It's considerably faster in Chrome than FF 3.6 for me as well. I noticed that Chrome manages to really max all four of the cores on my processor at once, while FF does not. I guess this is a pretty good tech demo for how well Chrome can distribute a heavy processing load.
FTA: "Elmer said he would not reveal what specifically was in the documents, and said that he personally would not disclose 'individual companies or individual names' of the account holders."
I read that to say that he will release lots of details proving how large this problem is, but won't reveal the actual people who are doing it. Am I misreading that?
That's funny, we one time hired a guy to help us move in Chicago. He packed the truck like I had never seen before, perfectly floor to ceiling, all in the front half, tied down and perfectly stable. The back was 100% empty. It was certainly more efficient than the horizontal stacking that occurs whenever I pack a moving van.
Turns out the guy was a former Tetris champ making a little side money to pay for grad school.
It's also worth pointing out that, with the linux software repositories, I receive automatic updates not only for my operating system, but for every application and library installed. I know I'm up-to-date in with all of my software (unless it's a rare program I compiled from scratch).
I challenge any windows user to make the same assertion.
secondly, both the submitter and the linked article seem to have absolutely no clue as to what this settlement means. it is in no way about 'enchancing competition' or 'opening up the industry'. it merely clarifies rules that allow brokerages to limit this data.
specifically, this has to do with VOW (Virtual Office Website) data. if you don't know anything about MLSs (Multiple Listing Services) here's a quick rundown: most regions of the US are served by one or more MLS. real estate brokerages pay to be a part of the MLS, and in return they are granted access to the full database of current property listings.
(now, before some of you go screaming that this database should be simply open to the public, like i initially did when i first learned about the MLS system, please realize that there is information contained in it that people may not exactly what to be in public hands. part of the job of the MLS and the traditional brokerage system is verifying the character of the agents)
for many years, the NAR had a policy allowing brokerages to restrict VOW data. through this, a real estate office could block their listings from appearing on a competitor's web page. the obvious point of this is that the listing brokerage would also like to be the selling brokerage (capturing both ends of the commission.) the not so obvious point is that the MLS prefers to have brokerages in it that contribute listings, not just 'leech' off of it in order to captured leads, and make money off of referrals.
a few years ago, the DOJ ended this practice, calling it anti-competitive. NAR came up with other policies, and contested the original DOJ order. this settlement allows NAR to reinstate VOW practices.
this settlement also has some other interesting pieces, such as giving a seller the right to not have a blog post or home estimate displayed next to the listing data, which will probably hurt sights such as zillow.
What does AOL have to do with the open sourcing of Milkdrop? Milkdrop was written by Ryan Geiss, the supergenius who wrote the old skool 'Geiss' screen saver. It totally rocks, and according to geisswerks.com, he opened the code up almost a month ago now.
But I can't see how that anything to do with AOL, other than the fact that it was only a Winamp plugin before...
one of the greatest movies ever? probably not. but DM2 is FAR better than the orginial drunken master, and a must see if you're a Jackie Chan fan, or of kung-fu films in general. it was rereleased a few years ago as 'the legend of the drunken master' in the states.
The reason that many libraries have you log in at all is so that they can limit the amount of time that you use a computer. When you have a medium-sized library or larger, it's the only way to ensure that everyone has access to the computers. Sign-up sheets won't cut it, and lots of people would just sit there all day playing games if given the opportunity.
The problem with library cards is that many families have a different library card for each family member. At the library I used to work at, there were lots of times that people would just come in with a fistful of library cards from their kids and attempt to log 8 straight hours while people were waiting.
That would shed a different light on the hiring of Rob Pike, what with his background in Inferno, an open source embedded OS. It could also help explain their recent purchases of dark fiber. A lot of thin clients are going to need a lot of bandwidth.
Perhaps Google could produce a device, maybe the size of a PDA, that simply acted as a thin client, with a web browser instead of a desktop. Google already has hardware out there with their rackmount search boxes.
As long as the bandwidth is there. While I can't see this as being a real alternative for home users, corporate environments might be very interested.
Funny you should mention the importance of "respecting IP" and then go on to laud the Gates Foundation for their philanthropic efforts.
Call me a cynic, but I have a sneaky suspicion that goodwill is only a small fraction of the motivation for Bill's giving. He's a smart man. He knows that the high cost of medicines to treat HIV represent an enormous threat to intellectual copyright enforcements, as nations stricken with AIDS come to the same conclusion as you did. And I can't think of many individuals who stand to lose more from the loss of copyright agreements than Mr. Gates.
