Well, yes (although that is not my experience with industrial Compact Flash drives; but presumably Intel did better than that).
But don't forget that NAND flash deteriorates on its own without writing. It needs to be scrubbed periodically and sectors moved around even if you are not writing to it or not accessing it at all!
Your numbers are wrong. In the degenerate case you have one erase cycle per sector write. The erase limit is 10,000. Multiply that by the number of free blocks (not sectors, but blocks - one block is at least 128K) and you get the result for the worst case.
Let's say 1MB extra free space. That is 8 blocks and 80,000 writes. Clearly within the realm of possibility.
Of course this just a lower bound, but is worth thinking about.
Don't answer with generalities unless you have really thought about it. Wear-leveling is based on heuristics; since it cannot predict the future it is always possible to construct scenarios which will hit the worst case. And if it is theoretically possible, it will happen.
Imagine a simple case and go from there. Imagine a flash with 5 blocks total, 4 sectors per block. The logical capacity is 16 sectors; the extra block is over-provisioned for wear leveling, etc. Now, imagine that you have the 4 blocks neatly filled with occupied sectors and the 5-th block is erased.
What happens if you want to write to a random sector? The sector is written in the erased space in the 5th block and its physical position is updated in the map. If you repeat that operation 3 more times, the 5th block will get filled with 4 used sectors, and each of the other 4 blocks will have one invalid sector on the average. So far so good.
What happens if you want to rewrite a random sector now, though? Tough luck. You need to erase a whole block, pack all valid sectors in it, and write the modified sector.
From now on you get one erase per sector write. Not only that, but you get 3 additional writes. That is called write amplification and is unavoidable in the worst case.
Now, tell me, how will wear leveling have helped this? Wear leveling works well only well there is plenty of free space. And even then it is possible to construct artificial bad scenarios.
The X25-M's initial firmware was unusually bad; the degradation was more rapid and more severe than necessary.
Unusually bad? More severe than necessary? Not really. Even with this supposed degradation, it was ages ahead of any and all competition. What was unusually bad was the complete lack of understanding from all reviewers who did not understand basic principles and the fundamental limitations of flash and yet rushed ahead with their articles. Those poor fools expected that the driver should behave like a regular HDD - they weren't prepared for the unavoidable deterioration in performance.
I expect they will be similarly surprised when some drives stop working, because Flash has a very limited number of rewrites. Wear leveling improves the situation, but it just postpones the inevitable. For example, if the driver us full to capacity and you start rewriting a single sector at full speed, you will get to the 10000 rewrite limit relatively quickly.
You are comparing space flight to climbing Mount Everest. No offense, but that is pretty sad. Climbing Mount Everest is totally useless, but at the same time "awesome" because it is hard, only a few people have been there, and you get to look on the world from up high. While there is some "coolness" factor in that, this is not what humanity aspires to.
We like space flight for other reasons - science, discovery, planetary colonization and so on. Paying $200K for a pointless suborbital flight makes a mockery of all that in a sense.
Now, don't get me wrong. Doing a suborbital flight is cool in the sense that jumping with a parachute is, mountain climbing, extreme sports, etc. If you can afford it and you enjoy it - more power to you. Have fun, and I sincerely mean it.
But let's not pretend that it is something meaningful or important.
(By comparison going to the ISS is awesome, because at least in theory it could be used as a starting point for interplanetary expeditions, and having ordinary people be able to go there means that we are advancing technology in that direction).
I for one don't think its awesome and I am sure I am not the only one. What's so awesome about it?
First, it is completely pointless. It is not like suborbital flight generates useful science, or launches satellites or anything. It sole purpose is just idiotic entertainment for the rich.
We were able to make real orbital flights in 1961. In 2009 you can pay a huge amount of money and make a pointless sub-orbital flight? Pfft. It is not my definition of awesome.
Now, if we could dock with the ISS, that would be inbcredible! Not in our life time though.
Are you just pretending not to understand that the meaning was "there are not that many businesses who rely on developing free software". Sheesh... And no, there are not that many compared to the ones who develop closed source software.
I also use P2P primarily to download Linux distros, and I have to say I usually get excellent speed - sometimes up to 1 MB/s. It is typically much better than a direct download for me. I guess it depends on the ISP - I am with Comcast in the US.
