I'm not going to choose sides on this debate. I don't have the first hand knowledge and experience to make that judgment.
I don't know who struck first.
Strategically, Israel could have struck first on a religous holiday, to take advantage religous or patriotic sentiment. This has been suggested in James Bamford's book on the NSA, titled "Body of Secrets". It certainly wouldn't be the first time it has happened, or could have possibly happened - he also details how the US governement were planning to down one of their own planes, and blame it on Cuba, so they could then have an excuse to invade that country.
After a quick google search, here are two items worth reading
I don't think this post should have been rated "5" informative, as that implies it is factual. It is probably opinion, with strong racism throughout.
Why did I post ? I FIND THE RACISM OFFENSIVE.
As they say, there are three sides to a story
Your side.
Their side.
The truth.
Of course, there is likely to be a response to this post, consisting of
Dispute of my suggestion that Israel may have struck first. That's fine, but try to be factual, and avoid the racist sounding spiel
A personal and offensive attack on me, accusing me of being an Arab sympathiser, which will be further demonstration why the original post shouldn't have been given a 5 - Informative
btw, I'm an Australian, my genetic backround is Anglo-Saxon and Keltic, but who cares ?. I don't give a fuck where you are from, or what religous beliefs you have, as long as you are a decent human being.
Yes, I've met both Jews and Arabs, and as indivuals, they were decent human beings. Neither am I going to blame them as individuals for crimes their cultures, populations or governments may or may not have committed.
Of course, feel free to have a go at me for using obscenities... my mother would.
If it isn't, then I suggest Rosco do some research into a few topics I've discribed below.
The internet (IP-based, as we know it) is only a complement to other forms of coummications.
The Internet will replace all other application specific networks. The advantage of the Internet (and the underlying technology) is that it is generalised to support many types of applications, not one particular type. The classical example of an application specific network is the traditional voice network. If you want to use it for any other type of application (eg fax, data comms), you have to shoe-horn every other application to look like a "voice call". As another example, ADSL overcomes a lot of the limitations of the old voice network, because it basically abandons the voice orientated architecture, yet takes advantage of the existing physical infrastructure ie. the copper wires in the ground.
Postal services are there to stay as well because they can transport physical good (that can be information too).
Until we invent devices such as a Star Trek Transporter, there will always be a requirement for physical goods networks.
Phone-style networks that are switched and provide a virtually copper wire from one person to another (or several) is there to stay, because it provides constant, low latency.
You are correct to characterise voice calls as latency sensitive or as a "real-time" application.
However, packet switched networks can also meet the same latency requirements as long as there enough capacity in the network to minimize or avoid congestion which will effect that latency. The technology success of VoIP i.e. that it works at all (it is only the market that is delaying adoption) is proof of that.
The only thing missing is a secure network. That's the fourth element that's really missing. If people had a secure network, they could vote and pay online. Current over-IP methods aren't good enough, and don't provide the sense of security needed. over-the-phone solutions aren't very secure either.
Hmm, I think you are mixing together the word "secure" and "trusted", into the word "secure".
Plenty of security technologies exist that are sufficient, for example, IPsec, SSL, AES, PKI etc etc etc.
However, the issue tends to be how much do we trust them, or rather, how can be sure they are working correctly, have been implemented correctly, or that they can have been architected correctly ?
I trust these technologies enough to pay my bills via the Internet. I've weighed up the risks, verses the reward, and the reward wins.
However, when it comes to voting, you have to think what you are risking. Well, usually "voting" implies control of the government. Control of the government usually involves control of the econonmy. Control of the economy is a far bigger "asset" to be concerned about than theft of financial details when paying utility bills. The problem we have is that the risks are too high to trust to our existing confidence in the technology.
The closest thing to a secure network I can think of it France's government-run X25 network, that powers the national Minitel network, that is inaccessible to anybody but authorised France Telecom personel, and runs completely separate from the internet. In fact, it was there before the internet. People in France use it massively to order and pay for things online, and some exams, notably the amateur radio exam, is taken on the Minitel too. Many people predicted the death of the Minitel because it's slow (1200/75 bauds) and very expensive (0.34 EUR / minute) but it's still around and going strong because people trust it, with good reasons.
A few questions:
How do France Telecom ensure that all their technical staff are fully and absolutely trustworthy ? Are Minitel customers confident that France Telecom technicians will always act with honesty and integrity ?
