One Co-Lo service I visited had nice individually locked cages, all ordered from the same manufacturer. Except that the manufacturer was cheap, and all the cages had the same key! So much for physical security.
What was really funny is that I discovered this while walking through their machine room as a potential customer. You shoulda seen the sales rep's eyes pop when I took the key from one cage and opened another one.
There was an interesting thread about the GPL vs. BSDL in comp.os.openbsd.misc recently.
Finally, one poster summed up the issue nicely. He said that the BSD license empowers developers, and the GPL empowers users. He also said that the GPL was bad for this reason.
That's exactly the issue. I spend a goodly percentage of my time as a software developer. But I spend all of my time in front of a computer (and increasingly elsewhere too) as a computer user. Every time I boot a system, every time I check my mail, I'm a software user. In my role as a systems administrator, I'm a "super-user" and having access to source code is even more important. That's why I like using open source software.
The GPL isn't about making the developer's life easier, but making the software user's life easier.
(offtopic) ... making the world go around
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
I thought it was gravity..?
Actually, it's inertia. Gravity keeps us stuck to the surface of the planet, and the planet in orbit around the sun. And the sun together.
You're still paying for it, just not directly. Every BigMac, t-shirt, and computer game has as part of it's price the advertising budget. You pay for the advertisements, which in turn pays for the "free" content.
I'd rather just pay directly and get exactly what I want, instead of using someone else's idea of what I want.
This is so excellent. Since Amoeba, Plan 9 and EROS are all now open source, there's no excuse not to experiment. Contrary to what Pike might have said, now is an excellent time for OS research. Since hardware is cheap too (I mean come on, an 100Mbps 8-port Ethernet switch for less than USD $200), it's a good time to be in the field, especially looking at distributed and/or parallel computing.
I'm not quite sold on the idea of "everything is a file" notion with Plan 9 (from my understanding of it) but it has a lot of cool ideas. Now if only I had room to set up a 19" rack for a small cluster...
Sheesh. I didn't get even half-way through the court document, and already I can see that the breakup would be a long, drawn-out mess, for Microsoft, for the Justice department that has to oversee it, and for the public.
I'd prefer to see a much simplier solution. Fine them, oh, say $30 billion USD and call it a day.
That would take the wind out of their sails. It would also keep them from buying up a bunch of other companies and technologies, slowing down their encroachment into other areas.
In 5 years, Microsoft (left whole) won't be nearly the factor in the computer industry it is now. The market will be more diverse, and we'll have more and better choices (not that we don't have some good ones now). Let the market decide fairly if it truly wants buggy shit from Redmond.
We don't need another Clinton/Lewinsky affair, dragged out over two or more years. Let's get on with our jobs.
I was curious about the bit mentioned about the NDA. If all your products are open source, I'd think you'd only need an NDA to perhaps cover internal processes that are special, and proprietary software (such as the clustering mentioned elsewhere). How broad was TL's NDA/non-compete?
What would the non-compete part cover, anyway? That I (as a hypothetical employee) can't work for another distribution for a year, or that I can't work on OSS for a year?
So what kind of NDA/non-compete agreement would be appropriate for an Open Source Company?
I don't if you can actually do a front wheelie on a street bike.
I don't know if anyone actually can flip upside down while shooting someone (the chances of me sucessfully completing a back flip are slim under the best of conditions).
I don't know if you really can make masks of other people and have them seem completely realistic.
I do, however, know system administration. In the movie, I just couldn't deal with the fact that the heros thought they could destroy all the copies of the virus, and the problem would be solved. As part of being a responsible sysadmin, I make backups every day. The dailies go in a seperate fire safe every day. The weeklies go off-site in another fire safe. So I guess the scientists in the movies never stored their data on computer?
And if you do have the genetic sequence of a virus, you may not immediately have a viable virus, but you're a long way towards such a goal. Besides, where were all the technicians that also worked on the project? To really finish the job, Ethan would have to kill all of them too.
An additional problem is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to get back in. Even if some other research group in the same company didn't have copies of the work, just knowing what was done (and knowing it's possible) can also take you a long way towards re-implementing it. We re-implement stuff all the time in the OSS world, right? Often pretty darn quickly.
Perhaps someone can do a hardware workaround using an intermediate NVRAM between the SDRAM HD and the hard disk, using principles borrowed from both cache technology and High reliability file systems. But it'll take a bit of work.
