One thing you have to keep in mind is, all patented devices seem obvious when you have the
benefit of hindsight.
Not all and I don't think it applies here (I can't say for certain though until I see the actual patents).
CCD's are designed to capture images to digital data. Digital memory technologies are designed to store digital data. Compression algorithms can be used to reduce the size of digital data.
It is obvious. More than 10 years ago, I "personally invented" music stored on digital memory cards, while standing in the street thinking about DAC's and "FRAMS".
Anyone who knew what a CCD was back in 1991 and put some thought into it, would see that some day, digital still cameras could exist utilising them with the OBVIOUS obligatory digital memory and compression.
But if you don't like the stuff, you won't be missing out on anything.
I'm not sure that I agree. If you don't like air travel, would you say that you aren't missing out on anything because you haven't been exposed to the rich tapestry that is life outside the country where you live?
What kind of wacky crazy logic is this?!?!?
He's saying, "if you don't like coffee, then you're not missing out on anything", but you're response is like, "if you don't like boiling water, then you will not have the wonderful experience of discovering that you actually hate coffee".
The guy does not like coffee BECAUSE HE TRIED IT!!!! You're analogy is absolutely illogical. It does not even mesh cleanly, let alone make any sense at all.
You might be able to convince yourself that you weren't, but I think that your life would be enriched by the experience, regardless of whether or not you don't feel you've missed out.
WTF!?!? The dude does not like coffee. One normal sane person would assume this to be due to him trying it at least once.
I know people who don't use a computer and never have.
So how are these people who refuse to try something, similar to someone who states they don't like using something? One has obviously not tried and the other obviously has.
You can't say you don't like coffee if you have not tried it.
Try drinking it when you have IBS. You practically have to master time travel to make it to the bathroom on time.
Yes, tell me about it!
Coffee, BTW, GAVE me IBS. I now also can no longer drink soda drinks with caffeine in them. I'll be shitting mucous for weeks after an espresso.
I really miss my espresso. Illy is awesome stuff. About as good as the best coffee my brother-in-law brought back from Italy.
However, I feel poisoned after consuming caffeine. Funny that, what with caffeine being a toxin and all. I read somewhere, that injecting a single drop of pure caffeine will kill a healthy adult.
And who can forget the first graphical Linux installation? With Tetris?
I certainly won't forget it.
Watching the % complete field incrementing it's way towards 100%........ and then to 101%.... and beyond.... ; ) was not exactly inspiring my trust in their product.
I pressed reset when it got to around 700%, from memory.
I eventually got it installed. Didn't think much of it and moved back to Red Hat. Really, the graphical installer was the selling point for me to show off to my friends the advances Linux was making. But how often do you install anyway?
The irony is, that to this day, I prefer OpenBSD's installer, all text, done literally in under 5 minutes and never fails me.
What is it with OpenBSD bashing. OpenBSD is a great system.
I'm not bashing OpenBSD. In fact, I've been using OpenBSD since 2.5, have tried to buy each official CD since, have bought heaps of shirts and I have even purchased hardware with my own hard earned cash (ever flipped out your credit card to buy some brand new hardware, from a store thousands of km's away from you, only to have it sent to someone else? Done this during a long stint of unemployment?). As I write this, I am part way through the xwindow compile part of building OpenBSD -stable source which I updated through CVS a few hours ago...
I run OpenBSD on: many x86 boxes (my home and client sites), Sun UltraSPARC and Mac PPC. I would also run it on an old 68k Mac I have, if it had an FPU.
OpenBSD is my OS of choice!
The point I was trying to make, is that comparing the political management of software development and government is just silly. There is no correlation between the two, since comparisons to the software development side can show a particular style working and not working (dictatorship for example), depending on the project you choose. Whereas dictatorships in government almost always suck for the people.
The difference is, that if people don't like the decisions being made in a software project being run like OpenBSD, then they can just leave it and choose another. The impact of doing the same with your dictatorship government can get you and your family killed.
Big difference, silly comparison.
Thats if by democracy you mean one person one vote.
Theo has the absolute last say (if and when he so wishes to flex his power) and it works well, a Linux distro (as a complete system, not just the kernel) on the other hand tends to be more of a group decision.
BTW, I don't see Linux as an absolute democracy and OpenBSD as an absolute Dictatorship. I think putting software development into political categories and then comparing them to government politics is silly, thus the reasoning for my original post.
Actually, I realised literally seconds after I'd posted it what a lousy idea suggesting CD-Rs for backup was- 100 CDs per 80GB drive.
Assuming the 80GB drived was filled with data that was expected to be backed up.
I worked for a stock exchange which used CDR for certain backup tasks. They had rows and rows (like a library) of CDR's, not including the latest stuff which was shipped off site each night.
For many people and businesses, CDR storage is enough. The stock exchange at that time, also relied heaviliy on RS-232 and other low bandwidth lines to link to customers, simply because it met the requirements. Which is the point.
Of course, you need to do it from single user mode after booting off a known-clean boot media like the install CD, but that's a helluva lot better than reinstalling everything.
Amen brother. Last time I installed Solaris 9 (4/03 SPARC), I moved my DVD-ROM drive from my Thunderbird to my Sun Ultra 10, just so that I could install from the Solaris 9 DVD (quicker transfer rate, much less disk juggling and thus less requirement to hang around waiting for prompting).
It still took many hours to get Solaris installed to the (starting) point where I'd want to use it... then there were patches (well over 100) to download and apply...
