My point wasn't in regards to the what the GPL says.
My point was that Nvidia benefits from Linux, yet gives nothing back. That is why I'd never buy an Nvidia video card, and never recommend one to run under Linux.
Nvidia would be valued much more highly in the open source community by making some sort of reciprical gift. The level is up to them - no demands are being made. However, they would find that their value as a contributor would increase as they give back more. Mind you, they aren't expected to give everything. It is up to them.
Nvidia would have plenty of other examples of companies who have realised that recipricating benefits both them and the community - IBM, Intel, AMD, SGI, HP, etc. etc. etc.
"So Linux is of no benefit to them at all -- it's a detraction. But if it's a necessary step to get revenue (say because Renderman runs on Linux and big shops ask for it), then they'll do the work to get the money."
Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly. One moment you seem to be saying they get no benefit at all, the next you say they are "only" supporting Linux because they make revenue from it. How can making revenue not be a benefit to an organisation whose goal is to make money ? Bare in mind that revenue, unless you make a profit from it after taking out your costs, is pointless.
I would have thought it would be obvious that any business with even a small amount of intelligence only does things which will make it money. If you don't make money, and your intention is to, you are out of business.
"Workers are prepared to give away their passwords for a cheap pen, according to a somewhat unscientific - but still illuminating - survey published today."
I'm using a Matrox G550. I know, not the latest greatest 3D card, then again, I don't play games, and don't care to compete with the FPS figures of other people. Of course, there are uses for 3D graphics other than games.
If you want get a video card that has open source drivers, have a look at the list of video cards supported by the XFree86/Xwin project, and the DRI project.
Last time I looked, the ATI 9200 series of cards where the latest supported with fully open DRI drivers. Again, not the latest and greatest, still they are still available new, so they a probably adequate.
We are in a bit of a dark period at the moment with drivers. People want fast, yet the vendors aren't releasing programming specs for them. Their "Linux support" is really just lip service.
Security is best done end-to-end. As significant amounts of traffic requiring security cross layer 2 boundaries (ie. the wired or wireless networks you are talking about), it is far better to implement the protocols you are taking about, which usually provide end-to-end, or near end-to-end protection.
You may like MacOS, and prefer it over other, cheaper, functionally equivalent alternatives. Fair enough.
I don't think your car analogy works though. Car "geeks" don't drop their late 80s, early 90s car for a new BMW/Accord for "geek" reasons. If they do, they aren't car "geeks", they are "ricers".
This is what car "geeks" do to their Hondas - The New LCRX.
Yada, yada, yada 419-like text here, only coming from the "CEO of Rolex".
Actually this is a bit like some art - some dude publishes a 1000s of years old idea, and is recognised for it. So he's basically being rewarded for publishing the idea, not having it. Sort of like some art - you look at it and think, who on Earth would do that ? And then they sell it for $1000s, and then you think to yourself, "I'm an idiot", I could have done that !
because, by the looks of it, I'd prefer not to have to take it apart and ship it.
I'm not sure how I'm going to cope with the hot center of the Earth, to get it down here to Australia though.
The name Alan Smithee is commonly used by film directors who's control of the film was taken away from them, such that the director wants to disown it.
If you live in the USA, do you only buy "Made in USA" clothes ?
I'm sure there are people who do, however, I'd suggest the majority don't, and end up with a cupboard full of clothes made in Mexico, Brazil, India, China etc. It is the same here in Australia.
It is both shareholders, wanting better profits, and consumers, wanting cheaper products, who are driving outsoucing. It happens with clothes, it happens with cars, its now starting to happen with IT.
If you only buy locally made goods, you are supporting your country. Fair enough. However, if all countries did that, then countries which are currently export positive, such as the USA, Australia, Japan etc, won't have a market to sell to. Longer term, it will cause these export positive countries to fail, a fate (arguably, depending on who you are) worse than the outsource alternative.
Re:IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
assuming no universal plug&play webserver/appliance multiplexing protocol in the futuristic 5-years-from-now world
That describes part of the feature set of IPv6.
is port forwarding.
