I'm not calling Windows users ignorant. I am calling the philosophy behind Windows ignorant. How can someone justify deliberately limiting their knowledge about how their underlying operating system works? The owners of the Windows operating system source code want everybody but themselves to be ignorant of how their computer functions.
This should not be a pragmatic discussion because what you are really doing by going back to a proprietary OS is saying that it is okay for someone other than you to limit what useful knowledge you can acquire.
Linux, GPL, OSS, it's all about education to me, not about some fancy desktop.
any ram you put into the ram disk takes away from space available to the buffer cache..
Not only that, but your buffer cache will *still* be buffering your RAM disk, so all of your data will be stored twice in RAM. There may be a way to bypass this, I'm not sure.
It's not surprising that if you took a significant chunk of memory for a RAM disk, you'd get *lower* performance.
There are almost no applications that are *good* for a ramdisk. nvram disk is another story altogether.:-)
I think they are talking about HP's 'learning' technology which allows them to take chips with 'dead' portions and have the logic discover those dead parts and work around them.
I think it was called something like the Terramac?
Saw an article a few years ago about HP putting a bunch of their broken/out-of-spec PA processors into this machine, and then a piece of software mapped out regions that had problems.
This would fundamentally help molecular computing as molecular-level manipulations are going to be sensitive to things such as cosmic radiation pushing molecules into undesirable states.
Software that can route instructions around such problems will be a cornerstone for such technology development.
Also I believe the purpose of pairing these two technologies was to achieve some sort of 'shake-n-bake' processor development. ie, put in a bunch of switches and carbon nano-tube 'wires'.. shake it up, and then use this piece of software to discover a way for processing to take place.
This would allow them to develop the technology without requiring cheap nano-manipulation.
Other attempts at this are being made with self-assembling systems/organic systems.
Even if this technology was perfected and cost effective now, I don't think it's in the interest of *any* of the powers that be to release such a disruptive technology immediately. This would completely gut the chip industry.... So who knows.
Of all the things *this* really scares me. Making it so easy.. for companies to control the information obtained by it's customers.. I know this has been going on previously, but this is taking it to a whole new level.
The only problem with these people chastizing the people who flame linux-bashers (justly or unjustly), is that they rarely contribute more to the 'effort' than the flamers do themselves. Sure, they may have the connections to make their voices heard, but they most often do not do so through contributing to open source projects. Generally they just speak loudly to anybody who will listen to them.
Flaming the flamers is still flaming. Ignore the lot of it.
(don't flame the flamers who are flaming the flamers... like I am:-))
Your facts are false. You cannot copy a DVD without css-auth. You can copy the DVD bit by bit with your DVD-ROM drive on your PC, but you will not be able to play the copy without having the DVD disc in the DVD-ROM drive. You appear to have bought into the unfortunate falsehoods spread by people who haven't looked up how DVD technology works. Rick Moen's letter posted on opendvd.org is one example of this lack of understanding.
Very simply: The DVD drives that are made for PC's are required to not return the encryption key for the DVD mpeg files *unless* the software requesting the key has authenticated itself with the DVD drive itself.
This is where the css-auth comes in. It use[sd] an authentication key originally ripped out of the xing DVD-player-software. (I gather they've got a bunch more as well already).
Can we just copy a DVD through my PC DVD drive without css-auth? Yes. Will the copy be playable in a normal DVD player/device? No. Why not? Because your the DVD drive will not give you the key to decrypt the DVD disc's data until you run css-auth.
What is really amazing, is that so many people think the DVD group is suing the makers of css-auth with a complete lack of understanding of the technology. No, it's the people protesting against the lawsuit who seem to know nothing about the technology. I found plenty of documentation on this subject with a google search in a matter of minutes.
Is what the css-auth authors did illegal? I don't think so. Was it unethical? Perhaps. I would say that creating this software is kind of like if you are given a key to a store, and you have a personal copy made. However, by distributing this software, you would be analogously making a copy of the key to this store available to anyone who wants one. Neither of these is really particularly illegal, but the ethics behind it are pretty shady.
This analogy definitely breaksdown when you consider the sheer cost of copying DVDs with css-auth, but in time, we'll have the capacity to store hundreds of full length DVD films on a hard drive.
The only way I could see of perfectly copying the data from a DVD without something like css-auth, would be to run the DVD-player software in a debugger. You could get less perfect copies by capturing the memory regions where the video output from the player is going probably.
Re:What goes around comes around..
