The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals--all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.
Yay! The Four Horsemen! But they forgot the Money-Launderers.
This reminds me, some guys had sent a PGP-encrypted email to the (Autstralian?) Prime Minister, then reported him to the police. His house was searched for the crypto keys; the next day the law project was put under the rug.
You're still missing the point. The act of "writing the driver" is often the *smallest* cost to the company. Supporting users of the driver, release management, providing updates, security fixes, etc. -- that's where the cost is. If a company doesn't think supporting an alternative OS will generate enough extra revenue (e.g., from increased sales of their hardware) to offset these costs, they probably won't support alternative OSes.
So they can release specs and the Community will take care of support and such.
Releasing specs is another matter. Some companies may have patent concerns, or may have licensed technology from other companies under terms that don't allow them to release specs.
I already adressed that. The System is broken. Abolish patents now. Not gonna happen? I'll ignore them and never sell anything save from countries that don't imagine that ideas can be monopolized.
And sometimes it's just simple "turf protection." They're afraid -- reasonably or unreasonably -- that releasing specs might give their competitors some kind of advantage. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but that's not really up to us. They spent the time and money to develop the hardware; it's really their choice whether or not to release specs.
Then why are the winmodems and winprinters and "windows-will-do-it-because-we're-cheap-assholes and will certainly never tell how we plugged the wires from PCI to phoneline! Someone else might figure it out and sell it for even cheaper!"
Those companies deserve to die an horrible economic death.
I've adressed that already, too : Reverse-engineering HW from specs is not profitable for several very good reasons. ONE : companies who do that are late to market. TWO : the label of "Follower" is Not Good in tech.
Fortunately, for most classes of hardware, Linux users can go elsewhere when we encounter this sort of company. Even now we're making inroads into video hardware, and there's an increasing number of well-supported wireless chipsets. Most other hardware has been "open" in one form or another for some time.
I need an OS that installs itself with drivers. Out of the box, no question asked. Same for codecs. Install all I'll ever need, NOW. (Automatic updates will take care of those that don't exist yet).
NO ONE needs a widget that's just a couple of wires and a Windows-only "driver" where all the functionality is. It WILL break, as soon as Microsoft introduces one more incompatibility layer between their old bad wrong broken design decisions and their new bad wrong broken design decisions, because the crappy driver will want to talk to the hardware by a channel that's FINALLY beeen abstracted... This applies to so many things I don't even know where to begin picking up examples. SB16 compatible cards that are no more SB16 compatible than mice and grape DNA is. And they need to have magic registers tweaked, or they won't be recognized as SB16. Tweaks only possible on DOS and Linux, it seems, because WinNT will NOT let you. That's ONE. (Or maybe motherboards makers only hire terminally incompetent morons for driver development...)
Depending what you run on it? Let's say "anything that makes the load go above 1 on *N*X".
Let's say "OpenOffice". It takes a year and more to load, so running it on any kind of VM will make that two years and more... (replace "years" by something less exaggerating)
"Even granpa" will notice. Yes. Even Granpa notices when the computer becomes really, really unusable. A VM to run a bot-infested machine? BWAHAHA. Welcome back, 8086 @ 4,77MHz.
Seriously, VMWare or any other solution will always be running at, what, 10% of native speed?
Thus, if you run your WHOLE F*ING ENVIRONMENT on top of a VM, it WILL be noticed - Know what? A 90% decrease in speed IS OBVIOUS.
Morons.
If you think "there are ways to make it fast" then stop. Stop thinking. Instead, go write your own VM and kill VMWare and QEmu and Bochs and Plex86 and Xen and so on, because you are so much smarter than all their devs.
I was trying to say, it's so easy to write a driver or have the community write it (go on the insanelymac forum about driver development sometime, one guy pretty much alone does the intel wireless 3945 driver for OSX86) that it's stupid NOT to support "alternative OS's", at least by releasing specs.
I've been thinking those very words... Scratch that. Make it "This is the nth post that makes me think "yeah,right" and it feels like those two words are playing in a loop inside my head."
