OK, I can see your point, but have you read the legislation?
It will be ILLEGAL for companies to create products that don't have copy protection built in. It will be ILLEGAL for you to circumvent those copy protections. It will be ILLEGAL for *you* to write code that doesn't have similar copy protections, unless you keep it locked away and don't even show it to your friends.
This issue has nothing to do with what some companies will or won't sell you. It defines (in very draconian terms) precisely what ALL companies will be able to manufcature and sell you in the US, and precisely what you will legally be allowed to do with those products. It also tighly restricts what you are allowed to create.
So when the WTO comes up with something similar (or even if they don't!) and US market share drives foreign companies to make the same machines, who exactly are you going to buy this hackable equipment from? The answer is going to be either your neighborhood drug/stolen car parts dealer, or no one at all.
He is 100% right: If the thing doesn't simply plug in, install, and sync flawlessly, then it's a screwed up product. If the company couldn't insure that it would do this on any random PC platform, then they don't care enough!
Way too many people on/. can't get away from the techie mindset. Almost all of the PDAs sold these days are tools--business tools in fact. (this even holds true for techies) A cute techie toy that's useless as a tool DESERVES a poor review when evaluated as a tool.
Hmm. Very strange--I've had my iname address for five years or so (!), and now mail.com is saying that ALL mail.com and iname.com accounts will have free autoforwarding shut off at the end of this month.
I hope you're right and my email from them is wrong, but make SURE you check it out ASAP. (i.e. before the end of the month)
Like the subject says. Mail.com is discontinuing free forwarding.
I can understand their reasons, but this one in particular galls me. I signed up with iname.net for "free forwarding for life." mail.com bought them out, and maintained the services (although not as well) until now. Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.
I don't mind the money, but those bastards aren't getting any from me for that sort of behaviour.
Nobody could be that stupid and manage to find security breaches. Come to think of it, I'm not sure someone could be that stupid and keep breathing. Well, we can only hope.
Apparently he didn't notice in all of those "made for prison TV" movies that the wrongfully convicted sorts who defend themselves successfully spend months poring over legal documents and books. It doesn't sound like he even understands the legal process from a 10,000 metre view. (which you could get by reading a newspaper)
I love my job. I spend a lot of my outside work hours playing with computers in a very similar fashion to what I do at work. BUT, I don't screw around at work. I do my job at work. If doing the job I get paid to do is 'having my spirit broken,' then so be it. I call it ethics. Or maturity. or even doing my job! Fucking scary concept to you, apparently.
Of course, I also have the luxury of choosing to work where I want (within reason), which means I get to find work that I enjoy. While I always considered this to be a luxury and something not to be taken for granted, I see now that it's just my poor beleagred spirit being broken.
Hope you enjoy soup, because you're going to be getting a lot of it from free kitchens when the economy actually gets bad.
Unless I'm misreading what you're saying here, you've got it backwards.
A pure tone is a sine wave of a single frequency. That frequency is all there is. A fourier transform of a sine wave will give a single line.
A triangular wave is mathematically a combination of pure tones based on the fundamental frequency. In other words, it's a sine wave at the base frequency, and sine waves of different amplitudes at different harmonics of that frequency. This, in fact, holds true for any non-sine waveform.
So if you have a triangular wave at, say, 50kHz and you feed it into a scope that tops out at 80kHz, all you'll see is the 50kHz sine wave, and all of the contributing harmonics will be chopped out. In other words, if you feed a square wave (easier to type than triangular:-) into a scope and start to crank up the frequency, it will approach a sine wave. Not the other way round.
As an aside, if you accept that a human's hearing drops off to ~none by 22kHz, then a 15kHz signal will sound the same to a person regardless of whether it's a square wave, sine wave, or anything else based on the first harmonic being at least an octave above the fundamental.
I said barely, and I meant it. I think you misunderstood my motives for the CD comment.
CDs cover a frequency range of DC (theoretically) to 22.05kHz. Humans on average can hear 20Hz-20kHz when they're young, and the high frequencies drop off as we age. Notice that that's an average. Some people can hear 22kHz frequencies, which strains CD quality to the breaking point. Then there's resolution--16 bits is again right on the border.
