Audio degradation is insignificant if you rip back at a high bit rate.
OK, if you don't mind using two or three times more disk space.
Hardly any time is wasted. CD-RW's can be burned and ripped while you're doing something else.
Also a good point, although the time is certainly > 0. You have to arrange the songs into disk-length sets, unwrap the CD, insert the CD, etc.
No plastic is wasted, CD-RW's are reusable, supposedly thousands of times.
CD-RWs are a good idea. I gave up on them after I had several in a row fail after one use, but maybe my experience is atypical.
The metadata (song title, album title, genre, etc.) isn't lost in the burn/re-rip cycle. iTunes stores the data on the CD somehow.
Cool; I didn't know this, and it was the main thing stopping me from using this method. Thanks. They probably store a CD-TEXT block like the ones that cdrdao can read and write. I'll have to test that.
You have to admit, though, that even after you set straight the accidental FUD in my previous comment, Hymn is a "better" method: smaller files, no plastic waste at all, less time, zero audio degredation. And it's not like Apple will ever win the arms race against hymn and make it completely useless.
I still say the best way to de-DRM iTunes purchases is to burn then to an Audio CD-RW, then rip back as MP3s. Grab the album art from WalMart.com and you're all set.
Hmmm...
If you don't notice the significant audio degredation from decoding a lossy format and then re-encoding with a different lossy format
... and if you don't mind spending all the time to burn those CDs
... not to mention wasting all that money and plastic
... and re-typing all of the track metadata when you rip from your custom-burned CD
... then maybe that is the best way. The rest of us will continue to try for something simpler and higher-quality.
Have you ever met Jesus Christ? No? How about one of those true believers who "can drink deadly poison and it will not hurt them at all"? (Mark 16:18) What's the difference, then?
Two diffferences spring to mind:
1) Jesus Christ is (roughly) the founder or basis of Christianity. It is not necessary to meet him in person in order to become Christian. Neither is it necessary to meet Mohammed to become Muslim or Buddha to become Buddhist. What you're missing is the concept of a lineage -- a chain of teacher-student transmission which maintains a tradition. The Jedi very clearly have this.
2) The Jedi were not based on Christians. The fact that a Christian may experience miracles or demonstrate miracle powers (with or without a valid lineage back to Jesus Christ) is not relevant because the Jedi were based on Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Asian martial arts where a lineage is important. Further, someone who spontaneously demonstrates Jedi-like powers is just that: Jedi-like. To be an actual Jedi one must train under a Jedi Master and pass a test administered by the Jedi Council. Good luck finding either one in meatspace.
Actually, as I have mentioned before, Jedi is no longer a religion, its an infection of little bugs inside you that make you have pre-cognition, according to the holy videos of EPI.
Good point. And how many of us in meatspace have midichlorians?
But Midichlorians are a side issue anyway. Anakin wasn't a Jedi at birth -- just a guy with pre-cognition and fast reflexes. Jedis are trained, not born.
OK, I'm late enough that probably no one will see this comment, let alone mod it up, but what the heck...
In the Star Wars movies, the method for becoming a Jedi was to meet one and train under him (or her?). How does anyone outside of the movies do this? Have you ever met an actual Jedi Master?
I am both a disciple and a teacher in one of the traditions Lucas imitated when he wrote ANH. For the record, Kadampa Buddhism, which was practiced in Tibet until recently. If someone comes up to me and tells me they are a Kadampa, but they have never met a Kadampa before and have never received teachings directly, I know they are mistaken. This is a tradition that must be passed on person-to-person. I always thought Jedi was too.
Or maybe I'm just taking this way too seriously...
The Andrew File System though is pretty good apert from the fact that it depends on DCE, it is certainly much better than NFS in all respects.
AFS does not depend on DCE - it depends on a hacked version of kerberos IV.
It is better than NFS in most respects, but not all:
Its ACLs are confusing because the UNIX mode bits are still visible, but meaningless, and only directories have ACLs.
Local cache is great, and generally better than NFS, but it gets swamped by very large files (>1 Gig).
integrating AFS into a normal UNIX environment can be tricky, especially because of the relatively limited number of platforms supported. Hopefully this will start to change.
