If you run Windows, use Winamp, it plays ogg by default and is (IMO) marvellous. For that matter any FOSS player will do. If you run Linux, any sensible player will play OGGs. If you run Mac, well you can either use iTunes (yuck), or download another player...
I can't stand iTunes, but then again, there is a long list of perfectly usable things I can't stand...
More interesting by far are the lyrics, including some of the other ones. The 'Debugging' song stirs strong feeling in me after spending days wading through heavily patched badly written x86 assembly language spaghetti code...
How many users actually *use* how much power they already have? When I play Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch 2.6 alpha on my home machine and on this laptop, CPU usage sits at 100%, and the game almost runs at normal speed... God forbid what happens when I play Total Annihilation...
I will be getting a new desktop soon. No doubt when I play Supreme Commander the CPU(s) will sit at 100% at times as well...
The latest games (and many other applications) usually require a high level of processing power respective to the available technology at release time. Hence people will always want faster computers
Heh! All you Slashdotters know zilch about truly terrible AIs... I regularly play Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch (and I am one of the programmers of the patch as well, but that is a different story). The AI is so terrible that you would not believe it. The game begins, and an AI company is created. It then acquires a huge loan, and sits for 5 years losing money. It then goes into "braindead constuction mode", where it feverently tries by trial and error to find the least profitable transportation system it can, by avoiding the non-existant obstacles. From knowing some of the internals, I know that terraforming is basically done by the rand() function, and that they do it for free. When zoomed out, their handiwork looks like my signiture, untidy, with no straight lines and lots of loops.
It's so broken, that I now play with it off, as they make the place look untidy and might accidentally demolish a small town or something equally foolhardy.
The only snag with using these huge Airbuses, is that they are too large for many of the gates. Either you have to build more spread-out gates, or you park the plane in the middle of the tarmac and drive a bus to it. Either way you have to spend ages and go miles to actually get to the plane. At Heathrow it's bad enough with small planes, you spend 45 minutes getting to the gate... When your gate is an extra-wide one... I can just imagine: Your flight at Gate Q587, leaves in 1 hour, you've checked in and you're at the departure lounge. Start running.
Here are a few reasons you might need proficiency in assembly language:
* You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.
* You're writing a compiler. In this case you may not have to write assembly directly, but you'll have to understand it intimately in order to convert source code to machine language. (Replace "assembly" with "bytecode" or "IL", if making a Java or.NET compiler)
* You are reverse-engineering closed-source software (another case where you must comprehend assembly)
* You're designing or testing a computer chip, in which case you may have all sorts of tests cases written in assembly language.
* You're maintaining an old "legacy" system that uses assembly.
* You're writing an emulator for another computer, and you need high performance. In this case you may need to understand the assembly language of both the real and emulated machines, as I learned when I wrote a Super Nintendo emulator.
* Those bastards make you study it in one of your college courses. Add to that: The need to debug any x86 binary compiled program, even if you have the source. No matter if you program is written in assembly, C or FORTRAN, if the binaries are x86 complied the debugger will list assembly instructions. If you don't understand them then debugging becomes infinitely more difficult. Additionally, if you write the program in assembly in the first place, then debugging it becomes so much easier, as you are not faced with wading through stacks and stack of bloat-code, as inserted by many high level languages. How many of you have disassembled a C program, and just instinctively known that you aren't going to enjoy poking through it, first seeing a horrendous and unneccesary stack maneouver, followed by multiple calls to superfluous library funtions (statically linked)? Knowing assembly is essential for good programming, not knowing the ins and outs of the chip you're supposedly coding for, is a recipe for inefficient code that doesn't make good use of the resources available. I've seen lots of such code. I personnaly code for TTDPatch, whilst some of the code is absolutely gracelesss and horrible, it is efficient and optimised, no bloat is permitted (because writting bloat in assembly is tedious and difficult, unlike C++ where bloat is the norm, and avoiding it requires years of experience, or just GCC).
Why would you want your computer case to be made from wood?
...which offers 'desktop computers in cases of oak, walnut, zebrawood, purpleheart, mahogany, maple and leopardwood'. Wouldn't it be much easier just to hide the desktop box behind your desk if you really don't want to look at it.
As for wood, it is both a saftey hazard and useless as a computer case material, it won't block any EM interference at all, and it's a fire hazard.
I don't want to think what a few year's worth of heat, dust and static will do to your lovely wood panelled box.
Money could be better spent elsewhere...
Read the article:
a 19- inch LCD monitor with a wooden frame -- is $2,950.
The prices for the computers, which include a monitor, keyboard, mouse and some service, start at about $5,740. Needn't say anything to that.
