But the other 99 fake registrars don't need to re-issue requests made by the others (whether granted or not). So they not only can make more requests per second, but those requests are more likely to be still available.
So-called intelligent design is a belief in creationism opposed to knowledge about evolution. Thus, ID is fighting against knowledge which is why their arguments are of the form "but the eye is too complex, prove it evolved. oh you can't and btw where's the missing link?". So how do you fight belief? By mocking it of course, hence the "flying sphagetti monster". Both approaches are similar in that they basically just insult the other side's core principles.
If you really want to fight their belief then come back with an equally compelling belief of your own. For example, argue with IDers that our universe is a mere simulation contained in another, greater one. "God" is a computer. This should be particularly infuriating because it actually makes more sense than "big bang" -or- christianity because it gives you an appeal to authority that is completely consistent with science. When they say "well science can't even explain gravity, what causes that? or explain quantum physics then?" you just say "it's part of the simulation duh". It just is, and covers for science's "problem" of not knowing everything. Plus you get to look as insane to them as they look to you, and by being finally on the same level of discourse some progress can be made.
Incidentally I think a Finite State Monster would be far more terrifying...
To me that smells like bs, that the fs has to be very low level or it kills performance. I think it's the other way around, that the filesystem being low-level is what kills performance. For example, if you are reading 50gb/sec you might expect at least 200 instructions to process each 4k page. But you aren't going to get that data rate unless the file is contiguous, in which case you could instead spend 20000 instructions finding a 400k page. So in other words the processor only has to keep up with the disk in situations where the disk is very slow (lots of seeking).
Furthermore, when people talk about fs performance they invariably focus on immediate performance such as filesystem micro-benchmarks. They don't consider that a fs that is "slow" at creating and destroying 100 kernel trees could be the overall fastest because it is doing work to save time in the future. For example, I was using reiser4 fs and it was the slowest fs I've even used after using if for a long time under a lot of varied conditions (it would do io for 10+ second stretches just by saving a file in vi...). Microbenchmarks put it at the top though in throughput *and* cpu.
It seems clear to me that the design of the fs is far more important than using lots of low-level code. I think the real problem is that *everything* in the linux kernel pretty much has to be low-level code, it's just that you notice it much more with complicated things like filesystems.
Who's to say that non-DRM WMA files are not just restricted with a known key? This actually makes sense because WMA was designed to be a digital restriction format from the start. In a post treacherous-computing world it would then be possible to identify creative-commons files versus files encoded before pervasive restrictions were in place. And it would offer the benefit of DRM files not 'costing' anything over free ones. So clearly there is motive for making non-DRM files use a known key rather than being just the raw data.
So unless you know differently then your suggestion could be *masking* the cost of DRM by doing an invalid comparison. Instead this comparison is between formats that a reasonable person might choose, a known-free format and a known-restricted one. They could have compared ogg vs wma for instance, but comparing wma to drm-wma is actually even worse than mp3 vs wma. I think it's a good comparison, definitely not worth the scorn so many have dumped on it.
Re:Thank you very much for Gnome Terminal improv.
on
Gnome 2.14 Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you are not disabled the best thing to improve gnome-terminal performance is to turn off the accessibility options (in Preferences -> Accessibility -> *). This makes gnome-terminal 2.6.12 only marginally slower the Konsole (maybe 20%) instead of several times slower.
Most programs may get an average speedup of 10%. But if the speedup happens in something critical you get a massive speed increase. I was using the resynth plugin in gimp to remove some text and fill it in with the background texture (interpolated). The difference between running it on gentoo linux and that of pre-compiled windows version was over 4x. Depending on the image size it can easily run for hours. Now that's not typical, but on the other hand I didn't do anything special on linux to get this speedup, it just happened because gentoo compiled it from source. I only discovered it because the difference was so huge.
But sometimes the results are contrary to expectations though. For instance, unless you set up the filesystem carefully over time the mess of files that is portage and the temp files from compiling will scatter programs all over the fs, making the system much slower to use than a binary distro like ubuntu.
People get all upset with the chinese farmers as if they are 'stealing' something or doing something dishonorable or dispicable. But get some perspective. Most slashdot readers work a half-hour to pay for a month. I bet most farmers work all day for a couple bucks.
