I agree with you. The parent has misunderstood something, I think it should be apparent from the article he linked to. I didn't read it, this is/.:)
First of all, nowadays dynamic RAM doesn't even have a real capacitor for each bit, but it uses wires as (real small but cheap) capacitors. The capacitors are so small that when the RAM reads a bit it is destroyed, each time something is read, it has to be rewritten too. The reading circuit ensures this. Because of leakage, they have to be refreshed thousands of times a second, or charge (and information) would be lost.
Add to all that the fact that a forensic method that tries to read very small charges on the storage nodes once the RAM is powered down, would require that the chip is open, some metalization is taken off and some really clever way to read terribly small charges is implemented _off-chip_. The wires you need to contact are something like 200nm away from each other.
Actually, I think 235 patent violation are not really a lot. I guess Microsoft has something like some thousands of obscure software patents. There's lot of open-source software, it should be fairly easy to find a violation for each patent.
I'm not saying that each of them would stand up in court, but the number doesn't seem very high, I wonder if this is because they have already selected those in which they are confident of winning. If so, I fear it will not be as easy as with SCO.
I don't know about Merkel, but I'm quite sure Sarkozy couldn't care less about software patents. And what about Prodi (Italy)? Do you think he can tell the difference between a PC and an OS? Most of European politicians aren't really tech-savvy. As usual, the ones that have to decide are the ones that have no knowledge on the matter.
They will of course take a decision, but based on convenience.
It's clear that if software patents are not allowed, msft will be really pissed off, for this reason most of the left/far-left politicians stand against them, since they blindly hate the US and everything that comes from there - except Michael Moore of course.
Once again, the only parties that stand against software patents do it for idiotic reasons. I'm sick of this.
Why can't anybody discuss software patents without making it a Bush-against-everybody-else / american-corporate-lapdogs-screw-everybody case?
I heard they release a song with each version of OpenBSD but I've never actually listened to it.
Now that I did, I think it's terrible. Other people think the same of old releases...
Anyway, if they like it, they can go on writing bad songs along with great software.
I think that will bring more problems that will prevent its the enforceability.
Where is the border between music and speech? And music and another type of sound?
I know at least a songwriter / performer that 'speaks' in his songs: Giovanni Lindo Ferretti
Where is the difference between a internet-radio and the download of a sound file? What if that file is played while downloaded?
My biggest concern are not the packages, which can be quickly enough downloaded and installed as you described (though I use dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections) but changing the default configs.
That's particularly annoying when the program depends on the particular hw (eg xorg.conf) because I can't copy a config from another box.
Another thing that makes me lose time is downloading the latest stable kernel sources from kernel.org, changing the default config, compiling, installing and troubleshooting the new kernel. I'm always missing something... I use make-kpkg, that helps compiling installing and archiving my pre-compiled kernel packages. I'm not sure it's a good choice, from the security point of view, not to use the debian kenel, but I often need something that's stable enogh only in newer kernels.
Installing the packages takes just 20min, but adding up the rest, it takes me from 2 to 3 hours usually to finish, depending on what the box runs.
I'm using a old pc as a router right now, to connect to my ISP. I set it up almost a year ago, it runs Debian, with iptables, SSH on the outside and a couple more daemons on the local interface.
It has an old Pentium III 800Mhz, a 20GB IDE disk, two 100Mbit ethernet cards, a 270W PSU. Since my internet connection (and my home services) depend on this machine, it's powered on 24/24h, 7 days a week. It's terribly loud and noisy too.
I was satisfied with it, until I realized that even such a "low-power" PC is terribly power-hungry.
I suppose (hope?) it uses a bit more than half of the max output power: P = 270W / 2 = 135W NoH = 365 * 24 = 8.760 number of hours in a year E = 135W * 8.760h = 1.182.600Wh = 1.182KWh
That means that my bill is a lot higher than usual.
I'm planning to buy a WRT54GL and a NSLU2 to save money. I still have to check their power consumption but I hope it will be below 70W, with a disk. And they are almost silent.
The same applies to Europe, sadly. Computers are overestimated, kids are often better off without them at those ages. Good post, I wish I had mod-points.
I think that not everyone is ready to use linux. Let's face it: linux is not for everyone. You need to be smart. When most of people I know ask me about linux, I sedolm recommended to try it out because I know they can't even handle Windows XP. It's sad but it's true.
So then you have a 90Watt electromagnet on your desk. Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to hard disks/microdrives inside laptops and MP3 players?
Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to you?
A microwave radiation of 90W is really a lot, especially if you spend a lot of time in the nearbies. That's a LOT more than the power emitted by your wireless card or bluethoot adapter. Those devices will never be available commercially in Europe, that's because they will never get a CE mark because of obvious EM compatibility issues. I guess they are probably even dangerous for your health.
I'm actually wondering if those devices really exists. I seem to recall there was a Apr 1st joke on engadget that sounded very similar to this... I can't find it right now...
