"... it would only be "quite the assumption" to believe they use it exactly like we do."
Right. But that assumption isn't really made. SETI At Home, for example, essentially does Fourier analysis on signals, looking for patterns. While they may not use it as we do, having patterns in the signal is a pretty safe assumption. Or to perhaps be more accurate: we don't know of a way to look for signals that do not exhibit patterns.
... before I'll submit to an iris scan at a bank. Several local banks have tried using thumbprints on checks, and it is NOT well-accepted by their customers and others.
Re:photoshop USED to be obvious.
on
The Book of GIMP
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"The Book of Gimp should probably have been released as 4 or 5 books, which you have to open all at once,
with all the page numbers in one book, the example images in another and the text, in no particular order, heaped in yet another book."
The new version of Gimp has a more-standard single-window mode. That was the single biggest complaint before. So now the other large objections are coming to the fore.
For example: among the multiple "select" tools, why is there not a simple "point and click" select tool for drawing objects? Every other major image manipulation program of which I am aware has one.
I agree with you and DrinkyPoo both. I have been in "conversations" in online forums (fora?) that, in the real world, would have led to me punching the other person in the nose. And usually it has been a guy, so I would probably punch him in the nose, rather than get into a hair-pulling session.
I do my darnedest to not behave the same way myself. Which is not to say I never have. But I try.
"You mean the one that says that they can modify the contract as they see fit anytime they wish?"
No, I don't.
If they can modify it any time they wish, then it isn't a contract! A contract can't be one-sided; it requires approval from all parties involved.
My contract is for delivery of specific services for a certain amount of money. They can't modify that without my consent, or they break the contract... I don't owe them the money. If, for example, they throttled or cut off my service, then they would not be delivering the product they agreed to deliver for the money I was paying them.
Some ISPs have also tried saying "by using this service you agree to the terms on page (http://blahblahblah) which may change at any time..." and in some cases might get away with that. But that isn't a contract, either... it's a TOS for month-to-month usage with no contract.
Further, if it is a contract at all, any such clause makes it a contract of adhesion, meaning it is entirely one-sided and there is no opportunity for negotiation. Often courts will refuse to honor contracts of adhesion, because the whole concept of contract implies that both parties have equal power in the deal and that any agreement has been negotiated in good faith.
"The Government can ignore this just like they ignore a sovereign States authority (See DIA raids in CA on marijuana shops and farms)."
The Feds actually can not -- and have not -- been conducting raids without at least tacit assistance from the State.
This administration has stated that it will not conduct raids unless the operations in question are in violation of STATE law. I know of anothr state where they did in fact conduct raids, but the operations were (technically, depending on how you interpret the law) in violation of State law.
So they may be asses about it, and interpret the law in their own favor, but to the best of my knowledge, they aren't raiding marijuana operations that are in full compliance with their respective States.
And the States are getting fed up (no pun intended): two states this year, Colorado and Washington, legalized marijuana or recreational use. No less than 18 states have decriminalized it so far, and others have legislation pending.
More and more states are also passing laws to "nullify" Obamacare, and certain Federal gun laws, on the basis that the Federal government has no actual authority to regulate them within the states. And that's a pretty solid basis, historically speaking.
"There are industries where a severely limited patent system makes sense."
Actually, individual inventors and small businesses would be the ones who would -- and should -- benefit most from a revamped patent system.
I agree that the current system has had some major problems, many of them related to "corporate cronyism" in Government. But the fact that the current highly corrupted system does damage is no excuse to abolish the patent system altogether.
To use the almost inevitable car analogy: that would be like saying that because some corporations changed the roads to serve themselves but not work well for everybody else, we should get rid of roads altogether. And I call BS on that.
"1984 appears to be rocketing right along as movie-turned-reality. instead of addressing foreign policy mistakes we've taken to bubblewrapping and tripwiring the nation until americans stop worrying about it and learn to love the terror"
Haha, I was going to write something similar. Along the lines of: it would be simpler and cheaper for the politicians to just stop pissing people off.
I should be more specific here. I meant that while many conspiracy theories may be crazy, history is full of actual conspiracies, great and small... and people who suspected their existence were often called crazy at the time.
