hopefully someone will be able to give an example that enlightens us both!
I doubt any are going to be forthcoming. From what I can work out, the argument going on now mostly boils down to how much you isolate drivers from the rest of the kernel. Expect to see lots of hot air and little code.
My vague recollections from my OS course at uni (which was back when microkernels were the "in" thing and exciting) was that kernels don't do all that much, but what they do do is both critical and complex, with the main difference being that with monolithic kernels all the complex bits are lumped together into one giant process while with microkernels the complex bits get seperated into what can almost be described as seperate processes. The main benefit of microkernels was that they're supposed to be more portable as the hardware dependent bits could be isolated away and it's also supposed to make it easier to write most of the kernel in a (very) high level language (and that was supposed to make it both easier to write and add to the portability). The downside of microkernels was/is that since the complex parts are seperated out, all the communication between the parts takes longer and gets more complictated, in much the same was that it takes a programme longer to call an object through CORBA than if it was a compiled into the programme (and calling through CORBA is a more complicated call, but most programmer's are shielded from the call complexity).
I think the security aspect of microkernels is a new angle.
But in practice Linux 2.6 is 6 million lines of code and a typical microkernel is less than 10k.
Umm, doesn't that mean while you've prooved that the 10k microkernel lines correct, you'd still have ~6 million lines of code sitting outside the microkernal waiting to be prooved? I can't see how a microkernel can magically do with 10k everything Linux is doing with 6 million lines (especially as by the definition of microkernel, than there's no way it could).
See, I imagine this bunch of distinct services all happily calling each other for what they need; I'd like to know more about how the need for complex distributed algorithms arises.
You must be getting something we Yanks aren't for all the extra taxes you are paying
You would think so, but it's sometimes hard to tell. I know a lot is made about how we have more and/or better social services than in the states, but it's hard to believe that the services are so much better for the high price being paid. Ok, we have the NHS and while I'm glad we have it, it certainly doesn't explain the vast differences in tax levels and it's certainly not the be all and end all in medical care (if it was, private medical insurance/practice wouldn't be on sale here). And unemployment insurance doesn't get cut off (well, they do at least try and put pressure on people to get jobs, but I don't think they'd fully cut somebody off of all benefit). Then again, as a single, employed, car driving home owner with no kids I get the fun of paying for everything and getting little back in return, so I may be a bit bitter. Did I mention the TV Tax?:-)
I'd imagine the VAT replaces the American income tax system entirely.
Nope, not even close. Most people's personal tax allowance (the amount of money they are allowed to earn without paying tax) is roughly 5000 pounds a year (there are differences depending on circumstances, but this is a roughly accurate figure). After that, the first £2,150 you earn is taxed at 10%, between 2,150 and 33,300 is at 22% and any taxable income over 33,300 is charged at 40%.
And this doesn't include National Insurance (equivalent to Social Security), which is a somewhat complicated calculation.
Some good info on our taxes can be found here. They're you'll find some of our other taxes like Council Tax, Capital Gains and Stamp Duty.
Mostly in order to confuse any enforcement officials - as long as the broken/recovered keys are kept seperate, then it would be hard to say that the copy is illegitimate. Yes, it's unlikely people would bother - my point was that once a key is broken/recovered, the DRM becomes worthless and you could trade the DRM'd file if you wanted to.
but the movie won't play without an internet connection
It might only need to phone home once and cache the key, but yeah, you wouldn't be able to watch the movie without an internet connection at all (but how do you download the film with out an internet connection:-)
If they tried to sell a DVD player that had to be plugged into the phone line before it would play anything, and that phone requirement added _nothing_ to the movie, they would not sell a single one.
Didn't they try that one already? I though that was how DiVX (the DVD player, not the codec) worked - cheap DVDs that needed to phone home before they would play.
Last week we had one warm day (warm by our standards anyway) and parts of the tube ground to a halt. Last Saturday, almost every line was part suspended somewhere for "planned" engineering works - usually when works are planned you get a fair amount of notice, I didn't see any notice until the Friday night. The Northern Line is a joke year round and I still feel like I'm taking my life into my own hands when the train goes underground thanks to what happened last year.
