what a hatchet job was done on California Governor Gray Davis (while I'm not a particularly huge fan of his) apparently to lay the foundation for a republican challenger to replace a disgraced democrat, while the Dept of Energy and the president sat on their hands.
I was starting to think I was the only one who noticed. I can't believe how many people honestly blame Davis for that.
Sorry, but 10 year olds rarely actually hold opinions, they just repeat whatever opinions their primary caregiver has expressed in their presence.
That's true of some 25 year olds, too, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and we chose 18. At least the 25 year old has had the opportunity to gain some life experience, and might be able to actually understand the opinions they profess.
I suggest you try a little experiment, and see if any of these uber-smart 10 year olds can actually defend any of their opinions. I strongly suspect you'll be disappointed.
I predict that at sometime in the future Digital Camera manufacturers may taught their cameras has having "evidence quality" data integrity.
It's a non-issue. Law enforcement agencies don't care, and neither do the courts*. It's simple enough to tell if a picture has been modified, regardless of whether it's digital or film, as long as you know what you're looking for.
* My wife and brother-in-law are cops in California. YMMV.
But what about quality? Will digital ever come close to the quality film when blowing up an image to full page size or more?
I'm not an expert, but I used to support high end digital film scanners, aka DataCines (film as in movies, btw).
The particular one I worked on came in 2k and, recently released, 4k varieties. 2k means 2k horizontal lines of resolution, and the resulting image of each frame is 2000x3000 pixels, 4k is 4000x6000. With the release of the 2k scanner there were some complaints of some strange artifacts in the scan, which turned out to be the grain of the film.
The thing is, film is NOT an analog media, it is just as digital as the electronic files we normally think of when we use that term. It is physical rather than electronic, but it does have many of the same properties, including limits on its resolution.
If you were looking for a straight number, though, I guess from the info above you could say that 6MP is roughly equivalent to 75mm movie film.
Alternatively, I vaguely remember from a film class I took about 12 years ago that film has a resolution of around 1k dpi. Now, IIRC, that's the resolution of the film itself, so it should be pretty easy to calculate what kind of resolution you need for a CCD that's the same size as your negative. From there it's just a matter of scaling and optics.
Will digital ever be as true as film, can an algorithm on a camera that converts colors and images to zero's and one's be as good as film which reacts naturally to the light?
Now you sound like a health food nut. Listen: just because it's "natural" doesn't mean it's good. HIV and arsenic are natural, that doesn't mean they're good for you.
The arguement hardly applies here, though. The elements in a CCD react just as "naturally" to light as the crystal grains in film, it just isn't permenant.
Yes, I think it is the right decision for courts to protect the rights of the people.
When I buy a book it becomes my property, and I have a right to enjoy it in ANY way I see fit, as long as that doesn't involve republishing it without permission of the copyright holder. I can read it, burn it, make copies for personal use or "backup", wipe my ass with it, whatever. It seems to be pretty obvious to everyone that these are my rights as the owner of a book.
Why should it be any different for a DVD?
I applaud the French court for recognizing the simple fact that it shouldn't be any different, and telling the movie industry to stop acting like spoiled children.
Adobe is raising a ruckus claiming the DMCA is preventing reverse engineering.
I thought it was Nikon that raised the ruckus by threatening Adobe with it.
Either way, it being trivial to break isn't going to be a winning arguement in court. Indeed, trivial encryption is exactly what the DMCA was made for. Strong encryption doesn't need to be protected by law.
Honestly, I hope Adobe is successful in stirring things up around this. If it actually goes to court there stands a very good chance of a bit of the DMCA being chipped away, since it's actually the end user who owns copyright on the data being encrypted.
Trivial or not, Nikon needs to be kicked in the head.
I think the moderation instructions suggest reading posts in reverse order so you see newer comments first. I guess it's supposed to counter the first post advantage, but I think they forget sometimes when they get to the end and see the same post they've seen 15 times already that it was actually the first, and all the others were redundant.
Well, that's not my domain of expertise, so I'll have to take your word for it.
However, that doesn't quite jive with what has filtered into my brain on the subject over the years, so I'm not convinced that my point has been invalidated. Though, I might be if you can explain in that context why servers seem to need to have such beefy specs.
