NVidia did things that were clearly NOT legitimate, and FutureMark caught them at it. There's a PDF report on FutureMark's Web site (assuming it hasn't met with an "accident" by now) detailing the dirty deeds. Chief among them, IMHO, was a trick where the driver was supposed to draw and update positions of stars in a night sky (involving clearing the background) as one moved along a 3D path; if one stays on the exact preprogrammed track of the demo, it looks OK. BUT... if you turn around (possible in the beta mode of the benchmark) you see that the driver SKIPPED clearing the background; the stars smear like mad. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY their driver was behaving legitimately. (Especially since changing the benchmark's fingerprint oh-so-slightly caused all these quirks to vanish; they were detecting the demo and screwing with things if it was being run...) The rest is just fear-of-pissing-off-the-800-pound-gorilla. A FutureMark developer admitted as much in a newsgroup posting. Sigh...
But Seriously, Folks, this kind of storage addresses one of the major problems with memory stick-based still cameras: too much $, too few pictures. Say that a camera with this disk only stores 100 or so 10 MByte pictures and then needs a few minutes to D/L them to a bigger box via USB; that STILL compares well with film cameras (36-exposure rolls), and is MUCH more convenient than a CD-R on the back of the camera (seen'em, not impressed, they're bulkier than my SLR and have no interchangeable lenses). And it's inexpensive. Nice engineering job, great toy!
As we can clearly see from SCO's assorted statements (sordid statements?). Then again, their lawyers have to put the best public face on whatever rotten hand their client and the facts have dealt them, so maybe they KNOW that they have no case and are banking on the fact that judges can be idiots as well. It makes me have a moment's sympathy for lawyers with idiot clients.... Whew, thank goodness that passed quickly!
Definition of "derived" is the key
on
OSI vs SCO
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I believe the key is what "derived" means in the context of that graphic. Yes, Linux uses UNIX design concepts and structures, but that's true of all the OSes in the graphic; to that extent, they're all related. Solid lines indicate direct inheritance of code. The off-to-the-side bit reflects the fact that Linus' original project was built from scratch and didn't use code from the other family members.
WRT the use of BSD tools, I suspect this was a judgement call in producing a readable graphic describing major influences. Show all interactions and the page is an unreadable mess, (possibly resembling the profile of a gnu?).
The product in question would be Caldera's Linux distro (don't forget, the present SCO is Caldera operating under another name). Caldera does include source(else the GPL Squad would have chewed their extremities off long ago).
Setting aside for the moment the evident tenuosity of SCO's case (the OSI position paper is VERY interesting reading), we still have this showstopper:
If SCO *does* by some dark miracle own some IP on code that is being used in Linux distros (or the kernel), they've already voided any claim against others by their own act of GPL-releasing their own Linux distro, which can be assumed to contain that same code (because the GPL license on that SCO-owned code would be valid, since they WOULD have the right to license it out). They're fscked if they *do* own such IP, and fscked if they don't (which seems the vastly likelier case).
I guess there's no point making it aesthetic (i.e. with smooth panels and such) given the conditions of launch (cost per pound) and the fact that once it's up, nobody is going to see it ever again...
Aside from a total lack of aesthetic sensibility on all space instruments except ours, the outsides get all fiddly primarily for reasons of thermal control. Space environment is cold, mainly 'cause all your heat radiates away and there's nothing but the Sun to radiate back at you. Every external surface except instrument aperatures and antennas gets covered with thermal blankets (several layers of metallized plastic with plastic mesh spacers between) to reduce heat loss, or sometimes with mirrors (!) to radiate heat where one needs to lose it. It's a strange business...
IIRC, the FCC recently defined Internet service as an "information service" rather than a "communication service" so that they didn't have to apply common-carrier fairness restrictions to ISPs, notably cable providers. Is that subtlety likely to torpedo some of these bills that refer to "comminucation service provider", or does the bills' language sudestep this trap?
If the Yahoo example is prior art, its mere existence is sufficient for anyone (else) with standing to sue to use it as anti-patent Kryptonite. Yahoo's wishes in the matter are irrelevant.
I read a LOT of SF, have for all my reading life, and here are some of the better writers I've run across. (Interestingly, many of the best SF writers I've read lately are women. No idea what it means, but they're good storytellers.) YMMV, natch.
Lois McMaster Bujold The new Heinlein, IMHO. Everything she has written is excellent. Start with Borders of Infinity, a good introduction to the Miles Vorkosigan series. Also try The Spirit Ring; more fantasy than SF, but very well written.
C.J. Cherryh the Foreigner series. Also, anything else she's written, as I've liked all of her work that I've read.