If you look at the sentence again, what he is saying is the equipment required to connect to the ARPAnet had to be the same - and it was - all connections were via IMPs or Interface Message Processors. There were different types of computers behind the IMPs
If you use the OSI RM to classify the ARPAnet, as all connections and technology was the same, it was mostly just a big link or data link layer network.
Actually, being more specific, it was sort of like a cross between the network and link layers. It performed routing (network layer characteristic), but all devices were connected together via the same technology (a data link layer characteristic).
The revolution Vint was involved in was the idea of creating a link layer agnostic layer 3 ie. the network layer, hence, that is why he is one of the inventors of IP. Abstracting the network layer functions stopped the network being tied to a link layer technology, which allowed the network to then incorporate links such as satellite links, ethernets, pigeons, two cans and a piece of string, etc. etc. etc. This was not possible on the ARPAnet.
Interestingly, the early model of "TCP/IP" had TCP and IP merged as a single layer. During that development, Vint realised that TCP was a logically separate function to IP, and so it became TCP/IP.
It is also important to realise that the ARPAnet protocols were developed and deployed in the late 1960s, early 70s, where as TCP/IP was developed and started to be deployed in the late 1970s, early 80s. Admittedly, I haven't RFTA quite yet, but it sounds like they may have mixed together the history of the ARPAnet and the Internet, which can cause confusion.
In addition to the few historical documents you can find on the net, a good book on the history of packet switching, the ARPAnet and the Internet is "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".
The only valid reason I've heard of for e-voting is to purely speed up the counting of the votes, so that the result of the election can be known much quicker than via hand counting.
Commonly people seem to assume that this means replacing paper votes, or rather, more specifically, replacing an auditable paper trail.
So we have a additional-efficiency model verses a replacement model.
For some reason, the model that has been adopted (and maybe encouraged by the "US" governement aka GWB) by these E-voting companies is the replacement one. Who knows why, although the conspiracy theorists would suggest Florida 200(? - I'm Australian, don't know exactly when the last US election was).
Of course, as all slashdotters know, under the replacement, electronic only model, security and accountability are a lot harder to do. All these e-voting security stories, such as this one, are evidence of that.
Although the idea itself was a bit novel, and hadn't been done before that I could remember, here is where it falls over
"take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Most people, obviously including this girl, would take that statement as referring to their "clothing" top. She was silly enough to take it literally - which is the lameness in the ad.
OTOH, if he had given her the drink and said "take the top off for a chance to win $100000!", it would have worked better because the "top" became ambiguous. Still, it then becomes insulting to either that beautiful woman specifically, implying the dumb "beautiful" woman stereotype (she was brunette, if she was blonde there would have been a huge outcry), or all woman in general, as it implies they all would be silly enough abandon their dignity in a restaurant for money (and only $10 000 - I'd suggest for most people the "abandon dignity" threshold is $1 000 000).
Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but there are two things in TV ads that I find offensive, as a (male) child of the 70s, brought up in the post feminist era:
Ads that imply women are stupid, as mostly they are not, and no more than men.
Ads where if the gender roles were reversed, there would be huge outcry that the ad is sexist. Diet Coke ads in Australia have usually suffered from this in recent years. The "a group of men sexually objectifying an attractive woman" roles have been reversed, and Coke have seemed to get away with it. Reverse it "back to normal" and the ad would have been off the screen in no seconds flat.
Apparently, Rebok put an ad on the tv that used a very disgusting fake company name during a recent Superbowl. The guy at this site was sure it was intentional, so he rang them up...
Hmmmmmm, Coopers Beer. Thoroughly recommend the Pale (green label), Sparkling (red label) not too bad either. Fortunatley it's made where I come from (as does Rusty), so it is always fresh (can't speak for Rusty though, never met him - I did hear he got married a while back, so he may not be as fresh as he used to be.).
The last video card I bought was a Matrox G550. I don't play OpenGL based games, where high FPS mostly seems to matter, so this card is fine for "normal" 3d stuff, and provides great visual quality, which Matrox have a reputation for.
However, since that time, they've released the Parhelia, with binary only drivers (at least that is what I last found - I'm not looking for a video card at the moment, so I'm not following this sort of information all the time.). Although not ideal, at least these binary drivers are only XFree86 ones, and don't have to be installed inside the kernel, risking system stablity.
I don't think so. If you can't cope with opening an xterm, and running lspci, how can you cope with performing any other tasks under linux, possibly even using it, or managing to find and use the power switch ?
User friendliness is fine up to a point. After that, it just gets in the way of people who don't need it, and gives a false sense of competence to those who do "need" the user friendliness.
The question is though, who are they trying to protect their intellectual property from ?
