who is surprised that WebM steps all over patents associated with h.264
Objection. The correct sentence here is "who is surprised that MPEG-LA claims that WebM steps all over patents controlled by MPEG-LA".
Given that WebM was specifically designed to not infringe any patents, I for one would be very surprised if it "steps all over" a large number of patents.
Sadly, I would not be surprised if Google lost a lawsuit over some patent that someone claims covers WebM. But that's because there are so many patents, and stuff happens in lawsuits.
The one and only argument I have ever seen in favor of WebM is that it doesn't have licensing restrictions.
Isn't that enough?
The basic pitch for WebM is "not as good as H.264, but you are free to use it". If you need the best possible video encoder and are willing to abide the the licensing restrictions and fee schedules of H.264, you use H.264. If you are Debian, and you only ship free software that isn't patent-encumbered, you ship WebM and not H.264. This isn't rocket surgery.
From a code point of view h.264 is at least as open source seeing as many of the best tools and compressors are (and always have been) open and in many cases free. WebM doesn't do things significantly different from a technical point of view or an implementation point of view. It is substantially the same technology.
Your point about H.264 being available in open source is accurate, but pointless. Your second point is correct if we agree that the word "substantially" covers a lot of differences. The differences make H.264 the better encoder.
So if you have two projects that are effectively identical, but one has licensing restrictions on some streaming content and the other doesn't. Why would patents that cover one not cover the other?
Because patents aren't judged by this "substantially" word you used. Patents cover specific things. On2 seems to have studied patents to figure out what they couldn't do, and found ways to do things that work almost as well without being covered by the patents.
The dangers here are that On2 overlooked a patent or otherwise made a mistake; or that a court would rule that On2 skated too close to the line. There is no danger that a court will say "WebM is substantially doing the same thing as H.264, so all the H.264 patents apply." You didn't really mean to imply the situation was that simple, did you?
This stuff is like the JPG and GIF patents. Made zero real world impact and by the time everyone was finished arguing over them the patents had already expired.
There is one major difference: the patents on H.264 are not just about to expire. I did a quick Google search and found that you would have to wait until 2025 to use H.264 for free.
If you use a patented format, you have to get a patent license. The owners of the patent license get to dictate the terms of the license.
Google, who owns and runs YouTube, doesn't want to build its business around H.264, because then when it is time to renew the licenses, the terms or fees could become Draconian.
Google doesn't want to build YouTube around an old, lousy video coder that happens to be free, because the users won't be happy their videos load slowly and look horrible; and Google has to pay for the bandwidth.
So: WebM. Not as good as H.264, but nobody can use it to tell Google "you now have to give us big large huge royalties on your use of this video coder". They can predict their future licensing costs (zero), and their bandwidth costs aren't horrible and the user experience is good.
WebM benefits everyone except for the people who own H.264 patents. And they will still make money on H.264; they just won't be the only game in town anymore. They want very much to be the only game in town and charge whatever they feel like charging. I don't understand why you are so keen on this idea.
So, Apple has a standard docking port for iPads. I hope the Android world can converge on a standard docking port as well.
Clearly the ThinkPad Tablet must have some sort of docking port, since TFA mentions a clamshell keyboard case that docks with it. Does anyone know what this is?
I have read that the Samsung Galaxy Tab uses PDMI for its docking port; can anyone confirm that?
I don't really care what the standard is; I just hope there will be one.
P.S. The worst thing about the Motorola Xoom is the lack of a docking port. Desktop docking stations for it require you to get a micro-USB connector and a mini-HDMI connector to line up and engage the sockets on the tablet. And, none of the available desktop docking stations pass through the USB! You do get HDMI passthrough but not USB, which totally sucks if you are a developer trying to work with a Xoom.
Unless you're relatively young, you should remember a time when the average working parent could support a spouse and a family with children. Right now, the average working person can barely support him/herself with one job.
Fair enough. But I don't see any connection between that and the rich getting richer. I blame that on the horrible inflation; according to this site the US dollar is worth around 1/7 as much as it was when I was born. That means that if a family was living on $20,000 per year when I was born, a similar family would need to make $140,000 now to have the same buying power.
Of course that oversimplifies; no amount of money would buy a smart phone or a laptop computer in the year I was born, and both are available rather cheaply these days. But inflation is the key to your complaint, not "the rich getting richer".
Quantitative Easing printed vast amounts of new money; inflation, pure and simple. The massive borrowing of the US government also leads to inflation. Corn subsidies for ethanol have led to an increase in food prices generally. The increasing costs of fuel are making everything more expensive. None of this has anything to do with "the rich getting richer".
You're probably solidly in the "upper middle class"
Possibly. I didn't want to look up exactly where the class boundaries fall, and my basic point remains: I am not "the rich" and "tax cuts for the rich" will not directly benefit me.
It won't be 100% of course; some rich folks will stay, even if taxes get really high. (There's a cynical old rule of thumb: if you want to hang onto your money, do the same things that retired Senators and Congressmen do. There will always be a way for the rich to keep their money, as long as retired politicians have money.) And some people will just pay the taxes. But there are limits, and the more severe the tax rate, the more it will encourage people to leave.
I don't think it's fair to accuse me of demagoguery.
So, what you're saying is that tax shelters should be closed?
These "tax shelters" include things like municipal bonds, so it won't be easy to shut them all.
If you do manage to shut them all, the rich may leave the USA and go to a more tax-favorable country. I hear the Bahamas are nice.
If you have a plan for preventing the rich from leaving the country, you still can't get them to invest their money effectively.
You could just take all the money from the rich, but that only works once and may have consequences you didn't anticipate.
As I understand it, the Ryan plan actually does close many tax loopholes, but at the same time it cuts tax rates. I support this. Companies like GE pay no taxes; it would be better for all companies to pay the same rates, and it would be better for GNP growth if those rates were lower than the current rates.
It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes. Thus any meaningful tax cut, for any purpose, will cut taxes for "the rich" more than it will cut taxes for "the poor".
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?
Historically, the US government has not managed to collect more than 19 or 20 percent of GNP in tax revenue. Even when the highest tax bracket was 70% or even higher, revenues as a percent of GNP were not higher than when the highest tax bracket was under 40%. If you think you can fix the USA's financial problems by taxing the rich, you need to explain one of these: (a) why this time it will be different, and the government will collect over 20% of GNP; (b) why GNP will grow faster with higher tax rates; or (c) why the high tax rates will limit the growth of GNP and collect less tax revenue, but it's worth it because it is important to keep the rich from getting richer.
My own view is that if 19% is what the US government can realistically collect, we should be trying to grow the GNP of the US so that the government is collecting 19% of a larger GNP. That means reducing taxes, regulatory burden, and uncertainty.
But don't take my word for this; see some references:
Disclaimer: I'm either middle class or posibly upper-middle-class, but I am not remotely "the rich" and tax cuts for "the rich" would not directly benefit me.
If at some point in the future (admittedly a big IF) the HURD kernel is able to outperform the Linux kernel (e.g. offer better performance or better stability or better security, etc), most likely your distro of choice will offer the HURD kernel as an alternative for the Linux kernel
Sure, if it proves itself to have advantages, it will make inroads.