I agree. Even if Microsoft is playing fair - which I doubt - as Linux is the most important alternative to Microsoft products, I'd like Linux-based companies to stay away of them, so that we have real competition. They should be aware that in the long term Microsoft's goal is to outsell Linux, by any means. Remember the "Get the facts" campaign? I would appreciate if Novell would invest more resources in making the open source software it sells better rather than teaming up with their direct competitors.
Next in news: new DVD protection that makes it impossible to play it at all. All you can do is watch at its shiny surface and think about how cool the movie is.
The sad thing is that people will probably still be buying them.
I think that they're looking for better performances, porting it to python won't give a great improvement from this point of view. And MATLAB has a _HUGE_ collection of librieries and toolboxes of mathematical functions, even if python comes "with batteries included", it does not feature builtin functions such as coniugate gradient method solver, for example.
So it won't be nor faster nor (a lot) easier.
Maybe, porting to octave would free him from vendor lock-in, if octave is mature enough.
Nvidia probably has already reverse-engineered lots of ATI cards. It's not a secret that quite all hardware makers reverse-engineer the competitors products to check if they break any of their patents and to get new ideas. Same is - probably - true of ATI. They won't admit it, anyway, for obvious reasons.
When you have a huge music collection, things get damn difficult to find. I can't understan why a lot of post suggest using iTunes or Winamp to manage it. What you use to play a file is whatever you like, it may even be mpg123 or alsaplayer etc... But i think that the submitter is really looking for a full-featured app or script to do massive tagging, massive renaming, rational organization of files in folders and so on.
It would be really useful to check missing tags on musicbrainz and detect double files (in huge collection is common to have more copies of the same file in different locations, and maybe with different tags!)
Tagging and renaming may be done with easytag, but everything else?
The only useful thing in iTunes is the "Show Dupluicates" menu entry.
The firewall is FAR from "crippled". That was mearly spin put on the article to continue the "Microsoft is evil" jabber.
The ping reply is turned off by default, this is terribly annoying in large (private) networks, what if I just wanted to know if the remote machine is up? I have to mail the admin and ask him?
Slashdot Mirror
They want to keep the web open but they even want to make money out of it.
They are a for-profit organization, aren't they?
And what will they say when Konqueror will be released for Windows? Will they complain about kde damaging the OSS world?
I agree with you. The parent has misunderstood something, I think it should be apparent from the article he linked to. I didn't read it, this is /. :)
First of all, nowadays dynamic RAM doesn't even have a real capacitor for each bit, but it uses wires as (real small but cheap) capacitors. The capacitors are so small that when the RAM reads a bit it is destroyed, each time something is read, it has to be rewritten too. The reading circuit ensures this.
Because of leakage, they have to be refreshed thousands of times a second, or charge (and information) would be lost.
Add to all that the fact that a forensic method that tries to read very small charges on the storage nodes once the RAM is powered down, would require that the chip is open, some metalization is taken off and some really clever way to read terribly small charges is implemented _off-chip_. The wires you need to contact are something like 200nm away from each other.
I think it's not possible.
The quote in the text is wrong:
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
Should be:
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Poetry should be quoted correctly, or not quoted at all.
Actually, I think 235 patent violation are not really a lot. I guess Microsoft has something like some thousands of obscure software patents.
There's lot of open-source software, it should be fairly easy to find a violation for each patent.
I'm not saying that each of them would stand up in court, but the number doesn't seem very high, I wonder if this is because they have already selected those in which they are confident of winning. If so, I fear it will not be as easy as with SCO.
I believe that anyone using my code should leave to others the same freedoms I left them. Therefore, I GPL.
I don't know about Merkel, but I'm quite sure Sarkozy couldn't care less about software patents.
And what about Prodi (Italy)? Do you think he can tell the difference between a PC and an OS?
Most of European politicians aren't really tech-savvy. As usual, the ones that have to decide are the ones that have no knowledge on the matter.
They will of course take a decision, but based on convenience.
It's clear that if software patents are not allowed, msft will be really pissed off, for this reason most of the left/far-left politicians stand against them, since they blindly hate the US and everything that comes from there - except Michael Moore of course.
Once again, the only parties that stand against software patents do it for idiotic reasons. I'm sick of this.
Why can't anybody discuss software patents without making it a Bush-against-everybody-else / american-corporate-lapdogs-screw-everybody case?
I heard they release a song with each version of OpenBSD but I've never actually listened to it.
Now that I did, I think it's terrible. Other people think the same of old releases...
Anyway, if they like it, they can go on writing bad songs along with great software.
I think that will bring more problems that will prevent its the enforceability.
Where is the border between music and speech? And music and another type of sound?
I know at least a songwriter / performer that 'speaks' in his songs: Giovanni Lindo Ferretti
Where is the difference between a internet-radio and the download of a sound file? What if that file is played while downloaded?
There are plenty of players that support the DAAP protocol. At least the pre-iTunes-v7.x version of the protocol.
I'm using it right now on ppc - and it works fine.
Maybe you should try one of the patches, those changes will be included in Linux 2.6.21.
My biggest concern are not the packages, which can be quickly enough downloaded and installed as you described (though I use dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections) but changing the default configs.
