I couldn't understand what made Solaris x86 such a great idea... when the HCL could be printed legibly on a postage stamp, it just seemed to me that running Solaris on your x86 machine made about as much sense as running Windows NT on your Sparc 5...
For me, the point of having Solaris x86 was that admins could have solaris desktops using (quality) commidity PC hardware, and have the exact same user environment on the desktop PC as on the servers we administer.
Hardware compatibility was actually pretty good, with 2.6 and 7 each supporting a good range of major-brand (Compaq, Dell, IBM, etc) PCs, and even a number of laptops.
Solaris x86 wasn't something you would generally use to deploy a server (Sun did want to sell a few Sparcs), but it did serve real purposes.
Now, if they would have done some emulator work and given (slow) binary compatability, I could see why one might want to spend a kilobuck on a cheap PC instead of five on a cheap Sparc...
Given that Sun makes their money off the Sparc hardware, to the extent that they give away the operating system, that would be a bad move for them.
Qengho mentioned Bob Shaw's "The Light of Other Days" I'm not sure if this was the same as "Other Days, Other Eyes". I believe he has used the concept in at least one other short story, as have other authors.
There was also the short story (probably published in F&SF magazine?) where the local bordello went out of business, and everybody bid up the mirrors to amazing prices after hearing a rumor of 'slow glass' type image extraction from antique mirrors...
Good question...
I've been hunting for ANY codec that I can use on a Sparc platform, without any luck.
All I see out there is Windows DLL files and Pentium-optimized Linux source.
Allot of closed codecs with high license models seem to be the only ones competing. I want to see more open hardware and less reliance on costly software.
I'd pay good money for a hardware MPEG+DiVX encoder/decoder on a PCI card with an open API.
Wireless (Meaning Microwave or other RF) is the wrong direction to go for any critical system. By using 19th century technology (tuned spark gap transmitter) it is trivial to jam all RF communications in a particular frequency range. Area of coverage is limited only by the amount of power available to (and usable by) the transmitter.
Liquid(TJ) writes:
Beat me to it. I kind of doubt that ten years from now we'll be using wired connectivity at all, at least as far as the end-user is concerned.
Why would you assume that in the future people will choose to move to RF instead of wired connectivity?
Is the future somehow going to magically eliminate the problem of interference, the security concerns, the waste of omnidirectional broadcasting, the concerns about the side-effects of pumping radio waves into the environment?
I agree that it is unlikely that ten years from now we will be using copper wires. But, barring the development of stable wormholes or quantum tunneling or other such 'magic', I'm pretty damn sure the connectivity will be via some physical link, perhaps a vastly improved fiberoptic.
Why have region encoding at all? If having different encoding systems was good enough to keep markets seperated with video tapes, then why not do the same thing with DVDs.
Interesting point.
Part of it might be lack of granuality- there are just three competing video formats in the world, but more than three regions:
Region 1:USA & Canada
Region 2:Europe & Japan
Region 3:The Orient (exc Japan)
Region 4:Australia and New Zealand
Region 5:Asia and Africa
Region 6:China
Another issue is that DVD are different in that they usually offer both the original soundtrack and a local dub, where most tapes were only available with the local-language soundtrack. For example, many of my US DVDs have a Japanese or French soundtrack also). Both Japan and the USA use NTSC, but they are in different regions, and Japanese releases of US movies are delayed by six months.
For example, the
KeyGhost is a hardware dongle that records keystrokes. Requires physical access to install.
I've actually seen similar products for sale at $99 in consumer electronics catalogs as a way to catch your kids surfing porn.
While I have not (yet) seen equivalent products for USB on the market, sniffing USB is even easier than PS/2.
No, Region-2 PAL disks fail on a NTSC TV in USA.
on
Emigrating DVD's?
·
· Score: 2
FatRatBastard writes:
You wrote:
Most DVD players are NTSC/PAL/SECAM agnostic-
Isn't that pretty much what I said?
Yes and no. The DVD player just takes the signal on the disk and dumps it out to your TV, projector, etc. Generally the player doesn't care if the signal on the disk is PAL, SECAM, or NTSC.
Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM.
Wrong. My research and experience confirms that the disk itself is encoded as NTSC, PAL, etc.
That is to say, I live in the USA, and I personally have a copy of 'South Park: vol 4', as released in Region 2. This disk is clearly labeled as 'PAL'.
I can play this disk in a 'region free' Apex player on my NTSC television, and it works fine because the Apex internally does the conversion from PAL to NTSC.
A friend of mine has another brand of 'region free' DVD player, and while the player plays the disk, his TV displays a severely distorted picture.
In other words: DISKS CONTAIN PAL CONTENT, OR NTSC CONTENT, OR BOTH. A PAL DISK WILL NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY ON A NTSC-ONLY AMERICAN TELEVISION SET.
I know this both from references and from personal experience. If you claim otherwise, prove me wrong.
To 'bootstrap' a compiler by using it to compile it's own source code is a very important milestone in the development of any language.
There's an old geek brain-teaser that goes like this:
Q: In what language was the first C compiler written?
A: The first C compiler was written in.... C.
How is this possible?
The story as I heard it, which I cannot find any verification of from Ritchie's web site, is that a C interpreter was written in B, and the source code for a C compiler was run through the interpreter and used to compile itself.
(The actual history of the evolution of B into C is rather complex, and it is not clear whether this fable is true.)
If you are moving to the US permanently, in the long run you'll probably want to just replace your PAL disks with NTSC versions.
Because the USA is a cultural behemoth, Europe has an ample supply of players and televisions with the ability to decode and display NTSC disks with reasonable accuracy.
In the USA, there are very few means to play your PAL-encoded disks without distorted colors and other artifacts. The converter devices and the few PAL capable TVs sold for US use are both found in only two grades: cheaply made models with poor quality, or very expensive.
The best solution might be to check availability of American (NTSC/Region 1versions) of movies at good prices in the USA, and sell off the easily replaceble disks before you leave the Netherlands.
Most DVD players are NTSC/PAL/SECAM agnostic- If the region coding allows the disk to be played, the player dumps the signal out to your TV using whatever format it is encoded in.
IOW, if you have a 'no region' DVD disk with PAL content, it still won't play on the average North American NTSC television.
Playing a DVD under MS-Windows to a VGA monitor ignores the encoding, and some DVD decoder cards for PC's (e.g. DXR2 or Hollywood+/DXR3) will convert the signal between PAL and NTSC before output to your TV.
Far more likely is that you were fired for being a pagan asshole. The sort of in-your-face jerk who's gotta shove his religion.
If you weren't like that, then they'd have never known or cared.
I've worked in a few places where "everybody" was the same religion, and mostly attended the same (church|synagogue|mosque)... so the fact that none of your coworkers saw you at their services on the weekend stood out, and became a point of discussion.
The management turned a blind eye when your fellow employees would grill you about your religion, and anybody who would admit to a 'strange' religion (or no religion at all) didn't last long in that company.
A 'pagan' or atheist is going to have a hard time get the EEOC to take an interest in their claim of discrimination.
At the 'Frontline Expo' in Chicago (a major RFID and Wirless networking conference) a major vendor was demonstrating a system that was capable of reading the individual serial numbers in stacks of chips on a craps table.
The system can handle stacks up to about ten chips high, and can read 40+ chips in a matter of seconds, determining where on the field each stack is, and the individual serial number of the embedded RF tag in each chip.
The problem of being able to scan people as they walk through the door and determine how many notes of what denomination are in their wallet has not yet been solved...
Your selective quoting pisses me off. What I said was this:
For most 'pirates' their is a huge moral difference between selling software for a profit (commercial piracy) and providing copies of software and music to other 'fans' for free or in trade for more software.
What you quoted was:
"huge moral difference between selling software for a profit (commercial piracy) and providing copies of software and music to other 'fans' for free or in trade for more software.
So you're saying the ends justify the means? If I steal your car and give it away to someone else, that's ok, but if I steal it and sell it then I'm wrong? It doesn't matter what you do with it, stealing is the crime.