The point of these numbers though, is this: Any lossy compression on a CD-quality file will result in audible losses. If you had a 40-bit 100kHz frequency response on CDs, then you could grind them down into (large!) MP3s without worrying about losing detectible information. As it is, we're chopping away at a format (CD audio) that can't afford any chopping away, and in a few years when CDs go the way of the dinosaur, is their replacement going to be worse? It sure looks like it from my end.
I mean dominant as in the commercially embraced format. Right now the industry is struggling with MP3, and >90% of music is still being purchased on CD, despite what the RIAA would have us believe. MP3 is not yet a commercial format. It's barely even a commercially supported format, and the only reason it's got that far is that "support" means coding a player, not building hardware.
Sure, you've got half a terabyte of MP3s sitting in your basement. That doesn't make it a commercially dominant format. However, it's clear that something like MP3 is going to take over that role, and once it does we'll have a harder time buying CDs than we do records right now.
I've noticed that as we get cooler and more portable technology, sound quality seems to be on the decline.
MP3 sucks. Well maybe it doesn't suck, but it's a damned sight worse than CD audio, and let's not forget that CDs just barely encompass the resolution and frequency response that we can discern. There's bloody little headroom to muck about with on a CD without affecting the sound. Lossy compression (i.e. MP3 format) definitely qualifies, and definitely affects the sound.
This is fine for portable systems, computer speakers, and so forth; However, I'm getting worried that MP3 and other similar formats will become dominant in the marketplace. We may see before long a world where it's pointless to get really excellent audio equipment, because the playback quality is severely limited by the format.
OK, maybe "nothing to show for it" is a bit extreme. How about "nothing publicly visible to show for it."
I'm sure they're working on it, and I'm sure that it'll see the light of day sometime (although possibly in a very heavily altered form), but this was supposed to be part of NT4 or thereabouts. Regardless of the actual research being done, their press release doesn't mean much in terms of it seeing the light of day.
Note the historical sidebar on the article. It traces the on-again, off-again history of OFS. MS has been playing with it for over half a decade (!), and doesn't yet have anything to show for it. They've backpedalled and caught up again so many times that I think this article can be safely labelled as speculation.
In other words, it sounds cool. I'll believe it when I see it. (and only at that point judge whether it really makes Windows less likely to break)
Yeah, but note that I said _prefer_ it. I still use it quite often at work, because I'm running Solaris on old machines with 8-bit frame buffers, and mozilla sucks in 8-bit colour. But would you rather use NS4.76, or (almost anything else)?
That's nice. Hope you're happy with it. I'm not. That's just fine, though--in fact, it's the way things should be.
You like Opera. I like Mozilla. There's no reason I have to switch to Opera, or you have to switch to Mozilla. There's also no reason that the six people who live in a cave and prefer Netscape 4.76 have to switch either.
The thing that makes Opera and Mozilla (and Netscape, and ye randome othere browsere) good and important is that they're choices and alternatives. That's why we shouldn't be fighting about which one is better, and evaluating them honestly for ourselves.
Considering I'm not from or in the US, this is funny.
I'm working strictly on economic and political clout, combined with history. The US wields more power than it actually has, and will continue to do so. That's the facts. It sucks badly, but it's true. Deal with it or do something about it.
OK, that's not quite a legitimate question. Bill is and always has been a geek on his good days. (and a nerd on his bad days, and a sleazball on the other 90% of the days)
However, his version of events doesn't correspond with anyone else's, or with recorded history. In other words, Bill Gates is a liar.
Now let's quit quoting him and saying, "oh hey--we were wrong all these decades."
Where the US leads, others will follow. In some cases, the US is lagging behind other countries (Australia, for instance) but ultimately if the US mandates it, the western world will fall in line.
The next step after mandating these changes is to set up trade barricades on any incoming non-compliant hardware. Two months I thought that this was a thought-experiment to see where this could eventually lead. Now I think we can almost write a timetable for it.
This will not hurt the US economy--it'll trash the world's belief in freedom.