So, presuming these multiple PVRs, fridge, air con etc. each have embedded web servers, to which one of them are you going to port forward TCP port 80 to ? What are you going to do about the others ? You only have one TCP port 80 to forward, as you only have one IPv4 address.
Re:IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
No, it's like saying residential telephone users don't need a separate number for every phone in the house. Which they don't.
They do if they want to have multiple, concurrent conversations, with the ability to receive independent incoming calls.
None of those gee-whiz services listed in the article require IPV6 or separate per-device addresses. They can all be aggregated and gatewayed through shared addresses, and arguably should be for many reasons. E.g. imagine exploitable web server bugs in every camera, refrigerator, thermostat, traffic sensor, etc, etc, and having to keep them all patched and operational separately. Alternatively you can have a single web server handling public queries, doing proper authentication, and aggregating and presenting data from the various data-collecting devices according to a single set of configuration profiles. IMHO that would be much more maintainable.
They don't require IPv6, but IPv6 makes it much easier. With enought time and effort, almost anything is achievable. The question is, why go to a lot of effort inventing a complicated solution, when a simpler one already exists.
I'd like to know your solution for the following scenario. Say its 5 years time, and I've just bought a PVR that I'm going to plug into my home network, which I'd also like to have accessible from my work, so I can program it remotely, just in case I get delayed, or am on a work trip, for example. In this 5-year time plug and play world, all I need to do is plug in the power cable, and switch it on. For data access it will use Wifi. That is all I'm going to do to set it up, as I'm a non-technical end user.
How would you solve that problem ? Say I bought another PVR, and wanted the same accessiblity and convenience for both of them. Oh, and I also want to be able to access my air conditioner from work, because sometimes the weatherman is wrong, and I might want to turn it on from work, so that the house is cool when I get home.
If you don't think IPv6 is a good solution, I'd be interested to know how you are going to use IPv4 (and possibly NAT) to solve it.
So called "IPv8" is not IETF work.
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
A few quotes from the follow up emails
write it off to loonies and sociopaths not taking their meds. - Randy Bush
"IPv8" is a joke. Unfortunately it is a joke that has gone on
too long and is still wasting people's time. - Brian Carpenter
"The recent postings you have received, despite the use of the string
"IPv8" and being posted to the IETF list, have nothing to do with this
actual IPv8. Despite the use of the string "RFC" in these postings to
the IETF list, they having nothing to do with any IETF RFC. The link
you cite below is merely to an area with public comments, not an area
with any sort of official output by NTIA. It is as though these
postings were an effort to cause confusion.
- Donald E. Eastlake 3rd
Visit his site here to make your own judgement - IPv8. The site seems to be having some problems, make sure you get the groovy soup can version.
IPv6 is going to last a long, long time, there is no need to spend time on "IPv8".
IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Keith Moore, an author/co-author of a number of RFCs on IPv6 and other topics, posted the following to the IETF mailing list, regarding what IPv6 will enable and can be used for.
The comment was in response to somebody's claim that residential users would be happy with NAT, and non-globally routable IP addresses for their "internal" networks.
That's like saying residential telephone users don't need to have a
phone number at which they can be reached. (after all, the purpose of
their residential phones is to call businesses for the purpose of
obtaining services, right?)
There are lots of apps that would be valuable to residential users if
residential users had reachable IP addresses. check the status of your
alarm system, or your roast in the oven, or your freezer's inventory.
Grab a picture from your baby-cam while you're out for dinner and have
left the kid with the baby sitter. Reset the thermostat if you're
going to be out of town longer than you thought. Do all of these from
your portable phone/PDA which is running guess what? -- IPv6.
Also, don't assume that IPv6 addresses will be used by people or their
personal computers. IPv6 enables lots and lots of individually
addressable devices which don't have to be associated with individuals.