The WINE project is for creating a windows emulator for Linux
WINE
IS
NOT an
Emulator
WINE is an API wrapper layer, not a processor achitecture substitute, hence the code needs to be written for the same chipset as the machine (means x86 in most cases) and there isn't a virtual performance penalty (no pun intended).
Not true. I am currently running 47 extensions in Firefox 1.5.0.10 on WinXPSP2. Firefox almost never crashes, the only time I have problems is when I visit sites with crappy javascript or broken java applets, and then its merely extreme sluggishness. More firefox extensions does not equal instability. It equals a HUGE performance penalty on startup (and opening a new window) of about 4-5 seconds, especially if you run a 1.6GHz P4 like I do... Javascript is not the speediest of script languages, especially compared to precompiled code. It would be nice if you could precompile/preparse your browser chrome scripts...
Currently I use MSOffice 2003 on WinXP SP2. (I also run Slackware 11.0 under coLinux). This has always worked fine for me, I'm used to it and many of my documents are saved in this format. A converter between two competing XML document format changes absolutely nothing for me or anybody I know, at all. If you really want pixel/layout perfect compatability between all machines running all weird and wonderful OSs, then you realistically have to store you data in plain text with monospaced font, HTML or PDF. Office documents contain too much stuff instrinsic to the program used to create them. For example, you can include COM-based VB macros, OLE embedded objects (such as equation editor), and other miscallaneous items in MS Word documents, getting them to work correctly on different OSs correctly would be a nightmare. If the OpenOffice suite did absolutely everything that MS Office did (including in particular Excel with its myriad features, a real must), than I would just write all my new documents/spreadsheets with that and be done with it, leaving my existing documents as they are. The goal is mostly stationary as the real useful improvements in Office since 2000 (except Access, and perhaps Excel 2003), are frankly negligible (Word 2000 added nested tables, that is the only useful difference I have noticed between Word 2003 and Word 1997). Outlook in my opinion is rubbish so I try to avoid it wherever possible (what is wrong with webmail). Also, why do people seem to need an integrated calendar, email client and word processor? Calendar: Calendar program/piece-of-paper-on-wall. Word processor: Whatever you like/have. Email: Whatever, (webmail is least hassle by far).
What would really be useful is if MS Office would run properly and smoothly without huge amounts of messing about with WINE or paying for Cedega, under Linux. That is more important than whether I can convert (lossily), between the two formats at the moment. That and games are mostly what are stopping me leaving MS Windows. One day I'll reserve the order and run windows as a VM under Linux...
Why are they bothering to sell files over bittorrent?
Bittorrent is by definition a "Peer-to-Peer" protocol. --- There are no peers --- There are only the clients and the source. Hence it would be infinitely simpler to just use a perfectly ordinary HTTP (or whatever), download service from the source to the client, client--server.
Bittorent is perfect for downloading the latest ultra-popular freshly pirated movie, or downloading all six Slackware 11 isos at high speed (as there were so many peers after it was released), but using Bittorent to download a file from a point source, when there are probably negligble other seed/leech sources is simply counterintuitive, and ultimately a suboptimal use of the protocol.
Its no surprise that download speeds may be rubbish, that's a quirk of the protocol (and a function of its probable non-popularity).
As for the DRM, any half-baked excuse for an almost sentient attempt at a life form with more than working brain cell and with its head not buried in the sand (or in its wallet), could tell that DRM simply doesn't work, and merely annoys the user. This has been discussed to death over the last few years in great detail, and if even enormous companies like Apple can twig and get the hint by making their legally obligatory DRM as unobtrusive and transparent as possible (they partially succeded), then these "five movie studios" can do so too...
Overall I judge this as a method of "testing the waters", rather than a serious attempt at making money, or providing a service. Ultimately the conclusion is inevitably negative.
What this means is that at some point in time, the answer, the decrypted volume key, is stored in an SSE register, of which there are 8, and which are exactly the same length as the value you are trying to hide.
You would probably just have to monitor the SSE registers and any other 'funny business', like prevention of context switches, obvious obfuscation of memory/code, etc.
You might as well put up text reading: 'The key that you are looking for will at some point be stored in one of the eight shoe directly boxes below', in mile high letters of fluorescent green fire visible from the far side of the moon.
Besides, the SSE registers aren't used very often anyway except for things like block calculations in media decoding/encoding anyway, so it will look very suspicious when suddenly all sorts of stuff starts happening in them. Putting a few dummy SSE operations first will be transparent, as a coder can just break at that point and say: WTF is all this crap code doing.
They are probably better off storing the key in the middle of heap allocated memory block used by the system, making sure that all sorts of other bloatware junk necessary for the correct runing of the player program is stuffed in the haphazardly as well, whilst simultaneously doing absolutely no fancy tricks during the actual process of getting and handling the volume key.