You can get pretty good performance with NVRAM, by tightly integrating the OS, the filesystem, and the RAID subsystem. Hop on over to NetApp's Technical Library to read how they did it. In particular, check out File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance which discusses how the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL filesystem) knows (and can take advantage of) how the RAID subsystem works. The NVRAM is mainly used to speed up write performance. They've also got some interesting bits on how the RAM cache works. It gives decent performance, even though NetApp caches tend to be small by modern standards.
Constantly broadcasting your location is a serious invasion of your privacy. Even people who don't pay attention to privacy issues now will probably pay attention to this.
Theoretically it wouldn't be much of a privacy issue of only the wireless service provider knew your location. As a matter of fact, by using some sophisticated triangulation algorithms, they track your cell phone to a few hundred feet now, without GPS.
The problem with that is that there'll probably only going to be a few large advertising firms (like DoubleClick for the Internet now) and so they'll get a pretty good idea of where you go, even if there are some gaps in the record. They'd be able to learn quite a bit about you: where you shop, who your friends are, where you work, etc.
Not that some multi-national corporations can't learn that kind of stuff about me now. However, it'd be a lot harder to piece together information of disparate types. Consistent location information would be much more useful.
Bah. I spend most of my time at work or at home. I have plenty of computing and communication power at both locations. Maybe I should give up all my mobile devices, or at least the ones that can transmit something. At least at home I'm behind a firewall, to restrict the information I reveal to the Internet. Will I need firewall software for my mobile phone too?
I can still get hours of enjoyment out of MULE, and its theme music can still give me chills.
Yeah, like you're taking out a mule to a plot, and time's running out...
That was such an excellent game! Playing the market on smithore, worrying about pirates taking your crystite. Complaining to your friends because they won't sell you food at auction. Those were the days. Wish I had a C64.
Not that there aren't some good ones out now, like Alpha Centauri.
I don't think that Eiffel has any design mistakes, however, I can easily see why people might not like some of Meyer's deliberate design decisions. Meyer has gone very far down a particular road (in terms of OO programming) and come up with something that I think is quite interesting. To really use Eiffel, however, you have to understand how all the parts fit together (and they fit quite tightly). If you buy into the language, the libraries, and the method, then Eiffel has tremendous power.
However, if you don't buy into even a small part of that, Eiffel won't work well for you. Unless all your developers are "on board" with the entire Eiffel paradigm, they're not going to have a good time in the project, nor are they going to produce good code. With Eiffel, it's almost all-or-nothing.
Java is OK, and in my opinion, better than C++. However, some of it's creators' deliberate design decisions don't sit well with me, and overall I don't like it much.
Sather, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be making much progress. The community around Sather is very small, and it is (again in my opinion) not suitable for production systems yet. However, it has some interesting ideas of it's own, and I hope to hear more about it in the future. And of course, some of Sather's deliberate design decisions (like contravariance) don't sit well with me. James
More likely, it was a problem with using mail files in/var/spool/mail (VSM). Even using dot locks and other tricks, it's still quite easy to corrupt the mail folder if there's potentially more than one process writing to the same file.
That's the big win with Maildirs (originally exclusive to qmail). Since each mail message is a separate file, and there is a strict protocol for creating/renaming/deleting those files, the possibility of mail folder corruption is zero. No lost messages.
I should be easy for almost any organization to switch from VSM to Maildirs, unless that org has a bunch of old-time Unix-heads that are totally in love with their existing mail tools and scripts.
For my company, it was trivially easy, because all the users access their mail through the web or IMAP.
There are plenty of tools for Maildirs (including maildirdeliver, which can be used with sendmail) at qmail.org.
"Secondly, behind this... is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced."
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
How many people want to bet that the same kind of discussion took place during the introduction of the printing press? "Oh, this new-fangled print medium just allows you to product many impersonal copies of the same document. What about the skill and craft of the scribers? Where is the personal attention to detail and care that they provide a book?"
It was the printing press that enabled the masses to become literate. It broke the stranglehold the Church had on the Faith, allowing people to read for themselves the holy texts. It completely changed life and society... for the better I think.
And it's happening again with the Internet. The printing press drove the cost of distribution from high to low, allowing many more content creators to reach a wider audience. And now Internet technologies are allowing everyone to become content creators, and driving distribution costs to closer to zero than can be measured.