But I think you are missing my point. My point is that experience has shown the Linux kernel to be "Good Enough", and even if HURD is theoretically better, there will be little interest in switching to it. At this point HURD wouldn't just have to be a little bit better, it would have to be a lot better before it would have any chance of displacing Linux. And I don't think it has shown any signs of that kind of superiority so far.
have HURD claims not panned out because of flaws in the theoretical framework, or because of lack of developers to implement it properly
I believe that if HURD really was as good as grand claims made it sound, somebody would have driven the development forward. If nobody else, graduate students who needed research projects, or something like that.
The claims for HURD were that once it got going, it would overtake Linux quickly, because it would be so much easier to develop HURD. The overall system would be cleaner, with nice isolated subsystems with well-documented module boundaries; and it would be easier to debug, as you would just run GDB on your file system code or whatever and debug it like any other user-space program. If these claims had panned out, then at least the academic computer science people would have all jumped on board HURD and driven development.
massive-multi-core CPUs with hardware support for high speed message passing may negate or at least mitigate [the message passing] overhead [in HURD]
Perhaps so. But at this point HURD is late to the party, and unless it demonstrates some really compelling benefits, most people will just continue to develop Linux.
Business software, indeed MOST (Unix) software is written to the API level so as long as a POSIX layer sits on top of the kernel, most software should work with only a recompile.
Well, so what? If I'm in charge of IT at a big company, and it is my job to run a server that will be heavily loaded with lots of I/O and the company expects that the only downtime will be once-a-year maintenance on Christmas Day, which will I run? HURD claims to be wonderful, but everyone I know is running Linux and Linux is working. I'm going to run Linux too.
This is an example of "network effect" where sometimes people use something because "everybody else uses it". HURD is not benefiting from network effect, and Linux is.
Even if HURD has a theoretical advantage over Linux for reliability, Linux systems are running reliably now. Hard evidence beats theory.
I think that people kick at HURD because of the grand claims made by some HURD fans. These grand claims have not panned out.
If you look at the old HURD FAQ, you will see claims that "Linux and BSD don't scale well" and that HURD, being based on Mach, should scale better for SMP; furthermore, HURD would be "considerably more flexible and robust than generic Unix".
The superior architecture of HURD was supposed to make it easier and faster to develop and debug HURD, and thus HURD was going to leapfrog past Linux as the obviously better solution.
Kernel debugging in Linux is significantly harder than user-space debugging. The microkernel design of HURD was supposed to allow for things like file systems to be written and debugged with the ease of user-space development under Linux. That being the case, it seems surprising that HURD is so far behind Linux after so many years.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but here are my thoughts on the current Linux and HURD situation:
First, Linux scales really well now. People are using Linux on really large SMP systems.
Second, a microkernel architecture, while more robust than a monokernel, cannot be as fast as the monokernel. If one subsystem wants another subsystem to do something, it must format and send a message; the other subsystem then receives the message, unpacks it, validates it, and then does the action. This is more secure and more stable than the monokernel, where the one subsystem will just make a function call in the other subsystem's code; but it is inherently slower. So Linux is scaling better than HURD expected, and Linux has an inherent speed edge, so HURD is unlikely to outperform Linux. Meanwhile, while it might be true that HURD is easier to debug than Linux, the kernel developers have figured out how to debug Linux, and there just isn't enough benefit there to warrant a switch to HURD.
Finally, Linux is widely used and well understood; lots of businesses are running mission-critical apps on Linux. Even if HURD's microkernel design gave it a theoretical edge on Linux for reliability, the real-world experience is all on Linux; it has been shown to be Good Enough while HURD is only theoretically better.
There are several upvoted posts that have nothing to do with the actual article. Since I read TFA I can summarize the important points for you.
They have developed a way to use inkjet technology to "print" a solar cell that works. The chief advantage of this system is that there is much much less wastage compared to other means of producing a solar cell. Instead of using silicon, they are working with more exotic materials, with the potential to make better/cheaper solar cells than silicon ones.
At the moment their first prototypes are 5% efficient. TFA discusses the point that this is nowhere near good enough to start selling these solar panels yet; luckily enough the people working on this already know this fact, no need to point it out here on Slashdot. They say that with additional research they hope to bring it to 12%, but TFA didn't say why they mentioned that 12% number. (Enough for commercial success? Easily achievable? The maximum they think they can get with current "ink" formula? Who knows?)
My favorite quote:
"Some of the materials we want to work with for the most advanced solar cells, such as indium, are relatively expensive," Chang said. "If that's what you're using you can't really afford to waste it, and the inkjet approach almost eliminates the waste."
The engineers are also studying other compounds that could be used with the inkjet technology that could cost even less. If they are able to reduce costs enough, the researchers say it also offers the prospect of creating solar cells that could be built directly into roofing materials.
I like the roofing materials idea, because in many places the peak electrical demand is to run air conditioning on hot sunny days. In those places, solar roofing tiles would be a win/win and should pay for themselves quickly.
Come on IEEE, I expected better of you. Power output is irrelevent. We care about energy output. 11 grams of boron fuel will get you 300 megawatts for what duration?
I am not a physicist, but I think the info you want is in the article.
pulse frequencies up to 75 megahertz
Each pulse of the laser should generate roughly 100 000 particles
a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power.
So a mole is 6.0221415e23, right?
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, and I may be wrong, but:
6.02e23 / 100 000 == 6.02e18 pulses to process one mole of boron
6.02e18 / 75e6 == 8.02e11 seconds to process one mole of boron
300e6 W / 8.02e11 seconds == 3.7e-3 W/sec
I can't tell you how that compares with an ion drive.
Wow, no need to be so literal. Try to understand what your teacher was saying, rather than delighting in disagreeing when you actually agree.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying here. Are you implying that I am not accurately quoting the sense of what my teacher was saying? Because I am not sure how you know that. And I am absolutely sure that I had the sense of it correct: that we let watches control us.
If she was trying to push us to refute her, she could have had a discussion of this idea, but she didn't do that. And I don't recall it being part of a lesson plan, just an off-the-cuff comment she made one day.
And it was a teacher I liked, so I wasn't just sitting around looking for reasons to disagree.
But I guess I have to concede that it is possible she was saying one thing while thinking the exact opposite but not giving us any clues about it at all. She could have been faking that "off-the-cuff" thing; it could have been a crucial part of her lesson plan, just tossed out at the end of one class and never mentioned again. That seems like an odd educational strategy, though.
One of the examples from TFA is a set of colored balls, hanging in an open space by in a stairwell. The bright, cheerful balls represent people taking the stairs, and the grey balls represent people taking the elevators (lifts). There are pressure pads used to count people, and the counts are used to estimate stair usage and elevator usage. The colored balls are just a visual indicator.
According to the article, people say things like "You took the elevator... you are making the grey balls go up, you know" or similar.
And now, my point: the colored balls are not what people care about. People already have an opinion about whether stairs or elevator are "better" in any sense, and the colored balls display is leveraging that. I could use the same technology to track how many people look out the East window, vs how many people look out the West window, and I'm pretty sure nobody would care which color of balls is "winning" at the moment. The colored balls in and of themselves have no power.
I remember in Junior High School a teacher waxed philosophical about wrist watches. "Just think, we strap them on and then obey them. We rush through lunch because of them. A tiny and simple device can drastically shape our behavior!" (Probably a horribly inaccurate quote; this is a memory I haven't thought of in years.) Even at the time I rejected this thesis. It seemed to me (and still seems to me) that the watch itself has no power; it is the whole structure of civilization, at least where it is intersecting with your own life, that makes you care what time it is. If you took the watch off, you would still hurry through lunch, because you need to be done with lunch by some specific time. Indeed, without the watch, you might hurry more, since you might not be sure how much time you have.