Every km of highway can have an addressable traffic sensor so that
police and emergency crews know exactly when and where a traffic
accident happened. Every streetlight can be monitored to see if it is
functioning properly or if it needs service. Every traffic signal can
be made individually controllable so that they can dynamically adapt to
changes in traffic patterns. For reasons like this, the demand for
IPv6 addresses won't be determined by some linear multiple of the
number of humans on the planet.
Finally, don't assume that IPv6 devices will require the support
burdens we associate with PCs. PCs as we currently know them are
dinosaurs. Appliances that talk to the network aren't going to need the
same kind of technical hand-holding that PCs do (because they'd never
succeed if they did), and neither will the devices that replace what we
now think of as personal computers.
IPv6 will eventually replace IPv4, but it's misleading to think of IPv6
as just a replacement for IPv4. By the time IPv6 replaces IPv4, we
won't recognize the IPv6 network as something that resembles what the
IPv4 network is used for today. Even though the underlying technology
is very similar, IPv6 is really a new kind of network, one that enables
things that were really never possible with IPv4 on a large scale.
Professor Fels was appointed as Professor of Administration at Monash University in 1984 and was the Director of the Graduate School of Management, Monash University from 1985 until 1990 and is now an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University.
Professor Fels has degrees in economics and law from the University of Western Australia, and a Ph.D in Economics from Duke University. After leaving Duke he was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge, where his Duke Ph.D thesis was published as The British Prices and Incomes Board by Cambridge University Press.
What gave you the impression that he made it up, and then convinced everybody in the media and the government ? Academic fraud like that at his level, and in his (former) role, would be career suicide for him, and extremely very embarresing for the government.
It's possible to view the source, but it's not worth the trouble.
That's the trade off you have to decide upon. If you don't want to download it using the originator's methods, fair enough.
That being said, I would consider asking somebody else to download and mirror it for you, presumably at their costs, ie. free to you, to be pretty selfish. You are asking somebody else to do something which you are not prepared to do yourself. You are asking them to take the "security risk" of this javascript code, to avoid taking it yourself.
More broadly, if you don't trust javascript that you can view and audit if you choose too, how can you trust the web browser you use, the operating system you use, and even the hardware you use ? I'm guessing you didn't write every line of code in your browser or OS, or design the chips in your hardware, so how do you know they are doing what you think they are doing. So you are already implicitly trusting somebody else, very likely somebody you'll never meet, nor will be able to confirm absolutely that their intentions were honest and genuine when developing the browser, OS or hardware.
I'm just surprised you appear to distrust javascript so much, when there are so many other areas where trust may be far more commonly misplaced, and where the consequences of misplaced trust are far greater.
URLs start with the "http://" prefix, or probably more correctly "|protocol|://" prefix.
They have a domain name there, that is all, not a URL.
If they get the terminology wrong in a patent, does that mean it is invalid, because the "inventor" doesn't understand the topic well enough to be explicitly correct ? I would have thought patents have to be explicitly correct, as the government is granting the patent holder a monopoly, and therefore, the patent must be very clear and correct.
I suggest you have a read of this book, as it identifies the motivations behind a number of the design decisions behind IPv6.
For example, IPv6 addresses were originally 64 bits in size. However, to facilitate autoconfiguration of node addresses, based on their EUI-64 link layer address, the decision was made to increase the IPv6 address to 128 bits.
A fair amount of the content is mostly regurgitated RFC details. Those RFCs are now obscelete. The value in the book though is the commentary on the design decisions, and the "points of controversy" in each area. The only other way to learn about that would be to read through all the IPng / IPv6 mailing list archives, and that would take a lot, lot longer than reading this book.
Slashdot Mirror
My point wasn't in regards to the what the GPL says.
My point was that Nvidia benefits from Linux, yet gives nothing back. That is why I'd never buy an Nvidia video card, and never recommend one to run under Linux.
Nvidia would be valued much more highly in the open source community by making some sort of reciprical gift. The level is up to them - no demands are being made. However, they would find that their value as a contributor would increase as they give back more. Mind you, they aren't expected to give everything. It is up to them.