Anyone want to suggest the best way to patch Solaris 9? I am currently using pprosvc and find it painful (I know it makes patching easier, but when there are 100+ patches, I don't want to do each by hand).
It's times like these that I really appreciate OpenBSD's install, which typically takes me about 3 minutes to install the base system, another 5 minutes to configure X and then maybe an hour to install and configure all the desktop productivity stuff I want.
Hell I can build release (all including X and ports) OpenBSD -stable quicker than it takes me to install my basic Solaris 9 (desktop, compilers, StarOffice).
This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century
Some people do things with their machines, which have some parts operating at full occupancy for extended periods (more than just the quick bursts that perhaps you require).
They normally appreciate a machine which can get something done in a fraction of the time or give them a realtime interface to what they do.
(well, maybe after bottled water).
Bottled water, is almost always much better than tap water. Even in Sydney Australia, I will become ill from drinking "clean" tap water. I have done double blindfold tests in this regard to make sure it's not psychological. Rain water is certainly not perfect and even drinking spring water from areas beyond the populated fringes has it's dangers.
The World is becoming more and more polluted and bottled (or otherwise filtered) water is becoming a requirement for heathly living, at least in cities.
Yeah, I wish I could blame these bugs on M$, too... but it's not really fair in this case.
I don't agree.
Once a company takes ownership and responsibility for another product, they are responsible for the auditing of that product.
With the untold amounts of MS money, surely they can audit the product. I seem to remember they were trying to improve it's OSX compatibility or something like that, so I think they have done a little more than just a cosmetic brand and version change.
It's also true that Fedora is driving SELinux into their product, and I know the Snare guys are working on integrating syscall-level auditing into Linux.
It's all good. I'm quite excited by these developments.
The security options for Linux will continue to get better, the only question is whether that will dominate over the increasing number of naive Linux users.
; ) Agreed wholeheartedly. I would hate to see a perception that Linux security is poor because it has suddenly become fashionable over the last few years and therefore everyone wants to at least appear to be skilled with it.
Now, if only Linux and BSD people could always get along in this area, maybe we could gain greater security overall. (I'm refering to the PaX vs OpenBSD heat.)
But still, I feel unease about me having secured the box since there a quite a few other poorly documented security features that may be enabled, including tweaking the registry.
The other day I patched my mothers machine, a hardened Windows XP Pro machine with all security patches applied (she also runs as a ordinary user).
Windows update site told me that her machine was up to date when I last did my periodical check. I didn't trust it though, because I knew there was a new patch out. I tried the https Windows update site, which showed me many patches were required.
After 14 years running MS software, I don't know if I'll ever trust them.
OpenBSD has some nice security bits, but that high level of security touted on the OpenBSD site is only for bundled software. If you install any significant services, the security questions are the same on OpenBSD as they are for Linux or the other BSD's.
Once upon a time, this may have been true. But with all the consistency checking, W^X, ProPolice, randomizations, priv sep (where used), etc which OpenBSD does by default, when user space software vulnerabilities rear their ugly heads, they get chopped off.
Ah, yes, I forgot how useful ROM was for storing video memory, especially with its high speed write capabilities. So clearly I was a fool not to include ROM in mention of how much Video RAM was available. Silly me.
RAM, ROM and devices normally are within the addressable memory range.
Tu quoque, I see. Occam's razor. Got a better explanation?
You judge me to be speculating and yet you make comments like this...
All palm did was say "let's give them a huge potential screen aperture so they can do weird stuff. 15 bits sounds good, hurf hurf, let's go."
That's about 10,000 dpi,
I have heard claims that the healthy young human eye can perceive resolution up to 1000dpi (typically about 600dpi). Having 10,000 dots per inch is going beyond the human limits, which would be a marketing tool to sell more product to people who don't know better.
We are afterall, talking abouts dots per inch. I mentioned projection (previously AND originally) because it reduces the dpi dramatically (from the display substrate to the area where the image is formed).
or roughly eight and a half times the linear resolution of a $30 inkjet printer.
The dpi that common inkjet manufacturers refer to, is NOT the dpi you and I refer to (actual pixels). It refers to the very many dither dots which make up a real pixel. Without specifying the real dpi, their values for "dpi" are largely meaningless because one does not normally know how many of their "dither dots" makes up one real dot.
That sort of resolution would have a tremendous impact on zoomed documents, which on a very small screen like a PDA is often a critical issue.
More than 1000 dpi is a waste of bandwidth, memory and computing time. 10,000 dpi IS absurd on a display technology which is not projected (the act of projecting, decreases the dpi of the viewed image).
2 Gbyte display vs 256Mbytes of RAM.
That's exactly what I just told you
Yes, that's right, which means that my guess that the frame buffer might share main memory would probably be wrong. But it also means that the OS can address more than 1Gbyte memory (32k x 32k x 256 colour) for the frame buffer, which seems strange that it can only address 256Mbyte RAM for main memory. This is seperate from addressable memory though, which the frame buffer should fall within.
and you tried to tell me I had to count the rom and that I was off by a factor of two.
The display, RAM, ROM and other devices are usually seperate areas which typically fall within the addressable memory range. You do have to count ROM as addressable memory, but certainly not as display memory.
Apparently nobody's informed you that not all screens are square, and that especially in industry dramatically lopsided aspect ratio screens are moderately common.
I never said all screens are square. I'm using squares as the example because it is the most simple to do and relate to, you don't want me to provide examples of every possible resolution do you?