The map is not the territory. Neither a watch nor colored balls nor any of the other stuff in TFA can compel behavior. Simple ergonomics can give a mild nudge; tricks that leverage things people care about can give a stronger nudge, but only because the people already care about something.
So the whole "ethics" thing is overblown. And as others have noted, that was one throwaway line from TFA; it's odd that it was chosen for the summary.
Feel free to point out specific examples where Linux that has been ahead of the curve.
Okay, I just did what I told you to do, and I went to LWN. This week is for LWN subscribers, but last week is freely available, and since I wanted to link it, I wen there.
And I found a fascinating discussion of patching the Linux memory management system to save power by shutting down parts of the RAM that aren't needed! Which version of UNIX did they copy that from? Or will you concede that this is new?
There are plenty of other examples; feel free to actually read the LWN archives. LWN is great.
Because Linux was free and good enough, and it was being adopted in droves on the backend. So IBM decided to support it, rather than be left behind.
Linux was "good enough" that people were not buying as many IBM big-iron machines. Now IBM sells its big iron as a way to run lots of Linux VMs. As I said, a disruptive technology, and I don't see why you are so determined to denigrate Linux as a mere not-quite-as-good-as-UNIX.
Linux was just a Unix clone. I can't think of any area where it stood out as driving innovation.
It started out as a UNIX clone, but has lots of innovation going on under the hood. Subscribe to Linux Weekly News and read the kernel updates every week, and you will get a better feel for the innovation going on.
Note that IBM is pushing Linux. IBM used to push their own UNIX, AIX; but now they have taken all the best features from AIX and ported them to Linux. Can you think of any reason why IBM might have done that?
Linux has been a disruptive technology, and if it were such a blah "me-too" technology as you seem to think, I don't know why it would have been so disruptive.
PostgreSQL: Just a relational database, and usually behind the heavy-hitters in terms of features. Mainly notable for at least being competitive with the big, commercial databases.
Oracle: Just a relational database, and I hear it can be a real pain to work with it. Mainly notable for being well-supported and crazy expensive. See, this sort of negative comment even works on the industry leader.
Let's face it, SQL was invented in the 70's and every SQL database system is "just a relational database" with some combination of features and price.
And let's face it, mostly people just need a relational database that they can trust with their data. There are a few companies that have very specific needs that only Oracle can handle, but most would be just fine with PostgreSQL.
For innovation, how about NoSQL? For some purposes, these work better than SQL; for others, not; but you have to admit these are not "just another relational database".
In the area of desktop environments, GNOME 3 is doing something really different. Lots of people hate it, understand, but it's definitely a new environment. And I think Enlightenment was pushing the envelope a lot in the early days.
The GNOME 3 example shows that sometimes innovation is met with resistance. Some innovations are not popular and languish in obscurity (deserved or not). I think there are a lot of innovative open source projects you have never heard about. (I have a Python project I thought was pretty innovative, but the problem it solves doesn't seem to be a problem people have, because nobody seems to care. On the other hand, ElementTree is very popular and I would call it innovative; if you disagree, what exactly do you think ElementTree is a clone of?)
The fact that they left out C# seems odd as well. It makes me wonder what the point was, really.
Google has an official list of four languages that they approve for use: Java, JavaScript, C++, and Python.
Most of their business runs on Java. Search, Google Maps, etc.
YouTube mostly runs on Python, IIRC.
So, they compared C++, on their list; Java, on their list; Scala, which is not on their list but runs on the JVM and thus would work for them; and a language invented at Google. They didn't test Python, but if they had it would have come in last place (and I say that as one who loves Python; it's reality).
Why is it surprising that Google was testing languages that Google might use for projects?
P.S. Exciting things are happening in the Python world with the PyPy project. PyPy is a Python system that is written in Python. You might expect that to be slow, and for years it was slow; but it includes a Just-in-Time compiler that generates native machine code, and it isn't slow anymore. In fact, it is now faster than the C Python, because it can optimize away lots of stuff that C Python has to do.
Anthony Weiner just publicly admitted to sending the picture. He just publicly apologized to "everyone in the media", including Breitbart, for lying. Direct quote from Anthony Weiner: "I lied because I was ashamed at what I had done, and I didn't want to get caught." (taken from CNN article linked above) He has also publicly admitted, direct quote, that he had: "exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years."
So, Andrew Breitbart will not be going to prison for hacking, because there was no hacker. In this case, the simpler theory has been shown to be the correct one.
I would appreciate it if you would apologize to me for the rude things you have said about me and to me in this discussion thread.
0) I never heard about any campaign stop in Seattle, and I live in the Seattle area. Could you please post a link reference so I can read about this?
1) Why don't we let Slashdot readers click on the link below, look at the photo, and decide how pasty-white those legs are for themselves. They don't look suspiciously white to me, and cell phone cameras aren't the best for accurate color, so you definitely haven't persuaded me on this point.
5) I find it entertaining that the one point I actually provided a link reference for is the one where you claimed I have no reference. Please click on my provided link.
I haven't researched this myself. If you have a link that shows why he was following random young women, please share it. Maybe he rolls a pair of percentile dice, and follows anyone for whom he rolls "00"?
And, you were remarkably quick to claim that I make up information. To me, that means you just called me a liar. That's rather rude and insulting, and it is not winning me over to your point of view.
Tell me, do you have any idea who I am? Have you read a whole bunch of my postings on Slashdot and formed this as a considered opinion, or do you just feel that it's no big deal to call other people liars?
7) In the Fox video embedded here, he does say "I was tweeting about hockey at the time, when this all happened." About 3:21 in the video. No, the timestamps show that the photo was posted and several minutes later he tweeted about hockey.
But you know what, that is sufficiently vague that I don't really care about it. I'm much more convinced by the weird evasions about whether it is he in the photo.
They will be caught, and they will face prison time.
To which I can only say: hey, let's call in the FBI. They can get a search warrant, look at the server logs, and find the IP address from which the photo was sent.
According to the simple theory, the IP address will point right at Anthony Weiner's phone. Some other IP address, perhaps from a public place, would cast reasonable doubt over this theory.
Anthony Weiner, as a sitting member of Congress, ought to be taking this seriously if the story is as he claims.
Either you have a touching faith in Anthony Weiner, or else you are just cynically trolling me. Either way, you won't be swayed by any opinions or facts I might offer. And either way, you called me a liar. So, we're done.
Remember, this all comes from serial liar Andrew Breitbart [...] This smear has been in planning for several months.
You have just made an extraordinary claim. I require extraordinary evidence before I believe you.
The available evidence:
0) Anthony Weiner tweeted about being on TV, and added a hash tag "#thats545inseattle". He has not denied adding that hash tag; he also has not given a coherent explanation of what he meant by it. He did say it is "pure coincidence" that the young lady at the center of the privacy nightmare is in the same time zone as Seattle.
1) The picture showed legs that seem like the right color and build to be Anthony Weiner's legs.
2) Anthony Weiner has not denied that it is a picture of him, and has not even denied that he took the picture. This is weird right there. If you ask me whether I ever took a picture of my crotch with a Blackberry, I don't even have to think about it; I can just say "No."