Hello Mr. Billington? Here's a dollar, go buy a clue. I guess he's never used a good hypertext system. Say you're reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Wouldn't it be nice to have hypertext links to other reports on the subject from the same era? Would that be a lot more convenient than digging through some fscking microfische trying to find newspaper articles. You could spend all day on what could/should be a few clicks.
Public libraries are a political institution, sure, but not as useful as they once were. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have limited space. A lot of the older works get stuck back in storage (or sold at book sales) because few people want to read them anymore. Wouldn't it be nice to continue to have these titles available on-line?
Our greatest literature (Shakespeare, Chaucer and such) is so widely spread and already in electronic form that I'm not worried about it. However, there is a lot more good stuff out there that isn't accessible to anyone. For the less popular authors, there may be only a few dozen copies of their work left. Who knows where they all are (probably stuck in someone's attic), but I bet the Library of Congress has a copy... and can find it!
Heck, there are some excellent works of the 20th century that are now hard to get. For example Vernor Vinge's excellent "The Peace War" was published in the 1981. Just try finding a copy of that now (I have two, and you can't borrow either:-).
I'm sure the LoC should be making an effort to get other materials on-line, but they need to work on books too! The books are actually the most practical stuff they have to put on-line. It's already in a kind digital form (printed text) as opposed to recordings and such. Most books weigh in at a few hundred KB, and you can fit many of them in the space of one high-quality audio recoding.
All in all, a stunning lack of vision from the leadership of the LoC. Why am I not suprised?
I wrote a paper for history class 10 years ago called Technology and It's Effect on Society on some of these same topics. It ranges quite far afield, from nanotech to AI and MUDs.
I'd probably structure it a lot differently today, but I'm still interested in many of the same issues.
So anonymous reporting, when it's being used to snitch on "dangerous kids" is bad? But having Anonymous Cowards is considered an important part of Slashdot.
AC's here are anonymous because they're spewing crap, or because that have important information to disclose, but don't want to reveal themselves. Oftentimes, these ACs give us insight into corporations that are undertaking questionable practices.
So when is it OK to be anonymous? Is it OK to snitch on corporations when they're being bad, but not on people?
Or is it that Pinkerton's making money off the anonymous reporting scheme that bothers people?
I'm not trying to defend Pinkerton (I think their WAVE program will be next to useless), but I do want to know where the line is.
Yup, I loved the SGI I had at home so much I had to buy one for work too.
I've recently been on a quest to get better 3-D graphics performance though. The Nine RevIV support of Direct3D is marginal, and the OpenGL driver is beta, somewhat unstable, slow, and completely unusable for some games like Q3A.
I bought the Number Nine SR9 graphics card because it also has a DFP interface, which I assumed would be compatable with the SGI monitor. I was wrong. It supports the PanelLink-style, similar to the ones on those Compaq DFPs.
Ugh. To play games, I'm building a completely separate system, with an analog monitor so that I can get decent 3-D.
IIRC, you can read an image off a CRT from up to 2 miles away, right? I don't think that this applies for Digital systems like HDTVs and flat screens, right?
Yup, it'd be really, really hard to read the signal from a digital flat panel from anything more than a couple inches away.
For example, the SGI 1600SW uses OpenLDI, which is a high-speed, low-power, differential signaling scheme. All these add up to a signal that would be very hard to intercept. This is in sharp contrast to analog displays, where the signals themselves are higher power, and the displays have these massive electromagnets and electron-guns that throw off radio signals.
At any rate, I predict that this new encryption scheme by Intel would be very easy to crack. Firstly, it's only 56-bit. Secondly, it's easy to run a known-plaintext attack (you display a known picture on the display, and observe the encrypted display transmission).
That was the whole impetuous behind Display PostScript, pioneered by the NeXT computer / OS. It made for a very cool display / printer integration, because what you saw on screen was exactly what you'd get on paper. It took care of all the scaling issues for you. NeXT was very much ahead of it's time in the late eighties.
Unfortunately, it was perhaps too computationally-expensive for the machines available at the time. You gotta remember that back in 1989, a 16MHz 68020 was considered a high-end microprocessor.
