I never drank the Lisp Kool-Aid so I wasn't into lispms, but we had a Symbolics machine in college (is 3600 a model? that's all my dusty brain can cough up) and the keyboard was a real work of art! You had to stare at it for a while just to notice the QWERTY part floating in the ocean of other keys. The UI was pretty slick too. If only there were something like this for a language I *liked*.
>and essentially combined two lower bandwidth signals to produce a 10Gb signal from the interference.
"Mixer" ?
Stop the presses!!! Well OK so they did it with lasers, neat-o, but I'm having trouble getting excited. And I don't really get why these days people would *rather* be bombarded with insane amounts of RF than string a few wires and be done with it. Well as long as they don't aim it at me or expect me to pay for it, good for them I guess, but the article doesn't really capture the new-ness.
It's weird that people ever specified the swap size as being related to the size of real RAM... seems like it ought to be obvious, the size of swap is the difference between the size of RAM and the max amount of VM you'll ever use at one time. If you honestly have no way of guessing what that is, then there's no answer to the "how big should the swap partition be" question in the first place. Honestly I feel weird blindly adding swap partitions to all my Linux boxes these days when all my PCs have vastly more RAM than my old machines ever had of RAM+swap, and I haven't changed what I do all that much.
Anyway, is it seriously still required to be a fixed size? I mean of course you wouldn't want the VM system messing with partition sizes but I would hope that swap files could be grown as needed.
Or better yet, I have some dim memory that one of the PDP-10 OSes, might have been ITS, would simply use *all* unallocated disk blocks as potential swap space. It meant that the VM system had to be good friends with the FS driver (so nothing horrible happens when the FS driver creates/extends a file) but it seems like a pretty neat solution to the problem.
OK this is just flame bait. There's no DJNZ instruction on the x86. Even if it were a macro, you don't put the colon on the reference to a label, only its definition. Which only goes to show: YOU ARE NOT AN ASSEMBLY PROGRAMMER. It's not your fault, you could have been, but you just aren't. I'm so sick of hearing people gripe about the supposed unreadability of assembly code only to find that they're totally unqualified to be touching it in the first place. I can't make head or tails of most Java code either but that's hardly surprising since I don't know Java. Whose fault is that?
Not to say that the code you were looking at wasn't crap code, but I think you're missing the point. Assembly language (as written by grown-ups anyway) typically has three levels of commenting. The line-by-line stuff is absolute nuts and bolts and sometimes does get a bit inane (it certainly shouldn't be explaining what the instruction names mean since assembly programmers already know that, but it's there to walk the reader through the math etc. and keep track of what's happening in the registers), anyway it's really just there to make sure the low-level logic is totally transparent when you're zeroing in on a modification or bug fix. Until that point you don't even look at the line-by-line comments.
Then there will usually be a line or two at the top of each code block saying what the next chunk of code does at a higher level. And then each subroutine has a block comment at the top that explains the whole thing and how to call it and what it returns and how it reports errors. Or if not, fire the programmer!
Typical C programmers tend to see assembly code as hopelessly overcluttered with comments but, don't get me started on typical C code. It's a cultural difference I guess. All the more reason to specialize.
I absolutely agree that that's annoying. But just to state the not-quite-obvious, it may be legally *required* to be this way. At least in New York, state law requires that sales tax be itemized separately (there are special cases, like gasoline or vending machines) because apparently they have a bug up their ass about making sure the customer always *knows* when they're paying state sales tax (and doesn't get the impression that there simply is no sales tax). I suppose this all makes it easier for the state to notice vendors who don't seem to be collecting sales tax (like every junk yard I've ever been to).
What really irritates me with phone plans is when they add surcharges that *aren't* taxes. I don't even see how that's legal. It's like those frickin' Ticketmaster "convenience" fees -- if it's not a tax, and there's no way to get out of paying it no matter what you do, then it's part of the *price*. But they quote some totally made-up price because they know we're a bunch of sheep and will blindly pay $100+ a year extra in miscellaneous fees with generic names.