For the moment, considering your example of door locks, I choose to use them, not because they make my house impenetrable, but they ensure that most, "casual" theives won't bother to break in, because the risk and / or effort is now higher than the reward. Determined thieves won't bother with trying to break the locks, they will just cut a hole in a wall, creating a new doorway. That is if my assets are worth the risk and effort involved in doing so.
So, who are Nvidia trying to protect their intellectual property from ? Who would gain the most from seeing it ? Individual end users, or their determined rivals like ATi, who have much more at stake, and possibly more to gain from discovering Nvidia's IP ? Assuming it is ATi or other competitors, which is what most people suggest when faced with this argument, then the "locks" that Nvidia have put in place are useless, as they will not stop a determined adversary, such as ATi, who may be willing to invest multiple $100K or $1M decoding Nvidia's drivers, using AGP bus analysers etc. The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
I really can't guess why Nvidia won't open source their drivers. However, I struggle to believe only reason I always hear - "to protect IP".
Patents are intended to protect intellectual property. Nvidia shouldn't be worried about protecting it in their closed source drivers.
Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.
Other people may disagree, but I belive this "intellectual property, must close source" is just a furphy.
Even more contrary to this argument, companies like Nvidia and ATI want their extensions to be added to the OpenGL specs, which results in both an industry wide endorsement of their techniques, as well as licensing revenue from their competitors.
I'm pretty sure Linux never needed Nvidia to provide graphics drivers to succeed - it was doing fine by itself. Keep in mind that Linux had been going for something like six years (starting in 1991) before Nvidia came along and released Linux specific binary drivers (around 1998, IIRC).
A lot of people may think Linux is unreliable, because of the instability of binary drivers, such as the Nvidia ones. Linux could do without this undeserved reputation.
because, I've already got their GPL driver, that they wrote themselves...
--
The full GNU General Public License is included in this distribution in the
file called LICENSE.
Contact Information:
Linux NICS
Intel Corporation, 5200 N.E. Elam Young Parkway, Hillsboro, OR 97124-6497
Makefile for the Intel(R) PRO/10GbE driver
--
/usr/src/sys/kernel/linux-2.6.0/drivers/net/ixgb
As I understand it, hardware companies are in the business of making money from selling hardware. Drivers for that hardware would usually be considered a cost. Giving the community the hardware specs allows the community to absorb the driver development costs, allowing the hardware company to both sell more hardware, as they are community friendly, and the community supports its friends, and make more profit on the hardware, because they reduce some of their costs, as well as have the possiblity of selling hardware to people who may not have been customers in the first place. (for example, I remember a post to LKML with a patch for running an e1000 aka Intel 1Gbit card under PPC. If Intel developed closed source drivers, do you think they ever would have developed PPC drivers ? I doubt it, it would have cost them too much, for possibly a too smaller customer base. By open sourcing, they have sold at least one extra card that they wouldn't have sold before, under the closed driver development model)
I'd consider bloat to be when there is very little increase in functionality, yet the cost in consumed disk space or RAM is significant. I would consider MS Clippy would be a canonical example.
Does KDE offer increased, and more importantly, useful additional functionality to you ? If it does, then you have decided to accept the extra CPU, RAM and disk space it requires. It could also be argued that the visual "beauty" of the environment makes your computer more pleasurable to use, which will increase your efficiency.
OTOH, if you consider KDE to be pure bloat, then you are right, you probably should go back to using twm, resurrect your old 486.
I'm of the opinion that you should only dumb down tasks to a certain level. After that point, the task passes its efficiency threshold, and become less efficient..
Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.
It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.
Honestly, I can't see how this philosophy saves time. I believe it would take no more than 10 seconds to perform (1) open a terminal window (2) run lspci, and look for the "nvidia" item. Bang, you then download the appropriate file.
Assuming it takes 30 seconds, I'd suggest downloading the much larger single file would take a lot longer than the time saved.
If people can't cope with simple tasks such as this, they probably shouldn't be performing any maintenance on their PC at all, in particular installing new video drivers.
While there are always two sides to a story, from what Kevin says, it sounds like Markoff and Shimomura exploited the situation for all the $$$ they could get.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to choose sides on this debate. I don't have the first hand knowledge and experience to make that judgment.
I don't know who struck first.
Strategically, Israel could have struck first on a religous holiday, to take advantage religous or patriotic sentiment. This has been suggested in James Bamford's book on the NSA, titled "Body of Secrets". It certainly wouldn't be the first time it has happened, or could have possibly happened - he also details how the US governement were planning to down one of their own planes, and blame it on Cuba, so they could then have an excuse to invade that country.