-- Internett er et unikt verktøy, og statlig sensur passer ikke inn der. Internet is a unique worktool, and state censureship does not fit it.
Too right.
-- Samferdselsdepartementet ønsker ikke å kommentere Somenorweigengovernmentdepartmentorother wished not to comment.
I'm not surprised.
Whoever thought this up are a bunch of åndssvaks. -- Only insult I can remember.
The Norweigens people will never, ever stand for this. Nor would the government. The Norweigen people are amongst the few who, en masse, take great patriotic pride in their country, people and culture, and whose government genuinely acts in the general best interests of the people and not in their pockets or personal power. Having lived there for five years, and comparing it with life in Italy, France and the UK, this is not just an idle thought.
Jeg ønsker alle Norsk sammen en riktig god tid på den frie internett...
Bob'sFreeWidgetZ for Some-System-Nobody-Has-Ever-Heard-Of, version 0.0.1.2.5½ alpha, which hasn't been updated, except for a lengthened Todo list, for over a year, and has one part-time developer, is a perfect example of a 'Loser' OSS Project. There are plenty of these on Sourceforge.
Anybody who tries to program anything thorough, complex or unorthodox knows in great detail what Rosenborg means when he says, "software is hard", and that even trivially simple projects take eras to complete. You would be astonished, how many subtle bugs, memory leaks, logic errors, inconsistencies, typos, misinterpretations of specs, functionality, etc. can quietly mug your simple program. If you add multithreaded functionality as well, you introduce a whole new class of horrendous synchronisation, race-condition, resource starving, deadlock, memory corruption, instability, etc errors. Once you start with multiple files, header files, ridiculously complex make scripts (these are very popular) and odd dependencies on obscure libraries, you can while away many a dull evening having fun fixing things. If you have multiple programmers working on the same thing, then you tread on each others toes, can't understand what other people have written, somehow manage to subtley break someone else's code, can't agree on what to call object X, have to call a commitee meeting, time wasting...
I've spent many days, trying to figure out why my train goes through the wrong signal, and after a week, discover that I've saved something in one register, then used it again to save something else two lines down, then pushed and poped it for no apparent reason. Then if you simultaneously click button X while holding key Y, memory in arbitrary position Z is modified and your program starts acting really weird and then crashes ten minutes later... Developing properly robust, indestructable code varies proportionally to an unfortunately high power of program complexity. I've spent many dull evenings trying
The FSF are not doing themselves any favours by making people nervous. They would be better off: a) Demanding to know details on the MS-Novell contract/agreement, specifically in terms of possible litigation/GPL-violation possibilities. b) Waiting for the some MS IP-restricted code to find its way into GPL code, and then demand that either MSs IP restrictions of that code are removed, or that it is removed. c) Warning Novell QUIETLY not to try any funny business. (Probably not going to happen and not very effective) As for the Open Source Community, they can simply ignore Novell and concentrate their efforts somewhere else. Projects like Samba, as quoted previously, aren't happy with Novell, they can simply forget about them and concentrate on writing good code instead. All of this legal wrangling is pointless unless somebody has actually, obviously and blatantly broken a properly big and binding legal agreement, and the ton of legal bricks are poised to fall and deprive them of a dimension. Ultimately, nitpicking over commas and implied subtleties in license agreements should be reserved for fat coorporations, who charge big money for bloated, expensive software. Not Linux. Not GPL. Not FOSS.
It shouldn't be a huge amount of work to get ActiveX controls working on Windows. A.ocx activex control is just a COM DLL really, and ought not to be too much trouble to port to Linux Firefox (in conjunction with WINE perhaps), or to Mac OS possibly in conjunction with the Win32 api compatability layer (Darwin?). A plugin wouldn't be too difficult to write, as ActiveX is better documented than many other areas of Windows. I'm sure that if enough South Korean programmers, and there are a lot, get annoyed, the problem will be sorted, particularly with the Vista issue.
Personnely I doubt that Vista will break these Korean ActiveX modules indefinetely, as MS can release a patch after the OS is releashed and selling, at their leisure. MS would never create a situation where an entire country is put off their flagship product, especially a country with 99.9% MS Windows usage, as stated in the article.
While I find the prevalent MS monoculture in South Korea in itself quite alarming and surprising, I don't think that the compatability issues with Vista are a cause for major concern. Nobody is foring anybody to upgrade to Vista after all.