How fuckin' EASY it is to write a driver in Linux... Do you have any idea how simple it really is? I've at least read sched.c (gotta begin SOMEwhere), the driver for my SCSI card (trm395) and emu10k1.c, and written a gadget module (could read to and from some kernel space, cool). Let's see... mmap() the memory region, declare structures that hardware understands, fill interface to kernel calls, voilà - driver done. And that's not printing drivers, those are generated by a PHP script from the specs. Anecdote : I use a Lexmark E210 and the LinuxPrinting website fucks up the PDD, so I have to select the Samsung ML-1210 instead - that must be because the spec is better written. (The printer is the exact same.)
The companies are not releasing specs because they're afraid that someone would reverse-engineer the device from the spec. It's stupid because if another company did that, they'd be spending much on that effort and they would be later to market than the first. The other thing that keeps companies from releasing specs is that they're afraid they haven't invented everything in their devices, so they might be infringing patents, and there might be some intellectual property they have licensed and may not publicly release.
(I hope you're the kind of slashdotter who reads replies to his comments, so that you answer to this one.)
There are a lot of things that don't make sense in most interpretations of quantum mechanics. This is what I've read that does make some sense of it all. Does that interpretation not rule out the whole idea of MWI and spooky-action-at-a-distance? (I love that word. Does sum up most I've read on QM at all... sounds like so much medieval alchemy to me.)
What about "with the price of hardware as it is now, how about the musicians record their music in garages and they'll go to the studio if they ever receive enough $ for that"?
I'm singing in an experimental thrash-metal band. We work on our tapes until the result sounds like, say, Chimaira - we can do that, using affordable hardware and leasing a studio for that which can't be done at home (Eur5/hr, our drummer is a sound engineer). Once we have our songs recorded right, we'll work on art and packaging, then on a decent website (two of us graphic artists, I'm the generic computer guy, management we do democratically). What do we need a label for already?
About my idea, a development that seems natural to me is I'd let the ISPs decide what part of their fees they want. My idea is the exact opposite of "socialized"! The customers will naturally go to the ISP that will at best give them good conscience, and has reasonable pricing, and does not throttle bittorrent (now THAT would be stupid), and gives more cut to the artists than the current evil labels, and has a decent upload speed, not like the current assraping plans where we get 6Mbits down and 128Kbits up. I mean, there are many factors that the customers will get to choose upon, and The Market will even that out. Consumer Choice is the Holy Mechanism of Capitalism, and it works.
I said "copyrights holders" because we hold the copyrights to our songs, and I understand that, evil as the contracts are, they must make their time before they expire. Even if we've lost all music of before, new music that's being given away for free to the public, and not to soulless vampiric corporations will add SO much value. But yes, cutting the label out of the picture is somehow needed.
My model is "open to any idea that is convenient enough"... Make that "open to any idea, even those not enough convenient and that will fail."
Thinking of one : the truly lossless formats would be accessed by paying customers, probably redistributed on the 'Net, but it would be so much easier to just go to the central (carefully avoid "official") distribution website and download them using a login and pass. I would be happy to go in a store that pays for access to that, burns the cd, prints the package on pretty paper, and I go home with that for, what, Eur5? I'd buy them in six-packs. However, just the music, in a listenably high quality format like "lame -quality 0 -bitrate 192 mp3", that would be free to download and listen to. An option to that model would be that "seeded content is free, what's only on our servers is premium and needs a subscription". Or make available 128Kbps mp3s of all content available on fixed servers. You get the idea... There are a LOT of possible business models, once you take out the maximalist laws. (As an aside, and as a bank-free person, I deeply hate the idea of subscription, because I know how frustrating it is to have the money and not be able to buy anything.)
About the Blank Media Tax, well, fuck that. If I don't get to choose which artists the tax I pay goes to, I'll buy blank media on the black market. (It's really useless anyay, since hard disks cost about 20 cents per gigabyte, but that's just my opinion.)
Yes, there is only one reality. TFS mentions "According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by 'wave functions' representing a set of multiple 'probable' states."
Well, if you try to predict "where" a wave is as if it was a particle, then yes, you only get "a set of multiple 'probable' states". When you subsequently try to predict the state of the wave using THAT set,... WTF is the point?
"When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options."