They go through all the work of gutting a cute 'n' cuddly teddy bear, stuff it full of network electronics, and don't even put a webcam in the eyes?
Now that would be an evil idea. "I want you to make sure you put this bear on your dresser so you can see it every night when you've crawled into bed." And so it can see YOU, young lady! Heh heh hehhhhh.....
Advertisers know something that you're missing out on here.
They can be as annoying as hell--they can absolutely piss you off and make you REFUSE to click on their banners--or indeed any banners. But at the end of the day, you've seen the product's name, and if they annoy you often enough with that, it'll stick. Quick--picture C|Net. Who advertises there? You may or may not bring up the names instantly, but I can _guarantee_ that if you read C|Net, you're at least familiar with the names of companies who advertise.
Exposure is all they're after, and they don't give a flying fuck how they achieve it. Boycotts don't work until you can get 40% of the _buying_ market for a given product, and that's never going to happen for banner ads or even spam.
Now that's an interesting question and hypothesis.
How will they convince the public to go with this scheme? The same way they're doing with DVD right now, and for that matter, AGP video cards. Quit releasing other technology. Make whatever scheme you want the de facto standard by merely getting all of the other stuff out of the market.
Will there be an underground backlash? Absolutely! I'll be part of it--I suspect you will be too. But, 99% or more of the population will happily go along with whatever system is foisted upon them. They'll be looking at a small fraction of the population that's not going along, and if they get legislation in place, they can arrest and jail any one of us who gets too 'noisy.'
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I can see your point, but have you read the legislation?
It will be ILLEGAL for companies to create products that don't have copy protection built in. It will be ILLEGAL for you to circumvent those copy protections. It will be ILLEGAL for *you* to write code that doesn't have similar copy protections, unless you keep it locked away and don't even show it to your friends.
This issue has nothing to do with what some companies will or won't sell you. It defines (in very draconian terms) precisely what ALL companies will be able to manufcature and sell you in the US, and precisely what you will legally be allowed to do with those products. It also tighly restricts what you are allowed to create.
So when the WTO comes up with something similar (or even if they don't!) and US market share drives foreign companies to make the same machines, who exactly are you going to buy this hackable equipment from? The answer is going to be either your neighborhood drug/stolen car parts dealer, or no one at all.
Nope. Sorry. I don't buy it.
/. can't get away from the techie mindset. Almost all of the PDAs sold these days are tools--business tools in fact. (this even holds true for techies) A cute techie toy that's useless as a tool DESERVES a poor review when evaluated as a tool.
He is 100% right: If the thing doesn't simply plug in, install, and sync flawlessly, then it's a screwed up product. If the company couldn't insure that it would do this on any random PC platform, then they don't care enough!
Way too many people on
"...the RIAA members are being led around the nose by greedy asswipe lawyers."
Therein lies the real problem, methinks. The RIAA members ARE the greedy asswipe lawyers.
So forgive me for pointing this out, but what part of "1024-bit RSA keys In Danger Of Compromise?" didn't you understand???
The title is part of the article, and makes the necessary limitations. If you are going to nitpick, then at least nitpick correctly.
Hmm. Very strange--I've had my iname address for five years or so (!), and now mail.com is saying that ALL mail.com and iname.com accounts will have free autoforwarding shut off at the end of this month.
I hope you're right and my email from them is wrong, but make SURE you check it out ASAP. (i.e. before the end of the month)
Like the subject says. Mail.com is discontinuing free forwarding.
I can understand their reasons, but this one in particular galls me. I signed up with iname.net for "free forwarding for life." mail.com bought them out, and maintained the services (although not as well) until now. Suddenly they've decided not to honour contracts that they've bought out.
I don't mind the money, but those bastards aren't getting any from me for that sort of behaviour.
Nobody could be that stupid and manage to find security breaches. Come to think of it, I'm not sure someone could be that stupid and keep breathing. Well, we can only hope.
Apparently he didn't notice in all of those "made for prison TV" movies that the wrongfully convicted sorts who defend themselves successfully spend months poring over legal documents and books. It doesn't sound like he even understands the legal process from a 10,000 metre view. (which you could get by reading a newspaper)
He deserves what he gets, just for being a moron.
Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.
I love my job. I spend a lot of my outside work hours playing with computers in a very similar fashion to what I do at work.
BUT, I don't screw around at work. I do my job at work. If doing the job I get paid to do is 'having my spirit broken,' then so be it. I call it ethics. Or maturity. or even doing my job! Fucking scary concept to you, apparently.
Of course, I also have the luxury of choosing to work where I want (within reason), which means I get to find work that I enjoy. While I always considered this to be a luxury and something not to be taken for granted, I see now that it's just my poor beleagred spirit being broken.
Hope you enjoy soup, because you're going to be getting a lot of it from free kitchens when the economy actually gets bad.
"Name one DECENT game that was produced with OSS. Yep, thought so."
NETHACK!!!!
OK, I'll be quiet now.
Unless I'm misreading what you're saying here, you've got it backwards.
:-) into a scope and start to crank up the frequency, it will approach a sine wave. Not the other way round.
A pure tone is a sine wave of a single frequency. That frequency is all there is. A fourier transform of a sine wave will give a single line.
A triangular wave is mathematically a combination of pure tones based on the fundamental frequency. In other words, it's a sine wave at the base frequency, and sine waves of different amplitudes at different harmonics of that frequency. This, in fact, holds true for any non-sine waveform.
So if you have a triangular wave at, say, 50kHz and you feed it into a scope that tops out at 80kHz, all you'll see is the 50kHz sine wave, and all of the contributing harmonics will be chopped out. In other words, if you feed a square wave (easier to type than triangular
As an aside, if you accept that a human's hearing drops off to ~none by 22kHz, then a 15kHz signal will sound the same to a person regardless of whether it's a square wave, sine wave, or anything else based on the first harmonic being at least an octave above the fundamental.
THANKS!!!
This is exactly what I've been looking for, and I didn't know that such a thing existed. I'm a happy camper today.
I said barely, and I meant it. I think you misunderstood my motives for the CD comment.
CDs cover a frequency range of DC (theoretically) to 22.05kHz. Humans on average can hear 20Hz-20kHz when they're young, and the high frequencies drop off as we age. Notice that that's an average. Some people can hear 22kHz frequencies, which strains CD quality to the breaking point. Then there's resolution--16 bits is again right on the border.
The point of these numbers though, is this: Any lossy compression on a CD-quality file will result in audible losses. If you had a 40-bit 100kHz frequency response on CDs, then you could grind them down into (large!) MP3s without worrying about losing detectible information. As it is, we're chopping away at a format (CD audio) that can't afford any chopping away, and in a few years when CDs go the way of the dinosaur, is their replacement going to be worse? It sure looks like it from my end.
I mean dominant as in the commercially embraced format. Right now the industry is struggling with MP3, and >90% of music is still being purchased on CD, despite what the RIAA would have us believe. MP3 is not yet a commercial format. It's barely even a commercially supported format, and the only reason it's got that far is that "support" means coding a player, not building hardware.
Sure, you've got half a terabyte of MP3s sitting in your basement. That doesn't make it a commercially dominant format. However, it's clear that something like MP3 is going to take over that role, and once it does we'll have a harder time buying CDs than we do records right now.
I've noticed that as we get cooler and more portable technology, sound quality seems to be on the decline.
MP3 sucks. Well maybe it doesn't suck, but it's a damned sight worse than CD audio, and let's not forget that CDs just barely encompass the resolution and frequency response that we can discern. There's bloody little headroom to muck about with on a CD without affecting the sound. Lossy compression (i.e. MP3 format) definitely qualifies, and definitely affects the sound.
This is fine for portable systems, computer speakers, and so forth; However, I'm getting worried that MP3 and other similar formats will become dominant in the marketplace. We may see before long a world where it's pointless to get really excellent audio equipment, because the playback quality is severely limited by the format.
Um...no. Not quite.
A soundboard is a resonant surface. A piano has a soundboard, not a sounding board. Ditto for a violin.
A sounding board usually refers to a discussion forum or something like. Historically though, it was the reflecting surface above and behind a pulpit.
More recently, you're right--a sound board is also a mixer.
