This story seems like it's asking for opinions, so I hope no one will mind too much if mine happen to be redundant.
I know that someone else has probably said all these things, but I don't have moderator points ans so I can't emphasize the ones that I feel are important.
- One thing I'd really like to see, more than new features and new advertisements, is better stability. It seems that every other day I reload slashdot and get the generic page instead of the one I've customized in my user settings. Eventually if I keep reloading I get my custom page. This started happening two months ago and has been an ongoing problem ever since on ALL the machines I browse slashdot from, regardless of their internet bandwidth. If bandwidth is the issue, then reduce the complexity of the html and find technical ways of speeding up the dynamic code.
- Putting more obnoxious advertisements in front of people is a terrible idea. If you need to raise money do some creative (or even not-so-creative) fundraising. There is still a ".org" in slashdot. Since slashdot has traditionally been a community site instead of the usual corporate media outlet, why not try typical community forms of fundraising such as pledges (with hat and T-shirt prizes), donors, etc. Reward people for their generosity by keeping up a list of donors at various levels like libraries do. I have to admit that if slashdot wants to behave like C-net, I'll probably start looking elsewhere. I know that slashdot is owned by a public company, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a concept of "we're doing good enough". Too many companies kill themselves trying to grow beyond their natural market instead of serving it.
- Sticking more ads in front of people (especially this audience) is simply going to increase ad filtering.
- I don't have anything against subscriptions for no ads at all, but I'm against increasing the amount of ads for non-subscribers.
That we would integrate a back door in our high-tech weapons that are sold abroad so that they misfire/explode/active a lojack-like device if they are used against us. The government is so back-door-encryption happy that I'm surprised they haven't done this. And, if they haven't done so because of fear that the keys would be compromised, then why would the FBI want to implement such system for civilian encryption?
In case you didn't notice their home page...
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It clearly says on Loki's web site that Tribes2 and Deus Ex are in the works. How much more mainstream can you get? I've been playing Heavy Gear II for the past few days and think that it is very impressive under linux.
It is a sad, sad day when this story gets posted and none of the top responses as of this comment mention the very obvious and very old problems that everyone should know by now.
- Cash is mostly anonymous and private. I earnestly hope that it never goes away until some electronic form of money has similar qualities. Your credit cards, debit cards, store charge cards are all extremely un-private. Yes, this actually has significant negative consequences. It's such an obvious arguement that I'll simply say EFF. Almost all privacy policies are mis-named. Which leads to...
- Under our current system of credit/debit cards, identity theft becomes a easy and devastating attack. It's much more efficient to script an exploit to get credit card numbers than to rob a bank. Simply getting rid of cash will only exacerbate these problems. I wouldn't be surprised if a good third of the ecommerce sites on the internet got hit with one of various viruses/worms this summer alone.
I know the author was a victim of techno lust and meant well, but people should really be more informed. Civil liberties are too important to foresake for convenience or because of ignorance.
I've run into guys from an company called mission-critical linux www.missioncriticallinux.com at the local LUG meetings. I know that they do custom clusters. Perhaps they can help?
I didn't mean to imply that other news sources are not biased. Of course they are as well, however, they are often biased in a different direction, giving you a better idea of where the truth is.
Also, I think your second paragraph misses the point I was trying to make. Modern biases are often in what is *not* reported and *not* questioned. Many mainstream news sources do a good job on the issues they choose to investigate, but people should realize that there aren't others equally or even more worthy of investigation in the same sphere that are passed over.
Heh, the only thing unusual about this story is that a *hacker* changed the meaning of a story to suit an agenda. It's not as if the news wasn't biased already!
One of the things that worries me greatly when I am brave enough to think about it at length, is how fantastically biased and non-independent our (USA) official news sources are. Almost every traditional media segment (TV, newspapers, radio) are as we speak undergoing a tremendous reorganization, where the vast majority of the markets are controlled by a few private companies whose major line of business isn't journalism.
For an shock for those who haven't done it already, find an international issue and compare how it is covered in the US with how it is covered by far-foreign or minority news sources. You may find the experience similar to discovering Slashdot and Kuroshin after years of Ziff Davis, especially if you read coverage that goes on for a few pages instead of paragraphs. You might not discover the truth but you'll have much better questions.
The bias is subtle to detect without a comparison, because the bias is often in what is *not* reported, or arguments that are *not* published. If you don't mind being being stoned by a flag-waving mob you can even try this experiment with last week's horrible tragedy.
So, as much as I support punishing this hacker for his illegal actions, a part of me also commends him for increasing the average distrust of mainstream news.
I have a Tyan Thunder K7 Rev. B motherboard.. It's the one with an actual heat sink on the north bridge and the plastic socket lever. The BIOS is the latest from Tyan, 2.06 I believe. I'm tried it with both 1 and 2 1.2Ghz Palominos (AthlonMP). I'm using the NMB power supply. The memory is Crucial ECC-registered.. According to Crucial's web site the DIMMs I have are specifically for use with this board.
Attached I have an ATA-33 12GB hard drive, and two 18GB SCSI-160 IBM ultrastars attached to the onboard SCSI-160 A controller.
