OK, fine, I give up. I take back any interesting aspect of my original comment. This does not relate to open source. It completely lacks any relation. The fact that we can see it as its being developed has nothing to do with the fact that we can take part in the development process of open-source software, nor can the two things be related in any way, however slight or obscure. I'm dropping the whole issue. Any further correspondance on this should be considered off-topic. This issue no longer pertains to any discussion. It should be considered non-existant. This movie has nothing to do with slashdot other than its content. End of discussion.
No, see, my objective wasn't to 'tack on' open-source, it was to point out a similarity between this and the "Bazaar" vs. how movies are normally written and the "Cathedral". It's a shame you had to make it sound like I was some corporate CEO who had no idea what open-source meant sticking it on to every damn project my company did. And nobody ever said open-source had to mean that you could contribute code (although it usually does) -- last time I checked, all it meant was users could partake in the development process in some way. I'd imagine, though, if you wrote theses guys a letter with some ideas of yours, some might make it into the product. What's annoying though is that I point out something interesting, you bash it down, and you get moderated up. Your last sentence, like much of this post I'm writing right now, sounds rather Troll-ish. Grr.....
The way this is being done reminds me of a web site I saw once where somebody was writing a movie involving the X-Files and R.E.M.... they added a few pages every week or so. This seems kinda like an open-source writing project - you can see it as its being written, like you can see open-source software as its being developed.
Now see, if the machine's being watched by some hot chick, this ain't bad (for me anyways), but if it's some guy.... ewww eww eww ewww ewwww!!!!!!!! Not something I wanna think about.
Yes, of course they/we/whomever has an understanding of the real world.
In the real world, there's this new type of media called DVD, and this format in which it is stored, called CSS. CSS is an encryption format; it's not proprietary, really, as they (the creators) have published papers explaining how it works. What they haven't published, however, are the list of keys that can be used with CSS to decrypt DVD movies.
It is a perfectly feasible option to buy a product which will decrypt DVD movies (so they can be played) without having to know any of the keys. Such products come in two forms: (a) hardware, or actual physical VCR-like devices that connect to a TV, and (b) software, which decodes the DVD format with the aid of a computer.
Although both schemes require a key to operate, the key is embedded - the end user does not need to know what the key is in order to use the product.
This would work well for any standardized environment; from the hardware point of view, as long as you had a standard 60-hz NTSC television, you could use a NTSC DVD decoder; if you had a 50-hz PAL television, like in Europe, you could use a PAL DVD decoder. Here, there are only two major standards that companies need to produce products for.
In the software world, things are much more complicated. Not only are there different standards for how a software product talks to the operating system, but there are different graphical standards, different standards for talking to the DVD drive, etc.
Software companies so far have fulfilled very few niches in terms of all the standards in use. This means that there is still a demand that is unfulfilled, and in the _real world_, demand and supply go together hand-in-hand.
In other words, in the "real world", by not providing enough supply to make everybody happy, you invite competing products.
The only illegal thing done here is to have reverse-engineered a poorly-written software decoder to extract a key. However, it would also have been possible to brute-force test keys until one was found, although it would have taken a while.
So, here (as I see it) are all the things going on here: In the case of the company with the poorly-written software, negligence. In the case of the program crackers, reverse engineering. (but is it really illegal to know what the processor knows? I mean, you *own* the damn processor after all!)
Just my $0.02.
--TheOrangeSquid
The fellow sat down at a bar, ordered a drink and asked the bartender if he wanted to hear a dumb-jock joke. "Hey, buddy," the bartender replied, "you see those two guys next to you? They used to be with the Chicago Bears. The two dudes behind you made the U.S. Olympic wrestling team. And for you information, I used to play center at Notre Dame." "Forget it," the customer said. "I don't want to explain it five times."