Thank you for you thoughtful replies. Even though I don't necessarily agree with everything you said, you seem to have more insight into the matter than me. So what is your preferred solution to the conundrum of compensating authors while simultaneously not limiting the free exchange of information?
I don't really know how musicians get paid. It seems that if they didn't make money from the recording companies, they could completely ignore them and distribute their music under a creative commons license or whatever and make money from live acts. I don't know if that would be a sustainable model. I am worried that not every musician is necessarily great at touring. Creating music and performing it live for an audience are not necessarily related. There are great studio musicians that I would hate to lose.
On the subject of size of the initial investment: I think you are forgetting that _time_ is also an expensive investment and you need lots of it in upfront order to write software, a book, record a song. Time is money:-) So, while movies and games are obvious problematic examples, the same problem actually applies to everything else.
Well, I am not defending existing copyright laws. Personally, I think that the copyright extensions are harmful and absurd. But I guess some copyright law is necessary.
My fundamental point is that creators should be compensated in some way, if they decide they want to be (like I am sure most would). I am not sure how (blanket licenses, taxes, the existing model??), but I am fairly certain that downloading everything for absolutely free is not helping.
Ahem. Hosting business do not develop most of the software they use. So, what is your point?
Of course it is possible to make money with software that somebody else developed and you are using for free. Heck, I do it every day. Of course it is also possible (but much much harder) to make money from supporting free software, etc. Red Hat does it.
The point that almost everybody is conveniently missing is that it is up to the creator of the software/music/book/movie to chose whether it is free or not. You are not automatically entitled to the product of my work, unless I decide that I want to give it to you for free. (I am speaking hypothetically). I am amazed that this basic concept is so difficult to grasp.
Let me take a wild stab in the dark - you're an american and a republican yes?
The answer to those questions is no and hell no, but are they meant to be insulting?
Whether current copyright law is perfect is beside the point. One, it is still the law - if you don't like it, try to change it. Secondly, even without it authors should be entitled to chose the terms for distribution of their work.
The idea that art should be completely free is of course completely ridiculous. What is worse, it is harmful. Artists need to get paid in order to eat - that is the sad reality. Yes, we all would like to be able to do what we like without any concern for money, but it ain't gonna happen.
Just out of curiosity, are you a musician, writer, movie maker or software developer, and if so, do you give away your work for free? No?? Really?? Hmm. But you want to take other people's work for free? Isn't that nice. It seems a bit asymmetrical though.
Earth to Utopia: That ain't gonna work, pal. You either pay for their effort, or you are gonna have to try to write your own software/music/books/whatever...:-)
It is amazing how few people realize that without compensation there would be almost no literature, music, movies, not to mention software. It is fortunate that there are still some bozos paying for all that, so all the rest of the freeloaders can enjoy it.
BTW, reality does fully agree with me, and it will at least while people need to eat. You do know for example that most famous paintings were commissioned and paid for?
Well, this is not about legal terminology, which I really don't understand well. Nor am I familiar with the individual laws in every single country in the world (or any country at all, to be honest). I suspect "copyright infringement" is some sort of a crime in most places, though.
The point is, creating content takes time and work. Copying that content for free, against the wishes of its creator, is theft and is unethical. Also it undeniably decreases the incentive to create more content.
Whether music/movies/software are too expensive is a different subject. Ideally the market should decide.
Right now people are stealing like crazy, but fortunately there are still enough paying customers to support the creation of more music, movies, books, etc. I suspect that eventually most new content will either simply disappear (because lets face it, it takes a full time commitment and lots of effort to be good at it, and few people can do it for free), or some sort of blanket licensing scheme will make the whole point moot.
So the GNU movement and Creative Commons License are just figments of my imagination, eh? DAMN, I need to copyright my brain!!
I don't see the relevance. The GNU movement is a philosophical one. It doesn't claim it is a way to make money or to even support oneself. BTW, how many Creative Commons movies have you seen lately? Hmm, not that many you say?:-)
But seriously, there are ways to profit off 'free' stuff. Put a PayPal button on the download page of your software. Sell per-incident support and/or dead tree manuals on how to use it, including the nifty not so obvious features you wrote into it. Use your imagination already. You claim you have one. Use it already.