Even more importantly, and sofar unaddressed... what, exactly, are the specs? Does anyone have a link on exactly how to translate dot-patterns to serial numbers, or do we need to start getting some data together to figure this out ourselves? Couldn't this same technology be used to discover collusion/fraud in government/corporate environments? Can the pattern be easily detected in a scanned document, so that massive data maining could be performed? Which exact companies and models are affected? Anyone have links to actual documents and proof?
a few years ago, there was an interesting roundtable discussion between sen. hatch, hilary rosen, director keven smith, and a few others regarding file sharing in general. at the time, i didn't much like senator hatch, but his views in the roundtable seemed remarkably enlightened for a congressman. i hope that this ap article is taken out of context, or i'll have to go back to disliking him again.
As the sys admin for a fairly sizable public library system, I'd considered doing an "Ask Slashdot" on this very same subject. Our library (and, I'd assume, many many others) is fiercely protective of our patrons' right to privacy. And, like many on this site, we were outraged at the passing of the PATRIOT act. (At least CIPA still isn't in effect.)
We can still do quite a bit to protect our patrons' privacy, such as not requiring log-ins, using DHCP and NAT to keep their ip addresses hopping, etc. But as for records of what people have checked out, there's another problem that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere; backups. As with any database of mission-critical information, we have to maintain at least a small amount of backup information.
Of course, once a book is returned, we wipe the transaction record from the database. But the government will still be able to see who has what currently checked out, as well as whatever is on the backup tapes. Unfortunately, I can't see much of a way around that.
Please keep this thread going! I'm kind of having to teach myself the basics of system administration at my library, and some of the ideas that have come up so far have been very interesting...
Slashdot Mirror
It's considerably faster in Chrome than FF 3.6 for me as well. I noticed that Chrome manages to really max all four of the cores on my processor at once, while FF does not. I guess this is a pretty good tech demo for how well Chrome can distribute a heavy processing load.
FTA: "Elmer said he would not reveal what specifically was in the documents, and said that he personally would not disclose 'individual companies or individual names' of the account holders."
I read that to say that he will release lots of details proving how large this problem is, but won't reveal the actual people who are doing it. Am I misreading that?
That's funny, we one time hired a guy to help us move in Chicago. He packed the truck like I had never seen before, perfectly floor to ceiling, all in the front half, tied down and perfectly stable. The back was 100% empty. It was certainly more efficient than the horizontal stacking that occurs whenever I pack a moving van.
Turns out the guy was a former Tetris champ making a little side money to pay for grad school.
Wired ran a long article about Max Butler last year.
Google dropped their SOAP as well... and we all know where that leads.
It's also worth pointing out that, with the linux software repositories, I receive automatic updates not only for my operating system, but for every application and library installed. I know I'm up-to-date in with all of my software (unless it's a rare program I compiled from scratch). I challenge any windows user to make the same assertion.
I thought that Sneakers hit a lot of the technical points pretty well, especially when it came to social engineering.
There was a very interesting article in Rolling Stone recently regarding China's use of such technology in their ermerging hyper-surveillance society.
first off, here's the actual proposed final judgement that actually came out today, the actual news part of this, as the links above seem a few months old.
secondly, both the submitter and the linked article seem to have absolutely no clue as to what this settlement means. it is in no way about 'enchancing competition' or 'opening up the industry'. it merely clarifies rules that allow brokerages to limit this data.
specifically, this has to do with VOW (Virtual Office Website) data. if you don't know anything about MLSs (Multiple Listing Services) here's a quick rundown: most regions of the US are served by one or more MLS. real estate brokerages pay to be a part of the MLS, and in return they are granted access to the full database of current property listings.
(now, before some of you go screaming that this database should be simply open to the public, like i initially did when i first learned about the MLS system, please realize that there is information contained in it that people may not exactly what to be in public hands. part of the job of the MLS and the traditional brokerage system is verifying the character of the agents)
for many years, the NAR had a policy allowing brokerages to restrict VOW data. through this, a real estate office could block their listings from appearing on a competitor's web page. the obvious point of this is that the listing brokerage would also like to be the selling brokerage (capturing both ends of the commission.) the not so obvious point is that the MLS prefers to have brokerages in it that contribute listings, not just 'leech' off of it in order to captured leads, and make money off of referrals.
a few years ago, the DOJ ended this practice, calling it anti-competitive. NAR came up with other policies, and contested the original DOJ order. this settlement allows NAR to reinstate VOW practices.
this settlement also has some other interesting pieces, such as giving a seller the right to not have a blog post or home estimate displayed next to the listing data, which will probably hurt sights such as zillow.you can also now view chicago real estate listings in google earth.