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Actually the person would be suing for wrongfull termination or something like that... in this case, the company only violates the GPL if *it* distributes the modified binaries without the source.
An entity can only violate the GPL by distributing binaries to GPL'd software without source code. Firing someone for distributing anything doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
She said it was small, around a hundred people, with just a few exhibitors and a good number of unmanned booths. Seems like it wasn't promoted enough. From the HKLUG's website, they are going to be charging for membership in the HKLUG. Seems like a bad idea to me. We need someone to go over there and start some advocacy.
Do you buy the existence of the top quark? I read a couple stories about the research at Fermilab, but I heard so much differing information during the actual experiment, I'm not so sure that I'm convinced by their results. Do you think having two teams working towards finding the same phenomena in such close proximity is a good idea? Seems like people might be tempted to be less than accurate.
When will people realize that using big words doesn't make you smarter, nor does it make your points more valid. More words isn't the solution either. This "author" fails on both accounts. I wish people talking about abstract ideas and great new philosophies would stop writing 'persuasively' and begin writing concisely.
This same presumptuousness stopped me from reading that dumb-ass 'programmers stone' article some months back.
Never be afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
I don't think you'll ever find a lossless compression technique doing anywhere *near* 200:1 on a compiled binary. None of the techniques used to compress video/audio are useful when compressing data becuase they are all just lossy approximations of the data. I guess my point was that white noise video/audio signals are just as compressible as any other video/audio signal.
Taking a course in sentential (sp) calculus, is nearly *required* for understanding a lot of the legalese language, but I don't think the actual concepts behind law are that difficult.
*Anybody* can walk into law school straight out of college with no background in law and succeed. The same cannot be said for science-related post graduate programs. A whole lot of lawyers don't major in law as an undergrad, and some lawyers don't even go to law school. They just hit the bar exam and get their certification. (Not that I'm saying it's an easy task but a lot of former paralegals go this route....)
If we ever do get to the point where law is so complex, that bright people with an interest cannot understand the laws they read, we need to scrap our laws and create new ones that make sense.
Makes ya glad you had that y2k compliant laptop, battery, modem, and sattelite phone combo so you could continue to post to slashdot while everything else is dead! I commend you on your forethought and would pour you a drink, but my bouron was not y2k compliant... which meant.. of course... that I had to finish it before y2k!
Hmm.... roping y2k into all those others is really casting yer net too wide. y2k is a real problem, turned into a surreal media frenzy. the story resonated and gave justification to any loon's cockamamy (sp) reason for why the universe will implode on y2k.
The formula goes: Problem + Media = Random Number Generator
Wonder if there's a bit of chaos theory in there... try to predict how the media will *report* the problem to viewers... as compared to the actual nature of the problem.... can't be done:-)
Well said, let them put their money where their mouth is. going slightly off topic, you have to wonder about the intentions of these groups. Often times they have vested interests in influencing stocks one way or the other. Notice how often analysts who have a 'strong buy' rating on a particular stock, will switch all the way to 'hold' or 'sell' when the stock takes a dump after dissappointing quarterly results. You can bet they sold their stock prior to changing their recommendations.
Stocks of these types are largely based on expectations of future growth. Many stocks these days trade at huge multiples, but most all of them which constantly trade at these high levels continually meet or exceed their revenue growth expectations year after year. Making general statements about the viability of linux in the marketplace will have little or nothing to do with the future performance of related stocks. It's not just psychology, and it's not just substance. It's neither and both.
Yeah... the site.. the original article, it's all just gibberish to me. Maybe I'm just not intellectually enlightened enough to understand it eh?:-) Just the author's choice of words alone tells me s/he is more interested in writing text than expressing and idea.
I fully agree, but in a different way. What *really* is the problem behind this is the closed nature of the source. Forcibly breaking up the company would just make more proprietary software companies. Some would survive, some would fall. In the end, we would probably just have better proprietary software companies. We need to let Microsoft ride their own delusions until they fall *really* hard.... It will happen eventually, but if we break up Microsoft, it will take longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Plant a tree... build resources... conquer your enemy.
Time to resign!
I'm not calling Windows users ignorant.
I am calling the philosophy behind Windows ignorant.
How can someone justify deliberately limiting their knowledge about how their underlying operating system works?
The owners of the Windows operating system source code want everybody but themselves to be ignorant of how their computer functions.
