...will need to get serious about their 64-bit Windows drivers. That much memory won't work on a 32-bit OS.;-)
Actually, it sounds like the kernel developers will need to get started on code to make RAM and disk space interchangeable. For instance, you may not need extra memory to load executables or shared libraries if you could just point to where they're stored on the "hard drive". Although issues like self-modifying code and "running out of disk space" seem much more ominous from that perspective.;-)
Of course. But I'm waiting for the day that a real virus comes out for Skype. I'm not trying to be a troll. I just feel certain that Skype is a gaping security hole waiting to be exploited, and I can't figure out why no hacker has turned the Skype network into his own personal bot network yet.
I can only think of two valid reasons for them to stay away from it. One is that they're being lazy and going after lower hanging fruit. The other is that hackers probably all love using Skype because they love having free conversations that are practically impossible to track/monitor, so they don't want to tarnish Skype's reputation.
Actually, it's neither. It is a Skype trojan. It's a trojan because it must trick the user into installing it. It's a Skype trojan because it actually links to Skype to spread itself to other Skype users. So if you're not using Skype, the chance of being infected with it is essentially nil.
Good point. I wasn't sure, but I had serious doubts that he had come up with the idea by himself. However, I do believe that the details of the BitTorrent protocol itself were created by Bram, and for various reasons his protocol took off like wildfire when no one else's did. His BitTorrent client implementation has always been terrible, so that's not it.
Perhaps it was the tracker system that makes it easy for seeders anywhere to host large files on web sites? It's not exactly revolutionary but even if he didn't really invent anything, he put a lot of work into it, he was the first person to make it palatable to the masses, and he chose to give it away freely.
I think he did a great public service there, and I don't mean by enabling people to distribute pirated content. Every time I download a new OS distro or a new 500MB game demo to try, I have Bram to thank for not having to make the choice between waiting forever or paying for access to high-speed servers. If I was a small company that wanted to host large files, I would have even more to thank him for. I'm still waiting for TV companies to jump on the bandwagon and distribute videos containing ads online using BitTorrent.
...but I sincerely hope they gave Bram Cohen a well-deserved bonus. He came up with a truly great invention that helps smaller companies and individuals host content (without BitTorrent, it would've cost way too much), and he decided to share his invention with the world for free.
MS doesn't have to pay him anything, but if they don't they lose a chance to gain a bit more respect from people. They're not struggling to pay their bills, and if they save money from his invention, they should toss him a bone.
It's difficult if you can't publish those changes. They may include proprietary code you want to keep from your competitors or calls to a closed-source third-party library. Depending on the design, it may be a real pain to move those changes/calls somewhere safe while providing the same functionality.
Not all developers are good developers, most developers don't want to have to figure out all the legal ins and outs of the tools/libraries they use, and even those that do make mistakes. On top of that, some are malicious, and may go out of their way to violate the GPL and hide it, using it as "insurance" in case they get fired or laid-off.
I know the GPL defenders aren't out there to put companies out of business or take money from them in law suits like patent trolls. But from the perspective of a non-technical boss who doesn't fully understand everything that can go wrong, it's safer to avoid creating a Linux-based appliance if he wants to keep his product closed-source. The larger the project and development team is, the safer you'll be avoiding it.
That makes sense to me unless the software you're using is an OS, and you're planning to use it for an appliance that has closed source. An OS has an awful lot of pieces, each of which can be under a different version of a different license, and it may cost a company quite a bit to keep track of it all and ensure they're in compliance. If you have a sizable team of developers, the chances of someone forgetting something and changing the wrong code will be high. Some companies end up hiring a lawyer to cut through the confusion and help make sure that they comply. This doesn't just make BSD easier to comply with, it makes it cheaper to comply with, as well as safer.
Another point to mention is that closed-source developers would benefit more from BSD growing than they would from Linux growing, and every closed source developer that chooses it helps it grow.