Or maybe you're just too dense to realize that there's no good reason to make it any smaller.
You've read beyond what I wrote and yet not noticed what I did write.
I do find it amusing, though, that my suggestion that this was a failure to handle future proofing in an appropriate fashion was met with "this is not future proofing."
You don't have to take every point in a discussion, as a counter point. You said it yourself.
I wonder if you're also the type which believes that if you just set the bar high by today's manufacturing cost standards that nobody six years down the road will find a way and then a reason.
I've worked in Computer Engineering since 1989 and Computer Science since 1994. I most certainly do not adhere to what you describe.
Especially given that elsewhere in the article they quote the addressable memory range at one quarter that
No they do not...
With support for up to 256MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM
That specifically refers only to RAM and ROM, which adds up to double what you claim. The addressable memory space (which usually includes RAM, ROM and devices) is almost certainly higher. Do you know at this stage whether the frame buffer shares main memory or not?
All palm did was say "let's give them a huge potential screen aperture so they can do weird stuff. 15 bits sounds good, hurf hurf, let's go."
You speak with such authority!
It's no more complex than that.
Back it up then.
Stop speculating on how absurd the maximum resultant screen could maybe someday be.
A gigapixel on a 3 inch screen will ALWAYS BE ABSURD unless it is to be projected. Gigapixel displays are not on the horizon yet. What's more, what good is an OS capable of addressing a 2 Gbyte display (as an example, 32,768x32,768x16bit) when it can only address 256Mbytes of RAM!
Besides, BillG once thought that having over a half million positions in RAM for a home computer would be useless. Palm's setting the same sort of "we'll fix it ten years down the road" limit here.
Garbage. Combining gigapixel display ability with 256MB main memory limit IS NOT FUTURE PROOFING!
Gigapixel screens won't seem absurd at all in ten years, when our reaction will be "of course it's a gigapixel, it's got to look at least as good as print."
I did not say they would. I said, gigapixel 3 inch displays (implying those to be viewed with the naked eye without projection) are absurd.
Some of my friends were software developers at General Electric years ago (admittedly doing Wintel desktop software).
I'm too tired to read the article, but I will say this, everything they did, they did in VB.
I know GE has also sold US approved crypto hardware to other countries, gear which was found to have back doors or known weaknesses that have allowed the US to eavesdrop on their supposed "friends" with ease.
Maybe they should stick to designing jet engines and toasters.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 300 and 600dpi for black and white stuff, but for grayscale there'll be a pretty big difference because of dithering.
Yes, but that is because a laser printer cannot show a single grey dot. To represent greyscale, a laser printer (as you know) must use an arrangement of many black and white dots in a given space, of varying ratio (dithering).
Because the dot is limited in size to start with, performing dithering causes effective pixel size to increase dramatically (because it must use multiple real pixels to represent one grey pixel).
On an interesting side note regarding deceptive marketing. Inkjet and bubblejet printer manufacturers use the word dot literally and distinctly from pixel, but never tell use because then their products wouldn't seem as good. They have a finite amount of colours that they can spit at the paper, so they use dithering to represent "true colour". When they state 7,000 dpi, they don't mean 7,000 pixels per inch, they mean 7,000 little dither dots per inch, of which a pixel is made up. It might take many of these little dots to make a real pixel dot.
This is why the printed edges of 600dpi inkjets never ever looked anywhere near as good as the printed edges from a 600dpi laser.
Where did you hear this? That isn't how the eye works at all.
I've heard this in a few documentaries about human sight. I was sceptical until I experimented with my own sight. I tried moving my head to a random location, while my eyes were shut and then opening them with the intention of not moving them after opening (Ha! that's funny! I think I can completely control my brain!). The image that forms seems instant and extends to my peripheral vision. I believe the eye needs to detect movement only in the peripheral areas to form an image there and the movement can be extremely small. So small that I do not notice and why would my brain allow me to notice anyway? BTW, this test is flawed because the act of opening ones eyes, causes an image change within the eye, which is the same as detecting movement.
I think when people hear this theory, their first thought is "small area of detection" and "large movement required", whereas I think the truth is "moderate area of detection" and "extremely small movement required to complete peripheral image".
Curiously, I see colour all the way to the peripheral edges using this method. Which goes against what I have learned about peripheral vision (no colour) and this image "build up" through movement theory (colour added by brain through what it knows is there).
To get a dramatic demonstration which adds weight to this theory... Ever tried staring at the same spot for an extended period of time (without even blinking)? You (well I do) get a flashing image (ring) where the peripheral vision is, which eventually blacks out completely. I find this state very hard to sustain. My eyes normally move a tiny little bit (seems to be horizontal movement) which causes the peripheral vision to suddenly appear again. This is difficult to do, your eyes will be stinging and begging for mercy because they have become dry due to no blinking and you will find that whether you like it or not, your eyes usually step from side to side ever so slightly, undoing the effect. The easiest way to do it is to lay down on your back with your head well supported so that movement of your head is less likely to ruin your chances of this working.
Based on this effect alone, I think the theory is correct.
I have been doing this since I was a child. I can also voluntarily change the focus of my eyes. Every person I have asked about this (bringing eyes in and out of focus), claim they cannot do it. Anyone else able to do these things?