Well, DUH. If you measure what you could have measured in the first place, using a theory that predicts "the state will more probably be around here than there, but you must measure to make sure", then you have a theory that can't be disproven, except by exhaustive testing. And the abra-cad-abra spooky string action at a distance can go the way of the pink unicorns too.
"The Oxford team, led by Dr. David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes."
What kind of drugs DO they use? "If we consider that all mathematical possibilities defined by our theory do somehow physically exist, then we can explain that we can't know the future state of the universe non-probabilistically." Whew, only typing that remembers me how I feel on mushrooms... and makes as much sense as I do in that state.
Seems like they believe their mathematical models somehow do exist? Well, take an xy graph and go draw an imaginary number on it: can't exist(*). Parallel universes: can't exist.
*: "There is a way that makes it can", I know. I'm talking of representing something that is an abstraction defined externally to that universe. "Not in the namespace". "Not in the domain". In that same sense, parallel universes that "exist" as abstract mathematical representations of non-existant things do not exist. "Not in the namespace of physical reality". "Defined in the domain of that which does not exist".
Thank you SO much! That's a point I've been unable to formulate, a logical link I'd never seen stand by itself. Yes, the point of downloading things is not only price, but convenience. It is so EASY! I'd happily pay for most content, really. What if my ISP gave money to some artists I name on a list, what with my 100/month bill. In my case, I'd see it that way : My ISP charges 50 for a month, with a 50GByte limit. Beyond that, it's priced 1/GB. I'd be happy to know that some percentage of that goes to the copyright holders of the things I download. Moreover, there are lots of things I download that are simply not available, like in "a collection of Italian Giallo flicks most of which VHS-rips in Italian with English hard-coded subtitles". Or Canadian amateur cinema. Or old zombie films. And such, on and on, the Long Tail - list of everything that someone, somewhere could like to watch, but that's never been profitable to keep and carry and ship and sell in shops.
Okay, long version : My friend comes by with a new laptop (Toshiba Satellite something). It boots, seems to work, annoys the hell out of me (Cancel or Allow?), then I insert an original, bought DVD, in the right region, and Vista refuses to play it, with both Windows Media player and the bundled WinDVD. That's when I downloaded VLC just in case, and there it displayed no image, only "can not play this content for lack of a protected content path" where the video should have been.
That's when I thought "Defective by design and broken by default? Thank you, now I'll HAVE to install Linux."
Add the tag "outrightlie". I tried to play a standard, legit DVD on a Toshiba laptop, and Vista refused to display the video for "lack of a protected content path". That was an out-of-the-box setup.
Nothing whatsoever prevents me from pulling the code, bugfix it 100%, add a couple of features and upload it on sourceforge under the name "Open Intel GFX Driver for $OS". Laws prevent me? How? "cvs -d blahblah"... no law at my door yet trying to stop me...
You're right. Child molesters should have their dick and balls cut off in open public spaces at appointed, publicized times. "Think of the children"? Shit, that would make the children so afraid of sex that they wouldn't ever try it if it were given freely. How is that not a Good Thing(tm) in the mind of the "think of the children"-spouting people?
I thought fission when I was writing it. The only problem with fission is waste disposal, but that one or how to make fusion work will be solved at some point in time anyway, because they're technical problems that will find technical solutions.
The technical solution to hunger is to grow food. Don't tell me Africa isn't fertile enough to feed all its inhabitants...
As for energy, well, I was just thinking that using solar to grow food under lamps is pretty stupid. Maybe wind?
Aw, yeah, right, forgot that one : use sea barrages. Most humans inhabit near the coasts, so there would be no need to transport the majority of power to the land, which could better be served by local solar and windmills, if that's less expensive than the logistics of distribution. Now THAT's renewable.
About niche applications, I'm thiking of one. Is nanoscale fission possible? If yes, we can happily begin to replace the AA(LR6) batteries by ones with the same format and 500 years of use. (If that's too much cheap cyberpunk for you, so is tagging people with RFID chips and that's been done already.)
What about a nuclear-powered hydroponic farming plant? Make it 20 floors high, multiply surface production by 20 - so we can grow food in cities and not use fossil fuels to move it around, or to farm the land.
How's that for ecology?