It is okay to make copies when you would never have paid for a legitimate version
This is pure bullshit. If you're not willing or able to pay the set price for something, that does not make it ok to steal it. This is especially true for things you don't even need. I could understand a starving man stealing a loaf of bread, not this.
Your quoting makes it sounds like those are MY opinions, not the rationalizations of 'most pirates' that I myself was quoting...
Aside from your misleading quotes, your arguments are also bogus.
As I said before, 'intellectual property' cannot be equated with 'real property', because a person can infringe on your 'IP rights' without denying you the use of your property.
If you steal my car, I cannot drive it. If you make a copy of my operating system, your 'theft' in no way infringes on my use of my official version.
If you copy my operating system and give copies away to your poor welfare-collecting pirate friends, I still haven't suffered any tangible loss, other than a continuing infringement on my 'IP rights', and some nebulous concept of loss of control over the distribution of my product.
If you turn around and make 'counterfeit' copies that look like my official copies of my software, and sell it to people who think they are buying the real thing, you are depriving me of 'actual' revenue.
For most 'pirates' their is a huge moral difference between selling software for a profit (commercial piracy) and providing copies of software and music to other 'fans' for free or in trade for more software.
Generally, giving away a copy of a commercial product is ethically acceptable, selling compilation disks or download access for a small fee (to cover media or bandwidth costs) is a grey area, and producing 'counterfeit' software that looks like the real thing is seen as the only aspect of piracy that is truly 'wrong'.
The difference in most people's minds is that it is okay to make copies when you would never have paid for a legitimate version. The real criminals are the ones who sell counterfeit copies, where the buyer is somebody who would have purchase the real thing, and might actually have been duped into thinking they were buying a legitimate product.
Just because something is not physical does not mean that it is without value.
The difference is, if I take your spear, you starve to death, because you lose the use of your 'real property'.
If I make my own copy using my own materials (flint, rawhide, wood), you still have your spear.
If you sell spears for an arm and a leg (literally) and I would/could never pay your price, how are you being hurt when I make my own copy of your product instead of buying it?
While I agree that copyright and patent laws could use some modification, now that information travels much faster than it used to, and the life of information is much shorter, I don't think they should be abolished. Few people are willing to
work to create something if they know that they won't be compensated for their time. For some people, a sense of recognition is enough compensation.
There are ways to make money off of 'intellectual property' without draconian copyright enforcement. For example, there are bands who give away MP3s of their music, and make their real profits off of the concerts.
They made the Fucked Company Hall of Fame, and the comments are a lot funnier than the ones showing up on Slashdot.
Dear Pud:
We're fucked. Damn.
Peter Beckman
[ex]Founder of AdCritic.com
Dear Peter:
Fuck you! Your site rocked. Why didn't you just make it subscription-only after you had the audience? Your "slow-bandwith-unless-you-pay" shit was dumb. Subscription-only might not have worked, but why didn't you try? Woulda cut your bandwith-bill down, and coulda made a couple of bucks.
Pud
When: 12/18/2001
Company: AdCritic.com
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee! Points: 200
I'd pay for a DVD/DVD-ROM archive of adcritic
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 2
mjgamble writes:
CD-R archive of the site.
CD-R? Nowhere near enough capacity!
I'd pay for a DVD of the entire adcritic site.
Make it region-free and unencrypted, with access to the editorial content of the site via DVD-ROM.
Pressing disks is probably still cheaper than their bandwidth costs had been:-)
We invented this shortly after Matt Blaze first released the 'CryptoGraphic Filesystem' (CFS). Originally it was an april fools joke... but very similar functionality is now used in OpenBSD to encrypt swap!
The OSFS (Oh Shit! File System) (TM)
The next step in preventing data recovery is the Oh Shit! filesystem. This is a CFS used solely for the storage of 'temporary data', where the key is randomly generated at boot time. If the system is shutdown, crashes, or loses power, all data is lost... irrecovably.
For the really paranoid, I've got friends working on the encryption of off-core memory, so the key only ever exists inside the CPU and on-chip cache.