Clearly, that power is needed for something. Just because it isn't the webserver itself that's using it doesn't mean the webserver should be allowed to take 5 times more than it needs.
If you honestly think that's a valid question, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. I like KDE, and yet I use Gnome apps all the time, even though I don't have enough of Gnome installed on my system for it to be usable itself. What's more, back when I was a WindowMaker guy I used both KDE and Gnome apps all the time, still without any significant issues.
When it comes right down to it, there are very few differences between distributions, and of those the only one that's really sugnificant is the administration and configuration tools they provide. Some are stupidly designed when it comes to certain tasks, but that problem hardly goes away when you add Windows as an option, and that's exactly where options ARE a good thing FOR BUSINESS. With Windows, you're stuck with whatever brain-dead tool MS decided to provide for you. With Linux, you have the option of choosing a different distro that is maybe better for the things that matter most to you.
Which one is that? How should I know? I'm not you.
Think about that for a second, because that's exactly why it's pointless to complain about this "problem". I like Suse, but clearly not everyone agrees that Suse does things in the best possible way. What's more, everyone agreeing is something that will NEVER happen, and that's not any less true on the admin side than it is on the developer side.
It's pointless to even call it a problem. You might as well have ranted about how business is being hindered by the fact that people in different parts of the world speak different languages. That's an equally solvable "problem", and for exactly the same reasons.
People write webservers in C(++) because what's more important than security is optimal use of available resources. Poor security isn't a tangible cost. Number of CPUs, amount of RAM required, rackspace, power, HVAC... all of these ARE tangible costs.
"5 times the CPU cycles" to me says you need 5 times the hardware to support the same number of users. Think you can justify that to the guy determining your department's budget?
Well, on Suse 9.1 I have problems mounting my flash drive when YOU installs a new kernel version and I haven't rebooted yet. It acts funny in other ways, but that's the only one that's consistent enough for me to have made the connection.
Yeah, it's obvious and easily fixed, but you asked...
I will agree that the goal is to get things working propperly in Linux. However, we can't simply ignore these people who keep spouting off on how everything needs to "just work" for Linux to get anywhere.
Usually they point at Windows as their example, but sometimes it's Mac. The simple fact is, though, that neither of these systems "just work" either, and yet they are somehow considered "ready for prime-time", where Linux is not. This points to a flaw in the basic arguement which should be addressed.
Really, I think this is just a branch of the critically flawed arguement that everything needs to have an intuitive interface that anyone can pick up without any training. What's the flaw in that? Simple: no such thing exists. The classic example of the intuitive interface -- the nipple -- must be learned by both mother and child!
The arguement usually turns into a festival of finger pointing, but there is a core truth that seems to keep getting missed by people like you: Windows doesn't work right either, so clearly that isn't actually a requirement for operating system popularity.
The real question is, what actually IS a requirement?
Mentioning it on slashdot is pointless. If you think it's a good idea, you should mention it to the guys at TrollTech.
This is the other side of the problem: people come up with feature ideas, or find bugs, and they post them on slashdot instead of telling somebody who can actually do something about it.
OK, so how do I put my Windows "home" (whatever unecessarily long and confusing name they're using for it these days) directory(s) on another drive?
In Linux, "home" can be a directory, a seperate partition, a seperate drive, or even on a seperate machine, and it makes not a bit of difference. AND I can very easily configure it that way during install, or after the fact. These are the kind of things the GP is talking about that he, and I, would kill to be able to do in Windows.
and anything that comes with suse is just an apt-get away with ubuntu.
Nope. The Suse boxed set usually includes some proprietary apps as well.
Anyway, YMMV obviously. I've used Suse for years, and the only time I've had problems installing it was IIRC Suse 6.3 on an old Pacard Bell Pentium machine, and even then it was just that the video card was unsupported, anything non-graphical worked fine. I've never successfully booted one of their live CDs or DVDs, though.
Suse Pro comes with the most excellent and useful printed manuals I have ever seen. Ever.
The Suse manuals were absolutely invaluable when I was learning to use Linux, and are the primary reason I still buy the Suse Pro boxed set, instead of simply waiting a month and updating directly from their ftp site (which can also be mounted via nfs, if you like to swing that way).