I am afraid that is utter nonsense. For one, most good programmers would be terrible at live support, or at writing manuals. If that is what it took to be a software developer, not many would do it. Fortunately this is not the case and you are confusing imagination with reality.
Of course there are ways to make money from free software, which is great. I love free software. However to think that it is possible to exist only with free software is a bit naive.
Much more importantly, my point was that it is up to the creator of the product (developer, musician, whatever) to decide how to license the product and we should respect their wishes, because it is the ethical thing to do, even if there was no copyright law. If they make them free, more power to them! However if they don't, we don't have the right to just do whatever we want.
No it's not, it's copyright infringement. If I steal something from you (classic definition of 'theft'), then I have it and you don't. Filesharers 'create' copies remotely, with the copy exactly like the original. Nothing's lost, and you still have your original copy.
Except that if I don't get paid I am not going to create any more songs (or movies, or programs, etc) and will go work in an accounting office instead...
As I don't have mod points to mod you down as troll..
Just because I have a different opinion, and am not afraid to express it, and am not posting as an AC, does not make me a troll. Not that I give a rat's ass about how you would hypothetically moderate me.
Apart from you mixing up stealing with copying songs.. I think you should research ethics. Ethics is more about acting on what you believe to be right despite outside influence than defining right from wrong. You may take issue with people's choices but trying to paint a picture of morality with copyright infringers on the wrong side seems an arrogant attempt to impose your choices on others.
Don't be ridiculous. I believe that I have the right to steal your car. Enough said.
This is a much more sensible point and one which I am glad to respond to. If people are not willing to pay for something.. then they make the choice not to invest in it. In the case of material goods.. this means you walk away as you cannot have the goods without depriving someone else. If the goods are infinite then there is nothing lost should you choose not to invest in the person who created them.
It is easy to make a concious choice as to whether you want to support the person who creates something. It is harder to make this concious choice if you are forced by law to pay the creater regardless of whether you wanted to or not. To those like me who oppose it, copyright law adds nothing to society.. it only takes away through creating a society where everything people do has to be a commodity and that people such as musicians are only worth as much as you spend on their CD's.
This is wrong on several levels. Firstly, nobody is forcing you to pay for copyrighted content, if you don't like it. Don't listen to copyrighted songs. There are enough bands who are willing to to give their music for free (and I applaud them for it), so it is not like you don't have a choice. Similarly, there is plenty of free software.
Secondly, the notion that the "goods" are infinite is provably wrong. A movie may take, say, 30 man/years to create. Who is going to do it for free? If you come up with an alternative way for compensating that work (compulsory licensing, whatever), and creators decide to adopt it, then I am all for it.
Everyone needs to make a living somehow. If you cannot work out how to do it without copyright.. don't be a software developer. There are plenty of people out there who would be glad for less competition.
Wow, I have never heard that argument before. And as usual it is so full of substance. You do realize that currently copyright pays the salary of most developers? There aren't many successful businesses who rely entirely on free software. Most either sell non-open source versions of their products, or have some entirely non-free add-ons, or rely on hardware sales.
To take a random example, how many high profile free games have you seen? Oh, yes, all game companies should immediately listen to you and close down because they can't figure out how to make money without copyright.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to live in an utopia as mush as the next guy, and I find idealism charming, but come on...
We are all a bunch of hypocrites. Of course I strongly disapprove of blocking P2P or throttling. It may become a big problem. However it is hypocritical to pretend that P2P is used mostly for legal purposes.
Say what you like, but downloading music and movies for free is still theft, no matter how you look at it. So, you don't approve of the current content owners' distribution policies, you think that CDs are overpriced, and that DRM sucks, and that everything should be available cheaply and conveniently online. I completely, 100% agree. However this is no excuse for stealing. Don't like the policies - don't use the product. End of story. Anything else is simply unethical.
Come on people, it is unethical. If I try to sell you a piece of crap for $1000 you are not obliged to buy it, but you don't have the right to steal it either.