I don't think BSD is less user-friendly than Linux. The installs are a lot worse (except for PC-BSD), but aside from that, I don't see a big difference in user-friendliness.
I know BSD is behind Linux in drivers, but on all the PC's I've tried it on, it hasn't been any worse than Linux. Not even Ubuntu 7.04 works with my wifi card, which is a Gigabyte card with an rt2500 chipset, and has supposedly been supported by Linux for years.
And the media tells the other 99% what to do. If it weren't for the media, some of the other 99% might listen to that 1%. Any decent candidates end up being removed from consideration before people like me even get a chance to vote for them.
What would be cool is something like Robert Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll". Instead of making cars that move on the road, make roads that move people/goods at up to 100 MPH (kind of like a train that's always running and with no waiting required to get on/off it). Enclose it to protect passengers from the elements, and cover the enclosure with solar power collectors. The cost would be ridiculous, but perhaps not compared to the cost of building all the existing roads plus all the cars that currently drive on them. I can think of several reasons why the idea wouldn't work, but it would be cool.
I wonder if people would still "drive" like assholes when they were running late. I can imagine people running down the conveyor belt, elbowing people out of the way, to get somewhere a few seconds ahead of everyone else.
"All these big machines stomp around like robots - we want our robot to walk like a human."
Based on what I've read and seen, this article is wrong about the Asimo. The Asimo is the only robot I've seen that looks very human in the way it moves. It can walk, run (with both feet leaving the ground), jump, perform a complex dance, get up after a fall, adapt to changes in the terrain, and maintain its balance if something unexpected pushes it. It also treats walking/running as a controlled fall.
It looks like runbot can't even get both feet off the ground, which means it's not running, it's power-walking. The only thing new here may be its "local circuits", which simply means that it has extra CPU's to take the load off the primary CPU.
I agree completely. Combine that with someone who is left-handed, and you have someone who gets complaints from the bank when he signs his checks (because the signature keeps changing). I use online checking now, so I only have to sign a check about once every 6 months now.
You would also have to scan my handwriting in by hand, as I can't write at all on those electronic pen pads for credit card purchases. The stylus slides all over the surface, producing something that looks nothing at all like my hand-writing. I'm guessing it has something to do with the way lefties hold the pen at a weird angle.
From their TOS: Robots: Due to the potential impact on system performance and availability, the use of robots (automated HTTP requests) to retrieve Content from the Service is in most cases prohibited.
It sounds like MythTV is what's causing them to shut down.
Well, duh. (It had to be said because you know those emails can't be missing. If they really are gone, then someone must have gone to a good deal of trouble to remove them from all clients, servers, and backups. I doubt they're really gone though. It's easier to just lie.)
Now that is news! The editors should scrap this article and put your post on the front page. It won't help me at all because my laptop can't run Aero (and Vista still hogs the battery), but it's still good to know.
I feel that Slashdot has much better articles than Digg because the stories are filtered by editors, but that doesn't prevent me from wanting to smack them around for things like this. Sometimes they're almost as bad as CNN when it comes to beating a subject to death.;-)
Almost every Vista post has had people mentioning battery life problems, with or without Aero. Here are the main battery-related problems I've encountered personally:
1) Vista's extra behind-the-scenes tasks make your CPU and hard drive work harder.
2) Sleep and hibernate are broken (causing you to waste battery life doing full shutdowns and startups).
3) Aero puts the graphics chip into 3D mode, which makes it rev up to full speed (and full power consumption). The graphics card companies haven't done as much work on their mobile chips to save power as Intel has, especially when it comes to 3D mode.
My laptop's battery life was almost 50% lower in Vista (compared to XP with SP2). I say was because I switched it back to XP.
Slashdot Mirror
...will need to get serious about their 64-bit Windows drivers. That much memory won't work on a 32-bit OS. ;-)
;-)
Actually, it sounds like the kernel developers will need to get started on code to make RAM and disk space interchangeable. For instance, you may not need extra memory to load executables or shared libraries if you could just point to where they're stored on the "hard drive". Although issues like self-modifying code and "running out of disk space" seem much more ominous from that perspective.