As to why people don't torch their warez collection when the Feds are kicking in the door, perhaps because that is a criminal act in of itself:-)
When I did my home office, I had the electricians put in 'quad' grounded outlets and 20-AMP circuits all around.
The cost for quads isn't much more than the cost for the usual 2-outlet boxes, and makes finding a spare outlet for additional systems much easier. The use of 20A breakers means that you are that much more likely to trip the 10/15A circuit breaker on a power strip before you trip a breaker down at the main panel.
You might also consider a whole house surge protector.
Other than that, I'll base it on wireless. People here have voiced concerns about security, and indeed, it must be made in such a way that the firewall isn't made pointless. But putting a lot of wire when you can use Bluetooth (which has been my primary choice, but I don't know), or 802.11 seems a complete waste.
I wouldn't plan on using wireless. The bandwidth is limited, and it is shared bandwidth, whereas if you wire ethernet you can go switched- this is a huge distinction.
The non-licensed spectrum, especially the 2.4Ghz range where 802.11b lives, is open to all sorts of consumer devices. A couple of neighbors with wirelss X-Cams and your 802.11b network is drowned in noise, totally dead. (I have tested this).
You can't wire all the gadgets I want anyway (I want the fridge online!
Security is also a major risk- wireless can easily be sniffed and is not difficult to spoof.
Do you really want some script kiddie rooting your fridge?
Don't run fiber today, just run plastic conduit.
on
Wiring A New House?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I would not run fiber now.
What I would do is build a patch panel or wiring closet in a basement or similar location, with all telephone/data/audio cabling to other parts of the house home-run to this location.
If you run 'smurf' (flexbible blue fire-rated plastic tubing) to each room, and two each to bedrooms, media room, then you should be ready for anything.
When you run the smurf, draw 2xCat5e to each room along with any necessary speaker cable. Most fire codes will permit you to leave in a 'pull line' of a code-accepted material, so you can easily draw more cables (fiber, etc) as needed.
When running the 'smurf' tubing, try to avoid running in parallel with power conduits, or if you must, maximize the separation. Where you pass power lines, try to intersect at right angles.
Maybe it's because they are the only news organization on the fucking planet that isn't owned by AOL/Time Warner, Fox, Belo or Clear Channel?
...
I am a liberal. This means I read books and have opposable thumbs.
LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel... all owned by
a firm not on your list.
Oh wait, they are (relatively) conservative papers, so you can't possibly trust their reporting.
IfI want a leftist viewpoint, I read Salon. When I want to see what the extreme right wing is saying, I read WorldNetDaily. Slashdot tends to lean about as far to the left as Salon, but doesn't have as much porn, which I suspect is the real reason many people subscribe.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually done complete 'Jumpstart' installations of new servers from thousands of miles away.
Hardware compatibility was actually pretty good, with 2.6 and 7 each supporting a good range of major-brand (Compaq, Dell, IBM, etc) PCs, and even a number of laptops.
Solaris x86 wasn't something you would generally use to deploy a server (Sun did want to sell a few Sparcs), but it did serve real purposes.
Given that Sun makes their money off the Sparc hardware, to the extent that they give away the operating system, that would be a bad move for them.There was also the short story (probably published in F&SF magazine?) where the local bordello went out of business, and everybody bid up the mirrors to amazing prices after hearing a rumor of 'slow glass' type image extraction from antique mirrors...
All I see out there is Windows DLL files and Pentium-optimized Linux source.
I'd pay good money for a hardware MPEG+DiVX encoder/decoder on a PCI card with an open API.
Liquid(TJ) writes:
Why would you assume that in the future people will choose to move to RF instead of wired connectivity?
Is the future somehow going to magically eliminate the problem of interference, the security concerns, the waste of omnidirectional broadcasting, the concerns about the side-effects of pumping radio waves into the environment?
I agree that it is unlikely that ten years from now we will be using copper wires. But, barring the development of stable wormholes or quantum tunneling or other such 'magic', I'm pretty damn sure the connectivity will be via some physical link, perhaps a vastly improved fiberoptic.