To be fair, that's hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, since much of the price you pay is taxes.
How is it an unfair comparison? American's are complaining about the price of petrol they pay at the pump, which is still half of what people in the UK are paying at the pump. Yes, the high price of petrol is in many ways our own fault, but as the media keeps hammering home that people should be getting the warm fuzzies from such high taxes/prices as it "helps the environment", it's not going to change soon. It almost did a few years back, but the protests soon fizzled out.
BTW, you forgot to mention the congestion charge. Driving in London must be damn expensive.
I also forgot to mention Road Tax. Just having your car on the public highway costs money. They even have a nifty new computer system that knows when your tax is due, so if you want to take your car off the road for a while (which means that you don't need to pay road tax) you better let the government know, otherwise they'll fine you for not renewing the licence.
I have no idea where any of this money's going, very little of it ends up improving either the roads or public transport and the health system is paid for mainly from another set of taxes.
But if Warner Bros is going to use the so called "super distribution" model (which is where a single encrypted file can be unencrypted by different people) then the person downloading the legal file from WB doesn't have to circumvent the DRM - all he has to is give the file to his friend (and WB will be none the wiser about this), and if his friend has an illegal key then his friend can do the circumventing. His friend could even upload the exact same drm'd file to pirate trackers, and as long as the pirates had the illegal key then they could all use the "legit" file.
The security would hinge on how hard it is to break the keys.
I was reading up on DRM for mobile phones, and one of the use cases involved the ability for users to send downloaded DRM'd content to other users, so that when user A sends a file to user B, user B's phone contacts the the rights owner and get's a key. It's called "Super Distribution"
So it could work like that - but I always thought that the only way that was in any way secure was that phones are fairly locked down compared to a PC.
IIRC, it was from a leaflet from a company that carries out LPG conversions. Maybe they didn't want the work:-)
I often see LPG sold at about 50% of the price of petrol/diesel - usually around 45-50p a litre (last time I looked), with petrol at around 95-98 and diesel now over a pound.
For example here LPG gets around 10% less miles per litre than petrol
I read somwhere that it was 50% less - which always made me wonder what the point was, as if it's roughly half the price of petrol but needs twice as much, then there's no net benefit (excluding the congestion charge). If it is only 10% less than there is a point to it.
I don't think it's the MPG that's the point of ethanol, it's that you're not putting excess carbon into the atmosphere. If you grow plants to make ethanol then they will soak up the carbon that was put into atmosphere from the last lot of ethanol produced from plants. With fossil fuels, you just keep puting carbon into the atmosphere and it's not getting taken back out.
And then there's the installation of the.deb packages. To get those to work, I have to download the package, open up the command window and type in the installation manually.
What packages are you installing that require a manual install? If you're installing something that isn't (for some weird reason) in the debian repository, are you certain that there isn't a repository you could add that will contain the package?
They also have a nice convenient program that installs files for me. Except that half the time, after it installs, I have no clue where to find it, and end up using the file manager to dig it out of the Bin folder
Most desktop oriented software will add shortcuts to the application menu, though sometimes you need to log out and back in again for the shortcut to show up. Command line software doesn't, but then the executables should end up in/usr/bin. If you use Synaptic you can right click on an installed package, select properties and then the installed files tab and you'll see a list of what has been installed where. I don't see how manually installing packages would help you here as they'll end up in exactly the same place if you used a package manager to get the files for you.
But I don't see why code should be purposefully dumbed down, wasting the time of its author, only for the sake of being more accessible to an inexperienced coder.
I wouldn't say code should be purposefully dumbed down, but it should be well commented and readable. And a lot of code, whether it's open, closed or in-house isn't. But this is a software engineering issue, not an open source vs closed source one.
I believe the OP feels that one of the "selling points" of open source is that people (of suitable technical ability) can read the code and learn from it and make changes, but that the way some/most/all OSS software is written stops this from happening. I tend to agree, though I don't think it's a dismal failure of open source - it's a problem with software engineering and some projects are going to be better coded/documented than others.