The relative disparity in wealth is the cause of gold-farming, played out through market forces. But what's really ironic is that their farming makes you richer. How did you afford that 100-stack of water you bought for the instance run? Because the value for the vendor price is lessened through inflation caused by the farmer's gold creation. The things you sell at AH go for a higher price because gold has less value. So the ironic thing is that farmers actually give everybody more buying power.
You may be at a disadvantage re: people who buy gold from farmers, but that's exactly the same situation the farmers are in (being disadvantaged by being relatively poorer to you that they have to work all day playing a freakin video game). If you think that the you are being put upon but don't feel sympathetic for the farmers then you are just a self-centered hypocrit.
Yes I share your experience. What is particularly frustrating is that enabling compression to increase the network speed usually slows down the end result by causing more latency. Many times it depends on your network speed, and using 'raw' mode is sometimes a better experience than any of the compressed ones.
But a remote screen doesn't have to be slow. Vnc was designed to be very simple and cross-platform, not to be fast. I have used radmin for instance on windows and it's easily 5x faster than any setting of vnc. It's fast enough on a lan that I do not get frustrated like I do with vnc. And even over radmin there are things you can do that improve the latency. Imagine for instance that your nvidia card in hardware compares the difference between frames and gives the vnc server a mask of pixels that changed (or regions, etc). This would remove a great deal of the latency.
But that's not even ultimately the point... people today read web pages on little 2"x3" screens or smaller. They use thumb inputs. And PDAs are really slow at some things anyway. They put up with a *lot* of hassles for the benefit of having something they can take anywhere that is disposable. Also sure you have pay out the nose *now*, but that's because there is a near-monopoly on the cell network. If there is a demand for lots of cheap wireless data then they'll solve the few technological problems doing it.
Can you imagine what this would do for Linux desktop uptake if it were a living cd instead? After booting up, you have an icon on the desktop that says "Install UbuntuGL". It copies the CD image onto the existing filesystem so the next boot from the CD mounts that as / instead of the cramfs file on the cd. Then bootup is maybe 10 seconds slower than a real install.
Maybe have the installer also create another file on the disk for the User's home dir. Have it automatically mount the existing filesystems like knoppix does. It would take some hacking, but have an overlay filesystem so they could install any programs they wanted permanently to their 'installed' os. Then people that know nothing about computers can use linux regularly without any hassle.
Of course not having a working NTFS driver makes this much more difficult technically. But just imagine saying you can replace your crufty Windows interface with Linux's opengl 3d one, for free, and still boot windows just by taking the cd out.
The killer product in this market is simply a wireless display. Ideally this would have a e-ink, some wireless adapter, a smallish keyboard, and a custom chip that does VNC really fast and efficiently. Then you can use the cell phone network to get your actual computer and all of its capabilities from anywhere over the cell network or get fast response over a house/hotel local wireless network. Or 'rent' a virtual computer from the phone company.
It would be light, disposable, rugged, protect against data loss, fast (if 'close' to your computer), have excellent batter life (10+ hours), etc.
Many games will either compress their network traffic or (lightly) encrypt it or both. They don't want the protocol reverse engineered and easily observable because then you get client-side cheats that monitor the stream and add enhancements (information overlays/sounds, os-level keypresses to push buttons in the game, etc). A card that did the decompression/decoding fast in hardware could easily cut a few ms off the delay.
There are plenty of other ways to squeeze our a few ms on the client side. Sure this product is probably just hype, but to be so sure it has to be a scam is just close minded and unimaginative.
Yes but when you look at a night picture from space you can clearly see some country borders because the government you live under is ultimately what affects your prosperity. If the government cuts off trade you go dark, like north korea. If the government makes poor decisions then you get dimmer.
It used to be, like a good pyramid scheme, that we would suck up the profits from the 3rd world and use them to make country better. But now we no longer redistribute the wealth to other in the country, thanks to the Republicans ending the Estate Tax, cutting taxes, and shifting spending from infrastructure to military. So now a tiny percent of u.s. get ridiculously wealthy, but the money doesn't go to the country it goes into swiss banks and private foreign investments. And that money can pretty much just leave our country any time somebody repatriates.
In other words, globalism was easily a good thing for our whole country. Now it is a good thing for a tiny percent of our country and a net loss for everybody else.