Nvidia would have plenty of other examples of companies who have realised that recipricating benefits both them and the community - IBM, Intel, AMD, SGI, HP, etc. etc. etc.
"So Linux is of no benefit to them at all -- it's a detraction. But if it's a necessary step to get revenue (say because Renderman runs on Linux and big shops ask for it), then they'll do the work to get the money."
Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly. One moment you seem to be saying they get no benefit at all, the next you say they are "only" supporting Linux because they make revenue from it. How can making revenue not be a benefit to an organisation whose goal is to make money ? Bare in mind that revenue, unless you make a profit from it after taking out your costs, is pointless.
I would have thought it would be obvious that any business with even a small amount of intelligence only does things which will make it money. If you don't make money, and your intention is to, you are out of business.
So why should Nvidia benefit from Linux, without some reciprical giving ? Hardware programming specs would be enough of a gift.
"Workers are prepared to give away their passwords for a cheap pen, according to a somewhat unscientific - but still illuminating - survey published today."
Office workers give away passwords for a cheap pen
I'm using a Matrox G550. I know, not the latest greatest 3D card, then again, I don't play games, and don't care to compete with the FPS figures of other people. Of course, there are uses for 3D graphics other than games.
If you want get a video card that has open source drivers, have a look at the list of video cards supported by the XFree86/Xwin project, and the DRI project.
Last time I looked, the ATI 9200 series of cards where the latest supported with fully open DRI drivers. Again, not the latest and greatest, still they are still available new, so they a probably adequate.
We are in a bit of a dark period at the moment with drivers. People want fast, yet the vendors aren't releasing programming specs for them. Their "Linux support" is really just lip service.
by openning up their hardware programming specifications.
I have none of the problems you mention, and that is because my video card has open programming specifications.
Wonder no more ...
RFC 3607 - Chinese Lottery Cryptanalysis Revisited: The Internet as a Codebreaking Tool
Security is best done end-to-end. As significant amounts of traffic requiring security cross layer 2 boundaries (ie. the wired or wireless networks you are talking about), it is far better to implement the protocols you are taking about, which usually provide end-to-end, or near end-to-end protection.
Does that stop us using Airplanes ? No, because their usefulness far outweighs the occasional terrorist attack.
Same with petrol (gasoline), hammers, screwdrivers, cars etc. etc. etc.
A false sense of security is worse than no security at all. At least with no security, you know you don't have any ...
You may like MacOS, and prefer it over other, cheaper, functionally equivalent alternatives. Fair enough.
I don't think your car analogy works though. Car "geeks" don't drop their late 80s, early 90s car for a new BMW/Accord for "geek" reasons. If they do, they aren't car "geeks", they are "ricers".
This is what car "geeks" do to their Hondas - The New LCRX.
Could you be a MacOS "ricer", and not know it?
Yada, yada, yada 419-like text here, only coming from the "CEO of Rolex".
Actually this is a bit like some art - some dude publishes a 1000s of years old idea, and is recognised for it. So he's basically being rewarded for publishing the idea, not having it. Sort of like some art - you look at it and think, who on Earth would do that ? And then they sell it for $1000s, and then you think to yourself, "I'm an idiot", I could have done that !
because, by the looks of it, I'd prefer not to have to take it apart and ship it. I'm not sure how I'm going to cope with the hot center of the Earth, to get it down here to Australia though.
I'm surprised you managed to get RH9 to install ...
The name Alan Smithee is commonly used by film directors who's control of the film was taken away from them, such that the director wants to disown it.
If you live in the USA, do you only buy "Made in USA" clothes ?
I'm sure there are people who do, however, I'd suggest the majority don't, and end up with a cupboard full of clothes made in Mexico, Brazil, India, China etc. It is the same here in Australia.
It is both shareholders, wanting better profits, and consumers, wanting cheaper products, who are driving outsoucing. It happens with clothes, it happens with cars, its now starting to happen with IT.