String theory describes very neatly and elegantly, using complex multidimensional mathematics, an imaginary universe. Unfortunately this hypothetical universe of strings does not seem to behave in a similar manner to our own, shown by the unending series of problems and mispredictions of string theory. Attempting to correct these by 'refining' the model, ie, making it unneccesarily complex by adding large numbers of arbitrary terms, dimensions and general gotchas, is a sign of a not particularly robust mathematical hypothesis. Nobody bases their next industrial application or development on string theory as it is simply not reliable, whereas other theories such as quantum theory, theories of electromagnetism, heat, gravity, etc, are. Trying to fit data to a series of made up equations is simply not the way to go. Physicists are thinking of turning strings into membranes and adding even more dimensions, to me that is even more improbable and unwealdy. Inventing ideas using a pencil, paper and supercomputer are no match for measuring first and then performing a detailed analysis. No doubt the physicists will be 'surprised', 'stumped' or 'shocked' by the results of the experiment, which will require some 'tweaking' of an obviously fundamentally flawed model. String theory is part of a long list of fictional entities or relationships that have been dreamt up on the spot. String theory, along with a few other miscalleaneous dingbats, has sipmly not yet been disproved and abandoned.
While being able to detect neural impulses and induce them in live connected nerve cells is an impressive feat, it does not really make deciphering or producing complex nerve signals, such as those associated with sight, hearing or thought, particularly easier. The ability to apply a voltage to a few dozen nerve cells does not make it possible to interface with the human nervous system in a seamless way as is suggested as future advancement. I can only assume that this refers to a long time in the future, after a significantly increased pace of advancement. However this hopefully does not preclude the interception of basic muscle motor neurone impulses for prosthetic limbs, and the feedback into the nervous system of touch sensors on the end, perhaps, which is a more realistic and highly useful, for those affected, form of technology/research.
Software is, by definition, only as "intelligent" as the programmers who wrote it (and almost always significantly less so). Attempting to cross a content filterer, electronic Tamagotchi and artificial conversationalist seems in my opinion to be a bit of a tall order, and unlikely to work out well in the end. If parents can't inspire respect and obedience in their children, how is a glorified computer program with a flashy GUI and a limited set of responses going to do that. The content filtering part/malicious chatter detector could be implemented as a stand-alone unobtrusive software daemon, and would probably be less disconcerting to the child, then having some odd purple figure give it advise. The 'main' interactive bit seems like overkill to me. Kids should be learning to communicate and learn from other people, not from a combination answering machine, electronic watchdog. The Tamagotchi idea, which is even mentioned explicitly in the article, seems to be bad idea in terms of the kids, as they may become more interested in talking to it online, than real people in real life; and sounds like me to be one way of ensuring that the kids keep using it, and don't get bored of it and ask their parents to get rid of it, ensuring continued use of the, probably revenue generating service.
In Britain, "Police hacking into government servers" means that a formal request was made to some civil servant who promptly went and retreived the spare admin authentication details from an unmarked brown file at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet that is sitting next to the boiler in the basement underneath the House of Commons, and then read out the passwords over the phone to a Police secratary.
M$ says that Vista/DrmOS 'degrades' unlawful (or whatever they're calling it this morning), video streams.
Now, how hard is it for some irritated hacker to find the conditional jump for 'Degrade Video' and simply convert it to a few NOPs. Recalculate the driver checksum and voilà, c'est fait.
He could even write a neat package installer to 'Automagically Correct DRM Bugs in Vista OSs'.
They'll be plenty of those floating over the various p2p and torrent nets.
M$ are shooting themselves in the foot (again).
Your average Joe will complain, the teenagers will download a hack (or even the whole of Vista, hacked), the computer know-it-alls will use a FOSS OS and the rest will buy a Mac.
Me, I'm sticking with my old decrepit OEM WinXP machine with dual-boot/coLinux combo Slackware 10.2
Much better...
If you want to report a bug, and your not sure if it'll go down well with the fat cats at the top, post it anonymously. Anyone who is clever enough to find a bug ought to be clever enough to notify those who should be informed without leaving oobvious traces as to who they are. You can't be sued if you don't exist... That doesn't stop people trying though...
What is global warming? Obviously it is warming of the globe...
It is hotter now than it was 100 years ago. Fact.
What exactly does this prove? It proves that it is warmer now than it was a few years ago! Congratulations, have a biscuit.
All this about people driving too much, using too much electricity, breathing too much, eating too many burgers and cows farting too much, being the unilateral and sole 100% cause of all global warming effects is simply not the case. Global warming has happened before, it is now happening again. One volcano going off has a much larger effect on climate than a few cars being driven about. Never mind the US were blowing holes in the sky with nuclear bomb tests.
Scientists have measured a decrease in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field and an increase in solar activity: CMEs, solar flares, etc. since they bagan measuremens. What effect might that have...
P.S. Don't believe what I say, and especially don't believe what the US government, or some Christian parent believes, as gospel. Look at the facts, filter the sensible conclusions from the chafe, and come to your own conclusion. Debate in an intelligent manner with your peers, and don't waste your time with legal or policy non-sense.