Display PostScript would be a lot more viable today, except for 3-D games. Most graphic accelerators now have way more power than they need to keep up with 2-D display tasks. And the CPU power is there too, even with a low-end, non-OC Celery.
Do you see a legitimate reason for the existence of this domain. It is there for one thing. To make money off poeple who think it would be cool to have an email address that looks like someone from Blizzard ent. Blizzard (whether you like suing or not) has a legitimate case here, they have the right to protect their good name.
Oh come on! I did check the site, and there is no reference to Blizzard Entertainment at all.
Blizzard Entertainment isn't the only blizzard around, I can think of at least two others: a Dairy Queen shake, and originally the term for a snow storm. How do you know what blizzard.net might be in reference to? I didn't see any reference to Oreo cookies in ice cream, but by your argument, Dairy Queen should sue the guy too.
Now don't get me wrong, I have no love for domain speculators (I've had to deal with them before). But in this case I think Russ is in the clear. "Blizzard" is a common word, and the trademark infringement case has got to have more teeth to it than that.
... is a friggen joke. The OpenGL driver by Nine never made it out of beta, and hasn't even been updated in 8 months. It barely runs with Quake and SiN, even as it is. I tried Quake3, and I was getting like.5 frames per second. Sheesh.
So, I've got a Number Nine SR9 card (32MB w/ DFP support) on order. It's based on the S4, so I'm hoping I can just use the reference OpenGL driver. Becuase it's a fairly obscure card, I wasn't able to find any reviews of it, and am buying it "blind". But that's what happens when you're desparate.
I love my SGIs (have two 1600SWs now) but I wish the situation with digital flat panels would get sorted out and standardized, so that I can have more of a choice in video cards. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen for at least another year.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
I admit it, I was suckered by the first two screenshots.
I thought the first one sorta reminded me of Q3DM12 (err... the one with the rocket launcher in the middle of the green slime pool).
I thought the 2nd one had a really good texture map of grass.
It all goes to show that what you think you're seeing has a large effect on what you actually see.
I commented to my friends that maybe Ms. Skywalker just got really drunk at a party once, and "it just happened" without her remembering it.
That seems much more plausible. :-) It happens all the time in the real world...
One Co-Lo service I visited had nice individually locked cages, all ordered from the same manufacturer. Except that the manufacturer was cheap, and all the cages had the same key! So much for physical security.
What was really funny is that I discovered this while walking through their machine room as a potential customer. You shoulda seen the sales rep's eyes pop when I took the key from one cage and opened another one.
There was an interesting thread about the GPL vs. BSDL in comp.os.openbsd.misc recently.
Finally, one poster summed up the issue nicely. He said that the BSD license empowers developers, and the GPL empowers users. He also said that the GPL was bad for this reason.
That's exactly the issue. I spend a goodly percentage of my time as a software developer. But I spend all of my time in front of a computer (and increasingly elsewhere too) as a computer user. Every time I boot a system, every time I check my mail, I'm a software user. In my role as a systems administrator, I'm a "super-user" and having access to source code is even more important. That's why I like using open source software.
The GPL isn't about making the developer's life easier, but making the software user's life easier.
I thought it was gravity..?
Actually, it's inertia. Gravity keeps us stuck to the surface of the planet, and the planet in orbit around the sun. And the sun together.
You're still paying for it, just not directly. Every BigMac, t-shirt, and computer game has as part of it's price the advertising budget. You pay for the advertisements, which in turn pays for the "free" content.
I'd rather just pay directly and get exactly what I want, instead of using someone else's idea of what I want.
This is so excellent. Since Amoeba, Plan 9 and EROS are all now open source, there's no excuse not to experiment. Contrary to what Pike might have said, now is an excellent time for OS research. Since hardware is cheap too (I mean come on, an 100Mbps 8-port Ethernet switch for less than USD $200), it's a good time to be in the field, especially looking at distributed and/or parallel computing.
I'm not quite sold on the idea of "everything is a file" notion with Plan 9 (from my understanding of it) but it has a lot of cool ideas. Now if only I had room to set up a 19" rack for a small cluster...
Time to read some code!
James Graves
Don't click on the above link. It'll post a message as you to this forum.
Sheesh. I didn't get even half-way through the court document, and already I can see that the breakup would be a long, drawn-out mess, for Microsoft, for the Justice department that has to oversee it, and for the public.