I've heard that this also differs between Canadanian and US usage. The context I heard it in referred to bands. While an American would say "Aerosmith is..." Canadian would "Aerosmith are...". Can anyone verify this?
You're thinking of the Brits. They say things like "the crowd are loving it" whenever the subject noun in question is clearly a collection of things, the way a crowd is a collection of people. Aerosmith is also a collection of people.
Honda has that new car (the Prius?) that gets ~60-70 MPG, and Toyota is going to start shipping a similar car.
Actually, the Prius is from Toyota, and Honda is soon coming out with a similar one.
The prius is really cool. It's got a small gas combustion engine (~50 h.p.) and a small electric motor (again, ~50 h.p.), which I believe runs on a fuel cell. The two work together. Then they did all kinds of stuff to make the car more efficient. They even designed special brakes which generate electricity as you slow the car down. I want one.
"What is the reason for limiting the number of TLD's?"
A better question is, `what is the reason for having suffixes on TLDs?', and the answer might be that it allows different entities wanting the same name for different reasons to have that same name.
"It seems to me it'd be just as well to allow any organization to register a single TLD as their own."
It sounds like you mean, `drop the suffixes' (unless a full name of just "ibm" would be illegal).
I think that the suffixes on domain-names are akin to suffixes or prefixes on file-names (they're an easy way to have and differentiate between several files with the same name but different types).
Just as the groupings of IP addresses in to Class A, Class B, and Class C simplified the job of routers quite considerably, I believe that splitting up the namespace into a relatively small number of TLDs simplified the job of the root name servers quite a bit. Somebody has to maintain an SOA record for each TLD at the root (the nothingness following final dot usually left off of domain names) and having tons of TLDs would significantly complicate this job. Splitting it into.com,.org, and so on helps a little.
Of course, the whole system was set up in the early eighties, when the face of the net was quite different. You didn't have the kind of abuses of the name system that you have today, like Micro$oft buying microsoft.org, and you also had the root nameservers running on what by todays standards was really lame hardware (in terms of power, not reliability). So the splitting really accomplished something, and the lack of computing resources on the root servers meant that it was necessary.
Not that I know any of this as fact - I'm just speculating. But it's speculation based on two years of running a couple of DNS servers.
"Almost all the symbolism was taken from Christianity, with Neo representing a "Christ" figure."
Interesting that different people can see different things in a movie. The Matrix was chock-full of Buddhist symbolism, including some very high Tantric stuff near the end. The whole world being generated in people's minds is a close approximation of the Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness; Neo's awakening after death is closely analagous to enlightenment. The death itself was not death, but the mind of "Black Near-Attainment", which does occur at death but also occurs just before enlightenment (the Tibetan Book of the Dead is probably one source on this, although my source is a qualified oral lineage).
Ever wonder why they dropped that bomb when they were going up the elevator shaft? Everyone in the lobby was already dead. The elevator shaft is the central channel, and the explosion is igniting the Fire of Tummo as they go up.
I could go on and on... this movie was a big hit among Tibetan Buddhists. One of the Centers in our tradition even did a mini-course based on it.
So anyway, the symbolism seems to be a mixture of a lot of things, since such different traditions and Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism (Mahayana/Vajrayana) both see tons of symbolism in it.
In case people are confused about how others use dates in the serial number, it's just a little trick sys admins use so they can see when someone last updated the zone.. generally people use the YYYYMMDDR thing like it said.. the R is the number of times in the day that the zone file was updated. the only thing about doing this is that if you put '10' in R and then the next day you start at 1 again, the number will be smaller than the previous day, e.g. 1999032710 and 199903281.
Yeah, we use that scheme here, and I like it a lot. But you can actually use two digits for the increment, which gets around the problem you mention. That's what we do - YYYYMMDDRR. But then again, I've never seen RR get above 05.
His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.
After two years of intensive study in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, I can speak to this with authority.
It is absolutely not true that Buddha Shakyamuni denounced rationality. All of the sutras appeal to logic and reason. If you ever study Buddhism in the Tibetan lineage, you will discover that the Sutra path is a very logical and reasonable one. Also take a look at the debates on emptiness between that Madhyamaka-Prasangaka school and the Chittamatrin school.