Slashdot Mirror
If you run Windows, use Winamp, it plays ogg by default and is (IMO) marvellous. For that matter any FOSS player will do.
If you run Linux, any sensible player will play OGGs.
If you run Mac, well you can either use iTunes (yuck), or download another player...
I can't stand iTunes, but then again, there is a long list of perfectly usable things I can't stand...
More interesting by far are the lyrics, including some of the other ones.
The 'Debugging' song stirs strong feeling in me after spending days wading through heavily patched badly written x86 assembly language spaghetti code...
God forbid what happens when I play Total Annihilation...
I will be getting a new desktop soon. No doubt when I play Supreme Commander the CPU(s) will sit at 100% at times as well...
The latest games (and many other applications) usually require a high level of processing power respective to the available technology at release time. Hence people will always want faster computers
Heh! All you Slashdotters know zilch about truly terrible AIs...
I regularly play Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch (and I am one of the programmers of the patch as well, but that is a different story).
The AI is so terrible that you would not believe it.
The game begins, and an AI company is created. It then acquires a huge loan, and sits for 5 years losing money. It then goes into "braindead constuction mode", where it feverently tries by trial and error to find the least profitable transportation system it can, by avoiding the non-existant obstacles.
From knowing some of the internals, I know that terraforming is basically done by the rand() function, and that they do it for free.
When zoomed out, their handiwork looks like my signiture, untidy, with no straight lines and lots of loops.
It's so broken, that I now play with it off, as they make the place look untidy and might accidentally demolish a small town or something equally foolhardy.
The only snag with using these huge Airbuses, is that they are too large for many of the gates.
Either you have to build more spread-out gates, or you park the plane in the middle of the tarmac and drive a bus to it.
Either way you have to spend ages and go miles to actually get to the plane.
At Heathrow it's bad enough with small planes, you spend 45 minutes getting to the gate...
When your gate is an extra-wide one...
I can just imagine: Your flight at Gate Q587, leaves in 1 hour, you've checked in and you're at the departure lounge. Start running.
* You're writing software for a low-speed or low-memory chip for an embedded system (e.g. one of the PIC chips). Such chips are used either because they are cheap or because they need very little power. You can often program these chips in some variant of C, but if you need that last drop of performance, you use assembly.
* You're writing a compiler. In this case you may not have to write assembly directly, but you'll have to understand it intimately in order to convert source code to machine language. (Replace "assembly" with "bytecode" or "IL", if making a Java or
* You are reverse-engineering closed-source software (another case where you must comprehend assembly)
* You're designing or testing a computer chip, in which case you may have all sorts of tests cases written in assembly language.
* You're maintaining an old "legacy" system that uses assembly.
* You're writing an emulator for another computer, and you need high performance. In this case you may need to understand the assembly language of both the real and emulated machines, as I learned when I wrote a Super Nintendo emulator.
* Those bastards make you study it in one of your college courses. Add to that: The need to debug any x86 binary compiled program, even if you have the source. No matter if you program is written in assembly, C or FORTRAN, if the binaries are x86 complied the debugger will list assembly instructions. If you don't understand them then debugging becomes infinitely more difficult.
Additionally, if you write the program in assembly in the first place, then debugging it becomes so much easier, as you are not faced with wading through stacks and stack of bloat-code, as inserted by many high level languages. How many of you have disassembled a C program, and just instinctively known that you aren't going to enjoy poking through it, first seeing a horrendous and unneccesary stack maneouver, followed by multiple calls to superfluous library funtions (statically linked)?
Knowing assembly is essential for good programming, not knowing the ins and outs of the chip you're supposedly coding for, is a recipe for inefficient code that doesn't make good use of the resources available. I've seen lots of such code.
I personnaly code for TTDPatch, whilst some of the code is absolutely gracelesss and horrible, it is efficient and optimised, no bloat is permitted (because writting bloat in assembly is tedious and difficult, unlike C++ where bloat is the norm, and avoiding it requires years of experience, or just GCC).
...which offers 'desktop computers in cases of oak, walnut, zebrawood, purpleheart, mahogany, maple and leopardwood'. Wouldn't it be much easier just to hide the desktop box behind your desk if you really don't want to look at it.As for wood, it is both a saftey hazard and useless as a computer case material, it won't block any EM interference at all, and it's a fire hazard.
I don't want to think what a few year's worth of heat, dust and static will do to your lovely wood panelled box.
Money could be better spent elsewhere...
Read the article:
a 19- inch LCD monitor with a wooden frame -- is $2,950.
The prices for the computers, which include a monitor, keyboard, mouse and some service, start at about $5,740. Needn't say anything to that.
WINE
IS
NOT an
Emulator
WINE is an API wrapper layer, not a processor achitecture substitute, hence the code needs to be written for the same chipset as the machine (means x86 in most cases) and there isn't a virtual performance penalty (no pun intended).