David Weber the Honor Harrington series, don't know the full list of titles.
Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon The Deep, and the unrelated but in-the-same-universe A Deepness in Space.
A good writer I avoid (and it's a shame) Iain Banks He's a very talented writer and his universes are engaging, but I stay away from his work these days 'cause his attitude is just too dark. I know that by the end of the book, the characters I've come to care about will be utterly destroyed and will lose everything. Heinlein wrote a novel in which authors and their characters come to inhabit the same universe; in this scenario, Mr. Banks would be in serious danger from all his delightfully engaging creations... those who survived the last chapter, that is.
Actually, our Congresscritters HAVE, in a very limited sense, figured this out: they screw EVERYONE except their personal revenue generators (read: their major campaign contributors). Of course, most of us would prefer their self-interest to be a bit more enlightened and their definition of "self" here to include the people they allegedly serve, but that's the trouble with our political system at present...
Me, I think I'll spend the night in a windowless room and come out in the morning to a world full of people blinded by the mysterious alien rays, but I'll have to watch out for the Triffids roaming the landscape eating all and sundry.
Of course, if John Wyndham had written Day of the Triffids after the advent of the Internet, he'd have used geeks as his accidentally-sighted protagonists instead of a bandaged hospital patient. The hardcore geeks will probably be taking advantage of the bandwidth everyone else isn't using 'cause they're all outside skywatching, and will catch their meteors on the NASA site;-)
Back in the 1980's, when I was a Physics grad student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Instutute in Troy, NY, there was a tradition of putting on physics "Magic Shows" for the freshman classes. A few dramatic classics included these:
Make liquid oxygen by passing air through a coil of copper tubing immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen (oxygen boils at a higher temperature than nitrogen). Great care is needed in working with LOX, it makes the damnest things catch fire!!!
Dip a cotton ball on the end of the proverbial 10 foot pole into liquid oxygen, wave it over a safely-distant flame, and create a BIG orange fireball.
Demonstrate that liquid oxygen is paramagnetic (weakly attracted to magnetic fields) by taking a BIG electromagnet with a small gap, placing a small test tube of LOX below the gap, firing a high DC current through the magnet, and video-watching the LOX being sucked up into the magnet gap.
With thanks to the late Professor Harry Meiners, otherwise a difficult person to work with, but a great showman...
As I understand it, copyright law prevents you from making ANY copies of a copyrighted work without special authorization (which the GPL provides). Thus, a firm CANNOT internally distribute GPL'ed software without observing the GPL terms. If you're not following the GPL, you lose all rights except those under copyright's "fair use" provision.
Think of it using Borland's "like a book" analogy: Under copyright law, a company can't buy one copy of a book and duplicate it for internal use, so the same applies to the software.
Of course, if EVERY employee separately downloaded it from a GPL-observant source, they'd be OK, but only for internal use, and they'd best be ready to prove that they did exactly that...
I run Win98 SE on mine (amazingly, I was still able to buy a copy), Win2K is a bit more resource-hungry IIRC, and XP is *not* to come into my house or it'll get shot on sight. If this weren't a LAN-party box, I'd have it dual-booting Mandrake. HL/CS, Operation Flashpoint (great game, BTW) and StarCraft are the major uses for it, and it seems to do all right in terms of frame rate, though testing is still in progress...
The difference in density of the cooling air due to the pressure rise or drop across the fan is utterly negligible in terms of heat capacity per unit volume, and may well be swamped by the results of heating of the air by the CPU heatsink (in those cases where the air path goes that way; the SS51 doesn't do that.)
The pressure across the fan is way less than 0.1 PSI, compared to 14 PSI ambient pressure at sea level, so a crude analysis would say the effect is way less than 0.5%, most likely hundreds of times less.
If you pass the air across the CPU first and then through the power supply as in the SS50, you likely get hotter PS temperatures 'cause the temp difference is lower, reducing the amount of heat transfer until the PS heats up more.)
I bought a Shuttle SS50 this month (gee, if I'd waited, I could have gotten an AGP slot...). Nice system, runs a bit hot, I wonder if the SS51 heat pipe can be retrofitted.
However, I would like to put a PCI graphics accelerator in it for LAN gaming. Question is, what's a good midrange PCI 3D card for this purpose? GeForce cards are out of the picture 'cause the reviewers point out that this chipset is too data-transfer-intensive to work well over a PCI bus. Suggestions, anyone? JPriest, what card did you use, and how much did it improve things? (Seems to me the internal on-board video's faster data path might reduce its slowness relative to a PCI plugin card, but I might be wrong...)