You see, about every 6-12 months some friend or family member decides they want to give Linux a try. At that point, I burn copies of the CDs and DVDs and hand them the entire origional boxed set. I find this dramatically reduces the number of questions they have for me, while dramatically increasing their level of confidence in being able to actually use it, which is the largest single factor in deciding if they will stick with it or not.
To put it bluntly, every person I've known that has started their Linux experience with Suse was using Linux primarily or exclusively within 2 years, without exception (they may switch distros, but they do stick with Linux). Every person I've known who has started out by downloading free Mandrake or Red Hat ISOs has given up on Linux as a "toy OS" within a few weeks. YMMV, obviously, but that's been my experience over the past 5 years since I started using Linux.
The manuals change from time to time, but typically there is a n00b guide (what apps to use for common tasks, and brief how-tos for them), a user guide (more in-depth user documentation for the apps in the n00b guide, and many more that might be of interest to a more serious user), and an admin guide (which IMO is far more useful than any other "Using Linux" style book I've seen, and I own several.)
So, that's why Suse Pro is $99.95, and IMO, as a Linux advocate, it's well worth the price. If you don't want to pay that, fine; wait a month and install it directly via ftp/nfs for free.
Part of the problem OOo has with attracting developers from outside Sun is that its codebase is too big, and part of the reason its codebase is so big is that it supports.doc..doc support is one of it's biggest selling points. Any office suite that wishes to gain any kind of market/mindshare MUST support.doc, simply because that is the format currently in use by the vast majority of office suite users. Dropping.doc support would be the kiss of death for OOo.
Slashdot Mirror
Stainless steel bearings.
Seriously, why is this even a question?
what a hatchet job was done on California Governor Gray Davis (while I'm not a particularly huge fan of his) apparently to lay the foundation for a republican challenger to replace a disgraced democrat, while the Dept of Energy and the president sat on their hands.
I was starting to think I was the only one who noticed. I can't believe how many people honestly blame Davis for that.
Sorry, but 10 year olds rarely actually hold opinions, they just repeat whatever opinions their primary caregiver has expressed in their presence.
That's true of some 25 year olds, too, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and we chose 18. At least the 25 year old has had the opportunity to gain some life experience, and might be able to actually understand the opinions they profess.
I suggest you try a little experiment, and see if any of these uber-smart 10 year olds can actually defend any of their opinions. I strongly suspect you'll be disappointed.
I sit corrected, and still rooting for the mailed fist of karma (I've never been an Adobe fan anyway).
I predict that at sometime in the future Digital Camera manufacturers may taught their cameras has having "evidence quality" data integrity.
It's a non-issue. Law enforcement agencies don't care, and neither do the courts*. It's simple enough to tell if a picture has been modified, regardless of whether it's digital or film, as long as you know what you're looking for.
* My wife and brother-in-law are cops in California. YMMV.
But what about quality? Will digital ever come close to the quality film when blowing up an image to full page size or more?
I'm not an expert, but I used to support high end digital film scanners, aka DataCines (film as in movies, btw).
The particular one I worked on came in 2k and, recently released, 4k varieties. 2k means 2k horizontal lines of resolution, and the resulting image of each frame is 2000x3000 pixels, 4k is 4000x6000. With the release of the 2k scanner there were some complaints of some strange artifacts in the scan, which turned out to be the grain of the film.
The thing is, film is NOT an analog media, it is just as digital as the electronic files we normally think of when we use that term. It is physical rather than electronic, but it does have many of the same properties, including limits on its resolution.
If you were looking for a straight number, though, I guess from the info above you could say that 6MP is roughly equivalent to 75mm movie film.
Alternatively, I vaguely remember from a film class I took about 12 years ago that film has a resolution of around 1k dpi. Now, IIRC, that's the resolution of the film itself, so it should be pretty easy to calculate what kind of resolution you need for a CCD that's the same size as your negative. From there it's just a matter of scaling and optics.
Will digital ever be as true as film, can an algorithm on a camera that converts colors and images to zero's and one's be as good as film which reacts naturally to the light?