You didn't say what *kind* of electronics you want to learn about. Ramsey Electronics has some general-interest kits, as do Jameco and JDR. TenTec has simple ham radio kits (with excellent support), so do Vectronics (part of MFJ Enterprises) and Small Wonder Labs. Elecraft has fancier ham radio kits (multiband stuff more in line with the old high-end Heathkits). And PAiA has audio kits. (All of these companies have obvious website URLs.)
If you want a stepping stone to building your own digital stuff, most of the IC companies put out really wonderful evaluation boards to show off their parts. They're not kits themselves but they're very much intended to get your juices flowing (the IC vendors want corporate customers to choose their parts to use in products so easy prototyping is vital) so they're easy to get to the "hello world" stage (or the lights-and-switches equivalent) and there's plenty of provision for adding your own stuff to it and then transplanting the whole thing to a free-standing design once you have your rat's nest prototype debugged. Prices vary wildly but some of them are really good deals.
I'm a huge fan of Microchip PIC CPUs because you don't need to buy *anything*, the programming protocol is simple and well-documented (none of that convoluted JTAG stuff) so you can build your own burner for a few dollars (I use the old "COM84" circuit available on the net, modified to work with the low voltages put out by current COM ports) and free burner software (or you can write your own, it's easy).
Seriously! It took me ages to realize that my hacking-related back problems had more to do with me slouching in the chair than with the chair itself (I'm too gangly to really fit any chair I've found). So I got a universal replacement seat belt at Pep Boys, drilled a couple of holes in my chair and bolted it on. Works great! Way less back trouble. Just a thought.
I wish NASA wouldn't get so distracted during the "fun" part of these missions. It seems like a regular pattern, they set up frankly a pretty awesome web site, put up a countdown timer, plaster it with nice background articles and then update it very regularly... until something happens. Then it's frozen in time for an hour or two (this time all they could come up with was "we got a signal") while they're all slapping each other five and pouring champagne into their consoles. The $420 million (or whatever it was) came out of our pockets, all I ask is that they get *one* intern to stay sober at the golden moment and clue in those of us who don't get the Science Channel.
Anyway it's great to see they pulled it off. It's weird how so many space shots worked on the first try and then we totally blew the next half-dozen tries. I blame the Martian strategic defense system.
I don't know what kind of interface the 3" drives have, but if it is or can be adapted to the usual 34-pin SA400-style interface then one of the Catweasel floppy controllers (made by Jens Schoenfeld A.K.A. Individual Computers) might be your friend. They can make reading almost any format a Simple Matter Of Programming(TM).
And don't listen to people telling you the media deteriorate. The older the better, really -- I've lost data on 3.5" floppies more and more lately (quality seems to be going down), but my old 8" and 5.25" disks read just fine. Same with 1/2" tape -- if only the drives were as reliable as the tapes.
This may be my geezer memory going, and imdb.com absolutely does *not* back me up, but I thought I saw early episodes of MacGyver as part of "CBS Late Night" which was what CBS briefly called the hodge-podge of bad movies and not-ready-for-prime-time (and often not-half-hour-multiple) TV shows that they ran after midnight (I remember Letterman being annoyed with the name, he was still at NBC at the time). I thought the actor was not Anderson?
Someone straighten me out so I can sleep at night (I already sleep OK during the day).
I don't care how they spelled "fuse", no one in the US spells Al "aluminium" (unless they actually *want* a wedgie). So I don't buy the argument that the author must have been American and not British.
I'm 63% sure the 777 was mentioned on UNIX-HATERS (I know, wrong crowd) back when it was in development. Something about the glass cockpit running on Unix and the FAA/etc. letting it pass certification with less testing than usual because of Unix's supposed proven track record. A good laugh was had by all (suddenly Amtrak's safety record looks appealing, etc.).
Yeah you may sneer, but things are different now that Unix only has Windows to compete against. Plus it's had another decade or so of development since then. Most of you are probably too young to remember how Unix was during its inexplicable rise -- everyone's sessions lock up at once, then the operator comes running into the terminal room and shouts "everybody stop typing! the keyboard buffers are full again!" And we sit at our Teleray 1061s and wait many minutes for the poor thing to stagger to its feet. And that's just bad I/O, the crashes were something else. See how much you'd want to ride in a Unix-controlled plane when *that's* your daily life.