Part of it might be lack of granuality- there are just three competing video formats in the world, but more than three regions:
Another issue is that DVD are different in that they usually offer both the original soundtrack and a local dub, where most tapes were only available with the local-language soundtrack. For example, many of my US DVDs have a Japanese or French soundtrack also). Both Japan and the USA use NTSC, but they are in different regions, and Japanese releases of US movies are delayed by six months.
I've actually seen similar products for sale at $99 in consumer electronics catalogs as a way to catch your kids surfing porn.
While I have not (yet) seen equivalent products for USB on the market, sniffing USB is even easier than PS/2.
Isn't that pretty much what I said?
Yes and no. The DVD player just takes the signal on the disk and dumps it out to your TV, projector, etc. Generally the player doesn't care if the signal on the disk is PAL, SECAM, or NTSC.
Wrong. My research and experience confirms that the disk itself is encoded as NTSC, PAL, etc.That is to say, I live in the USA, and I personally have a copy of ' South Park: vol 4 ', as released in Region 2. This disk is clearly labeled as 'PAL'.
I can play this disk in a 'region free' Apex player on my NTSC television, and it works fine because the Apex internally does the conversion from PAL to NTSC.
A friend of mine has another brand of 'region free' DVD player, and while the player plays the disk, his TV displays a severely distorted picture.
In other words:
DISKS CONTAIN PAL CONTENT, OR NTSC CONTENT, OR BOTH. A PAL DISK WILL NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY ON A NTSC-ONLY AMERICAN TELEVISION SET.
I know this both from references and from personal experience. If you claim otherwise, prove me wrong.
There's an old geek brain-teaser that goes like this:
How is this possible?
The story as I heard it, which I cannot find any verification of from Ritchie's web site, is that a C interpreter was written in B, and the source code for a C compiler was run through the interpreter and used to compile itself.
(The actual history of the evolution of B into C is rather complex, and it is not clear whether this fable is true.)
If you follow the link to Cisco's site, there is a link on the right for the video presentation.
Because the USA is a cultural behemoth, Europe has an ample supply of players and televisions with the ability to decode and display NTSC disks with reasonable accuracy.
In the USA, there are very few means to play your PAL-encoded disks without distorted colors and other artifacts. The converter devices and the few PAL capable TVs sold for US use are both found in only two grades: cheaply made models with poor quality, or very expensive.
The best solution might be to check availability of American (NTSC/Region 1versions) of movies at good prices in the USA, and sell off the easily replaceble disks before you leave the Netherlands.
Most DVD players are NTSC/PAL/SECAM agnostic- If the region coding allows the disk to be played, the player dumps the signal out to your TV using whatever format it is encoded in.
IOW, if you have a 'no region' DVD disk with PAL content, it still won't play on the average North American NTSC television.
Playing a DVD under MS-Windows to a VGA monitor ignores the encoding, and some DVD decoder cards for PC's (e.g. DXR2 or Hollywood+/DXR3) will convert the signal between PAL and NTSC before output to your TV.
http://www.techtronics.com/uk/shop/87-00-video-sta ndards-ntsc-pal.html
The management turned a blind eye when your fellow employees would grill you about your religion, and anybody who would admit to a 'strange' religion (or no religion at all) didn't last long in that company.
A 'pagan' or atheist is going to have a hard time get the EEOC to take an interest in their claim of discrimination.
The system can handle stacks up to about ten chips high, and can read 40+ chips in a matter of seconds, determining where on the field each stack is, and the individual serial number of the embedded RF tag in each chip.
The problem of being able to scan people as they walk through the door and determine how many notes of what denomination are in their wallet has not yet been solved...
Aside from your misleading quotes, your arguments are also bogus.
As I said before, 'intellectual property' cannot be equated with 'real property', because a person can infringe on your 'IP rights' without denying you the use of your property.
If you steal my car, I cannot drive it. If you make a copy of my operating system, your 'theft' in no way infringes on my use of my official version.