That's particularly annoying when the program depends on the particular hw (eg xorg.conf) because I can't copy a config from another box.
Another thing that makes me lose time is downloading the latest stable kernel sources from kernel.org, changing the default config, compiling, installing and troubleshooting the new kernel. I'm always missing something... I use make-kpkg, that helps compiling installing and archiving my pre-compiled kernel packages. I'm not sure it's a good choice, from the security point of view, not to use the debian kenel, but I often need something that's stable enogh only in newer kernels.
Installing the packages takes just 20min, but adding up the rest, it takes me from 2 to 3 hours usually to finish, depending on what the box runs.
I'm using a old pc as a router right now, to connect to my ISP. I set it up almost a year ago, it runs Debian, with iptables, SSH on the outside and a couple more daemons on the local interface.
It has an old Pentium III 800Mhz, a 20GB IDE disk, two 100Mbit ethernet cards, a 270W PSU. Since my internet connection (and my home services) depend on this machine, it's powered on 24/24h, 7 days a week. It's terribly loud and noisy too.
I was satisfied with it, until I realized that even such a "low-power" PC is terribly power-hungry.
I suppose (hope?) it uses a bit more than half of the max output power:
P = 270W / 2 = 135W
NoH = 365 * 24 = 8.760 number of hours in a year
E = 135W * 8.760h = 1.182.600Wh = 1.182KWh
That means that my bill is a lot higher than usual.
I'm planning to buy a WRT54GL and a NSLU2 to save money. I still have to check their power consumption but I hope it will be below 70W, with a disk. And they are almost silent.
The same applies to Europe, sadly. Computers are overestimated, kids are often better off without them at those ages.
Good post, I wish I had mod-points.
Let it sell itself to the right customer.
I think that not everyone is ready to use linux. Let's face it: linux is not for everyone. You need to be smart. When most of people I know ask me about linux, I sedolm recommended to try it out because I know they can't even handle Windows XP. It's sad but it's true.
So then you have a 90Watt electromagnet on your desk. Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to hard disks/microdrives inside laptops and MP3 players?
Has anyone wondered yet what will happen to you?
A microwave radiation of 90W is really a lot, especially if you spend a lot of time in the nearbies. That's a LOT more than the power emitted by your wireless card or bluethoot adapter. Those devices will never be available commercially in Europe, that's because they will never get a CE mark because of obvious EM compatibility issues. I guess they are probably even dangerous for your health.
I'm actually wondering if those devices really exists. I seem to recall there was a Apr 1st joke on engadget that sounded very similar to this... I can't find it right now...
I agree.
Even if Microsoft is playing fair - which I doubt - as Linux is the most important alternative to Microsoft products, I'd like Linux-based companies to stay away of them, so that we have real competition. They should be aware that in the long term Microsoft's goal is to outsell Linux, by any means. Remember the "Get the facts" campaign?
I would appreciate if Novell would invest more resources in making the open source software it sells better rather than teaming up with their direct competitors.
Next in news: new DVD protection that makes it impossible to play it at all. All you can do is watch at its shiny surface and think about how cool the movie is.
The sad thing is that people will probably still be buying them.
C&D Letter in 3..2..1...
It seems that Charles Hannum has had his commit priviledges removed too, on 1st Sept, because he refused to sign a new agreement.
http://bsdnews.com/view_story.php3?story_id=5998
I think that they're looking for better performances, porting it to python won't give a great improvement from this point of view. And MATLAB has a _HUGE_ collection of librieries and toolboxes of mathematical functions, even if python comes "with batteries included", it does not feature builtin functions such as coniugate gradient method solver, for example. So it won't be nor faster nor (a lot) easier. Maybe, porting to octave would free him from vendor lock-in, if octave is mature enough.
Nvidia probably has already reverse-engineered lots of ATI cards. It's not a secret that quite all hardware makers reverse-engineer the competitors products to check if they break any of their patents and to get new ideas. Same is - probably - true of ATI.
They won't admit it, anyway, for obvious reasons.
When you have a huge music collection, things get damn difficult to find. I can't understan why a lot of post suggest using iTunes or Winamp to manage it. What you use to play a file is whatever you like, it may even be mpg123 or alsaplayer etc... But i think that the submitter is really looking for a full-featured app or script to do massive tagging, massive renaming, rational organization of files in folders and so on.
It would be really useful to check missing tags on musicbrainz and detect double files (in huge collection is common to have more copies of the same file in different locations, and maybe with different tags!)
Tagging and renaming may be done with easytag, but everything else?
The only useful thing in iTunes is the "Show Dupluicates" menu entry.
Sounds nice if you have a flat T1/fiber optic connection...
The firewall is FAR from "crippled". That was mearly spin put on the article to continue the "Microsoft is evil" jabber.
The ping reply is turned off by default, this is terribly annoying in large (private) networks, what if I just wanted to know if the remote machine is up? I have to mail the admin and ask him?
Guess what, China is nearly not the land of freedom. Not even freedom of choiche, let alone freedom of speak.
So stop that nonsense about corporations' pressure, the only type of pression in China is the one by the Government upon chinese people.