Its not really the DRM, so much, as it is all the "features" (cough cough) that supports the DRM, especially how Vista encrypts alot of traffic crossing the system busses...and how Vista checks the "tilt bits" many many many times per second. All this needless "housekeeping" slows the system down. Vista only does this when you are using DRM-encumbered media. It does not do it at other times.
*hefts clue bat*
If you'd actually read Guttman's paper (which you clearly haven't) it talks about the fact that all the stuff needed in hardware to support Vista's DRM crap causes higher costs for manufacturers and reduced hardware performance.
Setup a foundation to be a industry friendly clearing-house to handle limited blanket licensing in terms the industry finds acceptable. Most labels want protection (from piracy and misuse) but also want exposure.
I recently registered broadcastbroker.{org,net,co.uk,org.uk} with exactly this in mind. Please get in touch if you're interested in taking this further.
who immediately opened a new tab and brought up yahoo.com to see a cluttered page (although less so than it used to be) and a Flash advertisement and sat there scratching my head with a "Huh?" look on my face?
No, Windows will not wipe out anything that is there. It involves knowing what you are doing. Windows installers find 'non-windows partitions' and ask what should be done about them. If you aren't familiar enough with MBR issues and how to recover from them, you shouldn't be dual booting.
Amusing anecdote: I had a Linux-only box, and wanted to put a Windows XP dual-boot on it. So I created some free space, and launched the XP installation CD (this was the OEM SP2 edition). The installer refused to boot, giving me a blank screen.
The eventual fix? Use dd to overwrite my MBR with 0s.
As long as grub was there, the Windows installer refused to boot.
It's really galling that Microsoft are so arrogant they assume that no-one will ever want to use an operating system other than their own, and refuse to provide drivers for filesystems other than their own. And then they have the guts to strut around bragging about how "interoperable" they are.
I love konqueror too, but I hate how it mangles a lot of web pages. Slashdot in particular looks like shit (misrenders)
Works For Me (tm).
The reason it "mangles" webpages is because, unlike many browsers, it's actually standards-compliant. It passes ACID2 completely. Ergo, the problem is that the webpages suck, not that Konqueror is broken.
There are some known issues with Javascript, of course. *rolls eyes* But Slashdot works almost perfectly in Konqueror on my system (KDE 3.5.7).
Of course, once Webkit is fully merged back into KHTML, Konqueror will be using the same HTML rendering engine as every OS X box out there, which will considerably increase the extent of website support!
Oh I hate stupid GUIs. Smart ones I have some time for.
Because browsing to audiocd:/ and dragging the contents of the "MP3" virtual directory to your ~/Music is such a stupid GUI. You really have no clue about the power of ioslaves, do you?
It's a pretty nice file manager. I've used it for about a year, and tended to prefer it over Konqueror, at least until I found Krusader. But it's not as though Konqueror will lose its capabilities to be a file manager; it just won't be the default choice in KDE 4.0. Actually I think they are planning to remove the file manager capabilities if I understand correctly, maybe not, but I thought I heard it said that konqueror would be faster if they removed the file manager, not sure, maybe I heard form an unreliable source?
You misunderstand. The file manager capabilities in Konqueror aren't going away: it would be vandalism to do that!
I personally hate Dolphin: it's too GNOME-ey and dumbed down. I like the fact that I use Konqueror for everything from ripping CDs (audiocd:/) through managing my files and browsing the internet to reading documentation (man:/ and info:/).
Only because it's something to do outside the house with your significant other. Prices here are at $9.75 per ticket here now, though. When it gets to $10, I seriously suspect we're not going to be going as often.
A cheap cinema ticket on my side of the pond is £5. That's $10.13 at the moment. OMG, $9.75 is ridiculously expensive.
Do you have 25 minutes of adverts and trailers to sit through before the movie too?
Feature-rich web browser? Where is the Flash support? Oh, it doesn't exist. Is it ACID complaint? Nope. Does it have problems with CSS? Yes. In fact, Apple suggested that people need to redesign valid css and xhtml so our websites work better with the iPhone.
[citation needed]
Seriously: Safari is based on Webkit, which is in turn based on KHTML, which renders ACID2 perfectly. Are Apple actually unable to recompile some existing, working code without screwing it up?
(a) snipping RX doesn't make the cable auditable or provable.
I'm not sure why not. If you make the cables up with a red connector at one end (the server) and a green connector at the other (the logging box), and leave the server's RX conductor physically connected to the shield at one end and floating at the other, that is provably a one way cable!
Of course, the ultimate provable one-way cable is a piece of coax which is connected to a D connector with the conductor to the TX line. I don't see how you can get any more one-way than that (especially if you opto-couple as the other gentleman suggested).
(b) serial cards are cheap.
Relative to what? Last time we evaluated using RS232 for an industrial control application, we found the hardware to be so expensive that we went for the (much more complex and much less expensive) CANbus option.
