I must say I find it difficult do disagree with him on this. In the early days of D3D there was heavy contention between OpenGL and D3D, I myself was very vocal on the side of OpenGL. OpenGL has barely moved forward in the intervening years whereas D3D has developed at an alarming rate. OpenGL support for the full range of features available on different graphics cards is limited at best whereas D3D has done a pretty good job of keeping up (although there are some nasty sides to the yearly release of the API).
Now I know I'm going to get flamed for saying anything pro a Microsoft api, and the first comment is going to be 'But Id software don't have a problem'. The largest benefit with openGL is that the specification defines exactly how every thing gets done, if the hardware can't do something it gets done in software, this unfortunately is also it's down falling. ID software don't have a problem, whenever they are about to release a big-name title all the card vendors run around making sure there drivers are optimally configured for the feature set ID is using. If you're a smaller developer, things work differently, the vendors are not as concerned with you and basically you have to limit yourself to using the features that the big-boys have already used. With D3D the situation is different, you are no longer shielded from the differences between cards but this can be used to your advantage, using once set of optimal features to achieve an affect on one card and another set on another (or a simpler effect).
The ironic situation here is that (Microsoft proprietary) D3D API is providing the smaller developer with a far more free development platform than the open OpenGL.
I must say I find it difficult do disagree with him on this. In the early days of D3D there was heavy contention between OpenGL and D3D, I myself was very vocal on the side of OpenGL. OpenGL has barely moved forward in the intervening years whereas D3D has developed at an alarming rate. OpenGL support for the full range of features available on different graphics cards is limited at best whereas D3D has done a pretty good job of keeping up (although there are some nasty sides to the yearly release of the API).
Now I know I'm going to get flamed for saying anything pro a Microsoft api, and the first comment is going to be 'But Id software don't have a problem'. The largest benefit with openGL is that the specification defines exactly how every thing gets done, if the hardware can't do something it gets done in software, this unfortunately is also it's down falling. ID software don't have a problem, whenever they are about to release a big-name title all the card vendors run around making sure there drivers are optimally configured for the feature set ID is using. If you're a smaller developer, things work differently, the vendors are not as concerned with you and basically you have to limit yourself to using the features that the big-boys have already used. With D3D the situation is different, you are no longer shielded from the differences between cards but this can be used to your advantage, using once set of optimal features to achieve an affect on one card and another set on another (or a simpler effect).
The ironic situation here is that (Microsoft proprietary) D3D API is providing the smaller developer with a far more free development platform than the open OpenGL.
I know slashdot is a usually a forum for slaging things of, making some kind of insightful or informative comment but I simply thought this was a really good idea.
The only issue here is will they try and patent the very principle and if not will systems from different vendors be interoperable. What we need here is a nice clean open standard so we can finally put the old phone system to rest along side the dodo, the dinosaurs and our freedom of speech.
If this is going to cause CD prices to drop for US customers this will further increase the (already significant) difference between CD prices in the UK and the US. It is already clear that the music distributors are taking advantage of strong import rules (as lobbied for by the music and film industry) to screw the British customer.
Even now, before this agreement you can expect to pay 50% more for a cd in the UK than in the US, does anyone know if this will affect prices across the board or will it (as I suspect) just serve to further increase the price difference between our countries? If this is the case what can we in the UK do to improve our situation, we are fed up with our own government supporting this kind of abuse of the British citizen.
Exactly the same situation exists for DVD (that is why I am strong support of the DeCss case) and for a while their was a strong import market until the police/ce (prompted by the government, who were themselves prompted by the US movie industry) raided all the distributors to enforce the region coding system.
This document is incredibly long and draw out, and yet it can be paraphrased down to "you can hide small bit's of data in a TCP/IP header". The document is full of minor technical errors (ascii values in the range 0-255, nah! Just call it an octet).
If you really want to go about hiding a data communications channel try encoding it icmp packets (A ping can be up to almost 64k filled with whatever you like), or maybe additional http headers. Going to all this effort for a hidden comms channel seems almost deranged.
Go look at the intel website link and it will take you about 5 seconds to see that this has nothing to do with open source. No designs have been published, no schematics, not even decent scale picture of the insides.
In fact what has happened is intel has published it's usually array of developer documentation online. This is the same information that has been freely available for all it's over processors. Yes intel has made these freely available online (a good thing), but even this is not new.
What we have here is a case of a journalist slapping the term 'open source' on a news item to get a bit of attention, either that or a journalist who never reads the material, some how 'technical specifications and programmer docs' has become 'blueprints', a bit a leap of imagination if ever I saw one.