Yah, I know, but I was trying to make it sound like I was making it up as I went along... 2001 was _the_ most realistic sci-fi movie ever done, *please* be defensive, my fault for mutilating it;-)
Hrmm.... the accuracy is claimed to have been increased... would this imply that they had 16-bit etc. processors before that were incapable of higher-precision arithmetic?
In that case, they probably could've used a high-precision arithmetic function library, but it would've been slow - a good reason for the upgrade, I guess.
Well, I'd imagine that since the Hubble is rotating around the earth, as well as a large number of other objects, lots of calculations have to be done to determine what direction to be facing and when. It probably gives NASA scientists an easier time to let Hubble figure some of this out for itself...
It's probably specially-developed embedded code, too. Specialized real-time operating systems seem to run rampant in projects like these;-)
Now what NASA needs is to get a few satellites running Linux up... (do they have some already? who knows...)
Maybe slashdot readers could contribute enough money to put Rob up in space in a giant hamster-wheel like device for a few days. Then he could go visit the moon (which people haven't done in a long time), and discover some deserted moon base. Then they could ship him out to Jupiter, where he would misteriously disappear into a large black hole at least several thousand miles deep on a small moon that is only a few hundred miles in diameter...
Oh wait, that was the plot from 2001.
progress, n.: Medieval man thought disease was caused by invisible demons invading the body and taking possession of it.
Modern man knows disease is caused by microscopic bacteria and viruses invading the body and causing it to malfunction.
Someone bought linuxbeer.com... linuxwine is avail. though, so is linuxbooze linuxfun is taken, so is linuxsex, but not linuxporn (where am I supposed to naked penguin pin-ups these days!?)
Now what would be interesting, is if the IRS started offering a service where any tax program could connect to a website and download a large file full of all the rules... This would simplify everybody's (except the IRS) life -- but then again, if the IRS is already shipping out tons of this stuff every few months, how much more work can it be to convert it into a webpage?
Yeah, yeah, so you want some questions. My ideas: Is there a way to keep people from having the urge to protect children in such ways that all of us lose out? Have any studies shown children who had a censored childhood turned out any better as people? (I know that Weird Al was censored as a child, and partly because of that became known as Weird F***ing Al in college, later just Weird Al... Is being weird partly from childhood censorship a good thing? Do parents want their children to be social outcasts? Or if no children have ever heard or seen anything inappropriate, would they get along any better?)
Censorship is dumb. The Internet should provide the freedom to speak about whatever you want, post whatever you want, etc. Three cheers for these guys.
The reason I live in the USA is because I am guaranteed certain rights; I do not like seeing my rights removed so we can 'protect the children.' Hell, sex was the main topic of conversation in the class in my second grade - and that didn't make me an immoral human being.
Sorry for posting this on this thread, (this is something that should be kinda near the top, IMHO) but I wanted to point out that some people (all?) may be having trouble 'clicking on the image to enlarge' [on the company's website] It seems it merely links to section #a of the page, which looks like it doesn't exist (nutscrape just points me to the very top of the page) But anyway, what I was going to say is: http://www.adsx.com/news/img/da2b.gif Is the URL for the enlarged image (the/news/img directory allows content listings (lucky for me)) Hope this helps some of you out there interested in the technical aspects. [If this problem is happening to only me and the "click to enlarge" thing works for everyone else, I apologize for posting this message]
Hmmm... interesting... I got X running at 640x480x16 on an old packard bell statesmen+ laptop just fine once. The problems you're having sound like what happens to X on my desktop machine when I turn on framebuffer support in my kernel (I'm running a Mach64 Rage II+DVD - I've tried with other ATI cards though and haven't had problems, maybe it's just my card...)
Yeah... the whole idea of having a drivers license is that you are held accountable for damages you cause... but unless someone is deliberately attempting to crack into other computers, its hard to accidentally cause damage on the net. I mean, when was the last time you were surfing down the information superhighway, took your eyes off the monitor to do something, and your packets suddenly began colliding into others, damaging them irreversably?;-) Besides, data is physically worthless - bits and bytes are effectively free, so all you'd be doing in that case would be interrupting communications, or changing records of someone's intellectual property, or something... Licenses to use the internet are dumb.