A package for each of a dozen Free distros is harder for the manufacturer to support than a package for each of two distros (Windows and Mac OS X).
The alternative would be a single installer application (that generally installs things to LSB locations, probably asking for confimations if necessary). The down side would that the app would be outside of the package management system. Not a really big deal, just a bit of an annoyance. And to be honest, once the installer app is out then people who care about such things can write wrappers for the package management system of choice - just like how java works under debian.
And there's probably not that many distro's you'd need to really need to worry about - if you have packages for Debian and Fedora, then a lot other distros will get there packages from one of those.
Most computers out there are probably bought to run office software, do email and browse the Web
While I can agree with email and browsing, I always wonder if Office apps are ever used that much in the home. I can see it being a factor in somebody's decision to buy a PC, but a few months down the line how often is Office fired up? How many people write letters that can't be written in Wordpad? Maybe people will want to use Excel (probably in order to look at thier finances) but how many people will go from the wanting to stage to the regularly using stage? Powerpoint? What use is that in the home? Access? You could catalogue all your CDs like you've wanted to for years, but are you really going to put in the effort? And then there's the "I can take my work home" argument with Office, yes, you could take your work home, but do you really want to?
Before the internet "came along" how many home computers were little more than games machines or paper weights?
"This argument falls flat on its nose if you take into consideration that not only the original developer but everyone is allowed to modify Free Software. It just takes one soul to clean up the messy GUI and the improved version (if it really is better) will win out."
No, the OP's argument still stands as while somebody could come along and clean things up/write documentation, nobody ever does. If writing the docs isn't an itch the developer himself wants to scratch, what's the likely hood that it's an itch somebody else is going to get? Who's going to want to trawl through what's there and figure out how things work, which, depending on how scant the original documenation is or how obfuscated the code is, may take almost as long as writing from scratch?
It's ceratinly the case I've found from a lot of the open source Java development technologies I've used (JBoss, Spring, Jasper, Hibernate) that while the API's are documented (usually) if you realy want to know how to use the tools then you pretty much have to buy a book (which is usually written by the developers of the tool). With Jasper you don't even get a real manual - they're that desperate for people to buy the docs.
The UK has an amazing law which allows its citizens - (sorry, subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth II von Battenberg Saxe Coburg Gotha usw)
There's a lot of differences between being a British citizen and a British subject (except, iirc, for British Subjects born before 1948) - the Home Office has some info on the matter here. And anyone who is still a British subject can't pass on subject status to thier children, so the status of "British Subject" will eventually die out anyway.
Anyone remember a particularly violent era called the Crusades? Let's not start a my religion is more peaceful than yours debate.
Or we could just say that all religions lead to bloodshed, however in modern times (which is all we should be caring about - complaining about the Crusades makes as much sense as complaing about the Roman Empire) certain religions are causing more bloodshed than others.
In modern times we do have the radicals who use religion as an excuse for violence. This has happened recently with some muslim terrorists in 9/11, madrid & london attacks, but don't forget the christian bombings of abortion centers & killings of abortion doctors or the jewish attacks on palestinians.
Right, a few wacko nutjobs in the US murdering a small number of targetted individuals is in some way comaparble to the mass murder of innocent people? As someone who lives in London, I have a hell of lot more to fear from some muslim who wants to take the quick route to paradise than I have with some wacko with a gun in the US who wants to take direct action against a doctor (I'm not supporting them - I'm just pointing out the difference in scale and directness of threat).
All the Abrahaman religions have blood on thier hands in modern times, however only one of them is a direct threat to me. Personally, I'd like to see all three consigned to the dustbin of history, but it's only Islam that's threataning my life and way of life at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
hopefully someone will be able to give an example that enlightens us both!
I doubt any are going to be forthcoming. From what I can work out, the argument going on now mostly boils down to how much you isolate drivers from the rest of the kernel. Expect to see lots of hot air and little code.