If you only buy locally made goods, you are supporting your country. Fair enough. However, if all countries did that, then countries which are currently export positive, such as the USA, Australia, Japan etc, won't have a market to sell to. Longer term, it will cause these export positive countries to fail, a fate (arguably, depending on who you are) worse than the outsource alternative.
RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet
assuming no universal plug&play webserver/appliance multiplexing protocol in the futuristic 5-years-from-now world
That describes part of the feature set of IPv6.
is port forwarding.
So, presuming these multiple PVRs, fridge, air con etc. each have embedded web servers, to which one of them are you going to port forward TCP port 80 to ? What are you going to do about the others ? You only have one TCP port 80 to forward, as you only have one IPv4 address.
No, it's like saying residential telephone users don't need a separate number for every phone in the house. Which they don't.
They do if they want to have multiple, concurrent conversations, with the ability to receive independent incoming calls.
None of those gee-whiz services listed in the article require IPV6 or separate per-device addresses. They can all be aggregated and gatewayed through shared addresses, and arguably should be for many reasons. E.g. imagine exploitable web server bugs in every camera, refrigerator, thermostat, traffic sensor, etc, etc, and having to keep them all patched and operational separately. Alternatively you can have a single web server handling public queries, doing proper authentication, and aggregating and presenting data from the various data-collecting devices according to a single set of configuration profiles. IMHO that would be much more maintainable.
They don't require IPv6, but IPv6 makes it much easier. With enought time and effort, almost anything is achievable. The question is, why go to a lot of effort inventing a complicated solution, when a simpler one already exists.
I'd like to know your solution for the following scenario. Say its 5 years time, and I've just bought a PVR that I'm going to plug into my home network, which I'd also like to have accessible from my work, so I can program it remotely, just in case I get delayed, or am on a work trip, for example. In this 5-year time plug and play world, all I need to do is plug in the power cable, and switch it on. For data access it will use Wifi. That is all I'm going to do to set it up, as I'm a non-technical end user.
How would you solve that problem ? Say I bought another PVR, and wanted the same accessiblity and convenience for both of them. Oh, and I also want to be able to access my air conditioner from work, because sometimes the weatherman is wrong, and I might want to turn it on from work, so that the house is cool when I get home.
If you don't think IPv6 is a good solution, I'd be interested to know how you are going to use IPv4 (and possibly NAT) to solve it.
A few quotes from the follow up emails
write it off to loonies and sociopaths not taking their meds. - Randy Bush
"IPv8" is a joke. Unfortunately it is a joke that has gone on too long and is still wasting people's time. - Brian Carpenter
"The recent postings you have received, despite the use of the string "IPv8" and being posted to the IETF list, have nothing to do with this actual IPv8. Despite the use of the string "RFC" in these postings to the IETF list, they having nothing to do with any IETF RFC. The link you cite below is merely to an area with public comments, not an area with any sort of official output by NTIA. It is as though these postings were an effort to cause confusion. - Donald E. Eastlake 3rd
Visit his site here to make your own judgement - IPv8. The site seems to be having some problems, make sure you get the groovy soup can version.
IPv6 is going to last a long, long time, there is no need to spend time on "IPv8".
Keith Moore, an author/co-author of a number of RFCs on IPv6 and other topics, posted the following to the IETF mailing list, regarding what IPv6 will enable and can be used for.
The comment was in response to somebody's claim that residential users would be happy with NAT, and non-globally routable IP addresses for their "internal" networks.
Re: dubious assumptions about IPv6 (was death of the Internet)That's like saying residential telephone users don't need to have a phone number at which they can be reached. (after all, the purpose of their residential phones is to call businesses for the purpose of obtaining services, right?)
There are lots of apps that would be valuable to residential users if residential users had reachable IP addresses. check the status of your alarm system, or your roast in the oven, or your freezer's inventory. Grab a picture from your baby-cam while you're out for dinner and have left the kid with the baby sitter. Reset the thermostat if you're going to be out of town longer than you thought. Do all of these from your portable phone/PDA which is running guess what? -- IPv6.