It's as if our brain contains a frame buffer (the image we perceive) which gets updated by the eye as it moves around under brain control. I guess we are like this because using our entire retina as the frame buffer for our brain, would not be feasible due to the huge amount of information that would have to constantly traverse the optic nerve. It's like using a video card with local frame buffer to get around bus interconnect (PCI/AGP) bandwidth limitations (I am serious by the way).
You can test this yourself by writing a program to flash a word on the screen for a short amount of time. (like a 30th or 60th of a second. You should still be able to read it.
Hang on, there are far too many things at work here that might muddy the facts. There is persistence of an image on a CRT screen due to light emitted from the phospors slowly decaying after they have been switched off (perhaps slow LCD response could cause a similar effect) and then there is also the persistence of vision due to slow response of the human eye itself.
What's more, how big is this word you are flashing on your screen? The fact that it is flashing means that it will be detected as movement to the eye, voiding the test.
Of course, the astute notice that 32,000 isn't 32k, that a word isn't nessecarily (soon even frequently) 32 bits, and that colors don't always come nearly packaged in machine-sized powers of two.
; ) I wonder if thier marketing department will decide that specifying a maximum screen resolution of a gigapixel sounds better than 32k x 32k. And I also wonder if it really is 32,768 x 32,768, but it got rounded down so as not to confuse anyone.
Is the screen frame buffer using main memory and thus within the main memory addressable range? Perhaps this is merely hyped up marketing speak for "1GB addressable memory"?
1 gigapixels on a screen measuring 2-3 inches across just seems absurd, no matter how far in the future we look. Do we need pixels that are 15 thousandths of an inch square? Unless of course this screen is "looked through" and appears ahead of us as a heads-up display. In which case, that would be awesome!
PS, I realise that Palm may merely be future proofing thier products OS. But even if they decided to build a notebook size "Palm" device, by the time 32k x 32k displays are around, I think a new Palm OS will be around.
BTW, a screen of that resolution, with 16bit colour depth refreshing at 60Hz, will require updating (frame buffer to screen) at 120 Gigabytes per second! But if you had such an awesome display, you probably would want no less than 24 bit colour, refreshing at 75Hz, which would require 225 Gigabytes per second. ; )
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
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Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 1
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
He made market changing contributions, but I would not put him up with Ken and Dennis. How long did it take Microsoft to deliver a relatively stable OS with memory protection in the kernel (NT)? They had to base it on another OS which was not written by themselves. Is that innovation? They finally glued the upside down MacOS-like GUI on top of it, is that innovation? Was it innovation when they threatened OEM's that they would be left out in the cold if they did not forcibly bundle MS shit on their hardware? Is purchasing smaller companies who look competitive in a very small area or using their ideas and then defeating them in court with MS endless financial might innovation?
With the extraordinary financial power of Microsoft and the huge talented teams of programmers which they can afford, why can't they make a kernel as secure as OpenBSD's or even Apple's Mac OSX? Surely with all that money they can provide security and functionality! But no, they concentrate on innovative marketing campains which seek to convince the general public that they need Microsofts latest "innovations".
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
No, I believe that Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. To add insult to injury, MacOS was very stable considering that they only recently got memory protection with OSX.
Microsoft now dominates that market through knife-in-the-back tactics. I don't know what would be worse, being a friend of Microsoft or being a foe. I would not put Bill Gates up on a pedestal because he managed desktop dominance. Look at how he achieved it.
They have not innovated as much as they have simply lifted from elsewhere.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
Commodore 64 actually. Yes, I was using Mircrosoft BASIC. But I was more interested in 6502 assembler.
Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world?
Yes. I'm known to surf the net on a DEC VT220 at times.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
It is a vast information network? I think the quality of the information on the internet was much better back in 1991 (when I got on) than it is now. It has become a great big stinking sewer of mostly misinformation because every moron with a computer now gets on with his Wintel PC and AOL account.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
If she bought an Apple Mac way back when they delivered desktop computing and upgraded as she liked along the Apple path, she'd be using a web cam if that is what she wanted. She might even be showing off her wrinkley old bits to the World for $4.95 per month.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Affordable? When the latest full version of MS Office is released in Australia, it typically costs around one thousand Australian dollars. The OS' are expensive too. Unless of course, I get them cheap with my next PC and MS succeeds in dominating one more desktop.
-- A Commodore, an assembler tape, and one bored kid
Slashdot Mirror
One thing you have to keep in mind is, all patented devices seem obvious when you have the
benefit of hindsight.
Not all and I don't think it applies here (I can't say for certain though until I see the actual patents).
CCD's are designed to capture images to digital data. Digital memory technologies are designed to store digital data. Compression algorithms can be used to reduce the size of digital data.
It is obvious. More than 10 years ago, I "personally invented" music stored on digital memory cards, while standing in the street thinking about DAC's and "FRAMS".
Anyone who knew what a CCD was back in 1991 and put some thought into it, would see that some day, digital still cameras could exist utilising them with the OBVIOUS obligatory digital memory and compression.
But if you don't like the stuff, you won't be missing out on anything.
I'm not sure that I agree. If you don't like air travel, would you say that you aren't missing out on anything because you haven't been exposed to the rich tapestry that is life outside the country where you live?
What kind of wacky crazy logic is this?!?!?
He's saying, "if you don't like coffee, then you're not missing out on anything", but you're response is like, "if you don't like boiling water, then you will not have the wonderful experience of discovering that you actually hate coffee".
The guy does not like coffee BECAUSE HE TRIED IT!!!! You're analogy is absolutely illogical. It does not even mesh cleanly, let alone make any sense at all.