Anyway I'm sure the true story won't be as simple as it being Unix's fault (if current 777s even run Unix), but I'll laugh my ass off if that's even 1% of it.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
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· Score: 1
No kidding, it's like assembly language for hardware! Even if people were making transistors at home (are they? hmmmmm), there wouldn't be much to see, so tubes are cool because the magical theoretical guts that you read about in books are right there for you to see inside a glass bubble.
Well, except for the parts that are silvered over (in commercial tubes) that is -- huh, I wonder if that means the home-made tubes are leaking radiation all over the place. Still worth it though (but to be on the safe side we'd better not make M. Paillard angry). The plate (the little cylinder he made first) presumably catches almost everything, so just stay away from the top and bottom.
Anyway I'm totally blown away, this is SO cool! All those jigs and fixtures, it must have taken a huge amount of work to develop his method. I like how casting the plastic base was almost an afterthought. It would probably take me a year just to figure that part out. What a great guy!
Seriously -- how does 80x25 text mode look on the lop-sided VGA screen? Also, how much noise does the machine make (assuming there's a fan at all)? 512 MB/4 GB make a pretty luxurious DOS system, and buying one of these wouldn't cost that much more than replacing the dead battery in my laptop (450 MHz K6 so I'm easily impressed).
Being a USB target doesn't require an OS. And writing one file at a time on (I suppose) a FAT flash ROM doesn't either. Heck, the FTDI Vinculum microcontrollers run a USB *host* and FAT driver w/o needing Linux. I just think everyone's too quick to cram megabytes of code into (what should be) trivial devices, just because they want to build the same nest they've always lived in. Well sure Linux is still better than WinCE.
OK I'll bite. Why does a stethoscope need an OS in the first place? How much file I/O, multitasking, networking etc. does a single-purpose device like this really do?
I wouldn't know about this in particular, but single-surface hang gliders effectively create an airfoil by defining the top and letting a pool of dead air (uh, or something, I'm sure not an AeroE) define the rest. So I imagine that's what they mean about this thing.
Obviously, when they say "lift" they just mean it contributes an upward component to the whole system. They're still plummeting. The clips I've seen look they're doing a little better than 1:1 (which is actually pretty impressive, considering) but not much better.
The maker of my H.G. reserve parachute claims their design (pulled-down apex but I don't know and/or wouldn't understand what else is special about it) generates "lift" too, whatever that means. I sure hope it still goes down not up! It's bad enough trying to crash-land a piece of twisted wreckage gracefully w/o worrying about winding up in outer space.
Yeah that's democracy for you, a bunch of unelected political bosses deciding whether to even give someone a *chance* for people to vote for them. Hell I'm thinking of writing him in anyway (even though he's not even trying to run for president of Mass.).
Well I hope at least they gave him back his $2500.
A very good use of these folks' time would be to reach some milestones on the Linux driver API so that the dang thing will stop changing all the time. A fundamental assumption of Linux is that constantly changing interfaces is no problem because the legions of faceless programmers will gladly rewrite everything each time around. True (but annoying) for generic hardware that everyone cares about, but not at all true for oddball stuff.
I'm maintaining a driver for a bus adapter interface (for connecting old minicomputer peripherals to PCs) and it's a much bigger time sink than it needs to be. The source code is on my web site, but the users are, well, USERS, so when a new kernel release breaks it they just chuck it back at me to fix. So much for open source taking care of itself by magic. I won't bother submitting this driver to the free driver project because it's kind of useless without the $3000 piece of hardware it works with (and that's not counting the crates full of minicomputer hardware needed for testing). I need mine and I don't picture these folks buying their own no matter how much they care.
Anyway I understand why Linus needs the freedom to get better ideas in the future and doesn't want to be weighed down with tons of backwards-compatibility stuff, but I still think it would make Linux more useful to split the difference and occasionally define an interface (doesn't have to be the default as long as you can ask for it somehow) which is guaranteed to work for some number of years. Then flush it at the end but at least some large amount of rarely-used stuff worked OK in the mean time, w/o having to be rewritten... by a tiny group of people... every few months.