Of course. But I'm waiting for the day that a real virus comes out for Skype. I'm not trying to be a troll. I just feel certain that Skype is a gaping security hole waiting to be exploited, and I can't figure out why no hacker has turned the Skype network into his own personal bot network yet.
I can only think of two valid reasons for them to stay away from it. One is that they're being lazy and going after lower hanging fruit. The other is that hackers probably all love using Skype because they love having free conversations that are practically impossible to track/monitor, so they don't want to tarnish Skype's reputation.
Actually, it's neither. It is a Skype trojan. It's a trojan because it must trick the user into installing it. It's a Skype trojan because it actually links to Skype to spread itself to other Skype users. So if you're not using Skype, the chance of being infected with it is essentially nil.
Don't forget extra power at low RPMs, which should mean quicker turning and starting.
Good point. I wasn't sure, but I had serious doubts that he had come up with the idea by himself. However, I do believe that the details of the BitTorrent protocol itself were created by Bram, and for various reasons his protocol took off like wildfire when no one else's did. His BitTorrent client implementation has always been terrible, so that's not it.
Perhaps it was the tracker system that makes it easy for seeders anywhere to host large files on web sites? It's not exactly revolutionary but even if he didn't really invent anything, he put a lot of work into it, he was the first person to make it palatable to the masses, and he chose to give it away freely.
I think he did a great public service there, and I don't mean by enabling people to distribute pirated content. Every time I download a new OS distro or a new 500MB game demo to try, I have Bram to thank for not having to make the choice between waiting forever or paying for access to high-speed servers. If I was a small company that wanted to host large files, I would have even more to thank him for. I'm still waiting for TV companies to jump on the bandwagon and distribute videos containing ads online using BitTorrent.
...but I sincerely hope they gave Bram Cohen a well-deserved bonus. He came up with a truly great invention that helps smaller companies and individuals host content (without BitTorrent, it would've cost way too much), and he decided to share his invention with the world for free.
MS doesn't have to pay him anything, but if they don't they lose a chance to gain a bit more respect from people. They're not struggling to pay their bills, and if they save money from his invention, they should toss him a bone.
...will be the little flashlight that alters memory, like in MiB. Nothing to see here. Move along.
It's difficult if you can't publish those changes. They may include proprietary code you want to keep from your competitors or calls to a closed-source third-party library. Depending on the design, it may be a real pain to move those changes/calls somewhere safe while providing the same functionality.
Not all developers are good developers, most developers don't want to have to figure out all the legal ins and outs of the tools/libraries they use, and even those that do make mistakes. On top of that, some are malicious, and may go out of their way to violate the GPL and hide it, using it as "insurance" in case they get fired or laid-off.
I know the GPL defenders aren't out there to put companies out of business or take money from them in law suits like patent trolls. But from the perspective of a non-technical boss who doesn't fully understand everything that can go wrong, it's safer to avoid creating a Linux-based appliance if he wants to keep his product closed-source. The larger the project and development team is, the safer you'll be avoiding it.
That makes sense to me unless the software you're using is an OS, and you're planning to use it for an appliance that has closed source. An OS has an awful lot of pieces, each of which can be under a different version of a different license, and it may cost a company quite a bit to keep track of it all and ensure they're in compliance. If you have a sizable team of developers, the chances of someone forgetting something and changing the wrong code will be high. Some companies end up hiring a lawyer to cut through the confusion and help make sure that they comply. This doesn't just make BSD easier to comply with, it makes it cheaper to comply with, as well as safer.
Another point to mention is that closed-source developers would benefit more from BSD growing than they would from Linux growing, and every closed source developer that chooses it helps it grow.
I don't think BSD is less user-friendly than Linux. The installs are a lot worse (except for PC-BSD), but aside from that, I don't see a big difference in user-friendliness.