You might be able to convince yourself that you weren't, but I think that your life would be enriched by the experience, regardless of whether or not you don't feel you've missed out.
WTF!?!? The dude does not like coffee. One normal sane person would assume this to be due to him trying it at least once.
I know people who don't use a computer and never have.
So how are these people who refuse to try something, similar to someone who states they don't like using something? One has obviously not tried and the other obviously has.
You can't say you don't like coffee if you have not tried it.
Try drinking it when you have IBS. You practically have to master time travel to make it to the bathroom on time.
Yes, tell me about it!
Coffee, BTW, GAVE me IBS. I now also can no longer drink soda drinks with caffeine in them. I'll be shitting mucous for weeks after an espresso.
I really miss my espresso. Illy is awesome stuff. About as good as the best coffee my brother-in-law brought back from Italy.
However, I feel poisoned after consuming caffeine. Funny that, what with caffeine being a toxin and all. I read somewhere, that injecting a single drop of pure caffeine will kill a healthy adult.
Hi Ozbird,
I am curious what your sig is about?
Are you keeping a tally of how many Aussie bird species exists as they die off?
And who can forget the first graphical Linux installation? With Tetris?
I certainly won't forget it.
Watching the % complete field incrementing it's way towards 100%........ and then to 101%.... and beyond.... ; ) was not exactly inspiring my trust in their product.
I pressed reset when it got to around 700%, from memory.
I eventually got it installed. Didn't think much of it and moved back to Red Hat. Really, the graphical installer was the selling point for me to show off to my friends the advances Linux was making. But how often do you install anyway?
The irony is, that to this day, I prefer OpenBSD's installer, all text, done literally in under 5 minutes and never fails me.
48 comments in 4 days - how many *BSD users think slashdot is relevent anymore?
/., but it has almost gone to the trolls and zealots.
/. for a heads-up though.
News for slf's. Stuff and propaganda.
News for Turds. Stuff that splatters.
I used to love
I moved over to BSD mailing lists loooonggg ago for the discussion side of things. I still use
What is it with OpenBSD bashing. OpenBSD is a great system.
I'm not bashing OpenBSD. In fact, I've been using OpenBSD since 2.5, have tried to buy each official CD since, have bought heaps of shirts and I have even purchased hardware with my own hard earned cash (ever flipped out your credit card to buy some brand new hardware, from a store thousands of km's away from you, only to have it sent to someone else? Done this during a long stint of unemployment?). As I write this, I am part way through the xwindow compile part of building OpenBSD -stable source which I updated through CVS a few hours ago...
I run OpenBSD on: many x86 boxes (my home and client sites), Sun UltraSPARC and Mac PPC. I would also run it on an old 68k Mac I have, if it had an FPU.
OpenBSD is my OS of choice!
The point I was trying to make, is that comparing the political management of software development and government is just silly. There is no correlation between the two, since comparisons to the software development side can show a particular style working and not working (dictatorship for example), depending on the project you choose. Whereas dictatorships in government almost always suck for the people.
The difference is, that if people don't like the decisions being made in a software project being run like OpenBSD, then they can just leave it and choose another. The impact of doing the same with your dictatorship government can get you and your family killed.
Big difference, silly comparison.
Thats if by democracy you mean one person one vote.
Theo has the absolute last say (if and when he so wishes to flex his power) and it works well, a Linux distro (as a complete system, not just the kernel) on the other hand tends to be more of a group decision.
BTW, I don't see Linux as an absolute democracy and OpenBSD as an absolute Dictatorship. I think putting software development into political categories and then comparing them to government politics is silly, thus the reasoning for my original post.
Theo is running a pretty successful dictatorship.
Linux is a successful democracy then? And Microsoft is successful...
I guess this means that software development and government are two completely different animals (duh).
The reason for the bruhaha is nothing more than laziness on the part of the various distros.
Talk about far out in left field!!!
People are talking about backporting and forking and you believe such bruhaha is because they are simply lazy?
Who the hell moderated this up to 5 Informative?
You think coders are too lazy to print a single string?
Absurd.
Actually, I realised literally seconds after I'd posted it what a lousy idea suggesting CD-Rs for backup was- 100 CDs per 80GB drive.
Assuming the 80GB drived was filled with data that was expected to be backed up.
I worked for a stock exchange which used CDR for certain backup tasks. They had rows and rows (like a library) of CDR's, not including the latest stuff which was shipped off site each night.
For many people and businesses, CDR storage is enough. The stock exchange at that time, also relied heaviliy on RS-232 and other low bandwidth lines to link to customers, simply because it met the requirements. Which is the point.
Of course, you need to do it from single user mode after booting off a known-clean boot media like the install CD, but that's a helluva lot better than reinstalling everything.
Amen brother. Last time I installed Solaris 9 (4/03 SPARC), I moved my DVD-ROM drive from my Thunderbird to my Sun Ultra 10, just so that I could install from the Solaris 9 DVD (quicker transfer rate, much less disk juggling and thus less requirement to hang around waiting for prompting).
It still took many hours to get Solaris installed to the (starting) point where I'd want to use it... then there were patches (well over 100) to download and apply...
Anyone want to suggest the best way to patch Solaris 9? I am currently using pprosvc and find it painful (I know it makes patching easier, but when there are 100+ patches, I don't want to do each by hand).