"Nearly everytime I see someone discuss thinking biases, they almost always try to link it to their pet ideology that's a hot topic."
Indeed. Which, as you say, suggests that they are subject to the same thinking biases of which they accuse others.
But also, I have to point out in all seriousness: the fact that some "skeptics" may be cognitively biased is no indication that all of them are. Nor does the fact that many conspiracy theories are crazy mean there is no such thing as conspiracies. History is full of real conspiracies, great and small.
What it boils down to, yet again, is that statistics about a population say nothing about specific instances.
"To recreate something is to understand it, and msdos is worth understanding."
Except they aren't really "re-creating" anything. DOS-compatible replacements have been around since the DOS days!
That is to say: pre-Windows, when DOS was "the" operating system. There were at least several widely-available replacements, which were often faster and better (look up DR-DOS).
"They recognize that there is a problem and speak up against it. "
And it's working. They've been going to implement this "real soon now" for the last year. It was "next month" at least 4 months ago.
And they've barely begun to scratch the surface of potential legal hassles they'll have to fight in order to pull this "6 Strikes" BS. Trying to implement it here would be a blatant violation of my WRITTEN contract.
There is very GOOD reason to distrust Oracle in this case.
Oracle actually has a history of acquiring open source projects and then killing them off. Maybe intentionally, maybe not. But a history nonetheless. It is no wonder people are concerned.
But they need not be. MariaDB is feature-compatible with MySQL, up to and including using the same commands to operate it, right down to the "mysql" and "mysqld" commands.
AND it remains open source. Plus, there have been a number of performance enhancements in the MariaDB fork.
As OP stated: MariaDB has become the default database for some open operating systems. I know people who have used it as a simple plug-and-play replacement for MySQL.
"Technical articles and opinions should have a level of proof and logic behind them. Incomplete arguments should be noted, and invalid arguments should be immediately identifiable..."
Good luck with that. There are forums at actual scientific journal websites that that don't always meet those qualifications. Half the time when I've tried to have a logical discussion on/. someone causes it to devolve into meaningless bickering over inconsequential details, or derisive ad-hominem attacks; even from people who should know better.
I would love to see that change. But as I stated earlier: good luck with that.
"CDGuru stated "Around 1993 the first CD recorder was introduced but it cost around $50,000""
Okay, but your argument with him or her is your business. *I* was referring to your earlier comment to me:
"CD-R dates back to 1990 while the MiniDisc was first introduced in 1992 (unless Wikipedia is wrong, that is). It was also apparently released in Japan 1 month before the US release, which points to your story being bullshit or at least wildly inaccurate."
Which has been shown in this context, i.e., that of consumer goods, to be bullshit. Or at least wildly inaccurate.
Pardon me for replying at the wrong spot in the comment heirarchy.
"You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs."
Actually, Apple used in their early Macbook Airs a proprietary SSD stick made by Hitachi, which were notorious for failures.
The Samsung version apparently does better.
Also, OS X does not support TRIM. Apple gets good drive performance out of SSDs without it, but I suspect their system writes more often, which would make their longevity suffer.
"If he used CCleaner to reverse-engineer the file and there was a clause in the TOS forbidding that, it might be a problem right?"
Technically, I suppose. Again, IANAL. I think that would make him, as a user, guilty of violating the TOS... but I still don't think it has anything to do with his own product reading the files. And it would be pretty hard to prove, too. He could have bought the knowledge about the file format from his next-door neighbor.
Um, no, it depends on context. The context of this discussion was consumer products. According to the Wikipedia article that you linked to:
"CD-R recording systems available in 1990 were similar to the washing machine-sized Meridian CD Publisher..."
Did you somehow miss that? Even an early MiniDisc player would fit in your pocket (if you had big pockets). But a CD-R? It probably wouldn't even fit through your door.
Why in the world would you have any obligation to honor their TOS? It doesn't legally bind you in any way.