Wolf Blitzer asked Anthony Weiner if he had ever taken such a picture of himself; no answer. Wolf Blitzer also said "You would know if that is your underwear or not, right?" No answer.
It would be weak if Anthony Weiner said "That's a real photo of me and I really wonder how that hacker got it." Weak, but far more convincing than the weird dissembling evasions he has been floating instead.
3) The EXIF data in the picture said it was taken with a Blackberry; other pictures posted to Twitter by Anthony Weiner were taken with a Blackberry.
4) Twitter has an easy command to send a private message. Twitter also has an easy command to post a message publicly. Human beings sometimes type one command when they meant to type another. Just as I have many times hit "Submit" rather than "Preview" right here on Slashdot, Anthony Weiner could trivially have made a mistake that would cause a private message to be posted publicly.
5) Anthony Weiner only followed 198 other people. A large number of those 198 people were good-looking young females with no obvious reason why a member of Congress should follow them. I mean, how many members of Congress have friended me on Facebook? None; if one did, it would be noteworthy. The stripper/porn star, Ginger Lee, was followed immediately after she tweeted that she was attracted to a short list of three famous people, one of whom was Anthony Weiner; and she tweeted that she had received a private message from Anthony Weiner.
6) Anthony Weiner counts Andrew Breitbart as a political enemy. With one phone call to the FBI, Anthony Weiner could unleash a full investigation, including IP address logs from Twitter servers, that would help track down the hacker. I can't think of anything that would destroy Breitbart more thoroughly than to be convicted of computer hacking to publicly defame the character of a sitting member of Congress. Anthony Weiner has not done this, saying that such an investigation would cost money. He is spending hours dodging questions, he is yelling angrily at reporters about this, it has been going on for days, and he hasn't taken any steps to bring the evil culprits to justice?
Oh wait, he hired a private firm! Instead of the FBI, which could get a search warrant to look at server logs, he is hiring a private firm. (I'll bet you that the private firm never finds anything conclusive.)
The FBI presumably could access the yfrog servers and recover the original image file with full EXIF data, rather than the resized one with only partial EXIF data, which would likely help identify the specific Blackberry used to take the picture. Unless the putative hackers knew exactly which model of Blackberry Anthony Weiner has, this would likely help prove the hacker theory; on the other hand if Anthony Weiner took the photo with his own Blackberry, this would help disprove the hacker theory.
Our hero, a young spaceman from Earth, is crewman on the first spaceship from Earth to land on one of the moons of Mars. He is involved with the humanoid aliens who live there. He is pretty sure there is something odd going on, and he doesn't entirely trust them. A faction of these aliens gives him a ray gun, and tells him that it is a harmless stunner, and it is vitally important that he use it to stun some person (I think the person was an alien but I'm not even certain). Because he is suspicious of them, he wonders whether the ray gun might not be as advertised; perhaps it is a lethal weapon. Perhaps, even, it emits some sort of horrible radiation that would kill the user. So, when the moment of truth comes, he doesn't pull the trigger; instead he throws the ray gun with great force against the head of his target, knocking the target out. Later it is revealed that the gun is a convincing prop, not a working ray gun at all; and the faction he didn't trust was setting him up to fail. But instead he succeeded, throwing their evil plans into disarray. Moral: don't trifle with spacemen from Earth.
If anyone else has read this and can confirm any details, or if this is from some other book, please post a follow-up here. I would actually like to get a copy of this book and re-read it. It probably isn't as good as I remember, but I still want to re-read it.
I'm still irritated that there is no easy way to put a different picture on different virtual desktops anymore.
Whoa, I never knew you could do this and I have wanted it for 15 years. How did you do this?
I use 5 because I hate minimizing and unminimizing. It's easier to just hit Alt+F5 and get my email desktop, Alt+F3, browser desktop, Alt+F1, terminal desktop, etc.
I haven't tried GNOME 3 yet, but I saw a couple of demos. They really tried to make it really easy to set up as many workspaces as you want. You can just grab some stuff and drag it and suddenly there is a new workspace with that stuff in it. (This is why they got rid of the minimize button; they want you to use workspaces instead of minimize.) I wonder if you would be happy in GNOME 3.
I am about to abandon Chromium and switch back to Firefox.
I am sort of a power user of web browsers. I like to open lots of windows. When I read my web comics, I just open every link in a subfolder, then close each page as I read each comic. I expect my web browser to be able to have dozens of windows open at once.
Using Chromium under Ubuntu 11.04 (with the "Ubuntu Classic" desktop if it matters), my computer is slow and unusable. The problem is that Chromium just sucks up all my RAM and the system starts swapping. That computer has 4GB of RAM... 4GB, and it's not enough for Chromium.
I now have to shut down Chromium twice a day, and reopen it, to free up leaked memory. I'm not happy about this.
I think the internals of Chromium can get into some sort of bad state, and if I close all my current open windows and start opening new ones, it might mitigate the situation somewhat (by getting rid of all state and starting over fresh). I'm very annoyed that the browser doesn't Just Work and I even have to think about this stuff.
And the surprising thing: there isn't any setting, anywhere, to tell Chromium to limit how much history it collects. I want history on the open pages, and that's pretty much it. If the history expires after two days, that's pretty ideal. There is no way to make the history expire. From time to time I manually nuke the history, and whenever I do so, the disk grinds away for a long time, I'm sure at least ten seconds.
So, in theory, Chromium is nice and fast because it caches the heck out of everything. In practice, it consumes gigabytes of RAM and starts my whole system swapping, which makes the whole system slower than a 486 running Windows 98.
I am willing to entertain the theory that Flash is partly to blame for the leaks. But somehow Firefox has never been as bad as Chromium, and it's the same Flash on both.
I am not a fan of Unity, and I am not a fan of the UI regressions that go along with it. And I have several computers upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04, and my desktop just freezes up sometimes, forcing a reboot. (Probably I could get by with just stopping and restarting GDM, thus slaughtering the X server and everything running under it. But at that point I might as well just reboot.) And on the laptop I upgraded to 11.04, the WiFi stopped working at all. (The good news: that laptop now wakes from sleep mode, which it never did before. Closing the lid used to force a cold boot. There is some actual progress in 11.04.)
I am cautiously optimistic about Wayland. We'll see.
But I am seriously considering moving to Xubuntu, because I really don't want to run Unity. And I am not happy that I need to reboot 11.04 more often than I need to reboot Windows on my work computer.
Slashdot Mirror
You shouldn't be able to sit on it and wait for it to be more "lucrative" to sue.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe this is what you wished for; it's already part of the law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laches_(equity)
steveha
who is surprised that WebM steps all over patents associated with h.264
Objection. The correct sentence here is "who is surprised that MPEG-LA claims that WebM steps all over patents controlled by MPEG-LA".
Given that WebM was specifically designed to not infringe any patents, I for one would be very surprised if it "steps all over" a large number of patents.
Sadly, I would not be surprised if Google lost a lawsuit over some patent that someone claims covers WebM. But that's because there are so many patents, and stuff happens in lawsuits.
The one and only argument I have ever seen in favor of WebM is that it doesn't have licensing restrictions.
Isn't that enough?
The basic pitch for WebM is "not as good as H.264, but you are free to use it". If you need the best possible video encoder and are willing to abide the the licensing restrictions and fee schedules of H.264, you use H.264. If you are Debian, and you only ship free software that isn't patent-encumbered, you ship WebM and not H.264. This isn't rocket surgery.