Completely wrong. This fight cannot be won with wallets, because the difference between DRM and non-DRM hardware can be as simple as not loading a key into the DRM thus disabling it. So every dollar you spend on non-DRM hardware also supports DRM-hardware. It's the same hardware.
Unless you think anti-DRM purchasers are going to be more than half the market, they are perpetually being marginalized by the faster-growing market of DRM-enabled hardware. And even if they are that large, they are still buying hardware with disabled DRM in it. Average Joe is going to see a $50 rebate on the system up-front to activate the DRM and then end up spending $50 on music or "reactivations" of his movies he could have had for free.
You don't go into this with the hardware you want, you go with the hardware you have. That hardware *already* has DRM on it, waiting to be activated. Instead you fight fire with fire: they take away your hardware and you respond by taking away their software. Then you sit back, wait, and watch the whole damn dumb-show play out. Then you win because software is more valuable.
1) Red Hat creates a binary linux distro based on GPLv3. 2) Dell makes hardware that only runs *specific, known binaries*. 3) You buy machine and compile linux from source, but it won't run.
How does GPL v3 help?
Dell can't distribute RH linux without making it possible for you to run your compiled version (whether the actual hardware that only loads the signed binaries is theirs or not), since they also have to accept GPLv3 in order to distribute software that is licensed with GPLv3.
What's the loophole?
Dell could just ship blank machines that you have to load yourself, that only run Red Hat. Dell may not even have agreed to GPLv3 for anything (by running completely commercial , bsd-like, or GPL-2 software).
What's the solution?
The GPLv3 can include a clause that if you accept the license you cannot distribute *any* product that prevents a user from using any of their own modified GPL-covered software. This means for Dell to ship a computer that only runs Red Hat Linux, they have to use *no* GPL3 software of any kind in their entire company. That's about the best you could do, legally, and even still it may not be enforceable.
Personally I don't care how far-reaching the GPLv3 is. The idea that Dell could take my work and actively use it to take away people's rights is so wrong that there's pretty much nothing the license could do that would be worse. I'll be releasing my code as GPLv3 as soon as it comes out.
What do you think an X server does, rasterize graphics primitives or something? That's old school pre-1990 thinking. All the cpu-intensive operations are done by the hardware. The only thing left is *managing* information like clipping regions, pens, window states, pixmaps, reading events, etc. So mostly heap-based data with the algorithms used making the major impact on performance.
Java's new/gc is faster than malloc/free and Java is well suited for this type of information management. In the X server you see horrible things like passing 12 parameters instead of 3 objects because the lifetime is not known and malloc is too slow for this. Then it passes this several-times copied data through function pointers that cannot be inlined or optimized. That is not efficient.
I wouldn't even be surprised if a moderately well done Java X server was faster than the current C-based one.
That's disappointing news that they are not rewriting the whole thing, but only the hardware-dependent code. I hope you are on crack saying that the rest is "relatively clean" (maybe relative to the device-dependent X code???).
Some of the cruft: * using the value of a constant in a comment (/* XLFG length is 255 */) * form feeds (ctrl-l) in the code * magic macros with many lines of hidden code side effects (BRESINCRPGON for example)... to avoid slowdowns on cpu-drawn lines and paths. Nobody does this anymore. It's all accellerated and anyway they use static inline (see linux kernel). * massive argument lists (XRenderCompositeDoublePoly takes 12 arguments) * massive #define of symbols, and thus massive switch statements (not in a table someplace!). try searching programs/xkbprint/psgeom.c for XK_ISO_Prev_Group_Lock. * symbols artificially limited to 32 characters long because compilers back then were dumb. * supid implementation decisions, for example inserting a 'fake' client request should be a one-liner (ala requests.addFirst(fakeRequest) but instead is 64 lines because it actually puts the data into the stream being read from the client.
I mean seriously, you just open up *any* file in the Xserver and it's just crap. I don't mean to diss the developers because a) it's a somewhat large undertaking and b) they didn't have the advantages of hindsight and c) they were using slow hardware. Still, I bet the NeWS server was much better despite being made about the same time. Hopefully the device-dependent part will be done well enough that the Xserver can be rewritten in something modern (Java, ObjectiveC, even C++).
I don't mean to troll, but what the heck is wrong with the Fedora-type people that they think incrementally improving the X server is a good idea? I've looked into the source and its full of 30-year old code. The 'best practices' for a 0.1 MIPS machine is just cruft on a 1000 MIPS one.