OK so I'm still stinging from udev. Sure, it's cute. But it required driver hacking (yet again) *and* broke my user-mode application by changing some of the device names. That would be OK back in kernel 0.x days but this is way too late in Linux history to start breaking applications, and after 16-17 years it's really time for the external interface to the kernel to start quieting down too.
Yes I suppose my view of copyright law has been distorted by actually *reading* the law! By all means please tell me how copying Prince's music into her home video is "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" (17 USC 107). Only for one of those uses do you get to use the other arguments (about commercial vs. nonprofit, nature, substantiality, effect on value). "Me wanty" is not a legally valid justification to infringe on copyrights.
Listen, I totally agree that current copyright law has been skewed ridiculously to favor the Disney company & cronies. I can't think of any good reason why the term should be more than 20 years -- if an IP creator hasn't made a decent profit by then, the IP can't have been worth much in the first place, and the whole point of publishing in the first place is to contribute the work to our culture.
But that doesn't mean there's no limit. IP creators deserve to be paid for their work just like anyone else. (OK I'm a programmer and my entire livelihood comes from customers giving me money for solving their problems, so I'm biased.) I'm so sick of spoiled whiny brats who think that it's the natural way of the universe that weenies like you can take whatever IP you want and the person who created it is a jerk for thinking you'd ever do anything in return. See, it's their duty to work for free because weenie society has conveniently defined any job that creates IP as being inherently worthless. Meanwhile of course, no one better forget to give you *your* paycheck! Because your work actually matters. I bow down in your saintly presence oh master.
... it *was* copyright violation. Plain and simple. This doesn't come close to fitting the criteria for fair use (a lot of/.ers think anything short of selling it for cash is "fair use" but that's not true at all, not by US law anyway). They didn't sue her, they didn't threaten her (she just assumed that part), they just made her stop distributing Prince's IP. She's totally wrong, she got off with a warning, and now *she's* complaining?
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I never drank the Lisp Kool-Aid so I wasn't into lispms, but we had a Symbolics machine in college (is 3600 a model? that's all my dusty brain can cough up) and the keyboard was a real work of art! You had to stare at it for a while just to notice the QWERTY part floating in the ocean of other keys. The UI was pretty slick too. If only there were something like this for a language I *liked*.
>using point-to-point millimeter-wave technology.
"Radio" ?
>and essentially combined two lower bandwidth signals to produce a 10Gb signal from the interference.
"Mixer" ?
Stop the presses!!! Well OK so they did it with lasers, neat-o, but I'm having trouble getting excited. And I don't really get why these days people would *rather* be bombarded with insane amounts of RF than string a few wires and be done with it. Well as long as they don't aim it at me or expect me to pay for it, good for them I guess, but the article doesn't really capture the new-ness.
It's weird that people ever specified the swap size as being related to the size of real RAM ... seems like it ought to be obvious, the size of swap is the difference between the size of RAM and the max amount of VM you'll ever use at one time. If you honestly have no way of guessing what that is, then there's no answer to the "how big should the swap partition be" question in the first place. Honestly I feel weird blindly adding swap partitions to all my Linux boxes these days when all my PCs have vastly more RAM than my old machines ever had of RAM+swap, and I haven't changed what I do all that much.
Anyway, is it seriously still required to be a fixed size? I mean of course you wouldn't want the VM system messing with partition sizes but I would hope that swap files could be grown as needed.
Or better yet, I have some dim memory that one of the PDP-10 OSes, might have been ITS, would simply use *all* unallocated disk blocks as potential swap space. It meant that the VM system had to be good friends with the FS driver (so nothing horrible happens when the FS driver creates/extends a file) but it seems like a pretty neat solution to the problem.
OK this is just flame bait. There's no DJNZ instruction on the x86. Even if it were a macro, you don't put the colon on the reference to a label, only its definition. Which only goes to show: YOU ARE NOT AN ASSEMBLY PROGRAMMER. It's not your fault, you could have been, but you just aren't. I'm so sick of hearing people gripe about the supposed unreadability of assembly code only to find that they're totally unqualified to be touching it in the first place. I can't make head or tails of most Java code either but that's hardly surprising since I don't know Java. Whose fault is that?