Now, Tantra is a different matter, and Zen seems to be very anti-reason (from my distant vantage point). But Zen does not represent all of Buddhism accurately, nor does Tantra, which is to be practiced only with a strong Sutra foundation.
This is what John Gilmore and the FSF did with the specs for their DES-cracking machine. They can't export the specs electronically because of munitions controls, but they can export a book because blocking a book would be censorship.
Great loophole. I saw John speak at last year's RSA conference, and you should have seen the look of triumph on his face when he explained that not only did they publish the specs in a book, but they used a machine-readable font, put checksums on every line, and wrote "Scan this book!" on the cover!
The book is _Cracking DES_ from O'Reilly: http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes/
This reply is a little late (I saw the comment in Meta-moderation), but here goes...
I'm a practicing Buddhist in a Tibetan lineage. From our perspective, you most certainly can "sin" (not our word) on a computer, but it takes some discernment to figure out when. According to our teachings, the main determinants of how negative a negative action is are your motivation, the way you carry it out (premeditated vs. spontaneous, slow and painful vs. quick and merciful, etc.), and whether the object of the action is sentient.
So, killing a process is not killing, because processes don't actually possess mind in the Buddhist sense. But, if there were a sentient being in a computer (like Jane in Orson Scott Card's _Ender_ series) then killing that being *would* be killing.
Viewing porn on the internet is morally no different from viewing porn in a magazine.
We don't really have an equivalent to "taking the Lord's name in vain", but my sense is that whatever you say in an xterm is speech just as much as it would be in handwriting on paper. If a shell script says something for you a thousand times, you'd have to check your motivation and see whether you really had the mental action of generating that word 1000 times or if you mentally generated the word once and had the shell script do the multiplying. Probably #2, if most people's brains are wired like mine.
Just thought the Buddhist perspective might be interesting and helpful.
BTW, most of the stuff in "Jesux" is just silly, IMHO. Renaming "kill" and "daemon"? No encryption? Come on, go a little below surface labels with your morality. Sheesh.
I'm a sysadmin for a site which uses AFS, so let me provide some details here
AFS servers divide up the filespace into "volumes" which are placed a mount points in the AFS tree in a way very similar to the was filesystems are mounted under UNIX. Generally you store a whole bunch of volumes on one partition of a server.
One sticky point here is that AFS might require separate partitions for its volumes. In other words, you may not be able to store AFS volumes on partitions which store other stuff. That's certainly our setup here - separate partitions for the AFS volumes. I've never checked whether it's required, and I wans't around when these servers were built. (Email me if you want to know how building their replacements goes next month.) If you do have to have separate partitions, then it defeats the poster's purpose.
Some pluses about AFS as a distributed system:
volumes can be replicated on several servers. you have one master read-write volume, and then "release" copies of it to the read-only volumes on other servers. Then, if one server goes down most of your volumes are still accessible, at least in read-only mode. This is mainly useful for installed software, which is fairly static. Dynamic stuff like user directories is hard to replicate because the release process is slow.
AFS Access Control Lists (ACLs) are much more flexible than UNIX permissions, once you get used to them. Not a big seller on the home front, where you probably only have a few users and have some personal trust built up.
yet another point that more attractive to a department with a budget than to a home user: TransArc just restructured their licensing system to make the number of AFS usernames the main factor in cost, rather than the number of clients or servers. But again, a home user probably won't even like the baseline cost.
If you're interested in playing with AFS, there are demos available at the website. You might also talk to the licensing department about whether they'll cut you a nice deal as a very-small site. But mainly I think AFS is much nicer for a University or Corporation doing things on a medium-to-large scale than for a home user with 1-10 boxes.
BTW, one tip for people stting up AFS cells: the user "system:anyuser" is everyone in the whole world. If your servers are connected to the internet, anyone can cd into your AFS space unauthenticated, unless you lock out system:anyuser in your ACLs.
The EFF did this with Deep Crack (the machine that broke the DES record a while back). They published a book with complete specs, in a machine-readable font, with checksums on each line, and on the cover it says, "Scan this book!"