The xgl people are actually rewriting the X server from scratch to use opengl. That is a much, much better idea, and it shows with what they can *already* do:
* virtual desktops on a cube * popup effect for menus * "gummi-bear" window effect when moving, sticks to other windows / side of screen * translucenty * gl screensaver on root window * shadows * fading * magnification * apple-style expose (show all windows non-overlapping) * accellerated 3d games (quake) and movies * make non-responsive windows go grey etc
This is I think using an existing Xserver to give an opengl window, which can be running a software opengl for unsupported cards, and then their xgl server using that as the opengl backend until the drivers are ready. Which basically means people will be able to get the eye candy slowly on computers and force nvidia/ati/intel to support the server with a driver. Eventually xgl gets a native opengl driver for you hardware and runs as a 'normal' X server (only without all the crap from 30 years of evolution).
What I want is a smallish dongle that goes into the headphone port of any media device and wirelessly sends the audio to another device with an audio out / headphone jack. Anybody know where to get something like this?
Or the real problem is that there are M people with laptops, N of which don't run unix, and 1 set of real speakers. There should be something like vnc for audio... a simple driver or program you can run on any system type and send the sound someplace else. Then I could just attach an old laptop to the speakers.
But don't pretend that the pendulum is swinging back, or is going to anytime soon. We've been resting on our laurels and are complacent. A lot of us don't know how to read, and the ones that do don't even grok grammar. lol. In short we're going to get beaten to all hell by globalism (despite our 'free trade' treaties where we actually try to forestall it). And when you can't compete on competence or skill or qualifications you have two choices a) pretend you are 'all that' anyway and keep sinking or b) get depressed about it, and maybe do something about it.
People these days don't want to face the reality. It's hard work just to say "we're fucked and we need to do something about it". We'd rather just take a chill pill and follow. This is what I sardonically call malignorance, the willful, malignant ignorance of those anti-intellectuals that active go out of their way not to learn. This administration is a prime example.
If the data they considered stops 1200 years ago then it can be correct that this was the warmest century in those 1200 years *and* it was colder before that. Similarly, if this was the hottest January on record that doesn't mean the hottest January ever.
Here "I" is clearly shorthand for "one", which sounds artificial in casual use:
"If one can't run the program, modify it, and redistribute it, with or without one's changes, then what's the point?"
It's not valid to purposely misconstrue his point and then argue against that. Instead of picking on pronouns, why not answer his question? If you are going to contribute something what's the point in letting other people take it for themselves? It can't even be pure altruism unless one is also naive (ie bsd;-P), in the sense that once one knows that one's good intentions will turn out badly then they aren't good intentions anymore.
See OSS kicks ass because we RESTRICT each other from co-opting each others contributions (and thus preventing others from running / modifying / redistributing them).
Indeed. Back when (for perspective) I calculated the Iraq War as being worth about 105 replacement world trade towers, adjusted for inflation, I also calculated the investment in terms of solar energy. Using existing solar boiler technology (in use in smallish generator arrays) it came to about 5% of our totaly energy use per year of all sources of energy, coal + solar + nuclear + oil.
In short, by now we have doubled the spending that was based on and we could have had upwards of 10% of our energy from green solar power. Of course there are problems such as solar not being available at night or in bad weather, and taking a lot of space in the desert, and transmitting the power. Of course you can store power during the day at some loss and the largest power demand is during the day for air conditioning. I didn't calculate the space it would take however, but there's a *lot* of desert in the southwest that gets a *lot* of sun.
But anyway these objections are largely missing the point that we've been screwed by the retards in office who are openly hostile towards science. $400 billion buys a lot of solar plant, or a lot of solar cell research, or a lot of wind turbines, etc. Instead we have jack to show for it.
I agree completely, although an alternative solution is to put the JVM into the kernel, where it could manage different user-level processes that all shared the same optimized code (essentially a process would hold the native code a Java app uses, if any). Of course, this would mean at least some optimizations would be global across all Java-using programs. That isn't necessarily bad though. Apple does this somewhat in userland with their version, but it still has a lot of unshared code that could be shared.
Slashdot Mirror
But the other 99 fake registrars don't need to re-issue requests made by the others (whether granted or not). So they not only can make more requests per second, but those requests are more likely to be still available.