Now you sound like a health food nut. Listen: just because it's "natural" doesn't mean it's good. HIV and arsenic are natural, that doesn't mean they're good for you.
The arguement hardly applies here, though. The elements in a CCD react just as "naturally" to light as the crystal grains in film, it just isn't permenant.
Yes, I think it is the right decision for courts to protect the rights of the people.
When I buy a book it becomes my property, and I have a right to enjoy it in ANY way I see fit, as long as that doesn't involve republishing it without permission of the copyright holder. I can read it, burn it, make copies for personal use or "backup", wipe my ass with it, whatever. It seems to be pretty obvious to everyone that these are my rights as the owner of a book.
Why should it be any different for a DVD?
I applaud the French court for recognizing the simple fact that it shouldn't be any different, and telling the movie industry to stop acting like spoiled children.
Adobe is raising a ruckus claiming the DMCA is preventing reverse engineering.
I thought it was Nikon that raised the ruckus by threatening Adobe with it.
Either way, it being trivial to break isn't going to be a winning arguement in court. Indeed, trivial encryption is exactly what the DMCA was made for. Strong encryption doesn't need to be protected by law.
Honestly, I hope Adobe is successful in stirring things up around this. If it actually goes to court there stands a very good chance of a bit of the DMCA being chipped away, since it's actually the end user who owns copyright on the data being encrypted.
Trivial or not, Nikon needs to be kicked in the head.
I think the moderation instructions suggest reading posts in reverse order so you see newer comments first. I guess it's supposed to counter the first post advantage, but I think they forget sometimes when they get to the end and see the same post they've seen 15 times already that it was actually the first, and all the others were redundant.
Well, that's not my domain of expertise, so I'll have to take your word for it.
However, that doesn't quite jive with what has filtered into my brain on the subject over the years, so I'm not convinced that my point has been invalidated. Though, I might be if you can explain in that context why servers seem to need to have such beefy specs.
Clearly, that power is needed for something. Just because it isn't the webserver itself that's using it doesn't mean the webserver should be allowed to take 5 times more than it needs.
It's amazing, but many/most libraries in C(++) are harder to use than doing things directly.
You clearly haven't spent much time working with assembly. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Suse with KDE as opposed to Red Hat with Gnome.
If you honestly think that's a valid question, you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. I like KDE, and yet I use Gnome apps all the time, even though I don't have enough of Gnome installed on my system for it to be usable itself. What's more, back when I was a WindowMaker guy I used both KDE and Gnome apps all the time, still without any significant issues.
When it comes right down to it, there are very few differences between distributions, and of those the only one that's really sugnificant is the administration and configuration tools they provide. Some are stupidly designed when it comes to certain tasks, but that problem hardly goes away when you add Windows as an option, and that's exactly where options ARE a good thing FOR BUSINESS. With Windows, you're stuck with whatever brain-dead tool MS decided to provide for you. With Linux, you have the option of choosing a different distro that is maybe better for the things that matter most to you.
Which one is that? How should I know? I'm not you.
Think about that for a second, because that's exactly why it's pointless to complain about this "problem". I like Suse, but clearly not everyone agrees that Suse does things in the best possible way. What's more, everyone agreeing is something that will NEVER happen, and that's not any less true on the admin side than it is on the developer side.
It's pointless to even call it a problem. You might as well have ranted about how business is being hindered by the fact that people in different parts of the world speak different languages. That's an equally solvable "problem", and for exactly the same reasons.
People write webservers in C(++) because what's more important than security is optimal use of available resources. Poor security isn't a tangible cost. Number of CPUs, amount of RAM required, rackspace, power, HVAC... all of these ARE tangible costs.
"5 times the CPU cycles" to me says you need 5 times the hardware to support the same number of users. Think you can justify that to the guy determining your department's budget?
Another area where C/C++ win, IMO. How many other languages can you embed hand-optimized assembly in directly?
I have a hard time blaming the language when the real problem is the developers not using its features.
Well, on Suse 9.1 I have problems mounting my flash drive when YOU installs a new kernel version and I haven't rebooted yet. It acts funny in other ways, but that's the only one that's consistent enough for me to have made the connection.
Yeah, it's obvious and easily fixed, but you asked...