I saw John Gilmore's talk at the RSA conference in January. He said the loophole is that they can ban software exports as munitions, but banning a book would be censorship.
So yeah, print the diffs, but use a good OCR font and give each line a checksum.
Sendmail supported non-relaying in 8.8, too, as long as you were willing to hack it in. There were plenty of web pages with directions, so it wasn't that hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Audio degradation is insignificant if you rip back at a high bit rate.
OK, if you don't mind using two or three times more disk space.
Hardly any time is wasted. CD-RW's can be burned and ripped while you're doing something else.
Also a good point, although the time is certainly > 0. You have to arrange the songs into disk-length sets, unwrap the CD, insert the CD, etc.
No plastic is wasted, CD-RW's are reusable, supposedly thousands of times.
CD-RWs are a good idea. I gave up on them after I had several in a row fail after one use, but maybe my experience is atypical.
The metadata (song title, album title, genre, etc.) isn't lost in the burn/re-rip cycle. iTunes stores the data on the CD somehow.
Cool; I didn't know this, and it was the main thing stopping me from using this method. Thanks. They probably store a CD-TEXT block like the ones that cdrdao can read and write. I'll have to test that.
You have to admit, though, that even after you set straight the accidental FUD in my previous comment, Hymn is a "better" method: smaller files, no plastic waste at all, less time, zero audio degredation. And it's not like Apple will ever win the arms race against hymn and make it completely useless.
Thanks for setting me straight, though.
W
Hmmm
If you don't notice the significant audio degredation from decoding a lossy format and then re-encoding with a different lossy format
W
Have you ever met Jesus Christ? No? How about one of those true believers who "can drink deadly poison and it will not hurt them at all"? (Mark 16:18) What's the difference, then?
Two diffferences spring to mind:
1) Jesus Christ is (roughly) the founder or basis of Christianity. It is not necessary to meet him in person in order to become Christian. Neither is it necessary to meet Mohammed to become Muslim or Buddha to become Buddhist. What you're missing is the concept of a lineage -- a chain of teacher-student transmission which maintains a tradition. The Jedi very clearly have this.
2) The Jedi were not based on Christians. The fact that a Christian may experience miracles or demonstrate miracle powers (with or without a valid lineage back to Jesus Christ) is not relevant because the Jedi were based on Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Asian martial arts where a lineage is important. Further, someone who spontaneously demonstrates Jedi-like powers is just that: Jedi-like. To be an actual Jedi one must train under a Jedi Master and pass a test administered by the Jedi Council. Good luck finding either one in meatspace.
Regards,
Wangden
Actually, as I have mentioned before, Jedi is no longer a religion, its an infection of little bugs inside you that make you have pre-cognition, according to the holy videos of EPI.
Good point. And how many of us in meatspace have midichlorians?
But Midichlorians are a side issue anyway. Anakin wasn't a Jedi at birth -- just a guy with pre-cognition and fast reflexes. Jedis are trained, not born.
Wangden
OK, I'm late enough that probably no one will see this comment, let alone mod it up, but what the heck ...
...
In the Star Wars movies, the method for becoming a Jedi was to meet one and train under him (or her?). How does anyone outside of the movies do this? Have you ever met an actual Jedi Master?
I am both a disciple and a teacher in one of the traditions Lucas imitated when he wrote ANH. For the record, Kadampa Buddhism, which was practiced in Tibet until recently. If someone comes up to me and tells me they are a Kadampa, but they have never met a Kadampa before and have never received teachings directly, I know they are mistaken. This is a tradition that must be passed on person-to-person. I always thought Jedi was too.
Or maybe I'm just taking this way too seriously
Wangden
Keep an eye on www.openafs.org. This is where the real action will be happening on this project, not at the ibm.com site.
Wangden
The Andrew File System though is pretty good apert from the fact that it depends on DCE, it is certainly much better than NFS in all respects.
AFS does not depend on DCE - it depends on a hacked version of kerberos IV.
It is better than NFS in most respects, but not all:
Wangden
an AFS sysadmin for 2+ years
I've heard that this also differs between Canadanian and US usage. The context I heard it in referred to bands. While an American would say "Aerosmith is..." Canadian would "Aerosmith are...". Can anyone verify this?