So-called intelligent design is a belief in creationism opposed to knowledge about evolution. Thus, ID is fighting against knowledge which is why their arguments are of the form "but the eye is too complex, prove it evolved. oh you can't and btw where's the missing link?". So how do you fight belief? By mocking it of course, hence the "flying sphagetti monster". Both approaches are similar in that they basically just insult the other side's core principles.
If you really want to fight their belief then come back with an equally compelling belief of your own. For example, argue with IDers that our universe is a mere simulation contained in another, greater one. "God" is a computer. This should be particularly infuriating because it actually makes more sense than "big bang" -or- christianity because it gives you an appeal to authority that is completely consistent with science. When they say "well science can't even explain gravity, what causes that? or explain quantum physics then?" you just say "it's part of the simulation duh". It just is, and covers for science's "problem" of not knowing everything. Plus you get to look as insane to them as they look to you, and by being finally on the same level of discourse some progress can be made.
Incidentally I think a Finite State Monster would be far more terrifying...
Okay genius:
Microsoft * OSS is
A) == Undefined
B) == Infinitely +Good/-Bad
D) == Neutral
C) == A 13+ dimensional value.
E) == Cowboy Neal's day job.
Which is it?
To me that smells like bs, that the fs has to be very low level or it kills performance. I think it's the other way around, that the filesystem being low-level is what kills performance. For example, if you are reading 50gb/sec you might expect at least 200 instructions to process each 4k page. But you aren't going to get that data rate unless the file is contiguous, in which case you could instead spend 20000 instructions finding a 400k page. So in other words the processor only has to keep up with the disk in situations where the disk is very slow (lots of seeking).
Furthermore, when people talk about fs performance they invariably focus on immediate performance such as filesystem micro-benchmarks. They don't consider that a fs that is "slow" at creating and destroying 100 kernel trees could be the overall fastest because it is doing work to save time in the future. For example, I was using reiser4 fs and it was the slowest fs I've even used after using if for a long time under a lot of varied conditions (it would do io for 10+ second stretches just by saving a file in vi...). Microbenchmarks put it at the top though in throughput *and* cpu.
It seems clear to me that the design of the fs is far more important than using lots of low-level code. I think the real problem is that *everything* in the linux kernel pretty much has to be low-level code, it's just that you notice it much more with complicated things like filesystems.
Who's to say that non-DRM WMA files are not just restricted with a known key? This actually makes sense because WMA was designed to be a digital restriction format from the start. In a post treacherous-computing world it would then be possible to identify creative-commons files versus files encoded before pervasive restrictions were in place. And it would offer the benefit of DRM files not 'costing' anything over free ones. So clearly there is motive for making non-DRM files use a known key rather than being just the raw data.
So unless you know differently then your suggestion could be *masking* the cost of DRM by doing an invalid comparison. Instead this comparison is between formats that a reasonable person might choose, a known-free format and a known-restricted one. They could have compared ogg vs wma for instance, but comparing wma to drm-wma is actually even worse than mp3 vs wma. I think it's a good comparison, definitely not worth the scorn so many have dumped on it.
If you are not disabled the best thing to improve gnome-terminal performance is to turn off the accessibility options (in Preferences -> Accessibility -> *). This makes gnome-terminal 2.6.12 only marginally slower the Konsole (maybe 20%) instead of several times slower.
Most programs may get an average speedup of 10%. But if the speedup happens in something critical you get a massive speed increase. I was using the resynth plugin in gimp to remove some text and fill it in with the background texture (interpolated). The difference between running it on gentoo linux and that of pre-compiled windows version was over 4x. Depending on the image size it can easily run for hours. Now that's not typical, but on the other hand I didn't do anything special on linux to get this speedup, it just happened because gentoo compiled it from source. I only discovered it because the difference was so huge.
But sometimes the results are contrary to expectations though. For instance, unless you set up the filesystem carefully over time the mess of files that is portage and the temp files from compiling will scatter programs all over the fs, making the system much slower to use than a binary distro like ubuntu.
People get all upset with the chinese farmers as if they are 'stealing' something or doing something dishonorable or dispicable. But get some perspective. Most slashdot readers work a half-hour to pay for a month. I bet most farmers work all day for a couple bucks.