IANAL, but as far as I know it's perfectly legal to build an app to read data from Excel, or Word, or QuickBooks, or whatever... unless it's incrypted (in the U.S.), the makers of those programs have pretty much no say in the matter. And even if encrypted, I would not consider it a moral obligation because the laws against un-encrypting are pretty darned questionable anyway. They are just a form of corporate welfare.
"Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive."
The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.
And don't forget improvements in technology. Even those spinning platters get higher capacities and performance every year.
Sooner or later, solid-state will shove the moving parts off the market. But that is still some years away.
"I fail to see how internet access is so important that the.gov needs to be in the business. You could similarly argue that.gov/union control has killed education."
Well, let's see: lack of choice re: which school to attend, negative correlation (above a certain baseline) between dollars spent and learning... rhen there is the Wisconsin situation, in which the teachers are arguably better off (higher pay, equal medical care) now that they are out of the union, etc. etc.
Yep. One sure can argue that.
But here's the thing: there *IS* such a thing as a "natural monopoly". When the U.S. was building its telephone infrastructure Ma Bell was given reign, but was very strictly regulated. As a result, the U.S. developed a coherent, interoperative, country-wide telephone infrastructure that was the envy of the world.
In contrast, the countries in which private companies were allowed to compete (much of Europe for example), ended up with multiple, often redundant, but incompatible phone systems. Voltages and signalling were different. If you were on one system and the next-door neighbor was on another, often you could not even call them.
Of course now we have competition for the landlines, but the majority of infrastructure was already built. Not so, for the internet.
Result: the countries where it is required that internet companies "share" (lease) backbone infrastructure to other parties are kicking the United States' ass in both service and pricing. Here, private companies have been allowed to build the whole thing, pretty much, and they have developed local monopolies. As a consequence prices are high and service is low, compared to the world average.
There is A LOT of good reason to regulate internet companies the way telephone companies were regulated. For one thing, the FCC should be allowed to declare ISPs to be Title II Common Carriers. (Which it would have done long ago, but the industry lobbied Congress, which made an exception just for them.) Then many current privacy concerns would simply disappear. Then they could also require backbone-sharing, which all evidence suggests would foster more competition, better service, and lower prices.
Does the government need to "get involved" in the process beyond that? That is debatable. But one thing is for sure: it will never be free nationwide if they don't.
"And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?"
Jesus, doesn't anybody here remember any history? Come on, folks, this is so far off as to be just plain BS.
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress! The music industry panicked over MiniDisc because it was a "perfect" copy. That meant that unlike cassettes, you could copy endlessly and it wouldn't degrade in quality, like cassette tapes did.
Hrm, that calls for some more history. MiniDisc came out -- in Japan -- before recordable CDs. The recording industry had fought both cassettes and CDs, unsuccessfully. But when faced with MiniDisc they lobbied Congress HARD, and the outcome was that Congress banned the importing or making of MiniDisc players until they implemented a DRM system that limited copying.
SONY at the time was NOT known for DRM. Remember, Sony had, not too long before, fought in court on the other side of the battle, to make sure videotapes were legal.
So it was Congress that is at fault here. Manufacturers wanted nothing to do with creating a DRM system in hardware. And consumers in the U.S., by and large, were uninterested in a DRM-laden system. The result was that it took a good 10 years before MiniDisc was widely available here. You could get them; a few were made with DRM. But they were rare and expensive. And the entire 10 years, Japan used them DRM-free.
So stop blaming Sony. You're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. It was the recording industry -- and a compliant Congress -- who were entirely at fault.
"Is this why I can't ever read the quote symbol? It is all garbled?"
That happens most often when people use copy-and-paste, because they are pasting in begin- and end-quotes, instead of the common universal double quotes: ".
Something about their encoding is weird. There is no doubt about that.
HTML escape characters used to work, but that stopped working quite a while ago. Most of them, anyway.
I'm not sure what they did. I believe most of the site is coded in Perl. But BuiltWith says the site encoding is in UTF-8. So, there must be some kind of munging going on in the back-end.
Slashdot Mirror
"... it would only be "quite the assumption" to believe they use it exactly like we do."