You're thinking of the Brits. They say things like "the crowd are loving it" whenever the subject noun in question is clearly a collection of things, the way a crowd is a collection of people. Aerosmith is also a collection of people.
Personally, I find that usage quite amusing.
Wangden
Honda has that new car (the Prius?) that gets ~60-70 MPG, and Toyota is going to start shipping a similar car.
Actually, the Prius is from Toyota, and Honda is soon coming out with a similar one.
The prius is really cool. It's got a small gas combustion engine (~50 h.p.) and a small electric motor (again, ~50 h.p.), which I believe runs on a fuel cell. The two work together. Then they did all kinds of stuff to make the car more efficient. They even designed special brakes which generate electricity as you slow the car down. I want one.
You can read more about it at prius.toyota.com.
Wangden"What is the reason for limiting the number of TLD's?"
.com, .org, and so on helps a little.
A better question is, `what is the reason for having suffixes on TLDs?', and the answer might be that it allows different entities wanting the same name for different reasons to have that same name.
"It seems to me it'd be just as well to allow any organization to register a single TLD as their own."
It sounds like you mean, `drop the suffixes' (unless a full name of just "ibm" would be illegal).
I think that the suffixes on domain-names are akin to suffixes or prefixes on file-names (they're an easy way to have and differentiate between several files with the same name but different types).
Just as the groupings of IP addresses in to Class A, Class B, and Class C simplified the job of routers quite considerably, I believe that splitting up the namespace into a relatively small number of TLDs simplified the job of the root name servers quite a bit. Somebody has to maintain an SOA record for each TLD at the root (the nothingness following final dot usually left off of domain names) and having tons of TLDs would significantly complicate this job. Splitting it into
Of course, the whole system was set up in the early eighties, when the face of the net was quite different. You didn't have the kind of abuses of the name system that you have today, like Micro$oft buying microsoft.org, and you also had the root nameservers running on what by todays standards was really lame hardware (in terms of power, not reliability). So the splitting really accomplished something, and the lack of computing resources on the root servers meant that it was necessary.
Not that I know any of this as fact - I'm just speculating. But it's speculation based on two years of running a couple of DNS servers.
Dave
They released the source under the GPL.
They didn't add Linux support.
Why does the Slashdot headline say "New Cye Support for Linux!"?
Sheesh.
Dave
"Almost all the symbolism was taken from Christianity, with Neo representing a "Christ" figure."
... this movie was a big hit among Tibetan Buddhists. One of the Centers in our tradition even did a mini-course based on it.
Interesting that different people can see different things in a movie. The Matrix was chock-full of Buddhist symbolism, including some very high Tantric stuff near the end. The whole world being generated in people's minds is a close approximation of the Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness; Neo's awakening after death is closely analagous to enlightenment. The death itself was not death, but the mind of "Black Near-Attainment", which does occur at death but also occurs just before enlightenment (the Tibetan Book of the Dead is probably one source on this, although my source is a qualified oral lineage).
Ever wonder why they dropped that bomb when they were going up the elevator shaft? Everyone in the lobby was already dead. The elevator shaft is the central channel, and the explosion is igniting the Fire of Tummo as they go up.
I could go on and on
So anyway, the symbolism seems to be a mixture of a lot of things, since such different traditions and Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism (Mahayana/Vajrayana) both see tons of symbolism in it.
Dave
In case people are confused about how others use dates in the serial number, it's just a little trick sys admins use so they can see when someone last updated the zone.. generally people use the YYYYMMDDR thing like it said.. the R is the number of times in the day that the zone file was updated. the only thing about doing this is that if you put '10' in R and then the next day you start at 1 again, the number will be smaller than the previous day, e.g. 1999032710 and 199903281.
Yeah, we use that scheme here, and I like it a lot. But you can actually use two digits for the increment, which gets around the problem you mention. That's what we do - YYYYMMDDRR. But then again, I've never seen RR get above 05.
Dave
His claim that all the great mystics valued rational thought is laughable. I can only wonder who is on his list of great mystics -- most of the classic mystics (Buddha, Lao Tse, and so on) denounced rationality when they bothered to mention it at all.
After two years of intensive study in the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism, I can speak to this with authority.