What does AOL have to do with the open sourcing of Milkdrop? Milkdrop was written by Ryan Geiss, the supergenius who wrote the old skool 'Geiss' screen saver. It totally rocks, and according to geisswerks.com, he opened the code up almost a month ago now.
But I can't see how that anything to do with AOL, other than the fact that it was only a Winamp plugin before...
one of the greatest movies ever? probably not. but DM2 is FAR better than the orginial drunken master, and a must see if you're a Jackie Chan fan, or of kung-fu films in general. it was rereleased a few years ago as 'the legend of the drunken master' in the states.
a MUST SEE if you enjoy kung fu flicks.
The reason that many libraries have you log in at all is so that they can limit the amount of time that you use a computer. When you have a medium-sized library or larger, it's the only way to ensure that everyone has access to the computers. Sign-up sheets won't cut it, and lots of people would just sit there all day playing games if given the opportunity.
The problem with library cards is that many families have a different library card for each family member. At the library I used to work at, there were lots of times that people would just come in with a fistful of library cards from their kids and attempt to log 8 straight hours while people were waiting.
In that light, the fingerprinting makes sense.
'Did you mean' spellcheck on Wikipedia.
Please.
That would shed a different light on the hiring of Rob Pike, what with his background in Inferno, an open source embedded OS. It could also help explain their recent purchases of dark fiber. A lot of thin clients are going to need a lot of bandwidth.
Perhaps Google could produce a device, maybe the size of a PDA, that simply acted as a thin client, with a web browser instead of a desktop. Google already has hardware out there with their rackmount search boxes.
As long as the bandwidth is there. While I can't see this as being a real alternative for home users, corporate environments might be very interested.
Popular Science ran an article on Aubrey de Grey last month as well. Guy's getting a lot of press these days.
Funny you should mention the importance of "respecting IP" and then go on to laud the Gates Foundation for their philanthropic efforts.
Call me a cynic, but I have a sneaky suspicion that goodwill is only a small fraction of the motivation for Bill's giving. He's a smart man. He knows that the high cost of medicines to treat HIV represent an enormous threat to intellectual copyright enforcements, as nations stricken with AIDS come to the same conclusion as you did. And I can't think of many individuals who stand to lose more from the loss of copyright agreements than Mr. Gates.
Even more importantly, and sofar unaddressed... what, exactly, are the specs? Does anyone have a link on exactly how to translate dot-patterns to serial numbers, or do we need to start getting some data together to figure this out ourselves? Couldn't this same technology be used to discover collusion/fraud in government/corporate environments? Can the pattern be easily detected in a scanned document, so that massive data maining could be performed? Which exact companies and models are affected? Anyone have links to actual documents and proof?
well, they celebrated his birthday in 1997. i was there. wonderful party.
shit, i used to live there on stoughton, too...
a few years ago, there was an interesting roundtable discussion between sen. hatch, hilary rosen, director keven smith, and a few others regarding file sharing in general. at the time, i didn't much like senator hatch, but his views in the roundtable seemed remarkably enlightened for a congressman. i hope that this ap article is taken out of context, or i'll have to go back to disliking him again.
perhaps we shouldn't discuss this item, then. don't want to infringe upon copyrights and all...
There was an article in Scientific American about this just recently...
As the sys admin for a fairly sizable public library system, I'd considered doing an "Ask Slashdot" on this very same subject. Our library (and, I'd assume, many many others) is fiercely protective of our patrons' right to privacy. And, like many on this site, we were outraged at the passing of the PATRIOT act. (At least CIPA still isn't in effect.)
We can still do quite a bit to protect our patrons' privacy, such as not requiring log-ins, using DHCP and NAT to keep their ip addresses hopping, etc. But as for records of what people have checked out, there's another problem that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere; backups. As with any database of mission-critical information, we have to maintain at least a small amount of backup information.
Of course, once a book is returned, we wipe the transaction record from the database. But the government will still be able to see who has what currently checked out, as well as whatever is on the backup tapes. Unfortunately, I can't see much of a way around that.
Please keep this thread going! I'm kind of having to teach myself the basics of system administration at my library, and some of the ideas that have come up so far have been very interesting...
i think /.'s QOTD is rather inappropriate, given the circumstances...