The relative disparity in wealth is the cause of gold-farming, played out through market forces. But what's really ironic is that their farming makes you richer. How did you afford that 100-stack of water you bought for the instance run? Because the value for the vendor price is lessened through inflation caused by the farmer's gold creation. The things you sell at AH go for a higher price because gold has less value. So the ironic thing is that farmers actually give everybody more buying power.
You may be at a disadvantage re: people who buy gold from farmers, but that's exactly the same situation the farmers are in (being disadvantaged by being relatively poorer to you that they have to work all day playing a freakin video game). If you think that the you are being put upon but don't feel sympathetic for the farmers then you are just a self-centered hypocrit.
Yes I share your experience. What is particularly frustrating is that enabling compression to increase the network speed usually slows down the end result by causing more latency. Many times it depends on your network speed, and using 'raw' mode is sometimes a better experience than any of the compressed ones.
But a remote screen doesn't have to be slow. Vnc was designed to be very simple and cross-platform, not to be fast. I have used radmin for instance on windows and it's easily 5x faster than any setting of vnc. It's fast enough on a lan that I do not get frustrated like I do with vnc. And even over radmin there are things you can do that improve the latency. Imagine for instance that your nvidia card in hardware compares the difference between frames and gives the vnc server a mask of pixels that changed (or regions, etc). This would remove a great deal of the latency.
But that's not even ultimately the point... people today read web pages on little 2"x3" screens or smaller. They use thumb inputs. And PDAs are really slow at some things anyway. They put up with a *lot* of hassles for the benefit of having something they can take anywhere that is disposable. Also sure you have pay out the nose *now*, but that's because there is a near-monopoly on the cell network. If there is a demand for lots of cheap wireless data then they'll solve the few technological problems doing it.
Can you imagine what this would do for Linux desktop uptake if it were a living cd instead? After booting up, you have an icon on the desktop that says "Install UbuntuGL". It copies the CD image onto the existing filesystem so the next boot from the CD mounts that as / instead of the cramfs file on the cd. Then bootup is maybe 10 seconds slower than a real install.
Maybe have the installer also create another file on the disk for the User's home dir. Have it automatically mount the existing filesystems like knoppix does. It would take some hacking, but have an overlay filesystem so they could install any programs they wanted permanently to their 'installed' os. Then people that know nothing about computers can use linux regularly without any hassle.
Of course not having a working NTFS driver makes this much more difficult technically. But just imagine saying you can replace your crufty Windows interface with Linux's opengl 3d one, for free, and still boot windows just by taking the cd out.
The killer product in this market is simply a wireless display. Ideally this would have a e-ink, some wireless adapter, a smallish keyboard, and a custom chip that does VNC really fast and efficiently. Then you can use the cell phone network to get your actual computer and all of its capabilities from anywhere over the cell network or get fast response over a house/hotel local wireless network. Or 'rent' a virtual computer from the phone company.
It would be light, disposable, rugged, protect against data loss, fast (if 'close' to your computer), have excellent batter life (10+ hours), etc.
Many games will either compress their network traffic or (lightly) encrypt it or both. They don't want the protocol reverse engineered and easily observable because then you get client-side cheats that monitor the stream and add enhancements (information overlays/sounds, os-level keypresses to push buttons in the game, etc). A card that did the decompression/decoding fast in hardware could easily cut a few ms off the delay.
There are plenty of other ways to squeeze our a few ms on the client side. Sure this product is probably just hype, but to be so sure it has to be a scam is just close minded and unimaginative.
Yes but when you look at a night picture from space you can clearly see some country borders because the government you live under is ultimately what affects your prosperity. If the government cuts off trade you go dark, like north korea. If the government makes poor decisions then you get dimmer.
It used to be, like a good pyramid scheme, that we would suck up the profits from the 3rd world and use them to make country better. But now we no longer redistribute the wealth to other in the country, thanks to the Republicans ending the Estate Tax, cutting taxes, and shifting spending from infrastructure to military. So now a tiny percent of u.s. get ridiculously wealthy, but the money doesn't go to the country it goes into swiss banks and private foreign investments. And that money can pretty much just leave our country any time somebody repatriates.
In other words, globalism was easily a good thing for our whole country. Now it is a good thing for a tiny percent of our country and a net loss for everybody else.
This fight can only be fought with wallets.
Completely wrong. This fight cannot be won with wallets, because the difference between DRM and non-DRM hardware can be as simple as not loading a key into the DRM thus disabling it. So every dollar you spend on non-DRM hardware also supports DRM-hardware. It's the same hardware.