If you check American Colonial history really carefully, you'll find that the Pilgrims didn't come to the New World(C) for religious tolerance; they had that in the Netherlands. What they came for was to set up their OWN religious tyranny (example: the excommunication of some religious nonconformists from the Mass Bay colonies). Religious freeedom was only on the Puritan mind insofar as it meant freedom to practice THEIR religious orthodoxy as THEY dictated it.
Fortunately, things have loosened up a bit since, but the ideological descendents of the Puritans (insert name of your favorite religious fundamentalist here) are ever with us...
Granted, the safe long-term disposal of nuclear wastes IS a serious problem, which I personally don't think is solved by this action (though I *do* think it's an improvement to have one long-term site rather than hundreds of short-term ones). However, it is also worth considering that conventional fuels produce toxics that NEVER go away. A careful analysis of what energy sources to use should take that into account and choose the least harmful option (conservation, anyone?). A nuclear physicist of my acquaintance has an interesting viewpoint:
1. I can EASILY detect radioactives at harmful levels with a radiation counter; there are chemical poisons I CANNOT detect that are lethal in microgram quantities. Those worry me LOTS more.
Disclaimer: I DON'T have cable, so I cannot comment thereon. The commercial broadcast (and sadly, most of the print) media I see and hear outside public radio and TV are ANYTHING but diverse, friends. With media outlets being sucked into fewer and fewer hands, and news departments becoming seen as profit centers and advertising venues rather than independent journalistic operations, diversity of news is vanishing. This phenomenon is real and well-documented. If anything, we need public broadcasting MORE rather than LESS as time goes on. Mind you, NPR ain't perfect either, but it DOES fill a gap...
I get your point 'bout the gov not trying to qualify as admin...
If I understand right, isn't the primary issue here one of control? from Mike's FAQ, it sounds like a) he is reasonably sane, competent, and responsible, b) he doesn't want to control the ccTLD himself anyway, and c) the primary issue is whether an independent section 21 company operates the domain with government and community participation, or the government controls the whole show and listens to whomever they please (or not), with the government presently trying to establish the latter situation by legal fiat. Am I missing something here?
Slashdot Mirror
NVidia did things that were clearly NOT legitimate, and FutureMark caught them at it. There's a PDF report on FutureMark's Web site (assuming it hasn't met with an "accident" by now) detailing the dirty deeds. Chief among them, IMHO, was a trick where the driver was supposed to draw and update positions of stars in a night sky (involving clearing the background) as one moved along a 3D path; if one stays on the exact preprogrammed track of the demo, it looks OK. BUT... if you turn around (possible in the beta mode of the benchmark) you see that the driver SKIPPED clearing the background; the stars smear like mad. There is NO POSSIBLE WAY their driver was behaving legitimately. (Especially since changing the benchmark's fingerprint oh-so-slightly caused all these quirks to vanish; they were detecting the demo and screwing with things if it was being run...) The rest is just fear-of-pissing-off-the-800-pound-gorilla. A FutureMark developer admitted as much in a newsgroup posting. Sigh...
Gee, can we boot Linux on it?
But Seriously, Folks, this kind of storage addresses one of the major problems with memory stick-based still cameras: too much $, too few pictures. Say that a camera with this disk only stores 100 or so 10 MByte pictures and then needs a few minutes to D/L them to a bigger box via USB; that STILL compares well with film cameras (36-exposure rolls), and is MUCH more convenient than a CD-R on the back of the camera (seen'em, not impressed, they're bulkier than my SLR and have no interchangeable lenses). And it's inexpensive. Nice engineering job, great toy!
Oreillynet's server is barfing on this. Anyone got a mirror or cached copy?
As we can clearly see from SCO's assorted statements (sordid statements?). Then again, their lawyers have to put the best public face on whatever rotten hand their client and the facts have dealt them, so maybe they KNOW that they have no case and are banking on the fact that judges can be idiots as well. It makes me have a moment's sympathy for lawyers with idiot clients. ... Whew, thank goodness that passed quickly!
I believe the key is what "derived" means in the context of that graphic. Yes, Linux uses UNIX design concepts and structures, but that's true of all the OSes in the graphic; to that extent, they're all related. Solid lines indicate direct inheritance of code. The off-to-the-side bit reflects the fact that Linus' original project was built from scratch and didn't use code from the other family members.
WRT the use of BSD tools, I suspect this was a judgement call in producing a readable graphic describing major influences. Show all interactions and the page is an unreadable mess, (possibly resembling the profile of a gnu?).
"Dance!" he souted, shooting himself in the foot. "Faster!" he added, aiming at the other one.
The product in question would be Caldera's Linux distro (don't forget, the present SCO is Caldera operating under another name). Caldera does include source(else the GPL Squad would have chewed their extremities off long ago).