Right. But that assumption isn't really made. SETI At Home, for example, essentially does Fourier analysis on signals, looking for patterns. While they may not use it as we do, having patterns in the signal is a pretty safe assumption. Or to perhaps be more accurate: we don't know of a way to look for signals that do not exhibit patterns.
... before I'll submit to an iris scan at a bank. Several local banks have tried using thumbprints on checks, and it is NOT well-accepted by their customers and others.
"The Book of Gimp should probably have been released as 4 or 5 books, which you have to open all at once, with all the page numbers in one book, the example images in another and the text, in no particular order, heaped in yet another book."
The new version of Gimp has a more-standard single-window mode. That was the single biggest complaint before. So now the other large objections are coming to the fore.
For example: among the multiple "select" tools, why is there not a simple "point and click" select tool for drawing objects? Every other major image manipulation program of which I am aware has one.
I agree with you and DrinkyPoo both. I have been in "conversations" in online forums (fora?) that, in the real world, would have led to me punching the other person in the nose. And usually it has been a guy, so I would probably punch him in the nose, rather than get into a hair-pulling session.
I do my darnedest to not behave the same way myself. Which is not to say I never have. But I try.
"You mean the one that says that they can modify the contract as they see fit anytime they wish?"
No, I don't.
If they can modify it any time they wish, then it isn't a contract! A contract can't be one-sided; it requires approval from all parties involved.
My contract is for delivery of specific services for a certain amount of money. They can't modify that without my consent, or they break the contract... I don't owe them the money. If, for example, they throttled or cut off my service, then they would not be delivering the product they agreed to deliver for the money I was paying them.
Some ISPs have also tried saying "by using this service you agree to the terms on page (http://blahblahblah) which may change at any time..." and in some cases might get away with that. But that isn't a contract, either... it's a TOS for month-to-month usage with no contract.
Further, if it is a contract at all, any such clause makes it a contract of adhesion, meaning it is entirely one-sided and there is no opportunity for negotiation. Often courts will refuse to honor contracts of adhesion, because the whole concept of contract implies that both parties have equal power in the deal and that any agreement has been negotiated in good faith.
"The Government can ignore this just like they ignore a sovereign States authority (See DIA raids in CA on marijuana shops and farms)."
The Feds actually can not -- and have not -- been conducting raids without at least tacit assistance from the State.
This administration has stated that it will not conduct raids unless the operations in question are in violation of STATE law. I know of anothr state where they did in fact conduct raids, but the operations were (technically, depending on how you interpret the law) in violation of State law.
So they may be asses about it, and interpret the law in their own favor, but to the best of my knowledge, they aren't raiding marijuana operations that are in full compliance with their respective States.
And the States are getting fed up (no pun intended): two states this year, Colorado and Washington, legalized marijuana or recreational use. No less than 18 states have decriminalized it so far, and others have legislation pending.
More and more states are also passing laws to "nullify" Obamacare, and certain Federal gun laws, on the basis that the Federal government has no actual authority to regulate them within the states. And that's a pretty solid basis, historically speaking.
"There are industries where a severely limited patent system makes sense."
Actually, individual inventors and small businesses would be the ones who would -- and should -- benefit most from a revamped patent system.
I agree that the current system has had some major problems, many of them related to "corporate cronyism" in Government. But the fact that the current highly corrupted system does damage is no excuse to abolish the patent system altogether.
To use the almost inevitable car analogy: that would be like saying that because some corporations changed the roads to serve themselves but not work well for everybody else, we should get rid of roads altogether. And I call BS on that.
"1984 appears to be rocketing right along as movie-turned-reality. instead of addressing foreign policy mistakes we've taken to bubblewrapping and tripwiring the nation until americans stop worrying about it and learn to love the terror"
Haha, I was going to write something similar. Along the lines of: it would be simpler and cheaper for the politicians to just stop pissing people off.
I should be more specific here. I meant that while many conspiracy theories may be crazy, history is full of actual conspiracies, great and small... and people who suspected their existence were often called crazy at the time.
"Nearly everytime I see someone discuss thinking biases, they almost always try to link it to their pet ideology that's a hot topic."
Indeed. Which, as you say, suggests that they are subject to the same thinking biases of which they accuse others.