If you copy my operating system and give copies away to your poor welfare-collecting pirate friends, I still haven't suffered any tangible loss, other than a continuing infringement on my 'IP rights', and some nebulous concept of loss of control over the distribution of my product.
If you turn around and make 'counterfeit' copies that look like my official copies of my software, and sell it to people who think they are buying the real thing, you are depriving me of 'actual' revenue.
Generally, giving away a copy of a commercial product is ethically acceptable, selling compilation disks or download access for a small fee (to cover media or bandwidth costs) is a grey area, and producing 'counterfeit' software that looks like the real thing is seen as the only aspect of piracy that is truly 'wrong'.
The difference in most people's minds is that it is okay to make copies when you would never have paid for a legitimate version. The real criminals are the ones who sell counterfeit copies, where the buyer is somebody who would have purchase the real thing, and might actually have been duped into thinking they were buying a legitimate product.
The difference is, if I take your spear, you starve to death, because you lose the use of your 'real property'.If I make my own copy using my own materials (flint, rawhide, wood), you still have your spear.
If you sell spears for an arm and a leg (literally) and I would/could never pay your price, how are you being hurt when I make my own copy of your product instead of buying it?
There are ways to make money off of 'intellectual property' without draconian copyright enforcement. For example, there are bands who give away MP3s of their music, and make their real profits off of the concerts.I'd pay for a DVD of the entire adcritic site.
Make it region-free and unencrypted, with access to the editorial content of the site via DVD-ROM.
Pressing disks is probably still cheaper than their bandwidth costs had been :-)
I get the feeling that the original archive is missing much of the early history of the alt.* hierarchy, among other gaping holes.
With this in place, 'stack overflow' exploits don't execute.
The OSFS (Oh Shit! File System) (TM)
The next step in preventing data recovery is the Oh Shit! filesystem. This is a CFS used solely for the storage of 'temporary data', where the key is randomly generated at boot time. If the system is shutdown, crashes, or loses power, all data is lost... irrecovably.
For the really paranoid, I've got friends working on the encryption of off-core memory, so the key only ever exists inside the CPU and on-chip cache.
As to why people don't torch their warez collection when the Feds are kicking in the door, perhaps because that is a criminal act in of itself :-)
When I did my home office, I had the electricians put in 'quad' grounded outlets and 20-AMP circuits all around.
The cost for quads isn't much more than the cost for the usual 2-outlet boxes, and makes finding a spare outlet for additional systems much easier. The use of 20A breakers means that you are that much more likely to trip the 10/15A circuit breaker on a power strip before you trip a breaker down at the main panel.
You might also consider a whole house surge protector.
The non-licensed spectrum, especially the 2.4Ghz range where 802.11b lives, is open to all sorts of consumer devices. A couple of neighbors with wirelss X-Cams and your 802.11b network is drowned in noise, totally dead. (I have tested this).
Security is also a major risk- wireless can easily be sniffed and is not difficult to spoof.Do you really want some script kiddie rooting your fridge?
What I would do is build a patch panel or wiring closet in a basement or similar location, with all telephone/data/audio cabling to other parts of the house home-run to this location.
If you run 'smurf' (flexbible blue fire-rated plastic tubing) to each room, and two each to bedrooms, media room, then you should be ready for anything.
When you run the smurf, draw 2xCat5e to each room along with any necessary speaker cable. Most fire codes will permit you to leave in a 'pull line' of a code-accepted material, so you can easily draw more cables (fiber, etc) as needed.
When running the 'smurf' tubing, try to avoid running in parallel with power conduits, or if you must, maximize the separation. Where you pass power lines, try to intersect at right angles.
LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel... all owned by a firm not on your list.
Oh wait, they are (relatively) conservative papers, so you can't possibly trust their reporting.
IfI want a leftist viewpoint, I read Salon. When I want to see what the extreme right wing is saying, I read WorldNetDaily. Slashdot tends to lean about as far to the left as Salon, but doesn't have as much porn, which I suspect is the real reason many people subscribe.
No, honestly, I just read it for the articles!