It's times like these that I really appreciate OpenBSD's install, which typically takes me about 3 minutes to install the base system, another 5 minutes to configure X and then maybe an hour to install and configure all the desktop productivity stuff I want.
Hell I can build release (all including X and ports) OpenBSD -stable quicker than it takes me to install my basic Solaris 9 (desktop, compilers, StarOffice).
This (usually baseless) need to have more and more power on a laptop - and to pay top dollar for it - has to be the marketing triumph of the century
Some people do things with their machines, which have some parts operating at full occupancy for extended periods (more than just the quick bursts that perhaps you require).
They normally appreciate a machine which can get something done in a fraction of the time or give them a realtime interface to what they do.
(well, maybe after bottled water).
Bottled water, is almost always much better than tap water. Even in Sydney Australia, I will become ill from drinking "clean" tap water. I have done double blindfold tests in this regard to make sure it's not psychological. Rain water is certainly not perfect and even drinking spring water from areas beyond the populated fringes has it's dangers.
The World is becoming more and more polluted and bottled (or otherwise filtered) water is becoming a requirement for heathly living, at least in cities.
You are not the yardstick.
Yeah, I wish I could blame these bugs on M$, too... but it's not really fair in this case.
I don't agree.
Once a company takes ownership and responsibility for another product, they are responsible for the auditing of that product.
With the untold amounts of MS money, surely they can audit the product. I seem to remember they were trying to improve it's OSX compatibility or something like that, so I think they have done a little more than just a cosmetic brand and version change.
It's also true that Fedora is driving SELinux into their product, and I know the Snare guys are working on integrating syscall-level auditing into Linux.
It's all good. I'm quite excited by these developments.
The security options for Linux will continue to get better, the only question is whether that will dominate over the increasing number of naive Linux users.
; ) Agreed wholeheartedly. I would hate to see a perception that Linux security is poor because it has suddenly become fashionable over the last few years and therefore everyone wants to at least appear to be skilled with it.
Now, if only Linux and BSD people could always get along in this area, maybe we could gain greater security overall. (I'm refering to the PaX vs OpenBSD heat.)
But still, I feel unease about me having secured the box since there a quite a few other poorly documented security features that may be enabled, including tweaking the registry.
The other day I patched my mothers machine, a hardened Windows XP Pro machine with all security patches applied (she also runs as a ordinary user).
Windows update site told me that her machine was up to date when I last did my periodical check. I didn't trust it though, because I knew there was a new patch out. I tried the https Windows update site, which showed me many patches were required.
After 14 years running MS software, I don't know if I'll ever trust them.
OpenBSD has some nice security bits, but that high level of security touted on the OpenBSD site is only for bundled software. If you install any significant services, the security questions are the same on OpenBSD as they are for Linux or the other BSD's.
Once upon a time, this may have been true. But with all the consistency checking, W^X, ProPolice, randomizations, priv sep (where used), etc which OpenBSD does by default, when user space software vulnerabilities rear their ugly heads, they get chopped off.
Ah, yes, I forgot how useful ROM was for storing video memory, especially with its high speed write capabilities. So clearly I was a fool not to include ROM in mention of how much Video RAM was available. Silly me.
RAM, ROM and devices normally are within the addressable memory range.
Tu quoque, I see. Occam's razor. Got a better explanation?
You judge me to be speculating and yet you make comments like this...
All palm did was say "let's give them a huge potential screen aperture so they can do weird stuff. 15 bits sounds good, hurf hurf, let's go."
That's about 10,000 dpi,
I have heard claims that the healthy young human eye can perceive resolution up to 1000dpi (typically about 600dpi). Having 10,000 dots per inch is going beyond the human limits, which would be a marketing tool to sell more product to people who don't know better.
We are afterall, talking abouts dots per inch. I mentioned projection (previously AND originally) because it reduces the dpi dramatically (from the display substrate to the area where the image is formed).
or roughly eight and a half times the linear resolution of a $30 inkjet printer.
The dpi that common inkjet manufacturers refer to, is NOT the dpi you and I refer to (actual pixels). It refers to the very many dither dots which make up a real pixel. Without specifying the real dpi, their values for "dpi" are largely meaningless because one does not normally know how many of their "dither dots" makes up one real dot.
That sort of resolution would have a tremendous impact on zoomed documents, which on a very small screen like a PDA is often a critical issue.
More than 1000 dpi is a waste of bandwidth, memory and computing time. 10,000 dpi IS absurd on a display technology which is not projected (the act of projecting, decreases the dpi of the viewed image).
2 Gbyte display vs 256Mbytes of RAM.
That's exactly what I just told you
Yes, that's right, which means that my guess that the frame buffer might share main memory would probably be wrong. But it also means that the OS can address more than 1Gbyte memory (32k x 32k x 256 colour) for the frame buffer, which seems strange that it can only address 256Mbyte RAM for main memory. This is seperate from addressable memory though, which the frame buffer should fall within.
and you tried to tell me I had to count the rom and that I was off by a factor of two.
The display, RAM, ROM and other devices are usually seperate areas which typically fall within the addressable memory range. You do have to count ROM as addressable memory, but certainly not as display memory.
Apparently nobody's informed you that not all screens are square, and that especially in industry dramatically lopsided aspect ratio screens are moderately common.
I never said all screens are square. I'm using squares as the example because it is the most simple to do and relate to, you don't want me to provide examples of every possible resolution do you?
Or maybe you're just too dense to realize that there's no good reason to make it any smaller.