This reminds me a lot of that altervista 'open sourceing' which just turned out to be the html code for a search box.
- "it is obviously not stealing." - Get your facts strait.
No way! Paying for your internet connection just pays your ISP, it does not pay for the content on the internet. The content provider you are viewing also pays bandwidth costs.
Instead, think of it as a premium rate phone number, you are paying for the ADDITIONAL content by downloading the ad-banner. If companies started adding buttons to telephones that caused a premium rate call to be charged at normal rates you would soon see the premium rate numbers disapear.
I agree Filtering spam is not stealing, you have not asked for anything, you get nothing out of it in return. Changing the channel during commercials is not stealing, the commercials have not gone away, the Tv company is still paid for runnign them and the program you are watching still gets financed.
Most Banner advertising gets sold on a CPM basis, if you don't download the banner then the website doesn't get paid.
I admit lynx is an interesting case in point, however lynx does not hide the fact it is a text only browser. The key point here is that lynx does not avoid displaying ad-banners, it just can't. The difference here is that an option like this in mozila is diliberately avoiding the banners.
When you pay for your internet conenction you are paying for a connection, not the content. Thats the fundamental basis of the internet, if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
My methodology is not draconian, I find banners as anoying as the next man, I am however a realist, content that is payed for by banners would not be here if it were not for the banners. Frankly I find your argument hipocritical that you post such an opinun on a website that IS PAYED FOR BY BANNERS.
Almost all the commercial WebPages on the internet use ad-banners to make money, for many websites (slashdot and yahoo included) this is their primary source of ongoing income. If you include features to block ad-banners in a major browser you will damage their income.
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them. Now obviously there is little to stop individuals from patching browsers, proxies etc.. Themselves but really and truly is this not steeling from the web publishers?
It's nice to see redhat putting some cold hard cash back into the open source community to encourage other companies to go where they have gone before (Although obviously they expect to make some money back).
It's generally been a rule with technology that the first practical solution to a problem becomes the defacto standard, regardless usually of better solutions further down the road. There have been instances where standards have developed under unix and then been railroaded of by Microsoft, the reason for this is simple. The wintel architecture dominates the desktop, and to a lesser extent the corporate server market, if you put together a solution under linux you MUST get someone to write the windows/NT drivers to go with it. It's is only when you have the windows drivers that can talk to your new protocol (or the windows server and linux client) does it truly provide a solution as far as the wintel dominated corporate sector are concerned. Once you provide a solution people will use it, and once actually they start using it there is very little anyone including MS can do to change that.
MySQL has no subqueries. Instead of performing one complex query that is entirely processed on the database end, MySQL users have to perform 2 or more serial queries that each must go over inter-process or network communication between the app and the database. This significantly reduces the speed advantages of MySQL.
MySQL has no stored procedures. If a series of DB actions need to be performed in a block, MySQL requires each SQL statement to be sent from the app, again in a serial manner, again over IPC or network.
MySQL has no triggers or foreign key constraints. Data invariants must be maintained by application-level code, which requires building carefully-planned abstractions to guarantee integrity (for every means of accessing your DB), and even more unnecessary back-and-forth communication between the app and the database.
MySQL only has table-level locking. Only one user can write to a table at the same time. For web usage, that falls under the category of "pathetic."
Is this a good or bad time to point out that slashdot uses mySQL? This article seems to avoid the real point, all software has flaws and if you understand the software and pick the appropriate peice for your needs then everything works fine. MySQL is not exactly the most advance peice DB software on the face of the earth but what it does it does well.
I remember a really cool Mud that has a 'bladder pressure' statistic, drink (particularly alcohol) caused it to climb faster and sooner or later you had to relieve yourself. There was a really great section where you were stuck somewhere with no conveniences and had to find a way out before you exploded. Does this ring any bells, I would love to know what game this was and if there are any incarnations of it still online.
There are some really funny ideas here, of course I feel I should point out that many of the 'inebriation' Features suggested for driving games already exist in one form or another in the Carmageddon games (I had the honor of doing some coding on a couple of it's incarnations).
I agree, Microsoft buisiness practices are the big issue in the case, and the one people should stick to. Microsoft are guilty as hell of monopoly missuse.
The side issue of making a browser part of the gui is the issue in my post, the government and the doj should not be able to dictate on this issue.