Not true.
I am currently running 47 extensions in Firefox 1.5.0.10 on WinXPSP2.
Firefox almost never crashes, the only time I have problems is when I visit sites with crappy javascript or broken java applets, and then its merely extreme sluggishness.
More firefox extensions does not equal instability.
It equals a HUGE performance penalty on startup (and opening a new window) of about 4-5 seconds, especially if you run a 1.6GHz P4 like I do...
Javascript is not the speediest of script languages, especially compared to precompiled code.
It would be nice if you could precompile/preparse your browser chrome scripts...
Currently I use MSOffice 2003 on WinXP SP2.
(I also run Slackware 11.0 under coLinux).
This has always worked fine for me, I'm used to it and many of my documents are saved in this format.
A converter between two competing XML document format changes absolutely nothing for me or anybody I know, at all.
If you really want pixel/layout perfect compatability between all machines running all weird and wonderful OSs, then you realistically have to store you data in plain text with monospaced font, HTML or PDF.
Office documents contain too much stuff instrinsic to the program used to create them.
For example, you can include COM-based VB macros, OLE embedded objects (such as equation editor), and other miscallaneous items in MS Word documents, getting them to work correctly on different OSs correctly would be a nightmare.
If the OpenOffice suite did absolutely everything that MS Office did (including in particular Excel with its myriad features, a real must), than I would just write all my new documents/spreadsheets with that and be done with it, leaving my existing documents as they are.
The goal is mostly stationary as the real useful improvements in Office since 2000 (except Access, and perhaps Excel 2003), are frankly negligible (Word 2000 added nested tables, that is the only useful difference I have noticed between Word 2003 and Word 1997).
Outlook in my opinion is rubbish so I try to avoid it wherever possible (what is wrong with webmail).
Also, why do people seem to need an integrated calendar, email client and word processor?
Calendar: Calendar program/piece-of-paper-on-wall.
Word processor: Whatever you like/have.
Email: Whatever, (webmail is least hassle by far).
What would really be useful is if MS Office would run properly and smoothly without huge amounts of messing about with WINE or paying for Cedega, under Linux. That is more important than whether I can convert (lossily), between the two formats at the moment.
That and games are mostly what are stopping me leaving MS Windows.
One day I'll reserve the order and run windows as a VM under Linux...
Why are they bothering to sell files over bittorrent?
Bittorrent is by definition a "Peer-to-Peer" protocol.
--- There are no peers ---
There are only the clients and the source.
Hence it would be infinitely simpler to just use a perfectly ordinary HTTP (or whatever), download service from the source to the client, client--server.
Bittorent is perfect for downloading the latest ultra-popular freshly pirated movie, or downloading all six Slackware 11 isos at high speed (as there were so many peers after it was released), but using Bittorent to download a file from a point source, when there are probably negligble other seed/leech sources is simply counterintuitive, and ultimately a suboptimal use of the protocol.
Its no surprise that download speeds may be rubbish, that's a quirk of the protocol (and a function of its probable non-popularity).
As for the DRM, any half-baked excuse for an almost sentient attempt at a life form with more than working brain cell and with its head not buried in the sand (or in its wallet), could tell that DRM simply doesn't work, and merely annoys the user. This has been discussed to death over the last few years in great detail, and if even enormous companies like Apple can twig and get the hint by making their legally obligatory DRM as unobtrusive and transparent as possible (they partially succeded), then these "five movie studios" can do so too...
Overall I judge this as a method of "testing the waters", rather than a serious attempt at making money, or providing a service. Ultimately the conclusion is inevitably negative.
What this means is that at some point in time, the answer, the decrypted volume key, is stored in an SSE register, of which there are 8, and which are exactly the same length as the value you are trying to hide.
You would probably just have to monitor the SSE registers and any other 'funny business', like prevention of context switches, obvious obfuscation of memory/code, etc.
You might as well put up text reading: 'The key that you are looking for will at some point be stored in one of the eight shoe directly boxes below', in mile high letters of fluorescent green fire visible from the far side of the moon.
Besides, the SSE registers aren't used very often anyway except for things like block calculations in media decoding/encoding anyway, so it will look very suspicious when suddenly all sorts of stuff starts happening in them. Putting a few dummy SSE operations first will be transparent, as a coder can just break at that point and say: WTF is all this crap code doing.
They are probably better off storing the key in the middle of heap allocated memory block used by the system, making sure that all sorts of other bloatware junk necessary for the correct runing of the player program is stuffed in the haphazardly as well, whilst simultaneously doing absolutely no fancy tricks during the actual process of getting and handling the volume key.
I used to live in Norway... Time to practise.
-- Internett er et unikt verktøy, og statlig sensur passer ikke inn der.