From a code point of view h.264 is at least as open source seeing as many of the best tools and compressors are (and always have been) open and in many cases free. WebM doesn't do things significantly different from a technical point of view or an implementation point of view. It is substantially the same technology.
Your point about H.264 being available in open source is accurate, but pointless. Your second point is correct if we agree that the word "substantially" covers a lot of differences. The differences make H.264 the better encoder.
So if you have two projects that are effectively identical, but one has licensing restrictions on some streaming content and the other doesn't. Why would patents that cover one not cover the other?
Because patents aren't judged by this "substantially" word you used. Patents cover specific things. On2 seems to have studied patents to figure out what they couldn't do, and found ways to do things that work almost as well without being covered by the patents.
The dangers here are that On2 overlooked a patent or otherwise made a mistake; or that a court would rule that On2 skated too close to the line. There is no danger that a court will say "WebM is substantially doing the same thing as H.264, so all the H.264 patents apply." You didn't really mean to imply the situation was that simple, did you?
This stuff is like the JPG and GIF patents. Made zero real world impact and by the time everyone was finished arguing over them the patents had already expired.
There is one major difference: the patents on H.264 are not just about to expire. I did a quick Google search and found that you would have to wait until 2025 to use H.264 for free.
If you use a patented format, you have to get a patent license. The owners of the patent license get to dictate the terms of the license.
Google, who owns and runs YouTube, doesn't want to build its business around H.264, because then when it is time to renew the licenses, the terms or fees could become Draconian.
Google doesn't want to build YouTube around an old, lousy video coder that happens to be free, because the users won't be happy their videos load slowly and look horrible; and Google has to pay for the bandwidth.
So: WebM. Not as good as H.264, but nobody can use it to tell Google "you now have to give us big large huge royalties on your use of this video coder". They can predict their future licensing costs (zero), and their bandwidth costs aren't horrible and the user experience is good.
WebM benefits everyone except for the people who own H.264 patents. And they will still make money on H.264; they just won't be the only game in town anymore. They want very much to be the only game in town and charge whatever they feel like charging. I don't understand why you are so keen on this idea.
steveha
I have a question for gamers who have tried both PS3 and Kinect, or PS3 and Wii.
The PS3 is trying to be all things to all gamers. "It only does everything." How does the PlayStation Move compare with Kinect or the Wii?
Is the Kinect actually better for sports games and such or is the experience about the same, and whichever game is better written is more fun?
Is the Wii controller better/more accurate, or about the same? Are the Wii games better?
steveha
So, Apple has a standard docking port for iPads. I hope the Android world can converge on a standard docking port as well.
Clearly the ThinkPad Tablet must have some sort of docking port, since TFA mentions a clamshell keyboard case that docks with it. Does anyone know what this is?
I have read that the Samsung Galaxy Tab uses PDMI for its docking port; can anyone confirm that?
I don't really care what the standard is; I just hope there will be one.
P.S. The worst thing about the Motorola Xoom is the lack of a docking port. Desktop docking stations for it require you to get a micro-USB connector and a mini-HDMI connector to line up and engage the sockets on the tablet. And, none of the available desktop docking stations pass through the USB! You do get HDMI passthrough but not USB, which totally sucks if you are a developer trying to work with a Xoom.
steveha
Unless you're relatively young, you should remember a time when the average working parent could support a spouse and a family with children. Right now, the average working person can barely support him/herself with one job.
Fair enough. But I don't see any connection between that and the rich getting richer. I blame that on the horrible inflation; according to this site the US dollar is worth around 1/7 as much as it was when I was born. That means that if a family was living on $20,000 per year when I was born, a similar family would need to make $140,000 now to have the same buying power.
Of course that oversimplifies; no amount of money would buy a smart phone or a laptop computer in the year I was born, and both are available rather cheaply these days. But inflation is the key to your complaint, not "the rich getting richer".
Quantitative Easing printed vast amounts of new money; inflation, pure and simple. The massive borrowing of the US government also leads to inflation. Corn subsidies for ethanol have led to an increase in food prices generally. The increasing costs of fuel are making everything more expensive. None of this has anything to do with "the rich getting richer".
You're probably solidly in the "upper middle class"
Possibly. I didn't want to look up exactly where the class boundaries fall, and my basic point remains: I am not "the rich" and "tax cuts for the rich" will not directly benefit me.
steveha
I don't think 'the rich' will leave.That argument is just as much as demagoguery as the 'tax-cuts for the rich' sleight mentioned in your post above.
Are you seriously saying that nobody would move from a high-tax area to a lower-tax area? Because there are plenty of examples.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/study_the_rich_are_leaving_new_jersey_a5E4Ti0z6CxWelbf6nGwOL
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23735878-darlings-50-percent-tax-sends-tycoons-to-switzerland.do
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8466160/Rich-Chinese-consider-leaving-China.html
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/20/more-rich-americans-renounce-u-s-citizenship-for-lower-taxes/
It won't be 100% of course; some rich folks will stay, even if taxes get really high. (There's a cynical old rule of thumb: if you want to hang onto your money, do the same things that retired Senators and Congressmen do. There will always be a way for the rich to keep their money, as long as retired politicians have money.) And some people will just pay the taxes. But there are limits, and the more severe the tax rate, the more it will encourage people to leave.
I don't think it's fair to accuse me of demagoguery.
steveha
So, what you're saying is that tax shelters should be closed?
These "tax shelters" include things like municipal bonds, so it won't be easy to shut them all.
If you do manage to shut them all, the rich may leave the USA and go to a more tax-favorable country. I hear the Bahamas are nice.
If you have a plan for preventing the rich from leaving the country, you still can't get them to invest their money effectively.
You could just take all the money from the rich, but that only works once and may have consequences you didn't anticipate.
As I understand it, the Ryan plan actually does close many tax loopholes, but at the same time it cuts tax rates. I support this. Companies like GE pay no taxes; it would be better for all companies to pay the same rates, and it would be better for GNP growth if those rates were lower than the current rates.
steveha
It turns out that "the rich" pay the majority of the taxes. Thus any meaningful tax cut, for any purpose, will cut taxes for "the rich" more than it will cut taxes for "the poor".
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?
Historically, the US government has not managed to collect more than 19 or 20 percent of GNP in tax revenue. Even when the highest tax bracket was 70% or even higher, revenues as a percent of GNP were not higher than when the highest tax bracket was under 40%. If you think you can fix the USA's financial problems by taxing the rich, you need to explain one of these: (a) why this time it will be different, and the government will collect over 20% of GNP; (b) why GNP will grow faster with higher tax rates; or (c) why the high tax rates will limit the growth of GNP and collect less tax revenue, but it's worth it because it is important to keep the rich from getting richer.
My own view is that if 19% is what the US government can realistically collect, we should be trying to grow the GNP of the US so that the government is collecting 19% of a larger GNP. That means reducing taxes, regulatory burden, and uncertainty.
But don't take my word for this; see some references:
Thomas Sowell: Dissecting The Demagoguery About 'Tax Cuts For The Rich'
Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy: The 19 Percent Solution
Disclaimer: I'm either middle class or posibly upper-middle-class, but I am not remotely "the rich" and tax cuts for "the rich" would not directly benefit me.
steveha
If at some point in the future (admittedly a big IF) the HURD kernel is able to outperform the Linux kernel (e.g. offer better performance or better stability or better security, etc), most likely your distro of choice will offer the HURD kernel as an alternative for the Linux kernel
Sure, if it proves itself to have advantages, it will make inroads.