This is definitely a good thing - we like having alternatives to what we already have. (How else would egcs have come about?) Mmmm... sparc... reminds me of how much fun non-86 platforms can be... nice SGI... pretty SGI... fast SGI...;-) [Written on orangesquid's SGI Indy;-)]
I'm still mad Lucas didn't make the movie when he was originally going to, back in '97.
I'm an actor (I did the national/mexico tour of tommy '95-'96 and the brasil tour '96 with big league theatricals, I also did several ovaltine radio commercials and I was going to be in a movie, but I couldn't because of the tour...) and made callbacks (for those of you not in the theatre business, it means you're being pretty seriously considered for the part - less than 20 or so people out of hundreds who audition usually make callbacks) There's a chance I would've been Anakin, but no, he had to put it off for a few years - by the time he was auditioning people again, I was too old!
But then again, after seeing Jar-jar binks, I think I might've not enjoyed being in SW1 as much as I would sans Jar-jar. (In other words, I thought he sucked;-)
These systems all have many problems... the only system I can envision which would potentially work for everything would be a direct interface to the nervous system - much like in the movie 'The Matrix' (which kicked ass, btw) - now we just need to convince everyone to prenatal get surgery to install jacks in their children's heads...;-) The sphere idea doesn't sound that bad, if we can build one big enough - only problem, you can't really insert things into the environment for them to interact with - namely, they can't sit down.
I built a liquid transistor once... the recipe was the following: 3 jars lemon juice water salt copper wire aluminum foil I used the copper wire tips and aluminum foil pieces as electrodes. I put saltwater in the center jar and lemon juice in the left and right jars. The emitter was a copper electrode in the right jar. There was a wire running from an aluminum electrode in the right jar to a copper electrode in the middle jar. The base was a copper electrode in the middle jar. There was another copper electrode in the middle jar attached to an aluminum electrode in the left jar. The collector was a copper electrode in the left jar. I figured using different electrodes in such substances should create diode-like behavior - especially because copper+aluminum+electrolye=very sucky battery. After connecting a voltage supply across the emitter and base (positive on emitter I think), I connected another voltage supply's positive (I think) to emitter and put an ohmmeter between the collector and that supply's negative (methinks). I noted the resistance. I then removed the first voltage supply, and noted the resistance again. Not much different. I swapped the polarity of the voltage supplies and repeated the experiment. 70k ohms when the supply was connected, 120k when it wasn't. Woohoo! I had a cheap, ineffective giant liquid transistor. Completely impractical;-) The only problem with such liquid transistors (besides them being not very efficient): the liquids tend to pick up fun little things like fungi. I had the three jars (still full) in a box in my basement a little while ago... One day, as I was cleaning up, I looked in the box... ewww... Yet again, another nearly completely useless device pioneered by the infamous Matt Williams;-) If anyone repeats the experiment with even a small bit of success (try substituting other metals - it might make it more effective) please e-mail me at orangesquid@hotmail.com - I'd love to hear about it.
An interesting idea might just be to suddenly disappear from the web one day, setting up your site on a new domain name. (something like.... notactuallypurdueonline.com;-) Give the university the domain name, and let them deal with the hundreds of annoyed users. They just might give you back your domain.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, fine, I give up. I take back any interesting aspect of my original comment. This does not relate to open source. It completely lacks any relation. The fact that we can see it as its being developed has nothing to do with the fact that we can take part in the development process of open-source software, nor can the two things be related in any way, however slight or obscure. I'm dropping the whole issue. Any further correspondance on this should be considered off-topic. This issue no longer pertains to any discussion. It should be considered non-existant. This movie has nothing to do with slashdot other than its content. End of discussion.