I will agree that the goal is to get things working propperly in Linux. However, we can't simply ignore these people who keep spouting off on how everything needs to "just work" for Linux to get anywhere.
Usually they point at Windows as their example, but sometimes it's Mac. The simple fact is, though, that neither of these systems "just work" either, and yet they are somehow considered "ready for prime-time", where Linux is not. This points to a flaw in the basic arguement which should be addressed.
Really, I think this is just a branch of the critically flawed arguement that everything needs to have an intuitive interface that anyone can pick up without any training. What's the flaw in that? Simple: no such thing exists. The classic example of the intuitive interface -- the nipple -- must be learned by both mother and child!
The arguement usually turns into a festival of finger pointing, but there is a core truth that seems to keep getting missed by people like you: Windows doesn't work right either, so clearly that isn't actually a requirement for operating system popularity.
The real question is, what actually IS a requirement?
Mentioning it on slashdot is pointless. If you think it's a good idea, you should mention it to the guys at TrollTech.
This is the other side of the problem: people come up with feature ideas, or find bugs, and they post them on slashdot instead of telling somebody who can actually do something about it.
OK, so how do I put my Windows "home" (whatever unecessarily long and confusing name they're using for it these days) directory(s) on another drive?
In Linux, "home" can be a directory, a seperate partition, a seperate drive, or even on a seperate machine, and it makes not a bit of difference. AND I can very easily configure it that way during install, or after the fact. These are the kind of things the GP is talking about that he, and I, would kill to be able to do in Windows.
If you find these things so dificult in Linux, you're using the wrong distro. I recomend Suse.
and anything that comes with suse is just an apt-get away with ubuntu.
Nope. The Suse boxed set usually includes some proprietary apps as well.
Anyway, YMMV obviously. I've used Suse for years, and the only time I've had problems installing it was IIRC Suse 6.3 on an old Pacard Bell Pentium machine, and even then it was just that the video card was unsupported, anything non-graphical worked fine. I've never successfully booted one of their live CDs or DVDs, though.
How does charging for this comply with the GPL?
Try actually reading the GPL yourself. You clearly don't understand it.
aren't others also allowed to distribute Suse for free?
They can and do.
Suse Pro comes with the most excellent and useful printed manuals I have ever seen. Ever.
The Suse manuals were absolutely invaluable when I was learning to use Linux, and are the primary reason I still buy the Suse Pro boxed set, instead of simply waiting a month and updating directly from their ftp site (which can also be mounted via nfs, if you like to swing that way).
You see, about every 6-12 months some friend or family member decides they want to give Linux a try. At that point, I burn copies of the CDs and DVDs and hand them the entire origional boxed set. I find this dramatically reduces the number of questions they have for me, while dramatically increasing their level of confidence in being able to actually use it, which is the largest single factor in deciding if they will stick with it or not.
To put it bluntly, every person I've known that has started their Linux experience with Suse was using Linux primarily or exclusively within 2 years, without exception (they may switch distros, but they do stick with Linux). Every person I've known who has started out by downloading free Mandrake or Red Hat ISOs has given up on Linux as a "toy OS" within a few weeks. YMMV, obviously, but that's been my experience over the past 5 years since I started using Linux.
The manuals change from time to time, but typically there is a n00b guide (what apps to use for common tasks, and brief how-tos for them), a user guide (more in-depth user documentation for the apps in the n00b guide, and many more that might be of interest to a more serious user), and an admin guide (which IMO is far more useful than any other "Using Linux" style book I've seen, and I own several.)
So, that's why Suse Pro is $99.95, and IMO, as a Linux advocate, it's well worth the price. If you don't want to pay that, fine; wait a month and install it directly via ftp/nfs for free.
Part of the problem OOo has with attracting developers from outside Sun is that its codebase is too big, and part of the reason its codebase is so big is that it supports .doc. .doc support is one of it's biggest selling points. Any office suite that wishes to gain any kind of market/mindshare MUST support .doc, simply because that is the format currently in use by the vast majority of office suite users. Dropping .doc support would be the kiss of death for OOo.
Hurd...will develop rapidly...
BWA-HA-HA!!!!!!!!!!!