But also, I have to point out in all seriousness: the fact that some "skeptics" may be cognitively biased is no indication that all of them are. Nor does the fact that many conspiracy theories are crazy mean there is no such thing as conspiracies. History is full of real conspiracies, great and small.
What it boils down to, yet again, is that statistics about a population say nothing about specific instances.
"To recreate something is to understand it, and msdos is worth understanding."
Except they aren't really "re-creating" anything. DOS-compatible replacements have been around since the DOS days!
That is to say: pre-Windows, when DOS was "the" operating system. There were at least several widely-available replacements, which were often faster and better (look up DR-DOS).
"They recognize that there is a problem and speak up against it. "
And it's working. They've been going to implement this "real soon now" for the last year. It was "next month" at least 4 months ago.
And they've barely begun to scratch the surface of potential legal hassles they'll have to fight in order to pull this "6 Strikes" BS. Trying to implement it here would be a blatant violation of my WRITTEN contract.
"Haters gonna hate...."
There is very GOOD reason to distrust Oracle in this case.
Oracle actually has a history of acquiring open source projects and then killing them off. Maybe intentionally, maybe not. But a history nonetheless. It is no wonder people are concerned.
But they need not be. MariaDB is feature-compatible with MySQL, up to and including using the same commands to operate it, right down to the "mysql" and "mysqld" commands.
AND it remains open source. Plus, there have been a number of performance enhancements in the MariaDB fork.
As OP stated: MariaDB has become the default database for some open operating systems. I know people who have used it as a simple plug-and-play replacement for MySQL.
"Technical articles and opinions should have a level of proof and logic behind them. Incomplete arguments should be noted, and invalid arguments should be immediately identifiable..."
Good luck with that. There are forums at actual scientific journal websites that that don't always meet those qualifications. Half the time when I've tried to have a logical discussion on /. someone causes it to devolve into meaningless bickering over inconsequential details, or derisive ad-hominem attacks; even from people who should know better.
I would love to see that change. But as I stated earlier: good luck with that.
"CDGuru stated "Around 1993 the first CD recorder was introduced but it cost around $50,000""
Okay, but your argument with him or her is your business. *I* was referring to your earlier comment to me:
"CD-R dates back to 1990 while the MiniDisc was first introduced in 1992 (unless Wikipedia is wrong, that is). It was also apparently released in Japan 1 month before the US release, which points to your story being bullshit or at least wildly inaccurate."
Which has been shown in this context, i.e., that of consumer goods, to be bullshit. Or at least wildly inaccurate.
Pardon me for replying at the wrong spot in the comment heirarchy.
"You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs."
Actually, Apple used in their early Macbook Airs a proprietary SSD stick made by Hitachi, which were notorious for failures.
The Samsung version apparently does better.
Also, OS X does not support TRIM. Apple gets good drive performance out of SSDs without it, but I suspect their system writes more often, which would make their longevity suffer.
"If he used CCleaner to reverse-engineer the file and there was a clause in the TOS forbidding that, it might be a problem right?"
Technically, I suppose. Again, IANAL. I think that would make him, as a user, guilty of violating the TOS... but I still don't think it has anything to do with his own product reading the files. And it would be pretty hard to prove, too. He could have bought the knowledge about the file format from his next-door neighbor.
"CD-R recording systems available in 1990 were similar to the washing machine-sized Meridian CD Publisher..."
Did you somehow miss that? Even an early MiniDisc player would fit in your pocket (if you had big pockets). But a CD-R? It probably wouldn't even fit through your door.
Why in the world would you have any obligation to honor their TOS? It doesn't legally bind you in any way.
IANAL, but as far as I know it's perfectly legal to build an app to read data from Excel, or Word, or QuickBooks, or whatever... unless it's incrypted (in the U.S.), the makers of those programs have pretty much no say in the matter. And even if encrypted, I would not consider it a moral obligation because the laws against un-encrypting are pretty darned questionable anyway. They are just a form of corporate welfare.
"Currently there are hybrid drives with tiny SSDs as caches but they don't perform well enough to be competitive with SSDs and from what I see there's no technical reason why they can't be competitive."