My vague recollections from my OS course at uni (which was back when microkernels were the "in" thing and exciting) was that kernels don't do all that much, but what they do do is both critical and complex, with the main difference being that with monolithic kernels all the complex bits are lumped together into one giant process while with microkernels the complex bits get seperated into what can almost be described as seperate processes. The main benefit of microkernels was that they're supposed to be more portable as the hardware dependent bits could be isolated away and it's also supposed to make it easier to write most of the kernel in a (very) high level language (and that was supposed to make it both easier to write and add to the portability). The downside of microkernels was/is that since the complex parts are seperated out, all the communication between the parts takes longer and gets more complictated, in much the same was that it takes a programme longer to call an object through CORBA than if it was a compiled into the programme (and calling through CORBA is a more complicated call, but most programmer's are shielded from the call complexity).
I think the security aspect of microkernels is a new angle.
But in practice Linux 2.6 is 6 million lines of code and a typical microkernel is less than 10k.
Umm, doesn't that mean while you've prooved that the 10k microkernel lines correct, you'd still have ~6 million lines of code sitting outside the microkernal waiting to be prooved? I can't see how a microkernel can magically do with 10k everything Linux is doing with 6 million lines (especially as by the definition of microkernel, than there's no way it could).
See, I imagine this bunch of distinct services all happily calling each other for what they need; I'd like to know more about how the need for complex distributed algorithms arises.
distinct services -> distributed
happily calling each other -> complex algorithms
You must be getting something we Yanks aren't for all the extra taxes you are paying
:-)
You would think so, but it's sometimes hard to tell. I know a lot is made about how we have more and/or better social services than in the states, but it's hard to believe that the services are so much better for the high price being paid. Ok, we have the NHS and while I'm glad we have it, it certainly doesn't explain the vast differences in tax levels and it's certainly not the be all and end all in medical care (if it was, private medical insurance/practice wouldn't be on sale here). And unemployment insurance doesn't get cut off (well, they do at least try and put pressure on people to get jobs, but I don't think they'd fully cut somebody off of all benefit). Then again, as a single, employed, car driving home owner with no kids I get the fun of paying for everything and getting little back in return, so I may be a bit bitter. Did I mention the TV Tax?
I'd imagine the VAT replaces the American income tax system entirely.
Nope, not even close. Most people's personal tax allowance (the amount of money they are allowed to earn without paying tax) is roughly 5000 pounds a year (there are differences depending on circumstances, but this is a roughly accurate figure). After that, the first £2,150 you earn is taxed at 10%, between 2,150 and 33,300 is at 22% and any taxable income over 33,300 is charged at 40%.
And this doesn't include National Insurance (equivalent to Social Security), which is a somewhat complicated calculation.
Some good info on our taxes can be found here. They're you'll find some of our other taxes like Council Tax, Capital Gains and Stamp Duty.
And don't forget people who had Laserdisc. I suppose DVD killed off the "Videophile" (a term I don't think I've heard used in about 10 years).
But the whole point here is why?
Mostly in order to confuse any enforcement officials - as long as the broken/recovered keys are kept seperate, then it would be hard to say that the copy is illegitimate. Yes, it's unlikely people would bother - my point was that once a key is broken/recovered, the DRM becomes worthless and you could trade the DRM'd file if you wanted to.
but the movie won't play without an internet connection
:-)
It might only need to phone home once and cache the key, but yeah, you wouldn't be able to watch the movie without an internet connection at all (but how do you download the film with out an internet connection
If they tried to sell a DVD player that had to be plugged into the phone line before it would play anything, and that phone requirement added _nothing_ to the movie, they would not sell a single one.
Didn't they try that one already? I though that was how DiVX (the DVD player, not the codec) worked - cheap DVDs that needed to phone home before they would play.
Last week we had one warm day (warm by our standards anyway) and parts of the tube ground to a halt. Last Saturday, almost every line was part suspended somewhere for "planned" engineering works - usually when works are planned you get a fair amount of notice, I didn't see any notice until the Friday night. The Northern Line is a joke year round and I still feel like I'm taking my life into my own hands when the train goes underground thanks to what happened last year.
To be fair, that's hardly an apples-to-apples comparison, since much of the price you pay is taxes.