Setting aside for the moment the evident tenuosity of SCO's case (the OSI position paper is VERY interesting reading), we still have this showstopper:
If SCO *does* by some dark miracle own some IP on code that is being used in Linux distros (or the kernel), they've already voided any claim against others by their own act of GPL-releasing their own Linux distro, which can be assumed to contain that same code (because the GPL license on that SCO-owned code would be valid, since they WOULD have the right to license it out). They're fscked if they *do* own such IP, and fscked if they don't (which seems the vastly likelier case).
I guess there's no point making it aesthetic (i.e. with smooth panels and such) given the conditions of launch (cost per pound) and the fact that once it's up, nobody is going to see it ever again...
Aside from a total lack of aesthetic sensibility on all space instruments except ours, the outsides get all fiddly primarily for reasons of thermal control. Space environment is cold, mainly 'cause all your heat radiates away and there's nothing but the Sun to radiate back at you. Every external surface except instrument aperatures and antennas gets covered with thermal blankets (several layers of metallized plastic with plastic mesh spacers between) to reduce heat loss, or sometimes with mirrors (!) to radiate heat where one needs to lose it. It's a strange business...
IIRC, the FCC recently defined Internet service as an "information service" rather than a "communication service" so that they didn't have to apply common-carrier fairness restrictions to ISPs, notably cable providers. Is that subtlety likely to torpedo some of these bills that refer to "comminucation service provider", or does the bills' language sudestep this trap?
Unlike this thread...
;-)
Yeah, it is indeed all ronzelle between...
If the Yahoo example is prior art, its mere existence is sufficient for anyone (else) with standing to sue to use it as anti-patent Kryptonite. Yahoo's wishes in the matter are irrelevant.
I read a LOT of SF, have for all my reading life, and here are some of the better writers I've run across. (Interestingly, many of the best SF writers I've read lately are women. No idea what it means, but they're good storytellers.) YMMV, natch.
Lois McMaster Bujold
The new Heinlein, IMHO. Everything she has written is excellent. Start with Borders of Infinity, a good introduction to the Miles Vorkosigan series. Also try The Spirit Ring; more fantasy than SF, but very well written.
C.J. Cherryh
the Foreigner series. Also, anything else she's written, as I've liked all of her work that I've read.
David Weber
the Honor Harrington series, don't know the full list of titles.
Vernor Vinge
A Fire Upon The Deep, and the unrelated but in-the-same-universe A Deepness in Space.
A good writer I avoid (and it's a shame) Iain Banks
He's a very talented writer and his universes are engaging, but I stay away from his work these days 'cause his attitude is just too dark. I know that by the end of the book, the characters I've come to care about will be utterly destroyed and will lose everything. Heinlein wrote a novel in which authors and their characters come to inhabit the same universe; in this scenario, Mr. Banks would be in serious danger from all his delightfully engaging creations... those who survived the last chapter, that is.
Actually, our Congresscritters HAVE, in a very limited sense, figured this out: they screw EVERYONE except their personal revenue generators (read: their major campaign contributors). Of course, most of us would prefer their self-interest to be a bit more enlightened and their definition of "self" here to include the people they allegedly serve, but that's the trouble with our political system at present...
Me, I think I'll spend the night in a windowless room and come out in the morning to a world full of people blinded by the mysterious alien rays, but I'll have to watch out for the Triffids roaming the landscape eating all and sundry.
;-)
Of course, if John Wyndham had written Day of the Triffids after the advent of the Internet, he'd have used geeks as his accidentally-sighted protagonists instead of a bandaged hospital patient. The hardcore geeks will probably be taking advantage of the bandwidth everyone else isn't using 'cause they're all outside skywatching, and will catch their meteors on the NASA site
Back in the 1980's, when I was a Physics grad student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Instutute in Troy, NY, there was a tradition of putting on physics "Magic Shows" for the freshman classes. A few dramatic classics included these:
Make liquid oxygen by passing air through a coil of copper tubing immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen (oxygen boils at a higher temperature than nitrogen). Great care is needed in working with LOX, it makes the damnest things catch fire!!!
Dip a cotton ball on the end of the proverbial 10 foot pole into liquid oxygen, wave it over a safely-distant flame, and create a BIG orange fireball.
Demonstrate that liquid oxygen is paramagnetic (weakly attracted to magnetic fields) by taking a BIG electromagnet with a small gap, placing a small test tube of LOX below the gap, firing a high DC current through the magnet, and video-watching the LOX being sucked up into the magnet gap.
With thanks to the late Professor Harry Meiners, otherwise a difficult person to work with, but a great showman...