Not to say that the code you were looking at wasn't crap code, but I think you're missing the point. Assembly language (as written by grown-ups anyway) typically has three levels of commenting. The line-by-line stuff is absolute nuts and bolts and sometimes does get a bit inane (it certainly shouldn't be explaining what the instruction names mean since assembly programmers already know that, but it's there to walk the reader through the math etc. and keep track of what's happening in the registers), anyway it's really just there to make sure the low-level logic is totally transparent when you're zeroing in on a modification or bug fix. Until that point you don't even look at the line-by-line comments.
Then there will usually be a line or two at the top of each code block saying what the next chunk of code does at a higher level. And then each subroutine has a block comment at the top that explains the whole thing and how to call it and what it returns and how it reports errors. Or if not, fire the programmer!
Typical C programmers tend to see assembly code as hopelessly overcluttered with comments but, don't get me started on typical C code. It's a cultural difference I guess. All the more reason to specialize.
As long as they don't mind if I pay them later. How's $19 million a year sound?
I absolutely agree that that's annoying. But just to state the not-quite-obvious, it may be legally *required* to be this way. At least in New York, state law requires that sales tax be itemized separately (there are special cases, like gasoline or vending machines) because apparently they have a bug up their ass about making sure the customer always *knows* when they're paying state sales tax (and doesn't get the impression that there simply is no sales tax). I suppose this all makes it easier for the state to notice vendors who don't seem to be collecting sales tax (like every junk yard I've ever been to).
What really irritates me with phone plans is when they add surcharges that *aren't* taxes. I don't even see how that's legal. It's like those frickin' Ticketmaster "convenience" fees -- if it's not a tax, and there's no way to get out of paying it no matter what you do, then it's part of the *price*. But they quote some totally made-up price because they know we're a bunch of sheep and will blindly pay $100+ a year extra in miscellaneous fees with generic names.
(Credit: Gordon Greene)
If you want an endlessly expandable name space, you can't beat STDs. The catch is that no one can spell half of them.
Dead celebrities are good too. You can use the cause of death as a subdomain, to keep things a bit less chaotic. People *can* spell those.
You didn't say what *kind* of electronics you want to learn about. Ramsey Electronics has some general-interest kits, as do Jameco and JDR. TenTec has simple ham radio kits (with excellent support), so do Vectronics (part of MFJ Enterprises) and Small Wonder Labs. Elecraft has fancier ham radio kits (multiband stuff more in line with the old high-end Heathkits). And PAiA has audio kits. (All of these companies have obvious website URLs.)
If you want a stepping stone to building your own digital stuff, most of the IC companies put out really wonderful evaluation boards to show off their parts. They're not kits themselves but they're very much intended to get your juices flowing (the IC vendors want corporate customers to choose their parts to use in products so easy prototyping is vital) so they're easy to get to the "hello world" stage (or the lights-and-switches equivalent) and there's plenty of provision for adding your own stuff to it and then transplanting the whole thing to a free-standing design once you have your rat's nest prototype debugged. Prices vary wildly but some of them are really good deals.
I'm a huge fan of Microchip PIC CPUs because you don't need to buy *anything*, the programming protocol is simple and well-documented (none of that convoluted JTAG stuff) so you can build your own burner for a few dollars (I use the old "COM84" circuit available on the net, modified to work with the low voltages put out by current COM ports) and free burner software (or you can write your own, it's easy).
Seriously! It took me ages to realize that my hacking-related back problems had more to do with me slouching in the chair than with the chair itself (I'm too gangly to really fit any chair I've found). So I got a universal replacement seat belt at Pep Boys, drilled a couple of holes in my chair and bolted it on. Works great! Way less back trouble. Just a thought.
I wish NASA wouldn't get so distracted during the "fun" part of these missions. It seems like a regular pattern, they set up frankly a pretty awesome web site, put up a countdown timer, plaster it with nice background articles and then update it very regularly ... until something happens. Then it's frozen in time for an hour or two (this time all they could come up with was "we got a signal") while they're all slapping each other five and pouring champagne into their consoles. The $420 million (or whatever it was) came out of our pockets, all I ask is that they get *one* intern to stay sober at the golden moment and clue in those of us who don't get the Science Channel.