If you read the web page you soon realize that Konqueror is more than just a web browser, it's view and file manager as well. Sound familiar? Internet explorer does this for windows and this has been one of the arguments against Microsoft in the recent court case. I personally believe that MS and now KDE have got it right on this point, many years ago their was a similar argument about GUI's being bundled with the OS but most would object to the absence of one now. I am expecting the same to happen with browser functionality, all desktop operating systems will go this way eventually and one-day we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about.
"(sends network data over copper phone wiring without interfering with the phone calls). ". This sounds a lot like DSL/ADSL in that it sends the data down the line at frequencies outside the normal hearing range. British telecomm use a similar system in their Home-highway and cheap second line products (I don't know if there is equivalent technology being used in the US). Does anyone know if the HP system will interfere with these other technologies, besides am I thought all you guys had wired your houses for Ethernet as well.:-)
If this is anything like the i-opener then the machine costs more than it is sold for with the intention of making some back on subscription. Am I the only one who feels that this kind of hack is a little morally ambiguous at best? I know that is probably not against the fact of the law but in a world where we are taking stands against unjust law left right and center should we not be respecting the intent of deals like this?
In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.
The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.
The action by the Times comes in an article in today's electronic edition. What makes it particularly significant is this paragraph in which our attorney, Martin Garbus, is quoted:
"Take a hypothetical case, he said: If a major newspaper that operated an online news site wrote an article saying that somebody had broken the DVD encryption code, and it linked to a site that had the code on it, 'I think they'd have absolutely every right to do that.'"
2600.com Have regarded this as a vote of support by the NYT.
In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.
The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.
You could could measure the photon at an intermediate point but that resoves the photons quantom state and makes the transmission detectable, since you then must launch a new photon who's state is not defined and is not entagled with the other partys photon the message in transmission will become scramled and your taping will become known.
Slashdot Mirror
And F$#ked up this planet as well.
I must say I find it difficult do disagree with him on this. In the early days of D3D there was heavy contention between OpenGL and D3D, I myself was very vocal on the side of OpenGL. OpenGL has barely moved forward in the intervening years whereas D3D has developed at an alarming rate. OpenGL support for the full range of features available on different graphics cards is limited at best whereas D3D has done a pretty good job of keeping up (although there are some nasty sides to the yearly release of the API).
Now I know I'm going to get flamed for saying anything pro a Microsoft api, and the first comment is going to be 'But Id software don't have a problem'. The largest benefit with openGL is that the specification defines exactly how every thing gets done, if the hardware can't do something it gets done in software, this unfortunately is also it's down falling. ID software don't have a problem, whenever they are about to release a big-name title all the card vendors run around making sure there drivers are optimally configured for the feature set ID is using. If you're a smaller developer, things work differently, the vendors are not as concerned with you and basically you have to limit yourself to using the features that the big-boys have already used. With D3D the situation is different, you are no longer shielded from the differences between cards but this can be used to your advantage, using once set of optimal features to achieve an affect on one card and another set on another (or a simpler effect).
The ironic situation here is that (Microsoft proprietary) D3D API is providing the smaller developer with a far more free development platform than the open OpenGL.
I must say I find it difficult do disagree with him on this. In the early days of D3D there was heavy contention between OpenGL and D3D, I myself was very vocal on the side of OpenGL. OpenGL has barely moved forward in the intervening years whereas D3D has developed at an alarming rate. OpenGL support for the full range of features available on different graphics cards is limited at best whereas D3D has done a pretty good job of keeping up (although there are some nasty sides to the yearly release of the API).
Now I know I'm going to get flamed for saying anything pro a Microsoft api, and the first comment is going to be 'But Id software don't have a problem'. The largest benefit with openGL is that the specification defines exactly how every thing gets done, if the hardware can't do something it gets done in software, this unfortunately is also it's down falling. ID software don't have a problem, whenever they are about to release a big-name title all the card vendors run around making sure there drivers are optimally configured for the feature set ID is using. If you're a smaller developer, things work differently, the vendors are not as concerned with you and basically you have to limit yourself to using the features that the big-boys have already used. With D3D the situation is different, you are no longer shielded from the differences between cards but this can be used to your advantage, using once set of optimal features to achieve an affect on one card and another set on another (or a simpler effect).
The ironic situation here is that (Microsoft proprietary) D3D API is providing the smaller developer with a far more free development platform than the open OpenGL.
I know slashdot is a usually a forum for slaging things of, making some kind of insightful or informative comment but I simply thought this was a really good idea.