Unless you think anti-DRM purchasers are going to be more than half the market, they are perpetually being marginalized by the faster-growing market of DRM-enabled hardware. And even if they are that large, they are still buying hardware with disabled DRM in it. Average Joe is going to see a $50 rebate on the system up-front to activate the DRM and then end up spending $50 on music or "reactivations" of his movies he could have had for free.
You don't go into this with the hardware you want, you go with the hardware you have. That hardware *already* has DRM on it, waiting to be activated. Instead you fight fire with fire: they take away your hardware and you respond by taking away their software. Then you sit back, wait, and watch the whole damn dumb-show play out. Then you win because software is more valuable.
Summary:
1) Red Hat creates a binary linux distro based on GPLv3.
2) Dell makes hardware that only runs *specific, known binaries*.
3) You buy machine and compile linux from source, but it won't run.
How does GPL v3 help?
Dell can't distribute RH linux without making it possible for you to run your compiled version (whether the actual hardware that only loads the signed binaries is theirs or not), since they also have to accept GPLv3 in order to distribute software that is licensed with GPLv3.
What's the loophole?
Dell could just ship blank machines that you have to load yourself, that only run Red Hat. Dell may not even have agreed to GPLv3 for anything (by running completely commercial , bsd-like, or GPL-2 software).
What's the solution?
The GPLv3 can include a clause that if you accept the license you cannot distribute *any* product that prevents a user from using any of their own modified GPL-covered software. This means for Dell to ship a computer that only runs Red Hat Linux, they have to use *no* GPL3 software of any kind in their entire company. That's about the best you could do, legally, and even still it may not be enforceable.
Personally I don't care how far-reaching the GPLv3 is. The idea that Dell could take my work and actively use it to take away people's rights is so wrong that there's pretty much nothing the license could do that would be worse. I'll be releasing my code as GPLv3 as soon as it comes out.
What do you think an X server does, rasterize graphics primitives or something? That's old school pre-1990 thinking. All the cpu-intensive operations are done by the hardware. The only thing left is *managing* information like clipping regions, pens, window states, pixmaps, reading events, etc. So mostly heap-based data with the algorithms used making the major impact on performance.
Java's new/gc is faster than malloc/free and Java is well suited for this type of information management. In the X server you see horrible things like passing 12 parameters instead of 3 objects because the lifetime is not known and malloc is too slow for this. Then it passes this several-times copied data through function pointers that cannot be inlined or optimized. That is not efficient.
I wouldn't even be surprised if a moderately well done Java X server was faster than the current C-based one.
That's disappointing news that they are not rewriting the whole thing, but only the hardware-dependent code. I hope you are on crack saying that the rest is "relatively clean" (maybe relative to the device-dependent X code???).
Some of the cruft:
* using the value of a constant in a comment (/* XLFG length is 255 */)
* form feeds (ctrl-l) in the code
* magic macros with many lines of hidden code side effects (BRESINCRPGON for example)... to avoid slowdowns on cpu-drawn lines and paths. Nobody does this anymore. It's all accellerated and anyway they use static inline (see linux kernel).
* massive argument lists (XRenderCompositeDoublePoly takes 12 arguments)
* massive #define of symbols, and thus massive switch statements (not in a table someplace!). try searching programs/xkbprint/psgeom.c for XK_ISO_Prev_Group_Lock.
* symbols artificially limited to 32 characters long because compilers back then were dumb.
* supid implementation decisions, for example inserting a 'fake' client request should be a one-liner (ala requests.addFirst(fakeRequest) but instead is 64 lines because it actually puts the data into the stream being read from the client.
I mean seriously, you just open up *any* file in the Xserver and it's just crap. I don't mean to diss the developers because a) it's a somewhat large undertaking and b) they didn't have the advantages of hindsight and c) they were using slow hardware. Still, I bet the NeWS server was much better despite being made about the same time. Hopefully the device-dependent part will be done well enough that the Xserver can be rewritten in something modern (Java, ObjectiveC, even C++).