Anyway it's great to see they pulled it off. It's weird how so many space shots worked on the first try and then we totally blew the next half-dozen tries. I blame the Martian strategic defense system.
I don't know what kind of interface the 3" drives have, but if it is or can be adapted to the usual 34-pin SA400-style interface then one of the Catweasel floppy controllers (made by Jens Schoenfeld A.K.A. Individual Computers) might be your friend. They can make reading almost any format a Simple Matter Of Programming(TM).
And don't listen to people telling you the media deteriorate. The older the better, really -- I've lost data on 3.5" floppies more and more lately (quality seems to be going down), but my old 8" and 5.25" disks read just fine. Same with 1/2" tape -- if only the drives were as reliable as the tapes.
OK then! Thanks. I'm taking a nap now.
This may be my geezer memory going, and imdb.com absolutely does *not* back me up, but I thought I saw early episodes of MacGyver as part of "CBS Late Night" which was what CBS briefly called the hodge-podge of bad movies and not-ready-for-prime-time (and often not-half-hour-multiple) TV shows that they ran after midnight (I remember Letterman being annoyed with the name, he was still at NBC at the time). I thought the actor was not Anderson?
Someone straighten me out so I can sleep at night (I already sleep OK during the day).
I don't care how they spelled "fuse", no one in the US spells Al "aluminium" (unless they actually *want* a wedgie). So I don't buy the argument that the author must have been American and not British.
I'm 63% sure the 777 was mentioned on UNIX-HATERS (I know, wrong crowd) back when it was in development. Something about the glass cockpit running on Unix and the FAA/etc. letting it pass certification with less testing than usual because of Unix's supposed proven track record. A good laugh was had by all (suddenly Amtrak's safety record looks appealing, etc.).
Yeah you may sneer, but things are different now that Unix only has Windows to compete against. Plus it's had another decade or so of development since then. Most of you are probably too young to remember how Unix was during its inexplicable rise -- everyone's sessions lock up at once, then the operator comes running into the terminal room and shouts "everybody stop typing! the keyboard buffers are full again!" And we sit at our Teleray 1061s and wait many minutes for the poor thing to stagger to its feet. And that's just bad I/O, the crashes were something else. See how much you'd want to ride in a Unix-controlled plane when *that's* your daily life.
Anyway I'm sure the true story won't be as simple as it being Unix's fault (if current 777s even run Unix), but I'll laugh my ass off if that's even 1% of it.
No kidding, it's like assembly language for hardware! Even if people were making transistors at home (are they? hmmmmm), there wouldn't be much to see, so tubes are cool because the magical theoretical guts that you read about in books are right there for you to see inside a glass bubble.
Well, except for the parts that are silvered over (in commercial tubes) that is -- huh, I wonder if that means the home-made tubes are leaking radiation all over the place. Still worth it though (but to be on the safe side we'd better not make M. Paillard angry). The plate (the little cylinder he made first) presumably catches almost everything, so just stay away from the top and bottom.
Anyway I'm totally blown away, this is SO cool! All those jigs and fixtures, it must have taken a huge amount of work to develop his method. I like how casting the plastic base was almost an afterthought. It would probably take me a year just to figure that part out. What a great guy!
Seriously -- how does 80x25 text mode look on the lop-sided VGA screen? Also, how much noise does the machine make (assuming there's a fan at all)? 512 MB /4 GB make a pretty luxurious DOS system, and buying one of these wouldn't cost that much more than replacing the dead battery in my laptop (450 MHz K6 so I'm easily impressed).
Being a USB target doesn't require an OS. And writing one file at a time on (I suppose) a FAT flash ROM doesn't either. Heck, the FTDI Vinculum microcontrollers run a USB *host* and FAT driver w/o needing Linux. I just think everyone's too quick to cram megabytes of code into (what should be) trivial devices, just because they want to build the same nest they've always lived in. Well sure Linux is still better than WinCE.
OK I'll bite. Why does a stethoscope need an OS in the first place? How much file I/O, multitasking, networking etc. does a single-purpose device like this really do?
I wouldn't know about this in particular, but single-surface hang gliders effectively create an airfoil by defining the top and letting a pool of dead air (uh, or something, I'm sure not an AeroE) define the rest. So I imagine that's what they mean about this thing.