I know BSD is behind Linux in drivers, but on all the PC's I've tried it on, it hasn't been any worse than Linux. Not even Ubuntu 7.04 works with my wifi card, which is a Gigabyte card with an rt2500 chipset, and has supposedly been supported by Linux for years.
And the media tells the other 99% what to do. If it weren't for the media, some of the other 99% might listen to that 1%. Any decent candidates end up being removed from consideration before people like me even get a chance to vote for them.
Yes, and that lesson is to use BSD.
What would be cool is something like Robert Heinlein's short story "The Roads Must Roll". Instead of making cars that move on the road, make roads that move people/goods at up to 100 MPH (kind of like a train that's always running and with no waiting required to get on/off it). Enclose it to protect passengers from the elements, and cover the enclosure with solar power collectors. The cost would be ridiculous, but perhaps not compared to the cost of building all the existing roads plus all the cars that currently drive on them. I can think of several reasons why the idea wouldn't work, but it would be cool.
I wonder if people would still "drive" like assholes when they were running late. I can imagine people running down the conveyor belt, elbowing people out of the way, to get somewhere a few seconds ahead of everyone else.
I wouldn't be able to play my video games in the dark with this.
"All these big machines stomp around like robots - we want our robot to walk like a human."
Based on what I've read and seen, this article is wrong about the Asimo. The Asimo is the only robot I've seen that looks very human in the way it moves. It can walk, run (with both feet leaving the ground), jump, perform a complex dance, get up after a fall, adapt to changes in the terrain, and maintain its balance if something unexpected pushes it. It also treats walking/running as a controlled fall.
It looks like runbot can't even get both feet off the ground, which means it's not running, it's power-walking. The only thing new here may be its "local circuits", which simply means that it has extra CPU's to take the load off the primary CPU.
The only way to make it completely fair is to let one thread slice the time up, and let the other thread choose which slice it wants. ;-)
I agree completely. Combine that with someone who is left-handed, and you have someone who gets complaints from the bank when he signs his checks (because the signature keeps changing). I use online checking now, so I only have to sign a check about once every 6 months now.
You would also have to scan my handwriting in by hand, as I can't write at all on those electronic pen pads for credit card purchases. The stylus slides all over the surface, producing something that looks nothing at all like my hand-writing. I'm guessing it has something to do with the way lefties hold the pen at a weird angle.
It's not "good PR and poor research". It's lying.
From their TOS: Robots: Due to the potential impact on system performance and availability, the use of robots (automated HTTP requests) to retrieve Content from the Service is in most cases prohibited.
It sounds like MythTV is what's causing them to shut down.
Well, duh. (It had to be said because you know those emails can't be missing. If they really are gone, then someone must have gone to a good deal of trouble to remove them from all clients, servers, and backups. I doubt they're really gone though. It's easier to just lie.)
Well, I could be wrong. Sneakers wasn't bad, and it managed to include hackers and the mafia. ;-)
I don't think this would make an exciting movie.
That sales in France won't be as high as usual. ;-)
Now that is news! The editors should scrap this article and put your post on the front page. It won't help me at all because my laptop can't run Aero (and Vista still hogs the battery), but it's still good to know.
I feel that Slashdot has much better articles than Digg because the stories are filtered by editors, but that doesn't prevent me from wanting to smack them around for things like this. Sometimes they're almost as bad as CNN when it comes to beating a subject to death. ;-)
Almost every Vista post has had people mentioning battery life problems, with or without Aero. Here are the main battery-related problems I've encountered personally:
1) Vista's extra behind-the-scenes tasks make your CPU and hard drive work harder.
2) Sleep and hibernate are broken (causing you to waste battery life doing full shutdowns and startups).
3) Aero puts the graphics chip into 3D mode, which makes it rev up to full speed (and full power consumption). The graphics card companies haven't done as much work on their mobile chips to save power as Intel has, especially when it comes to 3D mode.
My laptop's battery life was almost 50% lower in Vista (compared to XP with SP2). I say was because I switched it back to XP.