But I think you are missing my point. My point is that experience has shown the Linux kernel to be "Good Enough", and even if HURD is theoretically better, there will be little interest in switching to it. At this point HURD wouldn't just have to be a little bit better, it would have to be a lot better before it would have any chance of displacing Linux. And I don't think it has shown any signs of that kind of superiority so far.
steveha
have HURD claims not panned out because of flaws in the theoretical framework, or because of lack of developers to implement it properly
I believe that if HURD really was as good as grand claims made it sound, somebody would have driven the development forward. If nobody else, graduate students who needed research projects, or something like that.
The claims for HURD were that once it got going, it would overtake Linux quickly, because it would be so much easier to develop HURD. The overall system would be cleaner, with nice isolated subsystems with well-documented module boundaries; and it would be easier to debug, as you would just run GDB on your file system code or whatever and debug it like any other user-space program. If these claims had panned out, then at least the academic computer science people would have all jumped on board HURD and driven development.
massive-multi-core CPUs with hardware support for high speed message passing may negate or at least mitigate [the message passing] overhead [in HURD]
Perhaps so. But at this point HURD is late to the party, and unless it demonstrates some really compelling benefits, most people will just continue to develop Linux.
Business software, indeed MOST (Unix) software is written to the API level so as long as a POSIX layer sits on top of the kernel, most software should work with only a recompile.
Well, so what? If I'm in charge of IT at a big company, and it is my job to run a server that will be heavily loaded with lots of I/O and the company expects that the only downtime will be once-a-year maintenance on Christmas Day, which will I run? HURD claims to be wonderful, but everyone I know is running Linux and Linux is working. I'm going to run Linux too.
This is an example of "network effect" where sometimes people use something because "everybody else uses it". HURD is not benefiting from network effect, and Linux is.
Even if HURD has a theoretical advantage over Linux for reliability, Linux systems are running reliably now. Hard evidence beats theory.
steveha
I think that people kick at HURD because of the grand claims made by some HURD fans. These grand claims have not panned out.
If you look at the old HURD FAQ, you will see claims that "Linux and BSD don't scale well" and that HURD, being based on Mach, should scale better for SMP; furthermore, HURD would be "considerably more flexible and robust than generic Unix".
The superior architecture of HURD was supposed to make it easier and faster to develop and debug HURD, and thus HURD was going to leapfrog past Linux as the obviously better solution.
Kernel debugging in Linux is significantly harder than user-space debugging. The microkernel design of HURD was supposed to allow for things like file systems to be written and debugged with the ease of user-space development under Linux. That being the case, it seems surprising that HURD is so far behind Linux after so many years.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but here are my thoughts on the current Linux and HURD situation:
First, Linux scales really well now. People are using Linux on really large SMP systems.
Second, a microkernel architecture, while more robust than a monokernel, cannot be as fast as the monokernel. If one subsystem wants another subsystem to do something, it must format and send a message; the other subsystem then receives the message, unpacks it, validates it, and then does the action. This is more secure and more stable than the monokernel, where the one subsystem will just make a function call in the other subsystem's code; but it is inherently slower. So Linux is scaling better than HURD expected, and Linux has an inherent speed edge, so HURD is unlikely to outperform Linux. Meanwhile, while it might be true that HURD is easier to debug than Linux, the kernel developers have figured out how to debug Linux, and there just isn't enough benefit there to warrant a switch to HURD.
Finally, Linux is widely used and well understood; lots of businesses are running mission-critical apps on Linux. Even if HURD's microkernel design gave it a theoretical edge on Linux for reliability, the real-world experience is all on Linux; it has been shown to be Good Enough while HURD is only theoretically better.
steveha
There are several upvoted posts that have nothing to do with the actual article. Since I read TFA I can summarize the important points for you.
They have developed a way to use inkjet technology to "print" a solar cell that works. The chief advantage of this system is that there is much much less wastage compared to other means of producing a solar cell. Instead of using silicon, they are working with more exotic materials, with the potential to make better/cheaper solar cells than silicon ones.
At the moment their first prototypes are 5% efficient. TFA discusses the point that this is nowhere near good enough to start selling these solar panels yet; luckily enough the people working on this already know this fact, no need to point it out here on Slashdot. They say that with additional research they hope to bring it to 12%, but TFA didn't say why they mentioned that 12% number. (Enough for commercial success? Easily achievable? The maximum they think they can get with current "ink" formula? Who knows?)
My favorite quote:
I like the roofing materials idea, because in many places the peak electrical demand is to run air conditioning on hot sunny days. In those places, solar roofing tiles would be a win/win and should pay for themselves quickly.
steveha
Come on IEEE, I expected better of you. Power output is irrelevent. We care about energy output. 11 grams of boron fuel will get you 300 megawatts for what duration?
I am not a physicist, but I think the info you want is in the article.
So a mole is 6.0221415e23, right?
Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, and I may be wrong, but:
6.02e23 / 100 000 == 6.02e18 pulses to process one mole of boron
6.02e18 / 75e6 == 8.02e11 seconds to process one mole of boron
300e6 W / 8.02e11 seconds == 3.7e-3 W/sec
I can't tell you how that compares with an ion drive.
steveha
Wow, no need to be so literal. Try to understand what your teacher was saying, rather than delighting in disagreeing when you actually agree.
I'm trying to understand what you are saying here. Are you implying that I am not accurately quoting the sense of what my teacher was saying? Because I am not sure how you know that. And I am absolutely sure that I had the sense of it correct: that we let watches control us.
If she was trying to push us to refute her, she could have had a discussion of this idea, but she didn't do that. And I don't recall it being part of a lesson plan, just an off-the-cuff comment she made one day.
And it was a teacher I liked, so I wasn't just sitting around looking for reasons to disagree.
But I guess I have to concede that it is possible she was saying one thing while thinking the exact opposite but not giving us any clues about it at all. She could have been faking that "off-the-cuff" thing; it could have been a crucial part of her lesson plan, just tossed out at the end of one class and never mentioned again. That seems like an odd educational strategy, though.
steveha
One of the examples from TFA is a set of colored balls, hanging in an open space by in a stairwell. The bright, cheerful balls represent people taking the stairs, and the grey balls represent people taking the elevators (lifts). There are pressure pads used to count people, and the counts are used to estimate stair usage and elevator usage. The colored balls are just a visual indicator.
According to the article, people say things like "You took the elevator... you are making the grey balls go up, you know" or similar.
And now, my point: the colored balls are not what people care about. People already have an opinion about whether stairs or elevator are "better" in any sense, and the colored balls display is leveraging that. I could use the same technology to track how many people look out the East window, vs how many people look out the West window, and I'm pretty sure nobody would care which color of balls is "winning" at the moment. The colored balls in and of themselves have no power.
I remember in Junior High School a teacher waxed philosophical about wrist watches. "Just think, we strap them on and then obey them. We rush through lunch because of them. A tiny and simple device can drastically shape our behavior!" (Probably a horribly inaccurate quote; this is a memory I haven't thought of in years.) Even at the time I rejected this thesis. It seemed to me (and still seems to me) that the watch itself has no power; it is the whole structure of civilization, at least where it is intersecting with your own life, that makes you care what time it is. If you took the watch off, you would still hurry through lunch, because you need to be done with lunch by some specific time. Indeed, without the watch, you might hurry more, since you might not be sure how much time you have.