Let's face it, illegal downloading of movies and songs is really rampant. I have more than a few acquaintances in Europe who have collections of many thousands songs, movies (and software packages), without having _EVER_ bought a single one. They will never buy a CD or a movie, for any price, while they can download it for free. They never go to the cinema either because they download all new movies. They act as if they are entitled to this product for free, just because they consider it too expensive or too inconvenient to buy. Personally I find that disgusting (even though I agree with the expensive and inconvenient part).
Distribution of pirated software is a subject that I find close to my heart. It takes a _lot of_ money to develop software. Perhaps not everybody realizes it, but programmers need to pay rent and eat. So do musicians and movie makers.
Man, if you casually disclose things like that about your previous employers, don't expect to get many contracts. It is simply unethical. If they made you sign an NDA, then you just violated it, so you could be in real trouble. If they didn't, then they really are complete idiots:-)
Is the world gone completely insane? One, QT already was open source (ahem, anyone heard of a obscure license called GPL?), and two, Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) has had an Arm port (among others) for practically ever. This is f*ing ridiculous.
Well, the choice of 32-bit vs 64-bit userspace boils down to convenience. If 64-bit works for you, great! On the other hand, I have carried over my desktop Linux installation through several different machines and only the last one is 64-bit capable; I'd rather not reinstall everything, given that none of the applications I use need 64-bit address space.
Also, don't forget that 64-bit userspace applications need more memory (pointers are twice as big). They have larger cache footprint and this alone could cause them to be slower than 32-bit despite of having more registers.
I'm sorry... what? I don't see how that's a reasonable choice at all.
The 32-bit Linux kernel cannot efficiently handle more than 1 GB RAM. Linus Torvalds himself is outspoken on this subject and recommends using a 64-bit kernel with more than 1 GB (alas, I can't find the reference right now, but he has written many times on the subject in RealWorledTech.com's forums).
On the other hand, using 64-bit in userspace is pointless for most users. Most applications don't need more than 3GB of RAM. Also, there are binary plugins, etc, which only work in 32-bit.
64-bit kernel and 32-bit userspace is the most efficient and practical choice for the vast majority of users.
I don't know about ATI, but NVidia is a _terrible_ choice! I also used to buy NVidia for all my Linux boxes and recommend it to everybody. I was wrong. The problem is that the free NVidia drivers are extremely slow. They are actually slower than using the generic VESA driver with Intel graphics.
I don't know why - I suspect it has something to do with reading from display memory - but it is a fact. I have a relatively fast quadcore machine, and yet when I am using the free NV drivers, it is unusable for Internet browsing. Scrolling of some websites is impossible (mostly ones who have a patterned background). Flash is about a magnitude slower for many things. Lots of the snazzy JavaScript demos are too slow to be impressive.
As soon as I installed the nonfree drivers everything improved drastically. However I am using 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace (this is the most reasonable choice if you have more than 1 GB of RAM), and the non-free drivers don't support that configuration...
So, short term I recommend only Intel. Given that ATI released some documentation recently, I recommend ATI long term. Sorry, NVidia, we had a nice run, but until you release detailed documentation, you will stay off all my machines.
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Well, yes (although that is not my experience with industrial Compact Flash drives; but presumably Intel did better than that).
But don't forget that NAND flash deteriorates on its own without writing. It needs to be scrubbed periodically and sectors moved around even if you are not writing to it or not accessing it at all!
Your numbers are wrong. In the degenerate case you have one erase cycle per sector write. The erase limit is 10,000. Multiply that by the number of free blocks (not sectors, but blocks - one block is at least 128K) and you get the result for the worst case.
Let's say 1MB extra free space. That is 8 blocks and 80,000 writes. Clearly within the realm of possibility.
Of course this just a lower bound, but is worth thinking about.
Don't answer with generalities unless you have really thought about it. Wear-leveling is based on heuristics; since it cannot predict the future it is always possible to construct scenarios which will hit the worst case. And if it is theoretically possible, it will happen.
Imagine a simple case and go from there. Imagine a flash with 5 blocks total, 4 sectors per block. The logical capacity is 16 sectors; the extra block is over-provisioned for wear leveling, etc. Now, imagine that you have the 4 blocks neatly filled with occupied sectors and the 5-th block is erased.
What happens if you want to write to a random sector? The sector is written in the erased space in the 5th block and its physical position is updated in the map. If you repeat that operation 3 more times, the 5th block will get filled with 4 used sectors, and each of the other 4 blocks will have one invalid sector on the average. So far so good.