After a quick google search, here are two items worth reading
BAMFORD "LIBERTY" ACCOUNT REPUDIATED
Response to charges made in Secrecy News on July 17, 2001
I don't think this post should have been rated "5" informative, as that implies it is factual. It is probably opinion, with strong racism throughout.
Why did I post ? I FIND THE RACISM OFFENSIVE.
As they say, there are three sides to a story
Of course, there is likely to be a response to this post, consisting of
btw, I'm an Australian, my genetic backround is Anglo-Saxon and Keltic, but who cares ?. I don't give a fuck where you are from, or what religous beliefs you have, as long as you are a decent human being.
Yes, I've met both Jews and Arabs, and as indivuals, they were decent human beings. Neither am I going to blame them as individuals for crimes their cultures, populations or governments may or may not have committed.
Of course, feel free to have a go at me for using obscenities ... my mother would.
If it isn't, then I suggest Rosco do some research into a few topics I've discribed below.
The internet (IP-based, as we know it) is only a complement to other forms of coummications.
The Internet will replace all other application specific networks. The advantage of the Internet (and the underlying technology) is that it is generalised to support many types of applications, not one particular type. The classical example of an application specific network is the traditional voice network. If you want to use it for any other type of application (eg fax, data comms), you have to shoe-horn every other application to look like a "voice call". As another example, ADSL overcomes a lot of the limitations of the old voice network, because it basically abandons the voice orientated architecture, yet takes advantage of the existing physical infrastructure ie. the copper wires in the ground.
Postal services are there to stay as well because they can transport physical good (that can be information too).
Until we invent devices such as a Star Trek Transporter, there will always be a requirement for physical goods networks.
Phone-style networks that are switched and provide a virtually copper wire from one person to another (or several) is there to stay, because it provides constant, low latency.
You are correct to characterise voice calls as latency sensitive or as a "real-time" application.
However, packet switched networks can also meet the same latency requirements as long as there enough capacity in the network to minimize or avoid congestion which will effect that latency. The technology success of VoIP i.e. that it works at all (it is only the market that is delaying adoption) is proof of that.
The only thing missing is a secure network. That's the fourth element that's really missing. If people had a secure network, they could vote and pay online. Current over-IP methods aren't good enough, and don't provide the sense of security needed. over-the-phone solutions aren't very secure either.
Hmm, I think you are mixing together the word "secure" and "trusted", into the word "secure".
Plenty of security technologies exist that are sufficient, for example, IPsec, SSL, AES, PKI etc etc etc.
However, the issue tends to be how much do we trust them, or rather, how can be sure they are working correctly, have been implemented correctly, or that they can have been architected correctly ?
I trust these technologies enough to pay my bills via the Internet. I've weighed up the risks, verses the reward, and the reward wins.
However, when it comes to voting, you have to think what you are risking. Well, usually "voting" implies control of the government. Control of the government usually involves control of the econonmy. Control of the economy is a far bigger "asset" to be concerned about than theft of financial details when paying utility bills. The problem we have is that the risks are too high to trust to our existing confidence in the technology.
The closest thing to a secure network I can think of it France's government-run X25 network, that powers the national Minitel network, that is inaccessible to anybody but authorised France Telecom personel, and runs completely separate from the internet. In fact, it was there before the internet. People in France use it massively to order and pay for things online, and some exams, notably the amateur radio exam, is taken on the Minitel too. Many people predicted the death of the Minitel because it's slow (1200/75 bauds) and very expensive (0.34 EUR / minute) but it's still around and going strong because people trust it, with good reasons.
A few questions :
If you look at the sentence again, what he is saying is the equipment required to connect to the ARPAnet had to be the same - and it was - all connections were via IMPs or Interface Message Processors. There were different types of computers behind the IMPs
If you use the OSI RM to classify the ARPAnet, as all connections and technology was the same, it was mostly just a big link or data link layer network.
Actually, being more specific, it was sort of like a cross between the network and link layers. It performed routing (network layer characteristic), but all devices were connected together via the same technology (a data link layer characteristic).
The revolution Vint was involved in was the idea of creating a link layer agnostic layer 3 ie. the network layer, hence, that is why he is one of the inventors of IP. Abstracting the network layer functions stopped the network being tied to a link layer technology, which allowed the network to then incorporate links such as satellite links, ethernets, pigeons, two cans and a piece of string, etc. etc. etc. This was not possible on the ARPAnet.