It is absolutely not true that Buddha Shakyamuni denounced rationality. All of the sutras appeal to logic and reason. If you ever study Buddhism in the Tibetan lineage, you will discover that the Sutra path is a very logical and reasonable one. Also take a look at the debates on emptiness between that Madhyamaka-Prasangaka school and the Chittamatrin school.
Now, Tantra is a different matter, and Zen seems to be very anti-reason (from my distant vantage point). But Zen does not represent all of Buddhism accurately, nor does Tantra, which is to be practiced only with a strong Sutra foundation.
Dave
This is what John Gilmore and the FSF did with the specs for their DES-cracking machine. They can't export the specs electronically because of munitions controls, but they can export a book because blocking a book would be censorship.
Great loophole. I saw John speak at last year's RSA conference, and you should have seen the look of triumph on his face when he explained that not only did they publish the specs in a book, but they used a machine-readable font, put checksums on every line, and wrote "Scan this book!" on the cover!
The book is _Cracking DES_ from O'Reilly: http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes/
Dave
This reply is a little late (I saw the comment in Meta-moderation), but here goes ...
I'm a practicing Buddhist in a Tibetan lineage. From our perspective, you most certainly can "sin" (not our word) on a computer, but it takes some discernment to figure out when. According to our teachings, the main determinants of how negative a negative action is are your motivation, the way you carry it out (premeditated vs. spontaneous, slow and painful vs. quick and merciful, etc.), and whether the object of the action is sentient.
So, killing a process is not killing, because processes don't actually possess mind in the Buddhist sense. But, if there were a sentient being in a computer (like Jane in Orson Scott Card's _Ender_ series) then killing that being *would* be killing.
Viewing porn on the internet is morally no different from viewing porn in a magazine.
We don't really have an equivalent to "taking the Lord's name in vain", but my sense is that whatever you say in an xterm is speech just as much as it would be in handwriting on paper. If a shell script says something for you a thousand times, you'd have to check your motivation and see whether you really had the mental action of generating that word 1000 times or if you mentally generated the word once and had the shell script do the multiplying. Probably #2, if most people's brains are wired like mine.
Just thought the Buddhist perspective might be interesting and helpful.
BTW, most of the stuff in "Jesux" is just silly, IMHO. Renaming "kill" and "daemon"? No encryption? Come on, go a little below surface labels with your morality. Sheesh.
Regards,
Dave
I'm a sysadmin for a site which uses AFS, so let me provide some details here
AFS servers divide up the filespace into "volumes" which are placed a mount points in the AFS tree in a way very similar to the was filesystems are mounted under UNIX. Generally you store a whole bunch of volumes on one partition of a server.
One sticky point here is that AFS might require separate partitions for its volumes. In other words, you may not be able to store AFS volumes on partitions which store other stuff. That's certainly our setup here - separate partitions for the AFS volumes. I've never checked whether it's required, and I wans't around when these servers were built. (Email me if you want to know how building their replacements goes next month.) If you do have to have separate partitions, then it defeats the poster's purpose.
Some pluses about AFS as a distributed system:
If you're interested in playing with AFS, there are demos available at the website. You might also talk to the licensing department about whether they'll cut you a nice deal as a very-small site. But mainly I think AFS is much nicer for a University or Corporation doing things on a medium-to-large scale than for a home user with 1-10 boxes.
BTW, one tip for people stting up AFS cells: the user "system:anyuser" is everyone in the whole world. If your servers are connected to the internet, anyone can cd into your AFS space unauthenticated, unless you lock out system:anyuser in your ACLs.
Enjoy,
Dave
The EFF did this with Deep Crack (the machine that broke the DES record a while back). They published a book with complete specs, in a machine-readable font, with checksums on each line, and on the cover it says, "Scan this book!"
I saw John Gilmore's talk at the RSA conference in January. He said the loophole is that they can ban software exports as munitions, but banning a book would be censorship.
So yeah, print the diffs, but use a good OCR font and give each line a checksum.
Dave
Sendmail supported non-relaying in 8.8, too, as long as you were willing to hack it in. There were plenty of web pages with directions, so it wasn't that hard to do.
Dave