What happens if you want to rewrite a random sector now, though? Tough luck. You need to erase a whole block, pack all valid sectors in it, and write the modified sector.
From now on you get one erase per sector write. Not only that, but you get 3 additional writes. That is called write amplification and is unavoidable in the worst case.
Now, tell me, how will wear leveling have helped this? Wear leveling works well only well there is plenty of free space. And even then it is possible to construct artificial bad scenarios.
Unusually bad? More severe than necessary? Not really. Even with this supposed degradation, it was ages ahead of any and all competition. What was unusually bad was the complete lack of understanding from all reviewers who did not understand basic principles and the fundamental limitations of flash and yet rushed ahead with their articles. Those poor fools expected that the driver should behave like a regular HDD - they weren't prepared for the unavoidable deterioration in performance.
I expect they will be similarly surprised when some drives stop working, because Flash has a very limited number of rewrites. Wear leveling improves the situation, but it just postpones the inevitable. For example, if the driver us full to capacity and you start rewriting a single sector at full speed, you will get to the 10000 rewrite limit relatively quickly.
You are comparing space flight to climbing Mount Everest. No offense, but that is pretty sad. Climbing Mount Everest is totally useless, but at the same time "awesome" because it is hard, only a few people have been there, and you get to look on the world from up high. While there is some "coolness" factor in that, this is not what humanity aspires to.
We like space flight for other reasons - science, discovery, planetary colonization and so on. Paying $200K for a pointless suborbital flight makes a mockery of all that in a sense.
Now, don't get me wrong. Doing a suborbital flight is cool in the sense that jumping with a parachute is, mountain climbing, extreme sports, etc. If you can afford it and you enjoy it - more power to you. Have fun, and I sincerely mean it.
But let's not pretend that it is something meaningful or important.
(By comparison going to the ISS is awesome, because at least in theory it could be used as a starting point for interplanetary expeditions, and having ordinary people be able to go there means that we are advancing technology in that direction).
I for one don't think its awesome and I am sure I am not the only one. What's so awesome about it?
First, it is completely pointless. It is not like suborbital flight generates useful science, or launches satellites or anything. It sole purpose is just idiotic entertainment for the rich.
We were able to make real orbital flights in 1961. In 2009 you can pay a huge amount of money and make a pointless sub-orbital flight? Pfft. It is not my definition of awesome.
Now, if we could dock with the ISS, that would be inbcredible! Not in our life time though.
Are you just pretending not to understand that the meaning was "there are not that many businesses who rely on developing free software". Sheesh... And no, there are not that many compared to the ones who develop closed source software.
I also use P2P primarily to download Linux distros, and I have to say I usually get excellent speed - sometimes up to 1 MB/s. It is typically much better than a direct download for me. I guess it depends on the ISP - I am with Comcast in the US.
Thank you for you thoughtful replies. Even though I don't necessarily agree with everything you said, you seem to have more insight into the matter than me. So what is your preferred solution to the conundrum of compensating authors while simultaneously not limiting the free exchange of information?
I don't really know how musicians get paid. It seems that if they didn't make money from the recording companies, they could completely ignore them and distribute their music under a creative commons license or whatever and make money from live acts. I don't know if that would be a sustainable model. I am worried that not every musician is necessarily great at touring. Creating music and performing it live for an audience are not necessarily related. There are great studio musicians that I would hate to lose.
On the subject of size of the initial investment: I think you are forgetting that _time_ is also an expensive investment and you need lots of it in upfront order to write software, a book, record a song. Time is money :-) So, while movies and games are obvious problematic examples, the same problem actually applies to everything else.
Well, I am not defending existing copyright laws. Personally, I think that the copyright extensions are harmful and absurd. But I guess some copyright law is necessary.
My fundamental point is that creators should be compensated in some way, if they decide they want to be (like I am sure most would). I am not sure how (blanket licenses, taxes, the existing model??), but I am fairly certain that downloading everything for absolutely free is not helping.
Ahem. Hosting business do not develop most of the software they use. So, what is your point?