Internet is a unique worktool, and state censureship does not fit it.
Too right.
-- Samferdselsdepartementet ønsker ikke å kommentere
Somenorweigengovernmentdepartmentorother wished not to comment.
I'm not surprised.
Whoever thought this up are a bunch of åndssvaks. -- Only insult I can remember.
The Norweigens people will never, ever stand for this. Nor would the government. The Norweigen people are amongst the few who, en masse, take great patriotic pride in their country, people and culture, and whose government genuinely acts in the general best interests of the people and not in their pockets or personal power. Having lived there for five years, and comparing it with life in Italy, France and the UK, this is not just an idle thought.
Jeg ønsker alle Norsk sammen en riktig god tid på den frie internett...
Bob'sFreeWidgetZ for Some-System-Nobody-Has-Ever-Heard-Of, version 0.0.1.2.5½ alpha, which hasn't been updated, except for a lengthened Todo list, for over a year, and has one part-time developer, is a perfect example of a 'Loser' OSS Project.
There are plenty of these on Sourceforge.
Anybody who tries to program anything thorough, complex or unorthodox knows in great detail what Rosenborg means when he says, "software is hard", and that even trivially simple projects take eras to complete.
You would be astonished, how many subtle bugs, memory leaks, logic errors, inconsistencies, typos, misinterpretations of specs, functionality, etc. can quietly mug your simple program. If you add multithreaded functionality as well, you introduce a whole new class of horrendous synchronisation, race-condition, resource starving, deadlock, memory corruption, instability, etc errors.
Once you start with multiple files, header files, ridiculously complex make scripts (these are very popular) and odd dependencies on obscure libraries, you can while away many a dull evening having fun fixing things.
If you have multiple programmers working on the same thing, then you tread on each others toes, can't understand what other people have written, somehow manage to subtley break someone else's code, can't agree on what to call object X, have to call a commitee meeting, time wasting...
I've spent many days, trying to figure out why my train goes through the wrong signal, and after a week, discover that I've saved something in one register, then used it again to save something else two lines down, then pushed and poped it for no apparent reason.
Then if you simultaneously click button X while holding key Y, memory in arbitrary position Z is modified and your program starts acting really weird and then crashes ten minutes later...
Developing properly robust, indestructable code varies proportionally to an unfortunately high power of program complexity.
I've spent many dull evenings trying
The FSF are not doing themselves any favours by making people nervous. They would be better off:
a) Demanding to know details on the MS-Novell contract/agreement, specifically in terms of possible litigation/GPL-violation possibilities.
b) Waiting for the some MS IP-restricted code to find its way into GPL code, and then demand that either MSs IP restrictions of that code are removed, or that it is removed.
c) Warning Novell QUIETLY not to try any funny business. (Probably not going to happen and not very effective)
As for the Open Source Community, they can simply ignore Novell and concentrate their efforts somewhere else. Projects like Samba, as quoted previously, aren't happy with Novell, they can simply forget about them and concentrate on writing good code instead.
All of this legal wrangling is pointless unless somebody has actually, obviously and blatantly broken a properly big and binding legal agreement, and the ton of legal bricks are poised to fall and deprive them of a dimension.
Ultimately, nitpicking over commas and implied subtleties in license agreements should be reserved for fat coorporations, who charge big money for bloated, expensive software. Not Linux. Not GPL. Not FOSS.
It shouldn't be a huge amount of work to get ActiveX controls working on Windows. .ocx activex control is just a COM DLL really, and ought not to be too much trouble to port to Linux Firefox (in conjunction with WINE perhaps), or to Mac OS possibly in conjunction with the Win32 api compatability layer (Darwin?). A plugin wouldn't be too difficult to write, as ActiveX is better documented than many other areas of Windows. I'm sure that if enough South Korean programmers, and there are a lot, get annoyed, the problem will be sorted, particularly with the Vista issue.
A
Personnely I doubt that Vista will break these Korean ActiveX modules indefinetely, as MS can release a patch after the OS is releashed and selling, at their leisure. MS would never create a situation where an entire country is put off their flagship product, especially a country with 99.9% MS Windows usage, as stated in the article.
While I find the prevalent MS monoculture in South Korea in itself quite alarming and surprising, I don't think that the compatability issues with Vista are a cause for major concern. Nobody is foring anybody to upgrade to Vista after all.
String theory describes very neatly and elegantly, using complex multidimensional mathematics, an imaginary universe. Unfortunately this hypothetical universe of strings does not seem to behave in a similar manner to our own, shown by the unending series of problems and mispredictions of string theory. Attempting to correct these by 'refining' the model, ie, making it unneccesarily complex by adding large numbers of arbitrary terms, dimensions and general gotchas, is a sign of a not particularly robust mathematical hypothesis. Nobody bases their next industrial application or development on string theory as it is simply not reliable, whereas other theories such as quantum theory, theories of electromagnetism, heat, gravity, etc, are.