I don't mean to troll, but what the heck is wrong with the Fedora-type people that they think incrementally improving the X server is a good idea? I've looked into the source and its full of 30-year old code. The 'best practices' for a 0.1 MIPS machine is just cruft on a 1000 MIPS one.
a nuary/011922.html
The xgl people are actually rewriting the X server from scratch to use opengl. That is a much, much better idea, and it shows with what they can *already* do:
* virtual desktops on a cube
* popup effect for menus
* "gummi-bear" window effect when moving, sticks to other windows / side of screen
* translucenty
* gl screensaver on root window
* shadows
* fading
* magnification
* apple-style expose (show all windows non-overlapping)
* accellerated 3d games (quake) and movies
* make non-responsive windows go grey
etc
You can see the video at:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2006-J
(click link for the movie)
This is I think using an existing Xserver to give an opengl window, which can be running a software opengl for unsupported cards, and then their xgl server using that as the opengl backend until the drivers are ready. Which basically means people will be able to get the eye candy slowly on computers and force nvidia/ati/intel to support the server with a driver. Eventually xgl gets a native opengl driver for you hardware and runs as a 'normal' X server (only without all the crap from 30 years of evolution).
What I want is a smallish dongle that goes into the headphone port of any media device and wirelessly sends the audio to another device with an audio out / headphone jack. Anybody know where to get something like this?
Or the real problem is that there are M people with laptops, N of which don't run unix, and 1 set of real speakers. There should be something like vnc for audio... a simple driver or program you can run on any system type and send the sound someplace else. Then I could just attach an old laptop to the speakers.
You have a 50/50 chance of being correct. Oh wait, that's sarcasm.
But don't pretend that the pendulum is swinging back, or is going to anytime soon. We've been resting on our laurels and are complacent. A lot of us don't know how to read, and the ones that do don't even grok grammar. lol. In short we're going to get beaten to all hell by globalism (despite our 'free trade' treaties where we actually try to forestall it). And when you can't compete on competence or skill or qualifications you have two choices a) pretend you are 'all that' anyway and keep sinking or b) get depressed about it, and maybe do something about it.
People these days don't want to face the reality. It's hard work just to say "we're fucked and we need to do something about it". We'd rather just take a chill pill and follow. This is what I sardonically call malignorance, the willful, malignant ignorance of those anti-intellectuals that active go out of their way not to learn. This administration is a prime example.
If the data they considered stops 1200 years ago then it can be correct that this was the warmest century in those 1200 years *and* it was colder before that. Similarly, if this was the hottest January on record that doesn't mean the hottest January ever.
Here "I" is clearly shorthand for "one", which sounds artificial in casual use:
;-P), in the sense that once one knows that one's good intentions will turn out badly then they aren't good intentions anymore.
"If one can't run the program, modify it, and redistribute it, with or without one's changes, then what's the point?"
It's not valid to purposely misconstrue his point and then argue against that. Instead of picking on pronouns, why not answer his question? If you are going to contribute something what's the point in letting other people take it for themselves? It can't even be pure altruism unless one is also naive (ie bsd
See OSS kicks ass because we RESTRICT each other from co-opting each others contributions (and thus preventing others from running / modifying / redistributing them).
Indeed. Back when (for perspective) I calculated the Iraq War as being worth about 105 replacement world trade towers, adjusted for inflation, I also calculated the investment in terms of solar energy. Using existing solar boiler technology (in use in smallish generator arrays) it came to about 5% of our totaly energy use per year of all sources of energy, coal + solar + nuclear + oil.
In short, by now we have doubled the spending that was based on and we could have had upwards of 10% of our energy from green solar power. Of course there are problems such as solar not being available at night or in bad weather, and taking a lot of space in the desert, and transmitting the power. Of course you can store power during the day at some loss and the largest power demand is during the day for air conditioning. I didn't calculate the space it would take however, but there's a *lot* of desert in the southwest that gets a *lot* of sun.
But anyway these objections are largely missing the point that we've been screwed by the retards in office who are openly hostile towards science. $400 billion buys a lot of solar plant, or a lot of solar cell research, or a lot of wind turbines, etc. Instead we have jack to show for it.
I agree completely, although an alternative solution is to put the JVM into the kernel, where it could manage different user-level processes that all shared the same optimized code (essentially a process would hold the native code a Java app uses, if any). Of course, this would mean at least some optimizations would be global across all Java-using programs. That isn't necessarily bad though. Apple does this somewhat in userland with their version, but it still has a lot of unshared code that could be shared.