I'd prefer to see a much simplier solution. Fine them, oh, say $30 billion USD and call it a day.
That would take the wind out of their sails. It would also keep them from buying up a bunch of other companies and technologies, slowing down their encroachment into other areas.
In 5 years, Microsoft (left whole) won't be nearly the factor in the computer industry it is now. The market will be more diverse, and we'll have more and better choices (not that we don't have some good ones now). Let the market decide fairly if it truly wants buggy shit from Redmond.
We don't need another Clinton/Lewinsky affair, dragged out over two or more years. Let's get on with our jobs.
I was curious about the bit mentioned about the NDA. If all your products are open source, I'd think you'd only need an NDA to perhaps cover internal processes that are special, and proprietary software (such as the clustering mentioned elsewhere). How broad was TL's NDA/non-compete?
What would the non-compete part cover, anyway? That I (as a hypothetical employee) can't work for another distribution for a year, or that I can't work on OSS for a year?
So what kind of NDA/non-compete agreement would be appropriate for an Open Source Company?
OK, I may not know a lot of things.
I don't if you can actually do a front wheelie on a street bike.
I don't know if anyone actually can flip upside down while shooting someone (the chances of me sucessfully completing a back flip are slim under the best of conditions).
I don't know if you really can make masks of other people and have them seem completely realistic.
I do, however, know system administration. In the movie, I just couldn't deal with the fact that the heros thought they could destroy all the copies of the virus, and the problem would be solved. As part of being a responsible sysadmin, I make backups every day. The dailies go in a seperate fire safe every day. The weeklies go off-site in another fire safe. So I guess the scientists in the movies never stored their data on computer?
And if you do have the genetic sequence of a virus, you may not immediately have a viable virus, but you're a long way towards such a goal. Besides, where were all the technicians that also worked on the project? To really finish the job, Ethan would have to kill all of them too.
An additional problem is that once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to get back in. Even if some other research group in the same company didn't have copies of the work, just knowing what was done (and knowing it's possible) can also take you a long way towards re-implementing it. We re-implement stuff all the time in the OSS world, right? Often pretty darn quickly.
The stunts definitely were cool, though.
Perhaps someone can do a hardware workaround using an intermediate NVRAM between the SDRAM HD and the hard disk, using principles borrowed from both cache technology and High reliability file systems. But it'll take a bit of work.
You can get pretty good performance with NVRAM, by tightly integrating the OS, the filesystem, and the RAID subsystem. Hop on over to NetApp's Technical Library to read how they did it. In particular, check out File System Design for an NFS File Server Appliance which discusses how the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL filesystem) knows (and can take advantage of) how the RAID subsystem works. The NVRAM is mainly used to speed up write performance. They've also got some interesting bits on how the RAM cache works. It gives decent performance, even though NetApp caches tend to be small by modern standards.
James
Constantly broadcasting your location is a serious invasion of your privacy. Even people who don't pay attention to privacy issues now will probably pay attention to this.
Theoretically it wouldn't be much of a privacy issue of only the wireless service provider knew your location. As a matter of fact, by using some sophisticated triangulation algorithms, they track your cell phone to a few hundred feet now, without GPS.
The problem with that is that there'll probably only going to be a few large advertising firms (like DoubleClick for the Internet now) and so they'll get a pretty good idea of where you go, even if there are some gaps in the record. They'd be able to learn quite a bit about you: where you shop, who your friends are, where you work, etc.
Not that some multi-national corporations can't learn that kind of stuff about me now. However, it'd be a lot harder to piece together information of disparate types. Consistent location information would be much more useful.
Bah. I spend most of my time at work or at home. I have plenty of computing and communication power at both locations. Maybe I should give up all my mobile devices, or at least the ones that can transmit something. At least at home I'm behind a firewall, to restrict the information I reveal to the Internet. Will I need firewall software for my mobile phone too?
James
I can still get hours of enjoyment out of MULE, and its theme music can still give me chills.
Yeah, like you're taking out a mule to a plot, and time's running out...
That was such an excellent game! Playing the market on smithore, worrying about pirates taking your crystite. Complaining to your friends because they won't sell you food at auction. Those were the days. Wish I had a C64.
Not that there aren't some good ones out now, like Alpha Centauri.
Then you'll want to read up on the Oceania Project.