How is it an unfair comparison? American's are complaining about the price of petrol they pay at the pump, which is still half of what people in the UK are paying at the pump. Yes, the high price of petrol is in many ways our own fault, but as the media keeps hammering home that people should be getting the warm fuzzies from such high taxes/prices as it "helps the environment", it's not going to change soon. It almost did a few years back, but the protests soon fizzled out.
BTW, you forgot to mention the congestion charge. Driving in London must be damn expensive.
I also forgot to mention Road Tax. Just having your car on the public highway costs money. They even have a nifty new computer system that knows when your tax is due, so if you want to take your car off the road for a while (which means that you don't need to pay road tax) you better let the government know, otherwise they'll fine you for not renewing the licence.
I have no idea where any of this money's going, very little of it ends up improving either the roads or public transport and the health system is paid for mainly from another set of taxes.
You've not tried to use the Northern Line, have you? :-)
You use your personal decryption key to decrypt the results from the "phoning home" process - those results contain the key to unlock the movie.
It does asssume that the key to unlocking the movie isn't found.
But if Warner Bros is going to use the so called "super distribution" model (which is where a single encrypted file can be unencrypted by different people) then the person downloading the legal file from WB doesn't have to circumvent the DRM - all he has to is give the file to his friend (and WB will be none the wiser about this), and if his friend has an illegal key then his friend can do the circumventing. His friend could even upload the exact same drm'd file to pirate trackers, and as long as the pirates had the illegal key then they could all use the "legit" file.
The security would hinge on how hard it is to break the keys.
I was reading up on DRM for mobile phones, and one of the use cases involved the ability for users to send downloaded DRM'd content to other users, so that when user A sends a file to user B, user B's phone contacts the the rights owner and get's a key. It's called "Super Distribution"
So it could work like that - but I always thought that the only way that was in any way secure was that phones are fairly locked down compared to a PC.
Details of mobile phone drm can be found here
IDK where you got the 50 % figure
:-)
IIRC, it was from a leaflet from a company that carries out LPG conversions. Maybe they didn't want the work
I often see LPG sold at about 50% of the price of petrol/diesel - usually around 45-50p a litre (last time I looked), with petrol at around 95-98 and diesel now over a pound.
For example here LPG gets around 10% less miles per litre than petrol
I read somwhere that it was 50% less - which always made me wonder what the point was, as if it's roughly half the price of petrol but needs twice as much, then there's no net benefit (excluding the congestion charge). If it is only 10% less than there is a point to it.
I don't think it's the MPG that's the point of ethanol, it's that you're not putting excess carbon into the atmosphere. If you grow plants to make ethanol then they will soak up the carbon that was put into atmosphere from the last lot of ethanol produced from plants. With fossil fuels, you just keep puting carbon into the atmosphere and it's not getting taken back out.
I'm paying $3.70 out here in Los Angeles
So that's approximatly $1 a litre - which is still almost half of what I (in London) have to pay.
And then there's the installation of the .deb packages. To get those to work, I have to download the package, open up the command window and type in the installation manually.
/usr/bin. If you use Synaptic you can right click on an installed package, select properties and then the installed files tab and you'll see a list of what has been installed where. I don't see how manually installing packages would help you here as they'll end up in exactly the same place if you used a package manager to get the files for you.
What packages are you installing that require a manual install? If you're installing something that isn't (for some weird reason) in the debian repository, are you certain that there isn't a repository you could add that will contain the package?
They also have a nice convenient program that installs files for me. Except that half the time, after it installs, I have no clue where to find it, and end up using the file manager to dig it out of the Bin folder
Most desktop oriented software will add shortcuts to the application menu, though sometimes you need to log out and back in again for the shortcut to show up. Command line software doesn't, but then the executables should end up in
But I don't see why code should be purposefully dumbed down, wasting the time of its author, only for the sake of being more accessible to an inexperienced coder.
I wouldn't say code should be purposefully dumbed down, but it should be well commented and readable. And a lot of code, whether it's open, closed or in-house isn't. But this is a software engineering issue, not an open source vs closed source one.