Interestingly, the early model of "TCP/IP" had TCP and IP merged as a single layer. During that development, Vint realised that TCP was a logically separate function to IP, and so it became TCP/IP.
It is also important to realise that the ARPAnet protocols were developed and deployed in the late 1960s, early 70s, where as TCP/IP was developed and started to be deployed in the late 1970s, early 80s. Admittedly, I haven't RFTA quite yet, but it sounds like they may have mixed together the history of the ARPAnet and the Internet, which can cause confusion.
In addition to the few historical documents you can find on the net, a good book on the history of packet switching, the ARPAnet and the Internet is "Where Wizards Stay Up Late".
All us ex MCI/Wcommers had to take like $10M home in cash and store it somewhere. I haven't been able to park my car in the garage since !
The only valid reason I've heard of for e-voting is to purely speed up the counting of the votes, so that the result of the election can be known much quicker than via hand counting.
Commonly people seem to assume that this means replacing paper votes, or rather, more specifically, replacing an auditable paper trail.
So we have a additional-efficiency model verses a replacement model.
For some reason, the model that has been adopted (and maybe encouraged by the "US" governement aka GWB) by these E-voting companies is the replacement one. Who knows why, although the conspiracy theorists would suggest Florida 200(? - I'm Australian, don't know exactly when the last US election was).
Of course, as all slashdotters know, under the replacement, electronic only model, security and accountability are a lot harder to do. All these e-voting security stories, such as this one, are evidence of that.
Your company is very naive then. They are probably using the "nobody else is using it, so it will be more secure" argument.
Give somebody who can make that decision the results of the following google search - security in obscurity
The first article in this Crypto-Gram also explains the problem - Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity
Although the idea itself was a bit novel, and hadn't been done before that I could remember, here is where it falls over
"take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Most people, obviously including this girl, would take that statement as referring to their "clothing" top. She was silly enough to take it literally - which is the lameness in the ad.
OTOH, if he had given her the drink and said "take the top off for a chance to win $100000!", it would have worked better because the "top" became ambiguous. Still, it then becomes insulting to either that beautiful woman specifically, implying the dumb "beautiful" woman stereotype (she was brunette, if she was blonde there would have been a huge outcry), or all woman in general, as it implies they all would be silly enough abandon their dignity in a restaurant for money (and only $10 000 - I'd suggest for most people the "abandon dignity" threshold is $1 000 000).
Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but there are two things in TV ads that I find offensive, as a (male) child of the 70s, brought up in the post feminist era :
Apparently, Rebok put an ad on the tv that used a very disgusting fake company name during a recent Superbowl. The guy at this site was sure it was intentional, so he rang them up ...
Felcher and SonsI don't know if this actually happened, I'm an Australian, don't watch Superbowl.
in the sky, not "Sun" computers.
John T. Moy - OSPF Tony Li (BGP), Yakov Rehkter (BGP, MPLS)
Aren't they getting enough Sun ?
At least Rusty is trying to ... although I'm not sure the "open source is better code" idea works after a few beers.
Outside hacking with beer Outside hacking with beer againHmmmmmm, Coopers Beer. Thoroughly recommend the Pale (green label), Sparkling (red label) not too bad either. Fortunatley it's made where I come from (as does Rusty), so it is always fresh (can't speak for Rusty though, never met him - I did hear he got married a while back, so he may not be as fresh as he used to be.).
It's somebody else's joke (I think I read it on the Register or the Inquirer), I can't take credit for it.
I found it pretty funny though.
The last video card I bought was a Matrox G550. I don't play OpenGL based games, where high FPS mostly seems to matter, so this card is fine for "normal" 3d stuff, and provides great visual quality, which Matrox have a reputation for.
However, since that time, they've released the Parhelia, with binary only drivers (at least that is what I last found - I'm not looking for a video card at the moment, so I'm not following this sort of information all the time.). Although not ideal, at least these binary drivers are only XFree86 ones, and don't have to be installed inside the kernel, risking system stablity.
Have a browse around Direct Rendering Open Source Project as well as XFree86 for open source X Windows support
So why aren't you trying to improve the GATOS drivers ? You've got the source code ...
I don't think so. If you can't cope with opening an xterm, and running lspci, how can you cope with performing any other tasks under linux, possibly even using it, or managing to find and use the power switch ?
User friendliness is fine up to a point. After that, it just gets in the way of people who don't need it, and gives a false sense of competence to those who do "need" the user friendliness.