No, see, my objective wasn't to 'tack on' open-source, it was to point out a similarity between this and the "Bazaar" vs. how movies are normally written and the "Cathedral". It's a shame you had to make it sound like I was some corporate CEO who had no idea what open-source meant sticking it on to every damn project my company did.
And nobody ever said open-source had to mean that you could contribute code (although it usually does) -- last time I checked, all it meant was users could partake in the development process in some way. I'd imagine, though, if you wrote theses guys a letter with some ideas of yours, some might make it into the product.
What's annoying though is that I point out something interesting, you bash it down, and you get moderated up. Your last sentence, like much of this post I'm writing right now, sounds rather Troll-ish. Grr.....
The way this is being done reminds me of a web site I saw once where somebody was writing a movie involving the X-Files and R.E.M.... they added a few pages every week or so. This seems kinda like an open-source writing project - you can see it as its being written, like you can see open-source software as its being developed.
Now see, if the machine's being watched by some hot chick, this ain't bad (for me anyways), but if it's some guy.... ewww eww eww ewww ewwww!!!!!!!!
Not something I wanna think about.
I used to think vb was cool.
But then again, that was back when I liked windows. A copy of slackware linux cured me of my illness.
This year, I resolve to make Bill Gates' life a living hell. (Of course, knowing how responsible _I_ am, he has not a thing to worry about...)
Yes, of course they/we/whomever has an understanding of the real world.
In the real world, there's this new type of media called DVD, and this format in which it is stored, called CSS. CSS is an encryption format; it's not proprietary, really, as they (the creators) have published papers explaining how it works. What they haven't published, however, are the list of keys that can be used with CSS to decrypt DVD movies.
It is a perfectly feasible option to buy a product which will decrypt DVD movies (so they can be played) without having to know any of the keys.
Such products come in two forms: (a) hardware, or actual physical VCR-like devices that connect to a TV, and (b) software, which decodes the DVD format with the aid of a computer.
Although both schemes require a key to operate, the key is embedded - the end user does not need to know what the key is in order to use the product.
This would work well for any standardized environment; from the hardware point of view, as long as you had a standard 60-hz NTSC television, you could use a NTSC DVD decoder; if you had a 50-hz PAL television, like in Europe, you could use a PAL DVD decoder. Here, there are only two major standards that companies need to produce products for.
In the software world, things are much more complicated. Not only are there different standards for how a software product talks to the operating system, but there are different graphical standards, different standards for talking to the DVD drive, etc.
Software companies so far have fulfilled very few niches in terms of all the standards in use. This means that there is still a demand that is unfulfilled, and in the _real world_, demand and supply go together hand-in-hand.
In other words, in the "real world", by not providing enough supply to make everybody happy, you invite competing products.
The only illegal thing done here is to have reverse-engineered a poorly-written software decoder to extract a key. However, it would also have been possible to brute-force test keys until one was found, although it would have taken a while.
So, here (as I see it) are all the things going on here:
In the case of the company with the poorly-written software, negligence.
In the case of the program crackers, reverse engineering. (but is it really illegal to know what the processor knows? I mean, you *own* the damn processor after all!)
Just my $0.02.
--TheOrangeSquid
The fellow sat down at a bar, ordered a drink and asked the bartender if he
wanted to hear a dumb-jock joke.
"Hey, buddy," the bartender replied, "you see those two guys next to
you? They used to be with the Chicago Bears. The two dudes behind you made
the U.S. Olympic wrestling team. And for you information, I used to play
center at Notre Dame."
"Forget it," the customer said. "I don't want to explain it five
times."
Yah, I know, but I was trying to make it sound like I was making it up as I went along... ;-)
2001 was _the_ most realistic sci-fi movie ever done, *please* be defensive, my fault for mutilating it
Hrmm.... the accuracy is claimed to have been increased... would this imply that they had 16-bit etc. processors before that were incapable of higher-precision arithmetic?