The map is not the territory. Neither a watch nor colored balls nor any of the other stuff in TFA can compel behavior. Simple ergonomics can give a mild nudge; tricks that leverage things people care about can give a stronger nudge, but only because the people already care about something.
So the whole "ethics" thing is overblown. And as others have noted, that was one throwaway line from TFA; it's odd that it was chosen for the summary.
steveha
Feel free to point out specific examples where Linux that has been ahead of the curve.
Okay, I just did what I told you to do, and I went to LWN. This week is for LWN subscribers, but last week is freely available, and since I wanted to link it, I wen there.
And I found a fascinating discussion of patching the Linux memory management system to save power by shutting down parts of the RAM that aren't needed! Which version of UNIX did they copy that from? Or will you concede that this is new?
LWN kernel page from last week
There are plenty of other examples; feel free to actually read the LWN archives. LWN is great.
Because Linux was free and good enough, and it was being adopted in droves on the backend. So IBM decided to support it, rather than be left behind.
Linux was "good enough" that people were not buying as many IBM big-iron machines. Now IBM sells its big iron as a way to run lots of Linux VMs. As I said, a disruptive technology, and I don't see why you are so determined to denigrate Linux as a mere not-quite-as-good-as-UNIX.
steveha
Linux was just a Unix clone. I can't think of any area where it stood out as driving innovation.
It started out as a UNIX clone, but has lots of innovation going on under the hood. Subscribe to Linux Weekly News and read the kernel updates every week, and you will get a better feel for the innovation going on.
Note that IBM is pushing Linux. IBM used to push their own UNIX, AIX; but now they have taken all the best features from AIX and ported them to Linux. Can you think of any reason why IBM might have done that?
Linux has been a disruptive technology, and if it were such a blah "me-too" technology as you seem to think, I don't know why it would have been so disruptive.
PostgreSQL: Just a relational database, and usually behind the heavy-hitters in terms of features. Mainly notable for at least being competitive with the big, commercial databases.
Oracle: Just a relational database, and I hear it can be a real pain to work with it. Mainly notable for being well-supported and crazy expensive. See, this sort of negative comment even works on the industry leader.
Let's face it, SQL was invented in the 70's and every SQL database system is "just a relational database" with some combination of features and price.
And let's face it, mostly people just need a relational database that they can trust with their data. There are a few companies that have very specific needs that only Oracle can handle, but most would be just fine with PostgreSQL.
For innovation, how about NoSQL? For some purposes, these work better than SQL; for others, not; but you have to admit these are not "just another relational database".
In the area of desktop environments, GNOME 3 is doing something really different. Lots of people hate it, understand, but it's definitely a new environment. And I think Enlightenment was pushing the envelope a lot in the early days.
The GNOME 3 example shows that sometimes innovation is met with resistance. Some innovations are not popular and languish in obscurity (deserved or not). I think there are a lot of innovative open source projects you have never heard about. (I have a Python project I thought was pretty innovative, but the problem it solves doesn't seem to be a problem people have, because nobody seems to care. On the other hand, ElementTree is very popular and I would call it innovative; if you disagree, what exactly do you think ElementTree is a clone of?)
steveha
The fact that they left out C# seems odd as well. It makes me wonder what the point was, really.
Google has an official list of four languages that they approve for use: Java, JavaScript, C++, and Python.
Most of their business runs on Java. Search, Google Maps, etc.
YouTube mostly runs on Python, IIRC.
So, they compared C++, on their list; Java, on their list; Scala, which is not on their list but runs on the JVM and thus would work for them; and a language invented at Google. They didn't test Python, but if they had it would have come in last place (and I say that as one who loves Python; it's reality).
Why is it surprising that Google was testing languages that Google might use for projects?
P.S. Exciting things are happening in the Python world with the PyPy project. PyPy is a Python system that is written in Python. You might expect that to be slow, and for years it was slow; but it includes a Just-in-Time compiler that generates native machine code, and it isn't slow anymore. In fact, it is now faster than the C Python, because it can optimize away lots of stuff that C Python has to do.
http://pypy.org/
steveha
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/06/06/new.york.weiner/
Anthony Weiner just publicly admitted to sending the picture. He just publicly apologized to "everyone in the media", including Breitbart, for lying. Direct quote from Anthony Weiner: "I lied because I was ashamed at what I had done, and I didn't want to get caught." (taken from CNN article linked above) He has also publicly admitted, direct quote, that he had: "exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years."
So, Andrew Breitbart will not be going to prison for hacking, because there was no hacker. In this case, the simpler theory has been shown to be the correct one.
I would appreciate it if you would apologize to me for the rude things you have said about me and to me in this discussion thread.
steveha
0) I never heard about any campaign stop in Seattle, and I live in the Seattle area. Could you please post a link reference so I can read about this?
1) Why don't we let Slashdot readers click on the link below, look at the photo, and decide how pasty-white those legs are for themselves. They don't look suspiciously white to me, and cell phone cameras aren't the best for accurate color, so you definitely haven't persuaded me on this point.
http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/29/weinergate-married-congressmans-twitter-account-shares-lewd-photo/
3) I only said the EXIF data shows it was a Blackberry; I said nothing about model.
What camera puts the string "Rim Exif Version 1.00a" other than a Research In Motion Blackberry?
Source: http://wireupdate.com/joereport/news/breaking-congressman-anthony-weiner-x-rated-photos-internet-cache-files-recovered/
5) I find it entertaining that the one point I actually provided a link reference for is the one where you claimed I have no reference. Please click on my provided link.
I haven't researched this myself. If you have a link that shows why he was following random young women, please share it. Maybe he rolls a pair of percentile dice, and follows anyone for whom he rolls "00"?
And, you were remarkably quick to claim that I make up information. To me, that means you just called me a liar. That's rather rude and insulting, and it is not winning me over to your point of view.
Tell me, do you have any idea who I am? Have you read a whole bunch of my postings on Slashdot and formed this as a considered opinion, or do you just feel that it's no big deal to call other people liars?
7) In the Fox video embedded here, he does say "I was tweeting about hockey at the time, when this all happened." About 3:21 in the video. No, the timestamps show that the photo was posted and several minutes later he tweeted about hockey.
http://pajamasmedia.com/tatler/2011/06/01/videos-anthony-weiners-disastrous-media-tour/
But you know what, that is sufficiently vague that I don't really care about it. I'm much more convinced by the weird evasions about whether it is he in the photo.
They will be caught, and they will face prison time.
To which I can only say: hey, let's call in the FBI. They can get a search warrant, look at the server logs, and find the IP address from which the photo was sent.
According to the simple theory, the IP address will point right at Anthony Weiner's phone. Some other IP address, perhaps from a public place, would cast reasonable doubt over this theory.
Anthony Weiner, as a sitting member of Congress, ought to be taking this seriously if the story is as he claims.
Either you have a touching faith in Anthony Weiner, or else you are just cynically trolling me. Either way, you won't be swayed by any opinions or facts I might offer. And either way, you called me a liar. So, we're done.
Have a nice life.
steveha
Remember, this all comes from serial liar Andrew Breitbart [...] This smear has been in planning for several months.
You have just made an extraordinary claim. I require extraordinary evidence before I believe you.