The only issue here is will they try and patent the very principle and if not will systems from different vendors be interoperable. What we need here is a nice clean open standard so we can finally put the old phone system to rest along side the dodo, the dinosaurs and our freedom of speech.
If this is going to cause CD prices to drop for US customers this will further increase the (already significant) difference between CD prices in the UK and the US. It is already clear that the music distributors are taking advantage of strong import rules (as lobbied for by the music and film industry) to screw the British customer.
Even now, before this agreement you can expect to pay 50% more for a cd in the UK than in the US, does anyone know if this will affect prices across the board or will it (as I suspect) just serve to further increase the price difference between our countries? If this is the case what can we in the UK do to improve our situation, we are fed up with our own government supporting this kind of abuse of the British citizen.
Exactly the same situation exists for DVD (that is why I am strong support of the DeCss case) and for a while their was a strong import market until the police/ce (prompted by the government, who were themselves prompted by the US movie industry) raided all the distributors to enforce the region coding system.
This document is incredibly long and draw out, and yet it can be paraphrased down to "you can hide small bit's of data in a TCP/IP header". The document is full of minor technical errors (ascii values in the range 0-255, nah! Just call it an octet).
If you really want to go about hiding a data communications channel try encoding it icmp packets (A ping can be up to almost 64k filled with whatever you like), or maybe additional http headers. Going to all this effort for a hidden comms channel seems almost deranged.
Go look at the intel website link and it will take you about 5 seconds to see that this has nothing to do with open source. No designs have been published, no schematics, not even decent scale picture of the insides.
In fact what has happened is intel has published it's usually array of developer documentation online. This is the same information that has been freely available for all it's over processors. Yes intel has made these freely available online (a good thing), but even this is not new.
What we have here is a case of a journalist slapping the term 'open source' on a news item to get a bit of attention, either that or a journalist who never reads the material, some how 'technical specifications and programmer docs' has become 'blueprints', a bit a leap of imagination if ever I saw one.
This reminds me a lot of that altervista 'open sourceing' which just turned out to be the html code for a search box.
- "it is obviously not stealing." - Get your facts strait.
No way! Paying for your internet connection just pays your ISP, it does not pay for the content on the internet. The content provider you are viewing also pays bandwidth costs.
Instead, think of it as a premium rate phone number, you are paying for the ADDITIONAL content by downloading the ad-banner. If companies started adding buttons to telephones that caused a premium rate call to be charged at normal rates you would soon see the premium rate numbers disapear.
I agree Filtering spam is not stealing, you have not asked for anything, you get nothing out of it in return. Changing the channel during commercials is not stealing, the commercials have not gone away, the Tv company is still paid for runnign them and the program you are watching still gets financed.
Most Banner advertising gets sold on a CPM basis, if you don't download the banner then the website doesn't get paid.
I admit lynx is an interesting case in point, however lynx does not hide the fact it is a text only browser. The key point here is that lynx does not avoid displaying ad-banners, it just can't. The difference here is that an option like this in mozila is diliberately avoiding the banners.
When you pay for your internet conenction you are paying for a connection, not the content. Thats the fundamental basis of the internet, if you remove the capability for content providers to make money you remove once chunk of the web, you will just be left with hobby sites, pay sites, charity sites and online stores.
My methodology is not draconian, I find banners as anoying as the next man, I am however a realist, content that is payed for by banners would not be here if it were not for the banners. Frankly I find your argument hipocritical that you post such an opinun on a website that IS PAYED FOR BY BANNERS.
Almost all the commercial WebPages on the internet use ad-banners to make money, for many websites (slashdot and yahoo included) this is their primary source of ongoing income. If you include features to block ad-banners in a major browser you will damage their income.
If this were to really happen you would run the risk of moving into an arms race between website designers trying to squeeze their banners past the checks (in order to gain ad-revenue) and the browser hackers trying to eliminate them. Now obviously there is little to stop individuals from patching browsers, proxies etc.. Themselves but really and truly is this not steeling from the web publishers?
It's nice to see redhat putting some cold hard cash back into the open source community to encourage other companies to go where they have gone before (Although obviously they expect to make some money back).
It's generally been a rule with technology that the first practical solution to a problem becomes the defacto standard, regardless usually of better solutions further down the road. There have been instances where standards have developed under unix and then been railroaded of by Microsoft, the reason for this is simple. The wintel architecture dominates the desktop, and to a lesser extent the corporate server market, if you put together a solution under linux you MUST get someone to write the windows/NT drivers to go with it. It's is only when you have the windows drivers that can talk to your new protocol (or the windows server and linux client) does it truly provide a solution as far as the wintel dominated corporate sector are concerned. Once you provide a solution people will use it, and once actually they start using it there is very little anyone including MS can do to change that.