This should not be a pragmatic discussion because what you are really doing by going back to a proprietary OS is saying that it is okay for someone other than you to limit what useful knowledge you can acquire.
Linux, GPL, OSS, it's all about education to me, not about some fancy desktop.
I could just see my orbital apartment.. cables *everywhere*.. yay.... :-)
any ram you put into the ram disk takes away from space available to the buffer cache..
:-)
Not only that, but your buffer cache will *still* be buffering your RAM disk, so all of your data will be stored twice in RAM. There may be a way to bypass this, I'm not sure.
It's not surprising that if you took a significant chunk of memory for a RAM disk, you'd get *lower* performance.
There are almost no applications that are *good* for a ramdisk. nvram disk is another story altogether.
I think they are talking about HP's 'learning' technology which allows them to take chips with 'dead' portions and have the logic discover those dead parts and work around them. I think it was called something like the Terramac? Saw an article a few years ago about HP putting a bunch of their broken/out-of-spec PA processors into this machine, and then a piece of software mapped out regions that had problems. This would fundamentally help molecular computing as molecular-level manipulations are going to be sensitive to things such as cosmic radiation pushing molecules into undesirable states. Software that can route instructions around such problems will be a cornerstone for such technology development. Also I believe the purpose of pairing these two technologies was to achieve some sort of 'shake-n-bake' processor development. ie, put in a bunch of switches and carbon nano-tube 'wires'.. shake it up, and then use this piece of software to discover a way for processing to take place. This would allow them to develop the technology without requiring cheap nano-manipulation. Other attempts at this are being made with self-assembling systems/organic systems. Even if this technology was perfected and cost effective now, I don't think it's in the interest of *any* of the powers that be to release such a disruptive technology immediately. This would completely gut the chip industry.... So who knows.
The article is false. Particularly being that CDNOW definitely secured plenty of continuing capital. Look at the news.. it's around.
Of all the things *this* really scares me.
Making it so easy.. for companies to control the information obtained by it's customers..
I know this has been going on previously, but this is taking it to a whole new level.
This really gives me the creeps!
The only problem with these people chastizing the people who flame linux-bashers (justly or unjustly), is that they rarely contribute more to the 'effort' than the flamers do themselves.
:-))
Sure, they may have the connections to make their voices heard, but they most often do not do so through contributing to open source projects.
Generally they just speak loudly to anybody who will listen to them.
Flaming the flamers is still flaming. Ignore the lot of it.
(don't flame the flamers who are flaming the flamers... like I am
Your facts are false.
You cannot copy a DVD without css-auth.
You can copy the DVD bit by bit with your DVD-ROM drive on your PC, but you will not be able to play the copy without having the DVD disc in the DVD-ROM drive.
You appear to have bought into the unfortunate falsehoods spread by people who haven't looked up how DVD technology works. Rick Moen's letter posted on opendvd.org is one example of this lack of understanding.
Very simply: The DVD drives that are made for PC's are required to not return the encryption key for the DVD mpeg files *unless* the software requesting the key has authenticated itself with the DVD drive itself.
This is where the css-auth comes in. It use[sd] an authentication key originally ripped out of the xing DVD-player-software. (I gather they've got a bunch more as well already).
Can we just copy a DVD through my PC DVD drive without css-auth? Yes. Will the copy be playable in a normal DVD player/device? No.
Why not? Because your the DVD drive will not give you the key to decrypt the DVD disc's data until you run css-auth.
What is really amazing, is that so many people think the DVD group is suing the makers of css-auth with a complete lack of understanding of the technology. No, it's the people protesting against the lawsuit who seem to know nothing about the technology. I found plenty of documentation on this subject with a google search in a matter of minutes.
Is what the css-auth authors did illegal? I don't think so. Was it unethical? Perhaps. I would say that creating this software is kind of like if you are given a key to a store, and you have a personal copy made. However, by distributing this software, you would be analogously making a copy of the key to this store available to anyone who wants one. Neither of these is really particularly illegal, but the ethics behind it are pretty shady.
This analogy definitely breaksdown when you consider the sheer cost of copying DVDs with css-auth, but in time, we'll have the capacity to store hundreds of full length DVD films on a hard drive.
The only way I could see of perfectly copying the data from a DVD without something like css-auth, would be to run the DVD-player software in a debugger. You could get less perfect copies by capturing the memory regions where the video output from the player is going probably.
Actually the person would be suing for wrongfull termination or something like that... in this case, the company only violates the GPL if *it* distributes the modified binaries without the source.