As I understand it, copyright law prevents you from making ANY copies of a copyrighted work without special authorization (which the GPL provides). Thus, a firm CANNOT internally distribute GPL'ed software without observing the GPL terms. If you're not following the GPL, you lose all rights except those under copyright's "fair use" provision.
Think of it using Borland's "like a book" analogy: Under copyright law, a company can't buy one copy of a book and duplicate it for internal use, so the same applies to the software.
Of course, if EVERY employee separately downloaded it from a GPL-observant source, they'd be OK, but only for internal use, and they'd best be ready to prove that they did exactly that...
I run Win98 SE on mine (amazingly, I was still able to buy a copy), Win2K is a bit more resource-hungry IIRC, and XP is *not* to come into my house or it'll get shot on sight. If this weren't a LAN-party box, I'd have it dual-booting Mandrake. HL/CS, Operation Flashpoint (great game, BTW) and StarCraft are the major uses for it, and it seems to do all right in terms of frame rate, though testing is still in progress...
73 de N1XNX
IMHO, better'n the SS51. A brushed aluminum cube looks spiffier to me than the same with a clear plastic faceplate tacked on.
The difference in density of the cooling air due to the pressure rise or drop across the fan is utterly negligible in terms of heat capacity per unit volume, and may well be swamped by the results of heating of the air by the CPU heatsink (in those cases where the air path goes that way; the SS51 doesn't do that.)
The pressure across the fan is way less than 0.1 PSI, compared to 14 PSI ambient pressure at sea level, so a crude analysis would say the effect is way less than 0.5%, most likely hundreds of times less.
If you pass the air across the CPU first and then through the power supply as in the SS50, you likely get hotter PS temperatures 'cause the temp difference is lower, reducing the amount of heat transfer until the PS heats up more.)
I bought a Shuttle SS50 this month (gee, if I'd waited, I could have gotten an AGP slot...). Nice system, runs a bit hot, I wonder if the SS51 heat pipe can be retrofitted.
However, I would like to put a PCI graphics accelerator in it for LAN gaming. Question is, what's a good midrange PCI 3D card for this purpose? GeForce cards are out of the picture 'cause the reviewers point out that this chipset is too data-transfer-intensive to work well over a PCI bus. Suggestions, anyone? JPriest, what card did you use, and how much did it improve things? (Seems to me the internal on-board video's faster data path might reduce its slowness relative to a PCI plugin card, but I might be wrong...)
If you check American Colonial history really carefully, you'll find that the Pilgrims didn't come to the New World(C) for religious tolerance; they had that in the Netherlands. What they came for was to set up their OWN religious tyranny (example: the excommunication of some religious nonconformists from the Mass Bay colonies). Religious freeedom was only on the Puritan mind insofar as it meant freedom to practice THEIR religious orthodoxy as THEY dictated it.
Fortunately, things have loosened up a bit since, but the ideological descendents of the Puritans (insert name of your favorite religious fundamentalist here) are ever with us...
Granted, the safe long-term disposal of nuclear wastes IS a serious problem, which I personally don't think is solved by this action (though I *do* think it's an improvement to have one long-term site rather than hundreds of short-term ones). However, it is also worth considering that conventional fuels produce toxics that NEVER go away. A careful analysis of what energy sources to use should take that into account and choose the least harmful option (conservation, anyone?). A nuclear physicist of my acquaintance has an interesting viewpoint:
1. I can EASILY detect radioactives at harmful levels with a radiation counter; there are chemical poisons I CANNOT detect that are lethal in microgram quantities. Those worry me LOTS more.
2. Radioisotopes decay, but arsenic is forever.
Disclaimer: I DON'T have cable, so I cannot comment thereon. The commercial broadcast (and sadly, most of the print) media I see and hear outside public radio and TV are ANYTHING but diverse, friends. With media outlets being sucked into fewer and fewer hands, and news departments becoming seen as profit centers and advertising venues rather than independent journalistic operations, diversity of news is vanishing. This phenomenon is real and well-documented. If anything, we need public broadcasting MORE rather than LESS as time goes on. Mind you, NPR ain't perfect either, but it DOES fill a gap...
I get your point 'bout the gov not trying to qualify as admin...
If I understand right, isn't the primary issue here one of control? from Mike's FAQ, it sounds like a) he is reasonably sane, competent, and responsible, b) he doesn't want to control the ccTLD himself anyway, and c) the primary issue is whether an independent section 21 company operates the domain with government and community participation, or the government controls the whole show and listens to whomever they please (or not), with the government presently trying to establish the latter situation by legal fiat. Am I missing something here?