Of course it is possible to make money with software that somebody else developed and you are using for free. Heck, I do it every day. Of course it is also possible (but much much harder) to make money from supporting free software, etc. Red Hat does it.
The point that almost everybody is conveniently missing is that it is up to the creator of the software/music/book/movie to chose whether it is free or not. You are not automatically entitled to the product of my work, unless I decide that I want to give it to you for free. (I am speaking hypothetically). I am amazed that this basic concept is so difficult to grasp.
The answer to those questions is no and hell no, but are they meant to be insulting?
Whether current copyright law is perfect is beside the point. One, it is still the law - if you don't like it, try to change it. Secondly, even without it authors should be entitled to chose the terms for distribution of their work.
The idea that art should be completely free is of course completely ridiculous. What is worse, it is harmful. Artists need to get paid in order to eat - that is the sad reality. Yes, we all would like to be able to do what we like without any concern for money, but it ain't gonna happen.
Just out of curiosity, are you a musician, writer, movie maker or software developer, and if so, do you give away your work for free? No?? Really?? Hmm. But you want to take other people's work for free? Isn't that nice. It seems a bit asymmetrical though.
Earth to Utopia: That ain't gonna work, pal. You either pay for their effort, or you are gonna have to try to write your own software/music/books/whatever ... :-)
It is amazing how few people realize that without compensation there would be almost no literature, music, movies, not to mention software. It is fortunate that there are still some bozos paying for all that, so all the rest of the freeloaders can enjoy it.
BTW, reality does fully agree with me, and it will at least while people need to eat. You do know for example that most famous paintings were commissioned and paid for?
Well, this is not about legal terminology, which I really don't understand well. Nor am I familiar with the individual laws in every single country in the world (or any country at all, to be honest). I suspect "copyright infringement" is some sort of a crime in most places, though.
The point is, creating content takes time and work. Copying that content for free, against the wishes of its creator, is theft and is unethical. Also it undeniably decreases the incentive to create more content.
Whether music/movies/software are too expensive is a different subject. Ideally the market should decide.
Right now people are stealing like crazy, but fortunately there are still enough paying customers to support the creation of more music, movies, books, etc. I suspect that eventually most new content will either simply disappear (because lets face it, it takes a full time commitment and lots of effort to be good at it, and few people can do it for free), or some sort of blanket licensing scheme will make the whole point moot.
I don't see the relevance. The GNU movement is a philosophical one. It doesn't claim it is a way to make money or to even support oneself. BTW, how many Creative Commons movies have you seen lately? Hmm, not that many you say? :-)
I am afraid that is utter nonsense. For one, most good programmers would be terrible at live support, or at writing manuals. If that is what it took to be a software developer, not many would do it. Fortunately this is not the case and you are confusing imagination with reality.
Of course there are ways to make money from free software, which is great. I love free software. However to think that it is possible to exist only with free software is a bit naive.
Much more importantly, my point was that it is up to the creator of the product (developer, musician, whatever) to decide how to license the product and we should respect their wishes, because it is the ethical thing to do, even if there was no copyright law. If they make them free, more power to them! However if they don't, we don't have the right to just do whatever we want.
Except that if I don't get paid I am not going to create any more songs (or movies, or programs, etc) and will go work in an accounting office instead...
Just because I have a different opinion, and am not afraid to express it, and am not posting as an AC, does not make me a troll. Not that I give a rat's ass about how you would hypothetically moderate me.
Don't be ridiculous. I believe that I have the right to steal your car. Enough said.
This is wrong on several levels. Firstly, nobody is forcing you to pay for copyrighted content, if you don't like it. Don't listen to copyrighted songs. There are enough bands who are willing to to give their music for free (and I applaud them for it), so it is not like you don't have a choice. Similarly, there is plenty of free software.
Secondly, the notion that the "goods" are infinite is provably wrong. A movie may take, say, 30 man/years to create. Who is going to do it for free? If you come up with an alternative way for compensating that work (compulsory licensing, whatever), and creators decide to adopt it, then I am all for it.
Wow, I have never heard that argument before. And as usual it is so full of substance. You do realize that currently copyright pays the salary of most developers? There aren't many successful businesses who rely entirely on free software. Most either sell non-open source versions of their products, or have some entirely non-free add-ons, or rely on hardware sales.