A quick quote from their website.
"A special thanks to The Macintosh News Network for driving some traffic to our site this morning."
I believe the phrase is "You ain't seen nothing yet!"
Well, thats the second 'first' mapping of the human genome this year. I think I can safely predict at least 4 more 'first' mappings this year.
A Few More Details (quoted from the article)
Instead of performing one complex query that is entirely processed on the database end, MySQL users have to perform 2 or more serial queries that each must go over inter-process or network communication between the app and the database. This significantly reduces the speed advantages of MySQL.
If a series of DB actions need to be performed in a block, MySQL requires each SQL statement to be sent from the app, again in a serial manner, again over IPC or network.
Data invariants must be maintained by application-level code, which requires building carefully-planned abstractions to guarantee integrity (for every means of accessing your DB), and even more unnecessary back-and-forth communication between the app and the database.
Only one user can write to a table at the same time. For web usage, that falls under the category of "pathetic."
Is this a good or bad time to point out that slashdot uses mySQL? This article seems to avoid the real point, all software has flaws and if you understand the software and pick the appropriate peice for your needs then everything works fine. MySQL is not exactly the most advance peice DB software on the face of the earth but what it does it does well.
I remember a really cool Mud that has a 'bladder pressure' statistic, drink (particularly alcohol) caused it to climb faster and sooner or later you had to relieve yourself. There was a really great section where you were stuck somewhere with no conveniences and had to find a way out before you exploded. Does this ring any bells, I would love to know what game this was and if there are any incarnations of it still online.
This has my vote for troll of the year
There are some really funny ideas here, of course I feel I should point out that many of the 'inebriation' Features suggested for driving games already exist in one form or another in the Carmageddon games (I had the honor of doing some coding on a couple of it's incarnations).
I agree, Microsoft buisiness practices are the big issue in the case, and the one people should stick to. Microsoft are guilty as hell of monopoly missuse.
The side issue of making a browser part of the gui is the issue in my post, the government and the doj should not be able to dictate on this issue.
What happend here?
It looks like your post was intended for the last news item "Attacking Open Source".
If you read the web page you soon realize that Konqueror is more than just a web browser, it's view and file manager as well. Sound familiar? Internet explorer does this for windows and this has been one of the arguments against Microsoft in the recent court case. I personally believe that MS and now KDE have got it right on this point, many years ago their was a similar argument about GUI's being bundled with the OS but most would object to the absence of one now. I am expecting the same to happen with browser functionality, all desktop operating systems will go this way eventually and one-day we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about.
"(sends network data over copper phone wiring without interfering with the phone calls). ". This sounds a lot like DSL/ADSL in that it sends the data down the line at frequencies outside the normal hearing range. British telecomm use a similar system in their Home-highway and cheap second line products (I don't know if there is equivalent technology being used in the US). Does anyone know if the HP system will interfere with these other technologies, besides am I thought all you guys had wired your houses for Ethernet as well. :-)
If this is anything like the i-opener then the machine costs more than it is sold for with the intention of making some back on subscription. Am I the only one who feels that this kind of hack is a little morally ambiguous at best? I know that is probably not against the fact of the law but in a world where we are taking stands against unjust law left right and center should we not be respecting the intent of deals like this?
04/28/00
In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.
The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.
The action by the Times comes in an article in today's electronic edition. What makes it particularly significant is this paragraph in which our attorney, Martin Garbus, is quoted:
At the bottom of the page, they do precisely that, linking not only to 2600, but to "2600's catalog of DeCSS mirror sites".
In what we see as an important show of support from a major force in journalism, the New York Times has linked directly to our list of sites which currently house the DeCSS code.
The links have been a source of contention in recent weeks, as the MPAA and eight Hollywood film studios have sought to force us to remove them, claiming the links are the same as having the code published on our own site. We see it differently - while they may have been able to get a federal court to order the material off of our site, forbidding us from telling the world what other sites still have it would be a very ominous precedent to set.
Read the rest of their news item Here.
Garbage,
You could could measure the photon at an intermediate point but that resoves the photons quantom state and makes the transmission detectable, since you then must launch a new photon who's state is not defined and is not entagled with the other partys photon the message in transmission will become scramled and your taping will become known.