The available evidence:
0) Anthony Weiner tweeted about being on TV, and added a hash tag "#thats545inseattle". He has not denied adding that hash tag; he also has not given a coherent explanation of what he meant by it. He did say it is "pure coincidence" that the young lady at the center of the privacy nightmare is in the same time zone as Seattle.
1) The picture showed legs that seem like the right color and build to be Anthony Weiner's legs.
2) Anthony Weiner has not denied that it is a picture of him, and has not even denied that he took the picture. This is weird right there. If you ask me whether I ever took a picture of my crotch with a Blackberry, I don't even have to think about it; I can just say "No."
Wolf Blitzer asked Anthony Weiner if he had ever taken such a picture of himself; no answer. Wolf Blitzer also said "You would know if that is your underwear or not, right?" No answer.
It would be weak if Anthony Weiner said "That's a real photo of me and I really wonder how that hacker got it." Weak, but far more convincing than the weird dissembling evasions he has been floating instead.
3) The EXIF data in the picture said it was taken with a Blackberry; other pictures posted to Twitter by Anthony Weiner were taken with a Blackberry.
4) Twitter has an easy command to send a private message. Twitter also has an easy command to post a message publicly. Human beings sometimes type one command when they meant to type another. Just as I have many times hit "Submit" rather than "Preview" right here on Slashdot, Anthony Weiner could trivially have made a mistake that would cause a private message to be posted publicly.
5) Anthony Weiner only followed 198 other people. A large number of those 198 people were good-looking young females with no obvious reason why a member of Congress should follow them. I mean, how many members of Congress have friended me on Facebook? None; if one did, it would be noteworthy. The stripper/porn star, Ginger Lee, was followed immediately after she tweeted that she was attracted to a short list of three famous people, one of whom was Anthony Weiner; and she tweeted that she had received a private message from Anthony Weiner.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/weiner_tweet_hearts_UTe6y5bwizh46ycTkIIkxH
6) Anthony Weiner counts Andrew Breitbart as a political enemy. With one phone call to the FBI, Anthony Weiner could unleash a full investigation, including IP address logs from Twitter servers, that would help track down the hacker. I can't think of anything that would destroy Breitbart more thoroughly than to be convicted of computer hacking to publicly defame the character of a sitting member of Congress. Anthony Weiner has not done this, saying that such an investigation would cost money. He is spending hours dodging questions, he is yelling angrily at reporters about this, it has been going on for days, and he hasn't taken any steps to bring the evil culprits to justice?
Oh wait, he hired a private firm! Instead of the FBI, which could get a search warrant to look at server logs, he is hiring a private firm. (I'll bet you that the private firm never finds anything conclusive.)
The FBI presumably could access the yfrog servers and recover the original image file with full EXIF data, rather than the resized one with only partial EXIF data, which would likely help identify the specific Blackberry used to take the picture. Unless the putative hackers knew exactly which model of Blackberry Anthony Weiner has, this would likely help prove the hacker theory; on the other hand if Anthony Weiner took the photo with his own Blackberry, this would help disprove the hacker theory.
Looks like my memory got a few details wrong:
http://winstonscifi.blogspot.com/2010/05/synopsis-for-secret-of-martian-moons-by.html
steveha
When I was a teen, I read a science fiction novel which contained a nifty subplot involving a ray gun.
I believe the novel was The Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald A. Wallheim.
Our hero, a young spaceman from Earth, is crewman on the first spaceship from Earth to land on one of the moons of Mars. He is involved with the humanoid aliens who live there. He is pretty sure there is something odd going on, and he doesn't entirely trust them. A faction of these aliens gives him a ray gun, and tells him that it is a harmless stunner, and it is vitally important that he use it to stun some person (I think the person was an alien but I'm not even certain). Because he is suspicious of them, he wonders whether the ray gun might not be as advertised; perhaps it is a lethal weapon. Perhaps, even, it emits some sort of horrible radiation that would kill the user. So, when the moment of truth comes, he doesn't pull the trigger; instead he throws the ray gun with great force against the head of his target, knocking the target out. Later it is revealed that the gun is a convincing prop, not a working ray gun at all; and the faction he didn't trust was setting him up to fail. But instead he succeeded, throwing their evil plans into disarray. Moral: don't trifle with spacemen from Earth.
If anyone else has read this and can confirm any details, or if this is from some other book, please post a follow-up here. I would actually like to get a copy of this book and re-read it. It probably isn't as good as I remember, but I still want to re-read it.
steveha
I'm still irritated that there is no easy way to put a different picture on different virtual desktops anymore.
Whoa, I never knew you could do this and I have wanted it for 15 years. How did you do this?
I use 5 because I hate minimizing and unminimizing. It's easier to just hit Alt+F5 and get my email desktop, Alt+F3, browser desktop, Alt+F1, terminal desktop, etc.
I haven't tried GNOME 3 yet, but I saw a couple of demos. They really tried to make it really easy to set up as many workspaces as you want. You can just grab some stuff and drag it and suddenly there is a new workspace with that stuff in it. (This is why they got rid of the minimize button; they want you to use workspaces instead of minimize.) I wonder if you would be happy in GNOME 3.
steveha
I am about to abandon Chromium and switch back to Firefox.
I am sort of a power user of web browsers. I like to open lots of windows. When I read my web comics, I just open every link in a subfolder, then close each page as I read each comic. I expect my web browser to be able to have dozens of windows open at once.
Using Chromium under Ubuntu 11.04 (with the "Ubuntu Classic" desktop if it matters), my computer is slow and unusable. The problem is that Chromium just sucks up all my RAM and the system starts swapping. That computer has 4GB of RAM... 4GB, and it's not enough for Chromium.
I now have to shut down Chromium twice a day, and reopen it, to free up leaked memory. I'm not happy about this.
I think the internals of Chromium can get into some sort of bad state, and if I close all my current open windows and start opening new ones, it might mitigate the situation somewhat (by getting rid of all state and starting over fresh). I'm very annoyed that the browser doesn't Just Work and I even have to think about this stuff.
And the surprising thing: there isn't any setting, anywhere, to tell Chromium to limit how much history it collects. I want history on the open pages, and that's pretty much it. If the history expires after two days, that's pretty ideal. There is no way to make the history expire. From time to time I manually nuke the history, and whenever I do so, the disk grinds away for a long time, I'm sure at least ten seconds.
So, in theory, Chromium is nice and fast because it caches the heck out of everything. In practice, it consumes gigabytes of RAM and starts my whole system swapping, which makes the whole system slower than a 486 running Windows 98.
I am willing to entertain the theory that Flash is partly to blame for the leaks. But somehow Firefox has never been as bad as Chromium, and it's the same Flash on both.
I am not a fan of Unity, and I am not a fan of the UI regressions that go along with it. And I have several computers upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04, and my desktop just freezes up sometimes, forcing a reboot. (Probably I could get by with just stopping and restarting GDM, thus slaughtering the X server and everything running under it. But at that point I might as well just reboot.) And on the laptop I upgraded to 11.04, the WiFi stopped working at all. (The good news: that laptop now wakes from sleep mode, which it never did before. Closing the lid used to force a cold boot. There is some actual progress in 11.04.)
I am cautiously optimistic about Wayland. We'll see.
But I am seriously considering moving to Xubuntu, because I really don't want to run Unity. And I am not happy that I need to reboot 11.04 more often than I need to reboot Windows on my work computer.
steveha