Obviously, when they say "lift" they just mean it contributes an upward component to the whole system. They're still plummeting. The clips I've seen look they're doing a little better than 1:1 (which is actually pretty impressive, considering) but not much better.
The maker of my H.G. reserve parachute claims their design (pulled-down apex but I don't know and/or wouldn't understand what else is special about it) generates "lift" too, whatever that means. I sure hope it still goes down not up! It's bad enough trying to crash-land a piece of twisted wreckage gracefully w/o worrying about winding up in outer space.
Yeah that's democracy for you, a bunch of unelected political bosses deciding whether to even give someone a *chance* for people to vote for them. Hell I'm thinking of writing him in anyway (even though he's not even trying to run for president of Mass.).
Well I hope at least they gave him back his $2500.
A very good use of these folks' time would be to reach some milestones on the Linux driver API so that the dang thing will stop changing all the time. A fundamental assumption of Linux is that constantly changing interfaces is no problem because the legions of faceless programmers will gladly rewrite everything each time around. True (but annoying) for generic hardware that everyone cares about, but not at all true for oddball stuff.
... by a tiny group of people ... every few months.
I'm maintaining a driver for a bus adapter interface (for connecting old minicomputer peripherals to PCs) and it's a much bigger time sink than it needs to be. The source code is on my web site, but the users are, well, USERS, so when a new kernel release breaks it they just chuck it back at me to fix. So much for open source taking care of itself by magic. I won't bother submitting this driver to the free driver project because it's kind of useless without the $3000 piece of hardware it works with (and that's not counting the crates full of minicomputer hardware needed for testing). I need mine and I don't picture these folks buying their own no matter how much they care.
Anyway I understand why Linus needs the freedom to get better ideas in the future and doesn't want to be weighed down with tons of backwards-compatibility stuff, but I still think it would make Linux more useful to split the difference and occasionally define an interface (doesn't have to be the default as long as you can ask for it somehow) which is guaranteed to work for some number of years. Then flush it at the end but at least some large amount of rarely-used stuff worked OK in the mean time, w/o having to be rewritten
OK so I'm still stinging from udev. Sure, it's cute. But it required driver hacking (yet again) *and* broke my user-mode application by changing some of the device names. That would be OK back in kernel 0.x days but this is way too late in Linux history to start breaking applications, and after 16-17 years it's really time for the external interface to the kernel to start quieting down too.
Yes I suppose my view of copyright law has been distorted by actually *reading* the law! By all means please tell me how copying Prince's music into her home video is "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" (17 USC 107). Only for one of those uses do you get to use the other arguments (about commercial vs. nonprofit, nature, substantiality, effect on value). "Me wanty" is not a legally valid justification to infringe on copyrights. Listen, I totally agree that current copyright law has been skewed ridiculously to favor the Disney company & cronies. I can't think of any good reason why the term should be more than 20 years -- if an IP creator hasn't made a decent profit by then, the IP can't have been worth much in the first place, and the whole point of publishing in the first place is to contribute the work to our culture. But that doesn't mean there's no limit. IP creators deserve to be paid for their work just like anyone else. (OK I'm a programmer and my entire livelihood comes from customers giving me money for solving their problems, so I'm biased.) I'm so sick of spoiled whiny brats who think that it's the natural way of the universe that weenies like you can take whatever IP you want and the person who created it is a jerk for thinking you'd ever do anything in return. See, it's their duty to work for free because weenie society has conveniently defined any job that creates IP as being inherently worthless. Meanwhile of course, no one better forget to give you *your* paycheck! Because your work actually matters. I bow down in your saintly presence oh master.
... it *was* copyright violation. Plain and simple. This doesn't come close to fitting the criteria for fair use (a lot of /.ers think anything short of selling it for cash is "fair use" but that's not true at all, not by US law anyway). They didn't sue her, they didn't threaten her (she just assumed that part), they just made her stop distributing Prince's IP. She's totally wrong, she got off with a warning, and now *she's* complaining?
And worst of all, she thinks Nirvana is punk?!
>Where did you get $95 from?
From Compulab's web site. I can't find who else sells these. Well $40 is better but not that much better.