If the standard really calls for copy control, then the people who thought it up are not being very smart, I think. Do they really think that there's anything they can put in the file format that is sufficient to prevent copying/altering of files? (remember CSS?)
At the risk of sounding paranoid, this looks to me like another atttempt to take away our freedom.
Besides, I think that Free Software should not acknowledge software patents. See Brian Martin's piece on information liberation.
So the GIMP developers could do several things:
don't support JPEG2000 if it uses patented algoriths.
crack eventual safety algorithms, and support it anyway (civil disobedience)
The first is politically most correct, but the second has more hacker appeal, I guess:-)
I think the previous poster is right in assuming that Free Software will not get a license.
You might have a look at the freely available DocBook DTD. If you can use that, you don't have to roll your own.
If you copyleft your DTD, with a GPL-like license, nobody can steal it, because it's free. You might even create a standard, if it's a usable DTD. And you could share the load for data conversion, by asking your contributors to format the data according to your open DTD before submitting it.
I'm not really sure if there are really any downsides, unless your DTD is in some way your critical moneymaking resource (although I can't imagine how).
The article mentions that the ship would require around 10 MW of electrical power for the drive.
I wonder how they're going to generate that, given that a thermal solar power source as proposed in Encounter with Tiber is only about 1 MW, and that the best solar panels were about 12% efficient last time I checked.
To generate 10 MW photovoltaically, you'd need about 62000 square meters of solar panels. (assuming solar irradiation is 1300 W/m^2, and an efficiency of 12%) That's a rectangle about 250 meters square!
I wonder what a nuclear reactor of this power would weigh?
Does anybody know how this drive compares to the drives built in the NERVA (using a fission pile to heat has directly) project with regard to thrust and specific impulse?
I've had problems with the dynamically linked setiathome 2.4 binary. It seemed to cause random hard lockups. I didn't see any sign of trouble in the logfiles.
The problems with setiathome disappeared when I switched to a statically linked version.
BTW, I'm running Slackware 7, upgraded to a 2.2.15 kernel. It has glibc-2.1.2.
What I can't understand is how this could happen. It seems to me that something must have gone wrong while the program was in kernel-mode. But what?
Also the X-server from NVidia for my TNT2 card caused intermittant lockups. I haven't tried XFree86 4.0 yet.
Or, as (I think) Eric Raymond called it, `scratching an itch'. Isn't that why most programmers do it?
I find that it's true for me. Whether I'm throwing together a quick-and-dirty shell-script or a more elaborate perl or C program, I code them because I want to get something done. It's just a bonus that I enjoy doing it.
It is very gratifying to see your shiny new program do something in a couple of seconds that would take you much longer to do by hand. Even more so because you understand what it is doing.
So you might say it comes down to personal satisfaction.
AFAIK, Apple has always presented their computer as just another appliance.
While you can agree or disagree with this philiosophy (I, for me, prefer the methaphor of the computer as a toolbox of small tools, where it pays to learn your tools), that doesn't qualify people who adher to it as "thick".
Let's stop this discussion at this point, please, since this is way off-topic.
I don't think it is a good idea to store lots of system critical information in a single file, which is in constant flux. (see the part on making backups:-)
IMHO it would be much cooler to make a hybrid of this database and the current UN*X/etc directory:
every program has it's own file in/etc.
all these files are in XML, and the system comes with a library that can parse XML.
This would be a nice compromise, I think. Easy to parse and read.
Consider a group basically everyone despises: white supremacists. If an ISP were to rise up, comprised entirely of Aryan Nation skinheads, and if their thousands of clients were to post every day their noxious personal opinions all over the web, there is a smal but real possibility that some news admins would call for a UDP against the service. There is also the possibility that this UDP would go into effect, although no actual crime or harm had been committed, and the silenced participants were exercising their constitutional rights to free speech.
Doesn't everybody also have the right not to listen to their garbage?
Everybody with a news server could decide to relay their messages or not. The key is that a UDP is voluntary. Nobody can force you to take part in it.
I think the highway methaphore is somewhat flawed. These people aren't speeding, they're blocking the highway.
There are numerous newsservers out there that spammer can just switched over to
True. But why should that deter us from trying to waste the bandwith we're all paying for?
In my opinion the sysadmins of ISP's have a right to try and stop misuse of their network in their clients interest. If my (or your) ISP has to buy bigger hard drives and more communication bandwith to cope with spam, guess who's going to pay for it?
The solution is easy don't support them.
I have never reacted to spam other than to complain to provider of the spammer. So you can say I haven't ever supported a spammer:) but I fail to see how this can deter people from spamming. Spammers need to learn that bandwith costs money, and they're really spending other people's money.
The Internet creates mountains of public -- not secret -- data that needs to be analyzed -- a job for which expensive eavesdropping equipment is of no use
No, but a search engine works quite well.
Perhaps the best way to keep something secret is to make it public?
As others have pointed out, CT is of a completely different order than NCBT. If I'd have to choose between two evils, it's less painfull to be ping-flooded than to be nuked.
Read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll or "Takedown" by Shimomura for accounts of cyber "terrorism" (such as they are).
Using Open Source software gives you better protection against attacks: you can audit the source code, and bugs usually get fixed faster (you can patch it yourself if necessary).
Really important computer systems should be protected by brute force: isolation.:) I.e, don't put them on the Internet, but on a private network.
Slashdot Mirror
If the standard really calls for copy control, then the people who thought it up are not being very smart, I think. Do they really think that there's anything they can put in the file format that is sufficient to prevent copying/altering of files? (remember CSS?)