They look to create a new country (made out of floating concrete hexagons) near Panama. They've also worked out a very pro-libertarian constitution.
Too bad they don't have nearly enough money to float the first block yet. It could be a good stop-gap measure until we start building space colonies.
Well, I disagree with you on a couple points.
I don't think that Eiffel has any design mistakes, however, I can easily see why people might not like some of Meyer's deliberate design decisions. Meyer has gone very far down a particular road (in terms of OO programming) and come up with something that I think is quite interesting. To really use Eiffel, however, you have to understand how all the parts fit together (and they fit quite tightly). If you buy into the language, the libraries, and the method, then Eiffel has tremendous power.
However, if you don't buy into even a small part of that, Eiffel won't work well for you. Unless all your developers are "on board" with the entire Eiffel paradigm, they're not going to have a good time in the project, nor are they going to produce good code. With Eiffel, it's almost all-or-nothing.
Java is OK, and in my opinion, better than C++. However, some of it's creators' deliberate design decisions don't sit well with me, and overall I don't like it much.
Sather, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be making much progress. The community around Sather is very small, and it is (again in my opinion) not suitable for production systems yet. However, it has some interesting ideas of it's own, and I hope to hear more about it in the future. And of course, some of Sather's deliberate design decisions (like contravariance) don't sit well with me. James
More likely, it was a problem with using mail files in /var/spool/mail (VSM). Even using dot locks and other tricks, it's still quite easy to corrupt the mail folder if there's potentially more than one process writing to the same file.
That's the big win with Maildirs (originally exclusive to qmail). Since each mail message is a separate file, and there is a strict protocol for creating/renaming/deleting those files, the possibility of mail folder corruption is zero. No lost messages.
I should be easy for almost any organization to switch from VSM to Maildirs, unless that org has a bunch of old-time Unix-heads that are totally in love with their existing mail tools and scripts.
For my company, it was trivially easy, because all the users access their mail through the web or IMAP.
There are plenty of tools for Maildirs (including maildirdeliver, which can be used with sendmail) at qmail.org.
James
I just loved one of the quotes from the article:
"Secondly, behind this ... is an implicit belief [that books] are not going to be replaced, and should not be replaced."
"There is a difference between turning pages and scrolling down," he said. "There is something about a book that should inspire a certain presumption of reverence."
How many people want to bet that the same kind of discussion took place during the introduction of the printing press? "Oh, this new-fangled print medium just allows you to product many impersonal copies of the same document. What about the skill and craft of the scribers? Where is the personal attention to detail and care that they provide a book?"
It was the printing press that enabled the masses to become literate. It broke the stranglehold the Church had on the Faith, allowing people to read for themselves the holy texts. It completely changed life and society... for the better I think.
And it's happening again with the Internet. The printing press drove the cost of distribution from high to low, allowing many more content creators to reach a wider audience. And now Internet technologies are allowing everyone to become content creators, and driving distribution costs to closer to zero than can be measured.
Hello Mr. Billington? Here's a dollar, go buy a clue. I guess he's never used a good hypertext system. Say you're reading Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Wouldn't it be nice to have hypertext links to other reports on the subject from the same era? Would that be a lot more convenient than digging through some fscking microfische trying to find newspaper articles. You could spend all day on what could/should be a few clicks.
Public libraries are a political institution, sure, but not as useful as they once were. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have limited space. A lot of the older works get stuck back in storage (or sold at book sales) because few people want to read them anymore. Wouldn't it be nice to continue to have these titles available on-line?
Our greatest literature (Shakespeare, Chaucer and such) is so widely spread and already in electronic form that I'm not worried about it. However, there is a lot more good stuff out there that isn't accessible to anyone. For the less popular authors, there may be only a few dozen copies of their work left. Who knows where they all are (probably stuck in someone's attic), but I bet the Library of Congress has a copy... and can find it!
Heck, there are some excellent works of the 20th century that are now hard to get. For example Vernor Vinge's excellent "The Peace War" was published in the 1981. Just try finding a copy of that now (I have two, and you can't borrow either :-).
I'm sure the LoC should be making an effort to get other materials on-line, but they need to work on books too! The books are actually the most practical stuff they have to put on-line. It's already in a kind digital form (printed text) as opposed to recordings and such. Most books weigh in at a few hundred KB, and you can fit many of them in the space of one high-quality audio recoding.