To take a random example, how many high profile free games have you seen? Oh, yes, all game companies should immediately listen to you and close down because they can't figure out how to make money without copyright.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to live in an utopia as mush as the next guy, and I find idealism charming, but come on...
We are all a bunch of hypocrites. Of course I strongly disapprove of blocking P2P or throttling. It may become a big problem. However it is hypocritical to pretend that P2P is used mostly for legal purposes.
Say what you like, but downloading music and movies for free is still theft, no matter how you look at it. So, you don't approve of the current content owners' distribution policies, you think that CDs are overpriced, and that DRM sucks, and that everything should be available cheaply and conveniently online. I completely, 100% agree. However this is no excuse for stealing. Don't like the policies - don't use the product. End of story. Anything else is simply unethical.
Come on people, it is unethical. If I try to sell you a piece of crap for $1000 you are not obliged to buy it, but you don't have the right to steal it either.
Let's face it, illegal downloading of movies and songs is really rampant. I have more than a few acquaintances in Europe who have collections of many thousands songs, movies (and software packages), without having _EVER_ bought a single one. They will never buy a CD or a movie, for any price, while they can download it for free. They never go to the cinema either because they download all new movies. They act as if they are entitled to this product for free, just because they consider it too expensive or too inconvenient to buy. Personally I find that disgusting (even though I agree with the expensive and inconvenient part).
Distribution of pirated software is a subject that I find close to my heart. It takes a _lot of_ money to develop software. Perhaps not everybody realizes it, but programmers need to pay rent and eat. So do musicians and movie makers.
Nope, the joke stays :-) You still have to reboot when you upgrade your f*ing web browser. Or other blatantly non-core shit like that.
Wow, man, wow! Posts like these make me continue reading Slashdot despite all the crap.
Man, if you casually disclose things like that about your previous employers, don't expect to get many contracts. It is simply unethical. If they made you sign an NDA, then you just violated it, so you could be in real trouble. If they didn't, then they really are complete idiots :-)
Is the world gone completely insane? One, QT already was open source (ahem, anyone heard of a obscure license called GPL?), and two, Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) has had an Arm port (among others) for practically ever. This is f*ing ridiculous.
Well, the choice of 32-bit vs 64-bit userspace boils down to convenience. If 64-bit works for you, great! On the other hand, I have carried over my desktop Linux installation through several different machines and only the last one is 64-bit capable; I'd rather not reinstall everything, given that none of the applications I use need 64-bit address space.
Also, don't forget that 64-bit userspace applications need more memory (pointers are twice as big). They have larger cache footprint and this alone could cause them to be slower than 32-bit despite of having more registers.
The 32-bit Linux kernel cannot efficiently handle more than 1 GB RAM. Linus Torvalds himself is outspoken on this subject and recommends using a 64-bit kernel with more than 1 GB (alas, I can't find the reference right now, but he has written many times on the subject in RealWorledTech.com's forums).
On the other hand, using 64-bit in userspace is pointless for most users. Most applications don't need more than 3GB of RAM. Also, there are binary plugins, etc, which only work in 32-bit.
64-bit kernel and 32-bit userspace is the most efficient and practical choice for the vast majority of users.
I don't know about ATI, but NVidia is a _terrible_ choice! I also used to buy NVidia for all my Linux boxes and recommend it to everybody. I was wrong. The problem is that the free NVidia drivers are extremely slow. They are actually slower than using the generic VESA driver with Intel graphics.
I don't know why - I suspect it has something to do with reading from display memory - but it is a fact. I have a relatively fast quadcore machine, and yet when I am using the free NV drivers, it is unusable for Internet browsing. Scrolling of some websites is impossible (mostly ones who have a patterned background). Flash is about a magnitude slower for many things. Lots of the snazzy JavaScript demos are too slow to be impressive.
As soon as I installed the nonfree drivers everything improved drastically. However I am using 64-bit kernel with 32-bit userspace (this is the most reasonable choice if you have more than 1 GB of RAM), and the non-free drivers don't support that configuration...
So, short term I recommend only Intel. Given that ATI released some documentation recently, I recommend ATI long term. Sorry, NVidia, we had a nice run, but until you release detailed documentation, you will stay off all my machines.