You've read beyond what I wrote and yet not noticed what I did write.
I do find it amusing, though, that my suggestion that this was a failure to handle future proofing in an appropriate fashion was met with "this is not future proofing."
You don't have to take every point in a discussion, as a counter point. You said it yourself.
I wonder if you're also the type which believes that if you just set the bar high by today's manufacturing cost standards that nobody six years down the road will find a way and then a reason.
I've worked in Computer Engineering since 1989 and Computer Science since 1994. I most certainly do not adhere to what you describe.
where's the connection??
Sorry. I shouldn't be replying when I'm so tired and certainly not without reading the article.
I was just trying to state that I don't trust GE with software when it comes to ability or honesty.
You just took four paragraphs to summarize what I stated in three words. Aren't you clever?
No you did not.
You stated the outcome, without giving the reason.
Am I not allowed to agree with you and ellaborate on the details?
I hope to God you do not teach or write technical documents.
Especially given that elsewhere in the article they quote the addressable memory range at one quarter that
No they do not...
With support for up to 256MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM
That specifically refers only to RAM and ROM, which adds up to double what you claim. The addressable memory space (which usually includes RAM, ROM and devices) is almost certainly higher. Do you know at this stage whether the frame buffer shares main memory or not?
All palm did was say "let's give them a huge potential screen aperture so they can do weird stuff. 15 bits sounds good, hurf hurf, let's go."
You speak with such authority!
It's no more complex than that.
Back it up then.
Stop speculating on how absurd the maximum resultant screen could maybe someday be.
A gigapixel on a 3 inch screen will ALWAYS BE ABSURD unless it is to be projected. Gigapixel displays are not on the horizon yet. What's more, what good is an OS capable of addressing a 2 Gbyte display (as an example, 32,768x32,768x16bit) when it can only address 256Mbytes of RAM!
Besides, BillG once thought that having over a half million positions in RAM for a home computer would be useless. Palm's setting the same sort of "we'll fix it ten years down the road" limit here.
Garbage. Combining gigapixel display ability with 256MB main memory limit IS NOT FUTURE PROOFING!
Gigapixel screens won't seem absurd at all in ten years, when our reaction will be "of course it's a gigapixel, it's got to look at least as good as print."
I did not say they would. I said, gigapixel 3 inch displays (implying those to be viewed with the naked eye without projection) are absurd.
BTW, in 10 years, will you be using Palm OS 6?
Some of my friends were software developers at General Electric years ago (admittedly doing Wintel desktop software).
I'm too tired to read the article, but I will say this, everything they did, they did in VB.
I know GE has also sold US approved crypto hardware to other countries, gear which was found to have back doors or known weaknesses that have allowed the US to eavesdrop on their supposed "friends" with ease.
Maybe they should stick to designing jet engines and toasters.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 300 and 600dpi for black and white stuff, but for grayscale there'll be a pretty big difference because of dithering.
Yes, but that is because a laser printer cannot show a single grey dot. To represent greyscale, a laser printer (as you know) must use an arrangement of many black and white dots in a given space, of varying ratio (dithering).
Because the dot is limited in size to start with, performing dithering causes effective pixel size to increase dramatically (because it must use multiple real pixels to represent one grey pixel).
On an interesting side note regarding deceptive marketing. Inkjet and bubblejet printer manufacturers use the word dot literally and distinctly from pixel, but never tell use because then their products wouldn't seem as good. They have a finite amount of colours that they can spit at the paper, so they use dithering to represent "true colour". When they state 7,000 dpi, they don't mean 7,000 pixels per inch, they mean 7,000 little dither dots per inch, of which a pixel is made up. It might take many of these little dots to make a real pixel dot.
This is why the printed edges of 600dpi inkjets never ever looked anywhere near as good as the printed edges from a 600dpi laser.
PS, I know they look pretty awesome these days.
Where did you hear this? That isn't how the eye works at all.
I've heard this in a few documentaries about human sight. I was sceptical until I experimented with my own sight. I tried moving my head to a random location, while my eyes were shut and then opening them with the intention of not moving them after opening (Ha! that's funny! I think I can completely control my brain!). The image that forms seems instant and extends to my peripheral vision. I believe the eye needs to detect movement only in the peripheral areas to form an image there and the movement can be extremely small. So small that I do not notice and why would my brain allow me to notice anyway? BTW, this test is flawed because the act of opening ones eyes, causes an image change within the eye, which is the same as detecting movement.
I think when people hear this theory, their first thought is "small area of detection" and "large movement required", whereas I think the truth is "moderate area of detection" and "extremely small movement required to complete peripheral image".
Curiously, I see colour all the way to the peripheral edges using this method. Which goes against what I have learned about peripheral vision (no colour) and this image "build up" through movement theory (colour added by brain through what it knows is there).
To get a dramatic demonstration which adds weight to this theory... Ever tried staring at the same spot for an extended period of time (without even blinking)? You (well I do) get a flashing image (ring) where the peripheral vision is, which eventually blacks out completely. I find this state very hard to sustain. My eyes normally move a tiny little bit (seems to be horizontal movement) which causes the peripheral vision to suddenly appear again. This is difficult to do, your eyes will be stinging and begging for mercy because they have become dry due to no blinking and you will find that whether you like it or not, your eyes usually step from side to side ever so slightly, undoing the effect. The easiest way to do it is to lay down on your back with your head well supported so that movement of your head is less likely to ruin your chances of this working.