OK, maybe "nothing to show for it" is a bit extreme. How about "nothing publicly visible to show for it."
I'm sure they're working on it, and I'm sure that it'll see the light of day sometime (although possibly in a very heavily altered form), but this was supposed to be part of NT4 or thereabouts. Regardless of the actual research being done, their press release doesn't mean much in terms of it seeing the light of day.
Note the historical sidebar on the article. It traces the on-again, off-again history of OFS. MS has been playing with it for over half a decade (!), and doesn't yet have anything to show for it. They've backpedalled and caught up again so many times that I think this article can be safely labelled as speculation.
In other words, it sounds cool. I'll believe it when I see it. (and only at that point judge whether it really makes Windows less likely to break)
Yeah, but note that I said _prefer_ it. I still use it quite often at work, because I'm running Solaris on old machines with 8-bit frame buffers, and mozilla sucks in 8-bit colour.
But would you rather use NS4.76, or (almost anything else)?
That's nice. Hope you're happy with it. I'm not. That's just fine, though--in fact, it's the way things should be.
You like Opera. I like Mozilla. There's no reason I have to switch to Opera, or you have to switch to Mozilla. There's also no reason that the six people who live in a cave and prefer Netscape 4.76 have to switch either.
The thing that makes Opera and Mozilla (and Netscape, and ye randome othere browsere) good and important is that they're choices and alternatives. That's why we shouldn't be fighting about which one is better, and evaluating them honestly for ourselves.
Considering I'm not from or in the US, this is funny.
I'm working strictly on economic and political clout, combined with history. The US wields more power than it actually has, and will continue to do so. That's the facts. It sucks badly, but it's true.
Deal with it or do something about it.
OK, that's not quite a legitimate question. Bill is and always has been a geek on his good days. (and a nerd on his bad days, and a sleazball on the other 90% of the days)
However, his version of events doesn't correspond with anyone else's, or with recorded history. In other words, Bill Gates is a liar.
Now let's quit quoting him and saying, "oh hey--we were wrong all these decades."
This is, unfortunately, utter bollocks.
Where the US leads, others will follow. In some cases, the US is lagging behind other countries (Australia, for instance) but ultimately if the US mandates it, the western world will fall in line.
The next step after mandating these changes is to set up trade barricades on any incoming non-compliant hardware. Two months I thought that this was a thought-experiment to see where this could eventually lead. Now I think we can almost write a timetable for it.
This will not hurt the US economy--it'll trash the world's belief in freedom.
What is WRONG with these people?
They go through all the work of gutting a cute 'n' cuddly teddy bear, stuff it full of network electronics, and don't even put a webcam in the eyes?
Now that would be an evil idea. "I want you to make sure you put this bear on your dresser so you can see it every night when you've crawled into bed." And so it can see YOU, young lady! Heh heh hehhhhh.....
Sorry. I'll go get some coffee now.
Advertisers know something that you're missing out on here.
They can be as annoying as hell--they can absolutely piss you off and make you REFUSE to click on their banners--or indeed any banners. But at the end of the day, you've seen the product's name, and if they annoy you often enough with that, it'll stick.
Quick--picture C|Net. Who advertises there? You may or may not bring up the names instantly, but I can _guarantee_ that if you read C|Net, you're at least familiar with the names of companies who advertise.
Exposure is all they're after, and they don't give a flying fuck how they achieve it. Boycotts don't work until you can get 40% of the _buying_ market for a given product, and that's never going to happen for banner ads or even spam.
Let's all bend over now...
Now that's an interesting question and hypothesis.
How will they convince the public to go with this scheme? The same way they're doing with DVD right now, and for that matter, AGP video cards. Quit releasing other technology. Make whatever scheme you want the de facto standard by merely getting all of the other stuff out of the market.
Will there be an underground backlash? Absolutely! I'll be part of it--I suspect you will be too. But, 99% or more of the population will happily go along with whatever system is foisted upon them. They'll be looking at a small fraction of the population that's not going along, and if they get legislation in place, they can arrest and jail any one of us who gets too 'noisy.'
Orwellian? Perhaps. Far-fetched? Not very.