The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.
And don't forget improvements in technology. Even those spinning platters get higher capacities and performance every year.
Sooner or later, solid-state will shove the moving parts off the market. But that is still some years away.
"I fail to see how internet access is so important that the .gov needs to be in the business. You could similarly argue that .gov/union control has killed education."
Well, let's see: lack of choice re: which school to attend, negative correlation (above a certain baseline) between dollars spent and learning ... rhen there is the Wisconsin situation, in which the teachers are arguably better off (higher pay, equal medical care) now that they are out of the union, etc. etc.
Yep. One sure can argue that.
But here's the thing: there *IS* such a thing as a "natural monopoly". When the U.S. was building its telephone infrastructure Ma Bell was given reign, but was very strictly regulated. As a result, the U.S. developed a coherent, interoperative, country-wide telephone infrastructure that was the envy of the world.
In contrast, the countries in which private companies were allowed to compete (much of Europe for example), ended up with multiple, often redundant, but incompatible phone systems. Voltages and signalling were different. If you were on one system and the next-door neighbor was on another, often you could not even call them.
Of course now we have competition for the landlines, but the majority of infrastructure was already built. Not so, for the internet.
Result: the countries where it is required that internet companies "share" (lease) backbone infrastructure to other parties are kicking the United States' ass in both service and pricing. Here, private companies have been allowed to build the whole thing, pretty much, and they have developed local monopolies. As a consequence prices are high and service is low, compared to the world average.
There is A LOT of good reason to regulate internet companies the way telephone companies were regulated. For one thing, the FCC should be allowed to declare ISPs to be Title II Common Carriers. (Which it would have done long ago, but the industry lobbied Congress, which made an exception just for them.) Then many current privacy concerns would simply disappear. Then they could also require backbone-sharing, which all evidence suggests would foster more competition, better service, and lower prices.
Does the government need to "get involved" in the process beyond that? That is debatable. But one thing is for sure: it will never be free nationwide if they don't.
"And rather than Sony learn any lessons, they have doubled down. For two decades. Is it any wonder their stock and their corporate goodwill are both in the shitter?"
Jesus, doesn't anybody here remember any history? Come on, folks, this is so far off as to be just plain BS.
The reason MiniDiscs had DRM in the U.S. (but not Japan) wasn't Sony, it was Congress! The music industry panicked over MiniDisc because it was a "perfect" copy. That meant that unlike cassettes, you could copy endlessly and it wouldn't degrade in quality, like cassette tapes did.
Hrm, that calls for some more history. MiniDisc came out -- in Japan -- before recordable CDs. The recording industry had fought both cassettes and CDs, unsuccessfully. But when faced with MiniDisc they lobbied Congress HARD, and the outcome was that Congress banned the importing or making of MiniDisc players until they implemented a DRM system that limited copying.
SONY at the time was NOT known for DRM. Remember, Sony had, not too long before, fought in court on the other side of the battle, to make sure videotapes were legal.
So it was Congress that is at fault here. Manufacturers wanted nothing to do with creating a DRM system in hardware. And consumers in the U.S., by and large, were uninterested in a DRM-laden system. The result was that it took a good 10 years before MiniDisc was widely available here. You could get them; a few were made with DRM. But they were rare and expensive. And the entire 10 years, Japan used them DRM-free.
So stop blaming Sony. You're pointing your fingers in the wrong direction. It was the recording industry -- and a compliant Congress -- who were entirely at fault.
"By the third generation, the wealth is gone."
Yeah? Tell that to the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.
But seriously, this whole thing reminds me of Asimov's Foundation series.
"Is this why I can't ever read the quote symbol? It is all garbled?"
That happens most often when people use copy-and-paste, because they are pasting in begin- and end-quotes, instead of the common universal double quotes: ".
Something about their encoding is weird. There is no doubt about that.
"I love the encoding issues I find on this site."
HTML escape characters used to work, but that stopped working quite a while ago. Most of them, anyway.
I'm not sure what they did. I believe most of the site is coded in Perl. But BuiltWith says the site encoding is in UTF-8. So, there must be some kind of munging going on in the back-end.