An entity can only violate the GPL by distributing binaries to GPL'd software without source code. Firing someone for distributing anything doesn't have anything to do with the GPL.
She said it was small, around a hundred people, with just a few exhibitors and a good number of unmanned booths.
Seems like it wasn't promoted enough.
From the HKLUG's website, they are going to be charging for membership in the HKLUG. Seems like a bad idea to me.
We need someone to go over there and start some advocacy.
... and why... :-)
Do you buy the existence of the top quark?
I read a couple stories about the research at Fermilab, but I heard so much differing information during the actual experiment, I'm not so sure that I'm convinced by their results.
Do you think having two teams working towards finding the same phenomena in such close proximity is a good idea?
Seems like people might be tempted to be less than accurate.
When will people realize that using big words doesn't make you smarter, nor does it make your points more valid. More words isn't the solution either.
This "author" fails on both accounts.
I wish people talking about abstract ideas and great new philosophies would stop writing 'persuasively' and begin writing concisely.
This same presumptuousness stopped me from reading that dumb-ass 'programmers stone' article some months back.
Never be afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
I don't think you'll ever find a lossless compression technique doing anywhere *near* 200:1 on a compiled binary.
None of the techniques used to compress video/audio are useful when compressing data becuase they are all just lossy approximations of the data.
I guess my point was that white noise video/audio signals are just as compressible as any other video/audio signal.
Taking a course in sentential (sp) calculus, is nearly *required* for understanding a lot of the legalese language, but I don't think the actual concepts behind law are that difficult.
*Anybody* can walk into law school straight out of college with no background in law and succeed. The same cannot be said for science-related post graduate programs.
A whole lot of lawyers don't major in law as an undergrad, and some lawyers don't even go to law school. They just hit the bar exam and get their certification. (Not that I'm saying it's an easy task but a lot of former paralegals go this route....)
If we ever do get to the point where law is so complex, that bright people with an interest cannot understand the laws they read, we need to scrap our laws and create new ones that make sense.
That is why these 'compression' techniques are always better labelled as 'compression-approximation' techniques.. :-)
:-)
You won't be able to compress your compiled binaries with this compression.
So is the year of that dude's birth:
a) 0 A.D.
b) 0 B.C.
c) 1 B.C.
d) 1 A.D.
:-)
Makes ya glad you had that y2k compliant laptop, battery, modem, and sattelite phone combo so you could continue to post to slashdot while everything else is dead!
I commend you on your forethought and would pour you a drink, but my bouron was not y2k compliant... which meant.. of course... that I had to finish it before y2k!
Hmm.... roping y2k into all those others is really casting yer net too wide.
:-)
y2k is a real problem, turned into a surreal media frenzy.
the story resonated and gave justification to any loon's cockamamy (sp) reason for why the universe will implode on y2k.
The formula goes: Problem + Media = Random Number Generator
Wonder if there's a bit of chaos theory in there... try to predict how the media will *report* the problem to viewers... as compared to the actual nature of the problem.... can't be done
Dunno, this is all too much personality-worship for me.... which isn't what got linux where it is today.
Well said, let them put their money where their mouth is.
going slightly off topic, you have to wonder about the intentions of these groups. Often times they have vested interests in influencing stocks one way or the other.
Notice how often analysts who have a 'strong buy' rating on a particular stock, will switch all the way to 'hold' or 'sell' when the stock takes a dump after dissappointing quarterly results.
You can bet they sold their stock prior to changing their recommendations.
Stocks of these types are largely based on expectations of future growth. Many stocks these days trade at huge multiples, but most all of them which constantly trade at these high levels continually meet or exceed their revenue growth expectations year after year. Making general statements about the viability of linux in the marketplace will have little or nothing to do with the future performance of related stocks. It's not just psychology, and it's not just substance. It's neither and both.
Yeah... the site.. the original article, it's all just gibberish to me. :-)
:-)
Maybe I'm just not intellectually enlightened enough to understand it eh?
Just the author's choice of words alone tells me s/he is more interested in writing text than expressing and idea.
- Anything I can't understand must be bad.
I fully agree, but in a different way.
What *really* is the problem behind this is the closed nature of the source. Forcibly breaking up the company would just make more proprietary software companies. Some would survive, some would fall. In the end, we would probably just have better proprietary software companies.
We need to let Microsoft ride their own delusions until they fall *really* hard.... It will happen eventually, but if we break up Microsoft, it will take longer.