I believe the OP feels that one of the "selling points" of open source is that people (of suitable technical ability) can read the code and learn from it and make changes, but that the way some/most/all OSS software is written stops this from happening. I tend to agree, though I don't think it's a dismal failure of open source - it's a problem with software engineering and some projects are going to be better coded/documented than others.
A package for each of a dozen Free distros is harder for the manufacturer to support than a package for each of two distros (Windows and Mac OS X).
The alternative would be a single installer application (that generally installs things to LSB locations, probably asking for confimations if necessary). The down side would that the app would be outside of the package management system. Not a really big deal, just a bit of an annoyance. And to be honest, once the installer app is out then people who care about such things can write wrappers for the package management system of choice - just like how java works under debian.
And there's probably not that many distro's you'd need to really need to worry about - if you have packages for Debian and Fedora, then a lot other distros will get there packages from one of those.
Most computers out there are probably bought to run office software, do email and browse the Web
While I can agree with email and browsing, I always wonder if Office apps are ever used that much in the home. I can see it being a factor in somebody's decision to buy a PC, but a few months down the line how often is Office fired up? How many people write letters that can't be written in Wordpad? Maybe people will want to use Excel (probably in order to look at thier finances) but how many people will go from the wanting to stage to the regularly using stage? Powerpoint? What use is that in the home? Access? You could catalogue all your CDs like you've wanted to for years, but are you really going to put in the effort? And then there's the "I can take my work home" argument with Office, yes, you could take your work home, but do you really want to?
Before the internet "came along" how many home computers were little more than games machines or paper weights?
"This argument falls flat on its nose if you take into consideration that not only the original developer but everyone is allowed to modify Free Software. It just takes one soul to clean up the messy GUI and the improved version (if it really is better) will win out."
No, the OP's argument still stands as while somebody could come along and clean things up/write documentation, nobody ever does. If writing the docs isn't an itch the developer himself wants to scratch, what's the likely hood that it's an itch somebody else is going to get? Who's going to want to trawl through what's there and figure out how things work, which, depending on how scant the original documenation is or how obfuscated the code is, may take almost as long as writing from scratch?
It's ceratinly the case I've found from a lot of the open source Java development technologies I've used (JBoss, Spring, Jasper, Hibernate) that while the API's are documented (usually) if you realy want to know how to use the tools then you pretty much have to buy a book (which is usually written by the developers of the tool). With Jasper you don't even get a real manual - they're that desperate for people to buy the docs.
The UK has an amazing law which allows its citizens - (sorry, subjects of Her Gracious Majesty Elizabeth II von Battenberg Saxe Coburg Gotha usw)
There's a lot of differences between being a British citizen and a British subject (except, iirc, for British Subjects born before 1948) - the Home Office has some info on the matter here. And anyone who is still a British subject can't pass on subject status to thier children, so the status of "British Subject" will eventually die out anyway.
Anyone remember a particularly violent era called the Crusades? Let's not start a my religion is more peaceful than yours debate.
Or we could just say that all religions lead to bloodshed, however in modern times (which is all we should be caring about - complaining about the Crusades makes as much sense as complaing about the Roman Empire) certain religions are causing more bloodshed than others.
In modern times we do have the radicals who use religion as an excuse for violence. This has happened recently with some muslim terrorists in 9/11, madrid & london attacks, but don't forget the christian bombings of abortion centers & killings of abortion doctors or the jewish attacks on palestinians.
Right, a few wacko nutjobs in the US murdering a small number of targetted individuals is in some way comaparble to the mass murder of innocent people? As someone who lives in London, I have a hell of lot more to fear from some muslim who wants to take the quick route to paradise than I have with some wacko with a gun in the US who wants to take direct action against a doctor (I'm not supporting them - I'm just pointing out the difference in scale and directness of threat).
All the Abrahaman religions have blood on thier hands in modern times, however only one of them is a direct threat to me. Personally, I'd like to see all three consigned to the dustbin of history, but it's only Islam that's threataning my life and way of life at the moment.