In that case, they probably could've used a high-precision arithmetic function library, but it would've been slow - a good reason for the upgrade, I guess.
Well, I'd imagine that since the Hubble is rotating around the earth, as well as a large number of other objects, lots of calculations have to be done to determine what direction to be facing and when. It probably gives NASA scientists an easier time to let Hubble figure some of this out for itself...
;-)
It's probably specially-developed embedded code, too. Specialized real-time operating systems seem to run rampant in projects like these
Now what NASA needs is to get a few satellites running Linux up... (do they have some already? who knows...)
Maybe slashdot readers could contribute enough money to put Rob up in space in a giant hamster-wheel like device for a few days. Then he could go visit the moon (which people haven't done in a long time), and discover some deserted moon base. Then they could ship him out to Jupiter, where he would misteriously disappear into a large black hole at least several thousand miles deep on a small moon that is only a few hundred miles in diameter...
Oh wait, that was the plot from 2001.
progress, n.:
Medieval man thought disease was caused by invisible demons
invading the body and taking possession of it.
Modern man knows disease is caused by microscopic bacteria
and viruses invading the body and causing it to malfunction.
Someone bought linuxbeer.com...
linuxwine is avail. though, so is linuxbooze
linuxfun is taken, so is linuxsex, but not linuxporn (where am I supposed to naked penguin pin-ups these days!?)
Yeah, I mean, come on, _somebody_ really should patent the lemonade stand! And street vendors! And advertisements! And the English language!
Better yet, someone should patent the idea of IP law - then sue the patent system for infringing on their patent!
Just my $0.01 (its not even worth 2 cents)
Now what would be interesting, is if the IRS started offering a service where any tax program could connect to a website and download a large file full of all the rules...
This would simplify everybody's (except the IRS) life -- but then again, if the IRS is already shipping out tons of this stuff every few months, how much more work can it be to convert it into a webpage?
Yeah, yeah, so you want some questions.
My ideas:
Is there a way to keep people from having the urge to protect children in such ways that all of us lose out?
Have any studies shown children who had a censored childhood turned out any better as people?
(I know that Weird Al was censored as a child, and partly because of that became known as Weird F***ing Al in college, later just Weird Al... Is being weird partly from childhood censorship a good thing? Do parents want their children to be social outcasts? Or if no children have ever heard or seen anything inappropriate, would they get along any better?)
OOps.. make that second real post - evidently I didn't write my comment fast enough ;-)
[Not like anyone cares anyway...]
Censorship is dumb. The Internet should provide the freedom to speak about whatever you want, post whatever you want, etc. Three cheers for these guys.
The reason I live in the USA is because I am guaranteed certain rights; I do not like seeing my rights removed so we can 'protect the children.' Hell, sex was the main topic of conversation in the class in my second grade - and that didn't make me an immoral human being.
Sorry for posting this on this thread, (this is something that should be kinda near the top, IMHO) but I wanted to point out that some people (all?) may be having trouble 'clicking on the image to enlarge' [on the company's website] /news/img directory allows content listings (lucky for me))
It seems it merely links to section #a of the page, which looks like it doesn't exist (nutscrape just points me to the very top of the page)
But anyway, what I was going to say is:
http://www.adsx.com/news/img/da2b.gif
Is the URL for the enlarged image (the
Hope this helps some of you out there interested in the technical aspects.
[If this problem is happening to only me and the "click to enlarge" thing works for everyone else, I apologize for posting this message]
Hmmm... interesting...
I got X running at 640x480x16 on an old packard bell statesmen+ laptop just fine once.
The problems you're having sound like what happens to X on my desktop machine when I turn on framebuffer support in my kernel (I'm running a Mach64 Rage II+DVD - I've tried with other ATI cards though and haven't had problems, maybe it's just my card...)