Trying to fit data to a series of made up equations is simply not the way to go.
Physicists are thinking of turning strings into membranes and adding even more dimensions, to me that is even more improbable and unwealdy.
Inventing ideas using a pencil, paper and supercomputer are no match for measuring first and then performing a detailed analysis.
No doubt the physicists will be 'surprised', 'stumped' or 'shocked' by the results of the experiment, which will require some 'tweaking' of an obviously fundamentally flawed model.
String theory is part of a long list of fictional entities or relationships that have been dreamt up on the spot. String theory, along with a few other miscalleaneous dingbats, has sipmly not yet been disproved and abandoned.
While being able to detect neural impulses and induce them in live connected nerve cells is an impressive feat, it does not really make deciphering or producing complex nerve signals, such as those associated with sight, hearing or thought, particularly easier.
The ability to apply a voltage to a few dozen nerve cells does not make it possible to interface with the human nervous system in a seamless way as is suggested as future advancement. I can only assume that this refers to a long time in the future, after a significantly increased pace of advancement. However this hopefully does not preclude the interception of basic muscle motor neurone impulses for prosthetic limbs, and the feedback into the nervous system of touch sensors on the end, perhaps, which is a more realistic and highly useful, for those affected, form of technology/research.
Software is, by definition, only as "intelligent" as the programmers who wrote it (and almost always significantly less so).
Attempting to cross a content filterer, electronic Tamagotchi and artificial conversationalist seems in my opinion to be a bit of a tall order, and unlikely to work out well in the end.
If parents can't inspire respect and obedience in their children, how is a glorified computer program with a flashy GUI and a limited set of responses going to do that.
The content filtering part/malicious chatter detector could be implemented as a stand-alone unobtrusive software daemon, and would probably be less disconcerting to the child, then having some odd purple figure give it advise. The 'main' interactive bit seems like overkill to me.
Kids should be learning to communicate and learn from other people, not from a combination answering machine, electronic watchdog.
The Tamagotchi idea, which is even mentioned explicitly in the article, seems to be bad idea in terms of the kids, as they may become more interested in talking to it online, than real people in real life; and sounds like me to be one way of ensuring that the kids keep using it, and don't get bored of it and ask their parents to get rid of it, ensuring continued use of the, probably revenue generating service.
In Britain, "Police hacking into government servers" means that a formal request was made to some civil servant who promptly went and retreived the spare admin authentication details from an unmarked brown file at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet that is sitting next to the boiler in the basement underneath the House of Commons, and then read out the passwords over the phone to a Police secratary.
M$ says that Vista/DrmOS 'degrades' unlawful (or whatever they're calling it this morning), video streams.
Now, how hard is it for some irritated hacker to find the conditional jump for 'Degrade Video' and simply convert it to a few NOPs. Recalculate the driver checksum and voilà, c'est fait.
He could even write a neat package installer to 'Automagically Correct DRM Bugs in Vista OSs'. They'll be plenty of those floating over the various p2p and torrent nets.
M$ are shooting themselves in the foot (again).
Your average Joe will complain, the teenagers will download a hack (or even the whole of Vista, hacked), the computer know-it-alls will use a FOSS OS and the rest will buy a Mac.
Me, I'm sticking with my old decrepit OEM WinXP machine with dual-boot/coLinux combo Slackware 10.2
Much better...
If you want to report a bug, and your not sure if it'll go down well with the fat cats at the top, post it anonymously.
Anyone who is clever enough to find a bug ought to be clever enough to notify those who should be informed without leaving oobvious traces as to who they are.
You can't be sued if you don't exist...
That doesn't stop people trying though...
What is global warming?
Obviously it is warming of the globe...
It is hotter now than it was 100 years ago. Fact.
What exactly does this prove?
It proves that it is warmer now than it was a few years ago! Congratulations, have a biscuit.
All this about people driving too much, using too much electricity, breathing too much, eating too many burgers and cows farting too much, being the unilateral and sole 100% cause of all global warming effects is simply not the case.
Global warming has happened before, it is now happening again.
One volcano going off has a much larger effect on climate than a few cars being driven about.
Never mind the US were blowing holes in the sky with nuclear bomb tests.
Scientists have measured a decrease in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field and an increase in solar activity: CMEs, solar flares, etc. since they bagan measuremens.
What effect might that have...
P.S. Don't believe what I say, and especially don't believe what the US government, or some Christian parent believes, as gospel. Look at the facts, filter the sensible conclusions from the chafe, and come to your own conclusion. Debate in an intelligent manner with your peers, and don't waste your time with legal or policy non-sense.