Based on this effect alone, I think the theory is correct.
I have been doing this since I was a child. I can also voluntarily change the focus of my eyes. Every person I have asked about this (bringing eyes in and out of focus), claim they cannot do it. Anyone else able to do these things?
It's as if our brain contains a frame buffer (the image we perceive) which gets updated by the eye as it moves around under brain control. I guess we are like this because using our entire retina as the frame buffer for our brain, would not be feasible due to the huge amount of information that would have to constantly traverse the optic nerve. It's like using a video card with local frame buffer to get around bus interconnect (PCI/AGP) bandwidth limitations (I am serious by the way).
You can test this yourself by writing a program to flash a word on the screen for a short amount of time. (like a 30th or 60th of a second. You should still be able to read it.
Hang on, there are far too many things at work here that might muddy the facts. There is persistence of an image on a CRT screen due to light emitted from the phospors slowly decaying after they have been switched off (perhaps slow LCD response could cause a similar effect) and then there is also the persistence of vision due to slow response of the human eye itself.
What's more, how big is this word you are flashing on your screen? The fact that it is flashing means that it will be detected as movement to the eye, voiding the test.
Of course, the astute notice that 32,000 isn't 32k, that a word isn't nessecarily (soon even frequently) 32 bits, and that colors don't always come nearly packaged in machine-sized powers of two.
; ) I wonder if thier marketing department will decide that specifying a maximum screen resolution of a gigapixel sounds better than 32k x 32k. And I also wonder if it really is 32,768 x 32,768, but it got rounded down so as not to confuse anyone.
Is the screen frame buffer using main memory and thus within the main memory addressable range? Perhaps this is merely hyped up marketing speak for "1GB addressable memory"?
1 gigapixels on a screen measuring 2-3 inches across just seems absurd, no matter how far in the future we look. Do we need pixels that are 15 thousandths of an inch square? Unless of course this screen is "looked through" and appears ahead of us as a heads-up display. In which case, that would be awesome!
PS, I realise that Palm may merely be future proofing thier products OS. But even if they decided to build a notebook size "Palm" device, by the time 32k x 32k displays are around, I think a new Palm OS will be around.
BTW, a screen of that resolution, with 16bit colour depth refreshing at 60Hz, will require updating (frame buffer to screen) at 120 Gigabytes per second! But if you had such an awesome display, you probably would want no less than 24 bit colour, refreshing at 75Hz, which would require 225 Gigabytes per second. ; )
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'll be lynched for saying that Bill "I am Satan" Gates should be on par with RMS, ESR and Linus, but think about this for a second.
He made market changing contributions, but I would not put him up with Ken and Dennis. How long did it take Microsoft to deliver a relatively stable OS with memory protection in the kernel (NT)? They had to base it on another OS which was not written by themselves. Is that innovation? They finally glued the upside down MacOS-like GUI on top of it, is that innovation? Was it innovation when they threatened OEM's that they would be left out in the cold if they did not forcibly bundle MS shit on their hardware? Is purchasing smaller companies who look competitive in a very small area or using their ideas and then defeating them in court with MS endless financial might innovation?
With the extraordinary financial power of Microsoft and the huge talented teams of programmers which they can afford, why can't they make a kernel as secure as OpenBSD's or even Apple's Mac OSX? Surely with all that money they can provide security and functionality! But no, they concentrate on innovative marketing campains which seek to convince the general public that they need Microsofts latest "innovations".
Bill founded what is now the largest software company in the world, and wether or not you agree with him, he has made a important contribution to the computing industry: Microsoft brought desktop computing to the home user.
No, I believe that Apple brought desktop computing to the home user. To add insult to injury, MacOS was very stable considering that they only recently got memory protection with OSX.
Microsoft now dominates that market through knife-in-the-back tactics. I don't know what would be worse, being a friend of Microsoft or being a foe. I would not put Bill Gates up on a pedestal because he managed desktop dominance. Look at how he achieved it.
They have not innovated as much as they have simply lifted from elsewhere.
Now, be honest. How many of us had our first computer experience with MS-DOS or Windows 3.1?
Commodore 64 actually. Yes, I was using Mircrosoft BASIC. But I was more interested in 6502 assembler.
Do you think that if computers still consisted on thin-client-server models based on huge VAX mainframes, that Joe and Jane Smith would be able to dial-in to AOL and connect to thousands of people around the world?
Yes. I'm known to surf the net on a DEC VT220 at times.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
It is a vast information network? I think the quality of the information on the internet was much better back in 1991 (when I got on) than it is now. It has become a great big stinking sewer of mostly misinformation because every moron with a computer now gets on with his Wintel PC and AOL account.
How about Grandma who wants to set up a webcam so she can chat with her grandchildren? She doesn't want to have to sit and hack kernels for hours. She wants Plug-and-Play, baby.
If she bought an Apple Mac way back when they delivered desktop computing and upgraded as she liked along the Apple path, she'd be using a web cam if that is what she wanted. She might even be showing off her wrinkley old bits to the World for $4.95 per month.
Look, disagree all you like, but thanks to things like Windows, Office, and MSN, modern computing has been made easy and affordable to everyone, thanks to pioneers like Bill Gates.
Affordable? When the latest full version of MS Office is released in Australia, it typically costs around one thousand Australian dollars. The OS' are expensive too. Unless of course, I get them cheap with my next PC and MS succeeds in dominating one more desktop.
--
A Commodore, an assembler tape, and one bored kid