At the risk of sounding paranoid, this looks to me like another atttempt to take away our freedom.
Besides, I think that Free Software should not acknowledge software patents. See Brian Martin's piece on information liberation.
So the GIMP developers could do several things:
The first is politically most correct, but the second has more hacker appeal, I guess :-)
I think the previous poster is right in assuming that Free Software will not get a license.
Roland
I've tried writing a page with Amaya, but I don't like it. Especially tables are a nuisance.
The only way of getting any decent work done, was by showing a separate code screen (Reminds me of the old days of WP 5).
For editing HTML, I'll take Emacs with psgml mode over Amaya any day, but then I don't like WYSIAYG (What You See Is ALL you Get) editors anyway.
The other comments here tell me I won't be using it for browsing either. :-)
Roland
You might have a look at the freely available DocBook DTD. If you can use that, you don't have to roll your own.
If you copyleft your DTD, with a GPL-like license, nobody can steal it, because it's free. You might even create a standard, if it's a usable DTD. And you could share the load for data conversion, by asking your contributors to format the data according to your open DTD before submitting it.
I'm not really sure if there are really any downsides, unless your DTD is in some way your critical moneymaking resource (although I can't imagine how).
Just my $0.02.
Roland
The article mentions that the ship would require around 10 MW of electrical power for the drive.
I wonder how they're going to generate that, given that a thermal solar power source as proposed in Encounter with Tiber is only about 1 MW, and that the best solar panels were about 12% efficient last time I checked.
To generate 10 MW photovoltaically, you'd need about 62000 square meters of solar panels. (assuming solar irradiation is 1300 W/m^2, and an efficiency of 12%) That's a rectangle about 250 meters square!
I wonder what a nuclear reactor of this power would weigh?
Does anybody know how this drive compares to the drives built in the NERVA (using a fission pile to heat has directly) project with regard to thrust and specific impulse?
I've had problems with the dynamically linked setiathome 2.4 binary. It seemed to cause random hard lockups. I didn't see any sign of trouble in the logfiles.
The problems with setiathome disappeared when I switched to a statically linked version.
BTW, I'm running Slackware 7, upgraded to a 2.2.15 kernel. It has glibc-2.1.2.
What I can't understand is how this could happen. It seems to me that something must have gone wrong while the program was in kernel-mode. But what?
Also the X-server from NVidia for my TNT2 card caused intermittant lockups. I haven't tried XFree86 4.0 yet.
I find that it's true for me. Whether I'm throwing together a quick-and-dirty shell-script or a more elaborate perl or C program, I code them because I want to get something done. It's just a bonus that I enjoy doing it.
It is very gratifying to see your shiny new program do something in a couple of seconds that would take you much longer to do by hand. Even more so because you understand what it is doing.
So you might say it comes down to personal satisfaction.
Roland
AFAIK, Apple has always presented their computer as just another appliance.
While you can agree or disagree with this philiosophy (I, for me, prefer the methaphor of the computer as a toolbox of small tools, where it pays to learn your tools), that doesn't qualify people who adher to it as "thick".
Let's stop this discussion at this point, please, since this is way off-topic.
Roland
Hmmm, interesting.
It looks a lot like the Windows registry to me.
I don't think it is a good idea to store lots of system critical information in a single file, which is in constant flux. (see the part on making backups :-)
IMHO it would be much cooler to make a hybrid of this database and the current UN*X /etc directory:
This would be a nice compromise, I think. Easy to parse and read.
Roland
Not that I mean to slight Mac users, but I don't see them playing sysadmin.
Whatever the solution Apple comes up with, it might give us in the Linux community new ideas on how to make Linux boxen newbie-friendly.
Roland
AFAIK the extensions prevent any other than a MS kerberos server from working with an MS client.
I'd call that interfering with the protocol.
Roland
Consider a group basically everyone despises: white supremacists. If an ISP were to rise up, comprised entirely of Aryan Nation skinheads, and if their thousands of clients were to post every day their noxious personal opinions all over the web, there is a smal but real possibility that some news admins would call for a UDP against the service. There is also the possibility that this UDP would go into effect, although no actual crime or harm had been committed, and the silenced participants were exercising their constitutional rights to free speech.
Doesn't everybody also have the right not to listen to their garbage?
Everybody with a news server could decide to relay their messages or not. The key is that a UDP is voluntary. Nobody can force you to take part in it.
Do we close highways when a few people speed?
I think the highway methaphore is somewhat flawed. These people aren't speeding, they're blocking the highway.
There are numerous newsservers out there that spammer can just switched over to
True. But why should that deter us from trying to waste the bandwith we're all paying for?
In my opinion the sysadmins of ISP's have a right to try and stop misuse of their network in their clients interest. If my (or your) ISP has to buy bigger hard drives and more communication bandwith to cope with spam, guess who's going to pay for it?
The solution is easy don't support them.
I have never reacted to spam other than to complain to provider of the spammer. So you can say I haven't ever supported a spammer :) but I fail to see how this can deter people from spamming. Spammers need to learn that bandwith costs money, and they're really spending other people's money.
No, but a search engine works quite well.
Perhaps the best way to keep something secret is to make it public?
Not if you post it on /. :-)
Read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll or "Takedown" by Shimomura for accounts of cyber "terrorism" (such as they are).
Using Open Source software gives you better protection against attacks: you can audit the source code, and bugs usually get fixed faster (you can patch it yourself if necessary).
Really important computer systems should be protected by brute force: isolation. :) I.e, don't put them on the Internet, but on a private network.
Just my 2$c.
Roland