At USENIX/EVT06 last year a team from the University of Iowa presented a cheap one-way data cable you could make with off-the-shelf parts from Radio Shack. Total cost is about $5 (for bulk, maybe $10 if you're buying single units) and it is provably, auditably, one-way. It was originally developed for electronic voting, to allow for counting computers to communicate with webservers that post election results. An attacker compromising the webserver cannot attack the counting computer, because there is literally no return path.
It works with very high reliability up to about 9600 baud.
Ah, the old "RS232 cable with the RX conductor snipped" trick. So, how does this help if you've got 20 servers?
I'm still not quite sure if you're an idiot or are trying to side track the argument (by taking what I say out of context, etc.). Either way I doubt I'll reply again, zealots and morons aren't worth my effort.
Well, I guess that makes two of us, because I have very little time for people who resort to name-calling rather than reasoned argument. Good day to you.
I never said it's surprising. I simply stated that right now for high end hardware OSS drivers are yugos if you're lucky. You can give excuses and reasons all you want but that's the truth and trying to ignore it when someone says why they use closed source drivers is idiotic.
OSS drivers for high-end hardware suck? Oh right, I'll go and tell the physicists who use our university's eight million pound supercomputer that they'd better switch to Windows.
How well does Windows run on a Cell processor, by the way?
In response to your ad-hominem: the only set of closed-source drivers I've used on Linux that worked well have been the Nvidia ones. All others have been buggy and unstable (some, such as the ATi drivers, unusable), not from lack of effort on my part to get them working properly. At least the less-featurefull open source drivers don't kill my system. My opinion of closed-source drivers is based on hard-won experience. And this makes me an idiot, does it?
Windows is an pathetic excuse for a platform. It doesn't even properly implement the minimal syscalls required by the POSIX standard (open, close, read, write, fork, exec).
If they actually cared about getting more open source developers to port their applications to Windows, they'd harmonise their API with the other major operating systems (Linux, OS X, Solaris, *BSD). As it is, this just looks like (yet another) an attempt by Microsoft to paint over the gaping flaws in both their business model and their approach to software development.
Wake me up when that changes. Until then, I really couldn't give a shit about Microsoft's supposed "friendliness" to open source software or their non-free "open" license.
Well if I had to choose between a closed hood car and a yugo (or moped or bike if you want to be nice) I'd choose the former. Open source drivers exist but their performance is apparently not that good.
Open source drivers where the specs are available are very good. Look at the Intel, Matrox or Radeon R200 drivers, for example.
Open source drivers where the developers have had to painfully reverse engineer the hardware interfaces from scratch are not very good (yet). This is surprising why?
There is a non-zero probability that it might even be right, at least for _some_ works. (Those numbers usually fall on a gauss curve or such, so there's usually no hard cut off at either 2% or 10%. The Illiad isn't worthless even after thousands of years, so the decay must have been even lower than 1% there. Ditto for the other values involved.)
The problem is that the argument for copyright extension is always argued using outliers. When was the last time you heard "Be A Man" by Aqua? That was on an album, "Aquarium", which made it to number 6 in the UK charts in 1997. I challenge you to find anyone who's even heard of the track. I estimate that 99.9999% of works currently under copyright are more obscure than that (this is probably an underestimate). Any idea where you'd be able to buy a copy of "A Castle for the Kopcheks" by James Stagg? Me neither (apart from my bookshelf).
Moore's law is about transistors per area and cost per transistor. Cheap laptops have nothing to do with that.
Yes, they do. Firstly, chip fab is approximately cost per wafer divided by number of devices on a wafer. The more devices you can fit on a wafer, the less the devices cost. Secondly, the smaller the transistors the lower the charge required to switch them, so the lower the power consumption, and the smaller and cheaper the battery required to power it.
I want to agree with you, I really do. But my SuSE 10.1 desktop regularly has fits where it becomes completely unuseable - if I can manage to get a shell, I find that the load has spiked to 5-10 (on a single core system) when the system was doing *nothing*. Just this morning, I woke up, poured a bowl of cereal, walked over to it to read some Slashdot over my Cheerios, and found the system thrashing and refusing to come out of screensaver because the load was so high. This happened while I was sleeping. I had to ssh in from my Powerbook to kill off any processes that appeared to be using CPU before the system would respond to the mouse.
Hmm. It sounds to me like you need to try out Con Kolivas' "swap prefetch" patch.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's "veni, vidi, vomui". But nice try.
*hefts clue bat*
If you'd actually read Guttman's paper (which you clearly haven't) it talks about the fact that all the stuff needed in hardware to support Vista's DRM crap causes higher costs for manufacturers and reduced hardware performance.
I recently registered broadcastbroker.{org,net,co.uk,org.uk} with exactly this in mind. Please get in touch if you're interested in taking this further.
Gaaah! My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
No, it's watching at die Blinkenlichten, silly!
I hear Tony Blair's... :(
Amusing anecdote: I had a Linux-only box, and wanted to put a Windows XP dual-boot on it. So I created some free space, and launched the XP installation CD (this was the OEM SP2 edition). The installer refused to boot, giving me a blank screen.
The eventual fix? Use dd to overwrite my MBR with 0s.
As long as grub was there, the Windows installer refused to boot.