As for animals, well, they're already bred just that way (more or less)...
Slashdot Mirror
Yay! The Four Horsemen! But they forgot the Money-Launderers.
This reminds me, some guys had sent a PGP-encrypted email to the (Autstralian?) Prime Minister, then reported him to the police. His house was searched for the crypto keys; the next day the law project was put under the rug.
What are you UKsians waiting for?
So they can release specs and the Community will take care of support and such.
I already adressed that. The System is broken. Abolish patents now. Not gonna happen? I'll ignore them and never sell anything save from countries that don't imagine that ideas can be monopolized.
Then why are the winmodems and winprinters and "windows-will-do-it-because-we're-cheap-assholes and will certainly never tell how we plugged the wires from PCI to phoneline! Someone else might figure it out and sell it for even cheaper!"
Those companies deserve to die an horrible economic death.
I've adressed that already, too : Reverse-engineering HW from specs is not profitable for several very good reasons. ONE : companies who do that are late to market. TWO : the label of "Follower" is Not Good in tech.
I need an OS that installs itself with drivers. Out of the box, no question asked. Same for codecs. Install all I'll ever need, NOW. (Automatic updates will take care of those that don't exist yet).
NO ONE needs a widget that's just a couple of wires and a Windows-only "driver" where all the functionality is. It WILL break, as soon as Microsoft introduces one more incompatibility layer between their old bad wrong broken design decisions and their new bad wrong broken design decisions, because the crappy driver will want to talk to the hardware by a channel that's FINALLY beeen abstracted... This applies to so many things I don't even know where to begin picking up examples. SB16 compatible cards that are no more SB16 compatible than mice and grape DNA is. And they need to have magic registers tweaked, or they won't be recognized as SB16. Tweaks only possible on DOS and Linux, it seems, because WinNT will NOT let you. That's ONE. (Or maybe motherboards makers only hire terminally incompetent morons for driver development...)
Depending what you run on it? Let's say "anything that makes the load go above 1 on *N*X".
Let's say "OpenOffice". It takes a year and more to load, so running it on any kind of VM will make that two years and more... (replace "years" by something less exaggerating)
"Even granpa" will notice. Yes. Even Granpa notices when the computer becomes really, really unusable. A VM to run a bot-infested machine? BWAHAHA. Welcome back, 8086 @ 4,77MHz.
Of course.
Seriously, VMWare or any other solution will always be running at, what, 10% of native speed?
Thus, if you run your WHOLE F*ING ENVIRONMENT on top of a VM, it WILL be noticed - Know what? A 90% decrease in speed IS OBVIOUS.
Morons.
If you think "there are ways to make it fast" then stop. Stop thinking. Instead, go write your own VM and kill VMWare and QEmu and Bochs and Plex86 and Xen and so on, because you are so much smarter than all their devs.
I was trying to say, it's so easy to write a driver or have the community write it (go on the insanelymac forum about driver development sometime, one guy pretty much alone does the intel wireless 3945 driver for OSX86) that it's stupid NOT to support "alternative OS's", at least by releasing specs.
"Yeah, right."
I've been thinking those very words... Scratch that. Make it "This is the nth post that makes me think "yeah,right" and it feels like those two words are playing in a loop inside my head."
How fuckin' EASY it is to write a driver in Linux... Do you have any idea how simple it really is? I've at least read sched.c (gotta begin SOMEwhere), the driver for my SCSI card (trm395) and emu10k1.c, and written a gadget module (could read to and from some kernel space, cool). Let's see... mmap() the memory region, declare structures that hardware understands, fill interface to kernel calls, voilà - driver done.
And that's not printing drivers, those are generated by a PHP script from the specs. Anecdote : I use a Lexmark E210 and the LinuxPrinting website fucks up the PDD, so I have to select the Samsung ML-1210 instead - that must be because the spec is better written. (The printer is the exact same.)
The companies are not releasing specs because they're afraid that someone would reverse-engineer the device from the spec. It's stupid because if another company did that, they'd be spending much on that effort and they would be later to market than the first. The other thing that keeps companies from releasing specs is that they're afraid they haven't invented everything in their devices, so they might be infringing patents, and there might be some intellectual property they have licensed and may not publicly release.