Direct Rendering Open Source Project, it will save you a lot of grief.
and it is the right type of thinking.
The question is though, who are they trying to protect their intellectual property from ?
For the moment, considering your example of door locks, I choose to use them, not because they make my house impenetrable, but they ensure that most, "casual" theives won't bother to break in, because the risk and / or effort is now higher than the reward. Determined thieves won't bother with trying to break the locks, they will just cut a hole in a wall, creating a new doorway. That is if my assets are worth the risk and effort involved in doing so.
So, who are Nvidia trying to protect their intellectual property from ? Who would gain the most from seeing it ? Individual end users, or their determined rivals like ATi, who have much more at stake, and possibly more to gain from discovering Nvidia's IP ? Assuming it is ATi or other competitors, which is what most people suggest when faced with this argument, then the "locks" that Nvidia have put in place are useless, as they will not stop a determined adversary, such as ATi, who may be willing to invest multiple $100K or $1M decoding Nvidia's drivers, using AGP bus analysers etc. The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
I really can't guess why Nvidia won't open source their drivers. However, I struggle to believe only reason I always hear - "to protect IP".
Patents are intended to protect intellectual property. Nvidia shouldn't be worried about protecting it in their closed source drivers.
Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.
Other people may disagree, but I belive this "intellectual property, must close source" is just a furphy.
Even more contrary to this argument, companies like Nvidia and ATI want their extensions to be added to the OpenGL specs, which results in both an industry wide endorsement of their techniques, as well as licensing revenue from their competitors.
I'm pretty sure Linux never needed Nvidia to provide graphics drivers to succeed - it was doing fine by itself. Keep in mind that Linux had been going for something like six years (starting in 1991) before Nvidia came along and released Linux specific binary drivers (around 1998, IIRC).
A lot of people may think Linux is unreliable, because of the instability of binary drivers, such as the Nvidia ones. Linux could do without this undeserved reputation.
because, I've already got their GPL driver, that they wrote themselves ...
-- The full GNU General Public License is included in this distribution in the file called LICENSE. Contact Information: Linux NICS Intel Corporation, 5200 N.E. Elam Young Parkway, Hillsboro, OR 97124-6497 Makefile for the Intel(R) PRO/10GbE driver --
/usr/src/sys/kernel/linux-2.6.0/drivers/net/ixgb
As I understand it, hardware companies are in the business of making money from selling hardware. Drivers for that hardware would usually be considered a cost. Giving the community the hardware specs allows the community to absorb the driver development costs, allowing the hardware company to both sell more hardware, as they are community friendly, and the community supports its friends, and make more profit on the hardware, because they reduce some of their costs, as well as have the possiblity of selling hardware to people who may not have been customers in the first place. (for example, I remember a post to LKML with a patch for running an e1000 aka Intel 1Gbit card under PPC. If Intel developed closed source drivers, do you think they ever would have developed PPC drivers ? I doubt it, it would have cost them too much, for possibly a too smaller customer base. By open sourcing, they have sold at least one extra card that they wouldn't have sold before, under the closed driver development model)
but that is because I refuse to run binary kernel modules, and only buy hardware with open programming specs.
I'd consider bloat to be when there is very little increase in functionality, yet the cost in consumed disk space or RAM is significant. I would consider MS Clippy would be a canonical example.
Does KDE offer increased, and more importantly, useful additional functionality to you ? If it does, then you have decided to accept the extra CPU, RAM and disk space it requires. It could also be argued that the visual "beauty" of the environment makes your computer more pleasurable to use, which will increase your efficiency.
OTOH, if you consider KDE to be pure bloat, then you are right, you probably should go back to using twm, resurrect your old 486.
I'm of the opinion that you should only dumb down tasks to a certain level. After that point, the task passes its efficiency threshold, and become less efficient..
Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.
It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.
Honestly, I can't see how this philosophy saves time. I believe it would take no more than 10 seconds to perform (1) open a terminal window (2) run lspci, and look for the "nvidia" item. Bang, you then download the appropriate file.
Assuming it takes 30 seconds, I'd suggest downloading the much larger single file would take a lot longer than the time saved.
If people can't cope with simple tasks such as this, they probably shouldn't be performing any maintenance on their PC at all, in particular installing new video drivers.
Would that speed up my processing ? Will I be able to play Half Life 2 on my Pentium now ?
including the missing chapter.
Mitnick's 'Lost Chapter' FoundWhile there are always two sides to a story, from what Kevin says, it sounds like Markoff and Shimomura exploited the situation for all the $$$ they could get.