Yeah... the whole idea of having a drivers license is that you are held accountable for damages you cause... but unless someone is deliberately attempting to crack into other computers, its hard to accidentally cause damage on the net. I mean, when was the last time you were surfing down the information superhighway, took your eyes off the monitor to do something, and your packets suddenly began colliding into others, damaging them irreversably? ;-)
Besides, data is physically worthless - bits and bytes are effectively free, so all you'd be doing in that case would be interrupting communications, or changing records of someone's intellectual property, or something...
Licenses to use the internet are dumb.
Yeah, I know, sorry, should've been more clear - I'm just referring to how non-x86 platform support is a _good_ thing.
;-)
This is definitely a good thing - we like having alternatives to what we already have. (How else would egcs have come about?) ;-) ;-)]
Mmmm... sparc... reminds me of how much fun non-86 platforms can be... nice SGI... pretty SGI... fast SGI...
[Written on orangesquid's SGI Indy
They probably have the clause in because there's penguin porn hidden somewhere in the product ;-)
It had to happen eventually... our government is too paranoid for its own good.
I'm an actor (I did the national/mexico tour of tommy '95-'96 and the brasil tour '96 with big league theatricals, I also did several ovaltine radio commercials and I was going to be in a movie, but I couldn't because of the tour...) and made callbacks (for those of you not in the theatre business, it means you're being pretty seriously considered for the part - less than 20 or so people out of hundreds who audition usually make callbacks) There's a chance I would've been Anakin, but no, he had to put it off for a few years - by the time he was auditioning people again, I was too old!
But then again, after seeing Jar-jar binks, I think I might've not enjoyed being in SW1 as much as I would sans Jar-jar. (In other words, I thought he sucked ;-)
These systems all have many problems... the only system I can envision which would potentially work for everything would be a direct interface to the nervous system - much like in the movie 'The Matrix' (which kicked ass, btw) - now we just need to convince everyone to prenatal get surgery to install jacks in their children's heads... ;-)
The sphere idea doesn't sound that bad, if we can build one big enough - only problem, you can't really insert things into the environment for them to interact with - namely, they can't sit down.
I built a liquid transistor once... the recipe was the following: ;-) ;-)
3 jars
lemon juice
water
salt
copper wire
aluminum foil
I used the copper wire tips and aluminum foil pieces as electrodes. I put saltwater in the center jar and lemon juice in the left and right jars. The emitter was a copper electrode in the right jar. There was a wire running from an aluminum electrode in the right jar to a copper electrode in the middle jar. The base was a copper electrode in the middle jar. There was another copper electrode in the middle jar attached to an aluminum electrode in the left jar. The collector was a copper electrode in the left jar.
I figured using different electrodes in such substances should create diode-like behavior - especially because copper+aluminum+electrolye=very sucky battery.
After connecting a voltage supply across the emitter and base (positive on emitter I think), I connected another voltage supply's positive (I think) to emitter and put an ohmmeter between the collector and that supply's negative (methinks). I noted the resistance. I then removed the first voltage supply, and noted the resistance again. Not much different.
I swapped the polarity of the voltage supplies and repeated the experiment. 70k ohms when the supply was connected, 120k when it wasn't.
Woohoo! I had a cheap, ineffective giant liquid transistor. Completely impractical
The only problem with such liquid transistors (besides them being not very efficient): the liquids tend to pick up fun little things like fungi. I had the three jars (still full) in a box in my basement a little while ago... One day, as I was cleaning up, I looked in the box... ewww...
Yet again, another nearly completely useless device pioneered by the infamous Matt Williams
If anyone repeats the experiment with even a small bit of success (try substituting other metals - it might make it more effective) please e-mail me at orangesquid@hotmail.com - I'd love to hear about it.
--theorangesquid
An interesting idea might just be to suddenly disappear from the web one day, setting up your site on a new domain name. (something like.... notactuallypurdueonline.com ;-)
Give the university the domain name, and let them deal with the hundreds of annoyed users. They just might give you back your domain.