It's really galling that Microsoft are so arrogant they assume that no-one will ever want to use an operating system other than their own, and refuse to provide drivers for filesystems other than their own. And then they have the guts to strut around bragging about how "interoperable" they are.
Works For Me (tm).
The reason it "mangles" webpages is because, unlike many browsers, it's actually standards-compliant. It passes ACID2 completely. Ergo, the problem is that the webpages suck, not that Konqueror is broken.
There are some known issues with Javascript, of course. *rolls eyes* But Slashdot works almost perfectly in Konqueror on my system (KDE 3.5.7).
Of course, once Webkit is fully merged back into KHTML, Konqueror will be using the same HTML rendering engine as every OS X box out there, which will considerably increase the extent of website support!
Because browsing to audiocd:/ and dragging the contents of the "MP3" virtual directory to your ~/Music is such a stupid GUI. You really have no clue about the power of ioslaves, do you?
You misunderstand. The file manager capabilities in Konqueror aren't going away: it would be vandalism to do that!
I personally hate Dolphin: it's too GNOME-ey and dumbed down. I like the fact that I use Konqueror for everything from ripping CDs (audiocd:/) through managing my files and browsing the internet to reading documentation (man:/ and info:/).
I actually meant after "showtime" (the published start time) and before the opening credits of the film.
A cheap cinema ticket on my side of the pond is £5. That's $10.13 at the moment. OMG, $9.75 is ridiculously expensive.
Do you have 25 minutes of adverts and trailers to sit through before the movie too?
[citation needed]
Seriously: Safari is based on Webkit, which is in turn based on KHTML, which renders ACID2 perfectly. Are Apple actually unable to recompile some existing, working code without screwing it up?
I'm not sure why not. If you make the cables up with a red connector at one end (the server) and a green connector at the other (the logging box), and leave the server's RX conductor physically connected to the shield at one end and floating at the other, that is provably a one way cable!
Of course, the ultimate provable one-way cable is a piece of coax which is connected to a D connector with the conductor to the TX line. I don't see how you can get any more one-way than that (especially if you opto-couple as the other gentleman suggested).
(b) serial cards are cheap.Relative to what? Last time we evaluated using RS232 for an industrial control application, we found the hardware to be so expensive that we went for the (much more complex and much less expensive) CANbus option.
Ah, the old "RS232 cable with the RX conductor snipped" trick. So, how does this help if you've got 20 servers?
Tells you something about R&D if that 'edge' is 40+ years old...
Just got an e-mail from Scott Lowther saying that he's established that there's no ITAR issue and it's just some idiot being unnecessarily officious.
Actually, everything has settled down. Just got off the phone... there's no ITAR issue.Panic over, everyone!
Pro Engineer runs really well on Linux (better, IMHO, than on Windows). I've used it extensively.
Well, I guess that makes two of us, because I have very little time for people who resort to name-calling rather than reasoned argument. Good day to you.
OSS drivers for high-end hardware suck? Oh right, I'll go and tell the physicists who use our university's eight million pound supercomputer that they'd better switch to Windows.
How well does Windows run on a Cell processor, by the way?
In response to your ad-hominem: the only set of closed-source drivers I've used on Linux that worked well have been the Nvidia ones. All others have been buggy and unstable (some, such as the ATi drivers, unusable), not from lack of effort on my part to get them working properly. At least the less-featurefull open source drivers don't kill my system. My opinion of closed-source drivers is based on hard-won experience. And this makes me an idiot, does it?
Windows is an pathetic excuse for a platform. It doesn't even properly implement the minimal syscalls required by the POSIX standard (open, close, read, write, fork, exec).
If they actually cared about getting more open source developers to port their applications to Windows, they'd harmonise their API with the other major operating systems (Linux, OS X, Solaris, *BSD). As it is, this just looks like (yet another) an attempt by Microsoft to paint over the gaping flaws in both their business model and their approach to software development.
Wake me up when that changes. Until then, I really couldn't give a shit about Microsoft's supposed "friendliness" to open source software or their non-free "open" license.
Open source drivers where the specs are available are very good. Look at the Intel, Matrox or Radeon R200 drivers, for example.
Open source drivers where the developers have had to painfully reverse engineer the hardware interfaces from scratch are not very good (yet). This is surprising why?
Kubuntu.
Next!
The problem is that the argument for copyright extension is always argued using outliers. When was the last time you heard "Be A Man" by Aqua? That was on an album, "Aquarium", which made it to number 6 in the UK charts in 1997. I challenge you to find anyone who's even heard of the track. I estimate that 99.9999% of works currently under copyright are more obscure than that (this is probably an underestimate). Any idea where you'd be able to buy a copy of "A Castle for the Kopcheks" by James Stagg? Me neither (apart from my bookshelf).
Yes, they do. Firstly, chip fab is approximately cost per wafer divided by number of devices on a wafer. The more devices you can fit on a wafer, the less the devices cost. Secondly, the smaller the transistors the lower the charge required to switch them, so the lower the power consumption, and the smaller and cheaper the battery required to power it.
Hmm. It sounds to me like you need to try out Con Kolivas' "swap prefetch" patch.