEEN that technician and IT manager at a school, and had
to discuss lesson plans with teachers) that this 24% saved is going to be spent
for the first 5 years in finding suitable replacements for Windows, and not on
saving money at all.
Nice to see Tux is still developed, but these days does it do much more than
khttpd now in the kernel?
The content acceleration on 2K3 seems to work with dynamic content too and they
SEEM to have some pretty decent caching (a bit like how we're stuck with Turck
or Zend). All of this is stuff you need to go out and get on Linux, but just
check a checkbox on 2K3 if it's not enabled by default. This is probably
inflating the benchmarks a LOT on the 2K3 side too.
Neko
Looks like it'll go really well next to an iMac :)
Neko
2003 has kernel-level webserver acceleration and offloads a lot of the processing
there, the same was as the Tux webserver (also RedHat?) beat the shit out of
Apache. It's essentially zero-copy-networking with zero-copy-webserving too.
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.asp
There may be some truth in it, therefore. Aren't there some patches these days to
hook Apache directly into the Linux kernel too, since Tux is obselete? I doubt
they ship with RedHat's stock system though even if they exist.
Well, at least we know what to expect of Star Trek on TV for the forseeable
future.
Neko
What you just said isn't what the OpenRAW site says at all.
Basically;
Most cameras output TIFF if they are not too whacked out.
DNG is just TIFF with some extra chunks and explanations of what should BE in
those chunks etc.
The goal would be to have camera manufacturers support DNG direct from the camera side of the equation the same way they standardise on JPEG or MJPEG/MPEG4 for movies.
The OpenRAW site STINKS of a bunch of opensource hippies seeing a hole that doesn't exist, and frantically looking for sand to fill it. Hole got dug by camera manufacturers YEARS ago, Adobe already filled the hole, what these guys see is just a dark patch of sand which will be gone tomorrow and make their efforts redundant (yet again).
Instead of OpenRAW, why not a "DNG Appreciation Society", where everyone can
contribute to badgering camera manufacturers into supporting this great new file format?
I understand that there is a need for PAST raw camera formats to be documented for interoperability, but we should force the camera manufacturers by sheer weight of public/customer need/opinion to use DNG first, and possibly provide their own "RAW to DNG" converters. If Nikon makes a Nikon-DCX-to-DNG converter, who really gives a shit anymore?
I find it stupid that there is a website crying out for open raw format documentation, as if it didn't exist, when uhh.. Adobe took an already Open image format, which is already well used for RAW images anyway, and added "standardised" versions of those extra TIFF chunks, so that nobody needs to add proprietary ones anymore.
Adobe have a LOVELY website with full documentation of the format, reasons why they did it, code, tools and so on.
What is OpenRAW going to do? Make another standard RAW format? What, really, is the point?
Already did this with DNG. It's derived from TIFF and works fine.
Why is everyone duplicating effort? Just to be "more open"? Jesus jesus jesus..
I suck. I meant extend to 2007 like the UK. Not to extend to the end of 2006
(which was the date all along..)
We're having the same kind of switchovers in the UK of course. Now that you
can get a "special converter box" for less than $60, and get all the free
to air channels with very little hassle at all, is it really a worry that
the analog signal will fade off overnight, considering how easy and cheap
it is to get the new technology?
They could always delay it by a year, and make it not New Years 2006 but
December 31st 2006, and use the time this year and next to really really
push it. The BBC and partners did wonders in the last two years with
digital uptake - especially considering that in the last two years they
had article after article dissing the switch-off, saying that millions
would be without television and the world would end; the UK date of 2007
doesn't seem a problem around here at all anymore for anyone involved.
What I wonder is; the BBC obviously plugs ad advert for digital TV in
between most programmes it cares to, what entity in the USA would have
to take up this challenge? Does the FCC get free ad space on FOX affiliates?
Neko
Some of these "designers" should look at what nearly destroyed the BBC
a couple years back, concerning "design" of important documents to make
them stand out to officials and/or the public.
Maybe some effort should be made in explaining terrorist threats to
politicians, rather than writing 1000-page dossiers, short-feed snippets
like you'd get in a magazine. Having people talk to people is much more
likely to get the point home than a bit of paper which can be whisked
from INBOX to TRASHCAN.
I meant in federal law..