Also, don't assume that IPv6 addresses will be used by people or their personal computers. IPv6 enables lots and lots of individually addressable devices which don't have to be associated with individuals. Every km of highway can have an addressable traffic sensor so that police and emergency crews know exactly when and where a traffic accident happened. Every streetlight can be monitored to see if it is functioning properly or if it needs service. Every traffic signal can be made individually controllable so that they can dynamically adapt to changes in traffic patterns. For reasons like this, the demand for IPv6 addresses won't be determined by some linear multiple of the number of humans on the planet.
Finally, don't assume that IPv6 devices will require the support burdens we associate with PCs. PCs as we currently know them are dinosaurs. Appliances that talk to the network aren't going to need the same kind of technical hand-holding that PCs do (because they'd never succeed if they did), and neither will the devices that replace what we now think of as personal computers.
IPv6 will eventually replace IPv4, but it's misleading to think of IPv6 as just a replacement for IPv4. By the time IPv6 replaces IPv4, we won't recognize the IPv6 network as something that resembles what the IPv4 network is used for today. Even though the underlying technology is very similar, IPv6 is really a new kind of network, one that enables things that were really never possible with IPv4 on a large scale.
Academic Staff Profile - Allan Fels
Professor Fels was appointed as Professor of Administration at Monash University in 1984 and was the Director of the Graduate School of Management, Monash University from 1985 until 1990 and is now an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at Monash University.
Professor Fels has degrees in economics and law from the University of Western Australia, and a Ph.D in Economics from Duke University. After leaving Duke he was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Economics, University of Cambridge, where his Duke Ph.D thesis was published as The British Prices and Incomes Board by Cambridge University Press.
What gave you the impression that he made it up, and then convinced everybody in the media and the government ? Academic fraud like that at his level, and in his (former) role, would be career suicide for him, and extremely very embarresing for the government.
Mercury Rising
It's possible to view the source, but it's not worth the trouble.
That's the trade off you have to decide upon. If you don't want to download it using the originator's methods, fair enough.
That being said, I would consider asking somebody else to download and mirror it for you, presumably at their costs, ie. free to you, to be pretty selfish. You are asking somebody else to do something which you are not prepared to do yourself. You are asking them to take the "security risk" of this javascript code, to avoid taking it yourself.
More broadly, if you don't trust javascript that you can view and audit if you choose too, how can you trust the web browser you use, the operating system you use, and even the hardware you use ? I'm guessing you didn't write every line of code in your browser or OS, or design the chips in your hardware, so how do you know they are doing what you think they are doing. So you are already implicitly trusting somebody else, very likely somebody you'll never meet, nor will be able to confirm absolutely that their intentions were honest and genuine when developing the browser, OS or hardware.
I'm just surprised you appear to distrust javascript so much, when there are so many other areas where trust may be far more commonly misplaced, and where the consequences of misplaced trust are far greater.
URLs start with the "http://" prefix, or probably more correctly "|protocol|://" prefix.
They have a domain name there, that is all, not a URL.
If they get the terminology wrong in a patent, does that mean it is invalid, because the "inventor" doesn't understand the topic well enough to be explicitly correct ? I would have thought patents have to be explicitly correct, as the government is granting the patent holder a monopoly, and therefore, the patent must be very clear and correct.
I suggest you have a read of this book, as it identifies the motivations behind a number of the design decisions behind IPv6.
For example, IPv6 addresses were originally 64 bits in size. However, to facilitate autoconfiguration of node addresses, based on their EUI-64 link layer address, the decision was made to increase the IPv6 address to 128 bits.
IPv6: The New Internet Protocol (2nd Edition)
A fair amount of the content is mostly regurgitated RFC details. Those RFCs are now obscelete. The value in the book though is the commentary on the design decisions, and the "points of controversy" in each area. The only other way to learn about that would be to read through all the IPng / IPv6 mailing list archives, and that would take a lot, lot longer than reading this book.