(I hope you're the kind of slashdotter who reads replies to his comments, so that you answer to this one.)
There are a lot of things that don't make sense in most interpretations of quantum mechanics. This is what I've read that does make some sense of it all. Does that interpretation not rule out the whole idea of MWI and spooky-action-at-a-distance? (I love that word. Does sum up most I've read on QM at all... sounds like so much medieval alchemy to me.)
What about "with the price of hardware as it is now, how about the musicians record their music in garages and they'll go to the studio if they ever receive enough $ for that"?
I'm singing in an experimental thrash-metal band. We work on our tapes until the result sounds like, say, Chimaira - we can do that, using affordable hardware and leasing a studio for that which can't be done at home (Eur5/hr, our drummer is a sound engineer). Once we have our songs recorded right, we'll work on art and packaging, then on a decent website (two of us graphic artists, I'm the generic computer guy, management we do democratically). What do we need a label for already?
About my idea, a development that seems natural to me is I'd let the ISPs decide what part of their fees they want. My idea is the exact opposite of "socialized"! The customers will naturally go to the ISP that will at best give them good conscience, and has reasonable pricing, and does not throttle bittorrent (now THAT would be stupid), and gives more cut to the artists than the current evil labels, and has a decent upload speed, not like the current assraping plans where we get 6Mbits down and 128Kbits up. I mean, there are many factors that the customers will get to choose upon, and The Market will even that out. Consumer Choice is the Holy Mechanism of Capitalism, and it works.
I said "copyrights holders" because we hold the copyrights to our songs, and I understand that, evil as the contracts are, they must make their time before they expire. Even if we've lost all music of before, new music that's being given away for free to the public, and not to soulless vampiric corporations will add SO much value. But yes, cutting the label out of the picture is somehow needed.
My model is "open to any idea that is convenient enough"... Make that "open to any idea, even those not enough convenient and that will fail."
Thinking of one : the truly lossless formats would be accessed by paying customers, probably redistributed on the 'Net, but it would be so much easier to just go to the central (carefully avoid "official") distribution website and download them using a login and pass. I would be happy to go in a store that pays for access to that, burns the cd, prints the package on pretty paper, and I go home with that for, what, Eur5? I'd buy them in six-packs.
However, just the music, in a listenably high quality format like "lame -quality 0 -bitrate 192 mp3", that would be free to download and listen to. An option to that model would be that "seeded content is free, what's only on our servers is premium and needs a subscription". Or make available 128Kbps mp3s of all content available on fixed servers. You get the idea... There are a LOT of possible business models, once you take out the maximalist laws. (As an aside, and as a bank-free person, I deeply hate the idea of subscription, because I know how frustrating it is to have the money and not be able to buy anything.)
About the Blank Media Tax, well, fuck that. If I don't get to choose which artists the tax I pay goes to, I'll buy blank media on the black market. (It's really useless anyay, since hard disks cost about 20 cents per gigabyte, but that's just my opinion.)
You meant to say "there is only one reality".
Yes, there is only one reality. TFS mentions "According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by 'wave functions' representing a set of multiple 'probable' states."
Well, if you try to predict "where" a wave is as if it was a particle, then yes, you only get "a set of multiple 'probable' states". When you subsequently try to predict the state of the wave using THAT set,... WTF is the point?
"When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options."
Well, DUH. If you measure what you could have measured in the first place, using a theory that predicts "the state will more probably be around here than there, but you must measure to make sure", then you have a theory that can't be disproven, except by exhaustive testing. And the abra-cad-abra spooky string action at a distance can go the way of the pink unicorns too.
"The Oxford team, led by Dr. David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes."
What kind of drugs DO they use? "If we consider that all mathematical possibilities defined by our theory do somehow physically exist, then we can explain that we can't know the future state of the universe non-probabilistically." Whew, only typing that remembers me how I feel on mushrooms... and makes as much sense as I do in that state.
Seems like they believe their mathematical models somehow do exist? Well, take an xy graph and go draw an imaginary number on it: can't exist(*). Parallel universes: can't exist.