All in all, a stunning lack of vision from the leadership of the LoC. Why am I not suprised?
James
I wrote a paper for history class 10 years ago called Technology and It's Effect on Society on some of these same topics. It ranges quite far afield, from nanotech to AI and MUDs.
I'd probably structure it a lot differently today, but I'm still interested in many of the same issues.
Later,
James
So anonymous reporting, when it's being used to snitch on "dangerous kids" is bad? But having Anonymous Cowards is considered an important part of Slashdot.
AC's here are anonymous because they're spewing crap, or because that have important information to disclose, but don't want to reveal themselves. Oftentimes, these ACs give us insight into corporations that are undertaking questionable practices.
So when is it OK to be anonymous? Is it OK to snitch on corporations when they're being bad, but not on people?
Or is it that Pinkerton's making money off the anonymous reporting scheme that bothers people?
I'm not trying to defend Pinkerton (I think their WAVE program will be next to useless), but I do want to know where the line is.
Yup, I loved the SGI I had at home so much I had to buy one for work too.
I've recently been on a quest to get better 3-D graphics performance though. The Nine RevIV support of Direct3D is marginal, and the OpenGL driver is beta, somewhat unstable, slow, and completely unusable for some games like Q3A.
I bought the Number Nine SR9 graphics card because it also has a DFP interface, which I assumed would be compatable with the SGI monitor. I was wrong. It supports the PanelLink-style, similar to the ones on those Compaq DFPs.
Ugh. To play games, I'm building a completely separate system, with an analog monitor so that I can get decent 3-D.
Later,
James
IIRC, you can read an image off a CRT from up to 2 miles away, right? I don't think that this applies for Digital systems like HDTVs and flat screens, right?
Yup, it'd be really, really hard to read the signal from a digital flat panel from anything more than a couple inches away.
For example, the SGI 1600SW uses OpenLDI, which is a high-speed, low-power, differential signaling scheme. All these add up to a signal that would be very hard to intercept. This is in sharp contrast to analog displays, where the signals themselves are higher power, and the displays have these massive electromagnets and electron-guns that throw off radio signals.
At any rate, I predict that this new encryption scheme by Intel would be very easy to crack. Firstly, it's only 56-bit. Secondly, it's easy to run a known-plaintext attack (you display a known picture on the display, and observe the encrypted display transmission).
Ho hum.
That was the whole impetuous behind Display PostScript, pioneered by the NeXT computer / OS. It made for a very cool display / printer integration, because what you saw on screen was exactly what you'd get on paper. It took care of all the scaling issues for you. NeXT was very much ahead of it's time in the late eighties.
Unfortunately, it was perhaps too computationally-expensive for the machines available at the time. You gotta remember that back in 1989, a 16MHz 68020 was considered a high-end microprocessor.
Display PostScript would be a lot more viable today, except for 3-D games. Most graphic accelerators now have way more power than they need to keep up with 2-D display tasks. And the CPU power is there too, even with a low-end, non-OC Celery.
Do you see a legitimate reason for the existence of this domain. It is there for one thing. To make money off poeple who think it would be cool to have an email address that looks like someone from Blizzard ent. Blizzard (whether you like suing or not) has a legitimate case here, they have the right to protect their good name.
Oh come on! I did check the site, and there is no reference to Blizzard Entertainment at all.
Blizzard Entertainment isn't the only blizzard around, I can think of at least two others: a Dairy Queen shake, and originally the term for a snow storm. How do you know what blizzard.net might be in reference to? I didn't see any reference to Oreo cookies in ice cream, but by your argument, Dairy Queen should sue the guy too.
Now don't get me wrong, I have no love for domain speculators (I've had to deal with them before). But in this case I think Russ is in the clear. "Blizzard" is a common word, and the trademark infringement case has got to have more teeth to it than that.
So, I've got a Number Nine SR9 card (32MB w/ DFP support) on order. It's based on the S4, so I'm hoping I can just use the reference OpenGL driver. Becuase it's a fairly obscure card, I wasn't able to find any reviews of it, and am buying it "blind". But that's what happens when you're desparate.
I love my SGIs (have two 1600SWs now) but I wish the situation with digital flat panels would get sorted out and standardized, so that I can have more of a choice in video cards. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen for at least another year. :-(