*: "There is a way that makes it can", I know. I'm talking of representing something that is an abstraction defined externally to that universe. "Not in the namespace". "Not in the domain". In that same sense, parallel universes that "exist" as abstract mathematical representations of non-existant things do not exist. "Not in the namespace of physical reality". "Defined in the domain of that which does not exist".
Maybe the alternate reality where God creates Man and Woman, then creates the First Woman from a rib?
Fuckin'moron.
Wtf? The euro sign doesn't appear in slachsod? How do I type 1 like $1? (Trying £1 (pound)... just to see)
Thank you SO much! That's a point I've been unable to formulate, a logical link I'd never seen stand by itself. Yes, the point of downloading things is not only price, but convenience. It is so EASY! I'd happily pay for most content, really. What if my ISP gave money to some artists I name on a list, what with my 100/month bill.
In my case, I'd see it that way : My ISP charges 50 for a month, with a 50GByte limit. Beyond that, it's priced 1/GB. I'd be happy to know that some percentage of that goes to the copyright holders of the things I download.
Moreover, there are lots of things I download that are simply not available, like in "a collection of Italian Giallo flicks most of which VHS-rips in Italian with English hard-coded subtitles". Or Canadian amateur cinema. Or old zombie films. And such, on and on, the Long Tail - list of everything that someone, somewhere could like to watch, but that's never been profitable to keep and carry and ship and sell in shops.
It wasn't a region setting.
Okay, long version :
My friend comes by with a new laptop (Toshiba Satellite something). It boots, seems to work, annoys the hell out of me (Cancel or Allow?), then I insert an original, bought DVD, in the right region, and Vista refuses to play it, with both Windows Media player and the bundled WinDVD. That's when I downloaded VLC just in case, and there it displayed no image, only "can not play this content for lack of a protected content path" where the video should have been.
That's when I thought "Defective by design and broken by default? Thank you, now I'll HAVE to install Linux."
An AC pops out of nowhere to call me a liar! How cute.
Add the tag "outrightlie". I tried to play a standard, legit DVD on a Toshiba laptop, and Vista refused to display the video for "lack of a protected content path". That was an out-of-the-box setup.
Nothing whatsoever prevents me from pulling the code, bugfix it 100%, add a couple of features and upload it on sourceforge under the name "Open Intel GFX Driver for $OS". Laws prevent me? How? "cvs -d blahblah" ... no law at my door yet trying to stop me...
With a web interface, for example. It could trap all http requests to reply with a config page. Some pay-for-wifi systems do Just That
Automagically, as they should always be.
Idiot. Dells run MacOSX easy as of now.
Why is that modded 0? +Funny, plz
You're right. Child molesters should have their dick and balls cut off in open public spaces at appointed, publicized times. "Think of the children"? Shit, that would make the children so afraid of sex that they wouldn't ever try it if it were given freely. How is that not a Good Thing(tm) in the mind of the "think of the children"-spouting people?
I thought fission when I was writing it. The only problem with fission is waste disposal, but that one or how to make fusion work will be solved at some point in time anyway, because they're technical problems that will find technical solutions.
The technical solution to hunger is to grow food. Don't tell me Africa isn't fertile enough to feed all its inhabitants...
As for energy, well, I was just thinking that using solar to grow food under lamps is pretty stupid. Maybe wind?
Aw, yeah, right, forgot that one : use sea barrages. Most humans inhabit near the coasts, so there would be no need to transport the majority of power to the land, which could better be served by local solar and windmills, if that's less expensive than the logistics of distribution.
Now THAT's renewable.
About niche applications, I'm thiking of one. Is nanoscale fission possible? If yes, we can happily begin to replace the AA(LR6) batteries by ones with the same format and 500 years of use. (If that's too much cheap cyberpunk for you, so is tagging people with RFID chips and that's been done already.)
...just when I was checking if someone had not had that idea yet...
What?
Replying just to tag the comment... hoping I won't post 23 more before I understand the first two paragraphs.
What about a nuclear-powered hydroponic farming plant? Make it 20 floors high, multiply surface production by 20 - so we can grow food in cities and not use fossil fuels to move it around, or to farm the land.
How's that for ecology?
As for animals, well, they're already bred just that way (more or less)...