I've tested both with the onboard ATI video, and with an AGP GeForce3. I've also tested both with an without an SB-Live! sound card.
In every single possible combination of the above parts, I get severe data corruption when using the onboard IDE controller. Although it correctly detects my IDE hard drive it generates constant ATA timeout errors and slows the system to a crawl. This happens even when I dumb down the bios to use older PIO (non-DMA) modes.
Eventually I became so frustrated with it that I disabled the onboard IDE ports and stuck in a Promise ATA-100 controller. Bada-bing, the problem is solved. The the system screams *and* is quite stable. It's good enough for me this way, but I would have expected a 500$ motherboard to have worked out of the box.
The only problem I may have is keeping the CPU's cool. Even with thermosonic thermoengine heatsinks with good fans the CPU temp is still 50 deg C. Of course, part of that might be the 32 C room temperature...
I agree that it's not practical to re-encode mp3's to oggs. You only want to re-encode if you have the originals or the quality will suffer badly.
To answer your question about anyone caring if you re-encode, that's easy to answer. If you start encoding with Ogg, then you will be receptive to products that support Ogg in the future, so you will probably end up supporting hardware vendors who pick up the format. If you never use Oggs, you'll be less likely to notice/reward the makers of Ogg hardware:) In economic terms you're creating a demand.
The political goals of Ogg are to provide a free, high quality digital music compression tool. There are no other encoders in the world that are free. When I say free I'm talking about the "free as in speech" cliche that protects you from company X suddenly deciding to extort money from a market via patent and copyright enforcement once it attains a sufficient size. This happens all the time (the.gif graphics format being the most famous example). Again, ogg is the only tool in its class that protects you from this.
It is an important thing that people be able to space-shift audio, especially audio that they already own. Being able to do this gives you, the user, control and flexibility to listen to your media as you see fit. Space-shifting is a a fair-use right that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Space shifting has numerous legitimate uses that far outweigh the "piracy angle".
Again, Ogg is the only tool in its class that legally *guarantees* the user the ability to space-shift audio into the future. You can be sure that corporate interests, even as we speak, are using technology to control how we use media to increase their profits. They would like to prevent, or charge money for the "priviledge" of space-shifting. Once again, Ogg is the only tool in its class that protects you from this kind of extortion.
Most people do care about this, but are too lazy to do anything about it, even something so small as re-encoding their music in the Ogg format to show others that they will not willingly set themselves up for space-shifting extortion. Other people are too shortsighted to see that something as small as a music format *will* effect the amount of control they have over media in the future. A few people aren't lazy or shortsighted- they simple don't care, usually because they are unaccostumed to caring about anything that affects someone outside their immediate family.
So no, I strongly disagree that use of Ogg, even in the face of technically better alternatives is bullshit politics. I think it's very important. I also think that Ogg is a technically superior product than mp3 encoders. As time goes on, the difference will grow even more.
I don't consider myself a zealot, simply an informed consumer with an understanding of history and the ability to extrapolate into the future.
... is that my ISP is on top of it. I just gave them a call because I know that I'm on Rhythms, and the last time my CLEC shut down (NorthPoint) my old ISP (Empire.net) simply dropped all their customers, and I was without a decent internet
connection for a month.
Anyway, I gave my current ISP (GalaxyDSL.net) a call because of the Rhythms news, and they have already started transitioning customers over to other providers. They said that they expected minimal, if any, downtime, and that I would be contacted shortly to make an appointment for a new router installation. Apparently they have dealt with this situation before from when HarvardNet closed down, and they are well prepared. The tech said that it was likely that I would be switched over sometime next week. Amazing!
I've lived in and around Boston for most of my life and have had accounts with almost every ISP in the area since ISP's existed. I've never seen such great technical support and customer service as with galaxydsl.net. They've been on top of the code red problems, the cisco router vulnerabilities, and now the Rhythms shutdown. When I call for support I get right through to an actual technician. They are a great alternative to Verizon/Time Warner if anyone's looking for one.
No, I am not affiliated with them in any way, just pleasantly surprised by the service.
Well I'll be a good little slashdotter and add my probably redundant reply to the pile.
All karma-whoring aside, however, I've been playing around with mp3's for as long as anyone but haven't bothered to rip my entire collection. The only time I ripped my own CDs where to make compilations for other people. After I was done I needed the hard drive space to install my Nth operating system and wiped the mp3's. I used bladenc for a long time and then switched to lame when it was more supported and higher quality.
Now I'm finally getting around to ripping my large CD collection and yes, I'm using ogg. I encode at 256kbps, and ogg does VBR. It sounds good to me on my vanilla stereo equipment, and it's a hell of a lot better than ANY of the poor quality MP3's that I've downloaded. This isn't a slam against the MP3 format, just about the morons who gave it a bad name by encoding at 128bit with awful encoders.
No, I'm not expecting to walk into Best Buy and pick up a portable ogg players, but that's not an issue for me. I believe in the ogg project because they are doing the right thing with regards to their licensing. It's as simple as that. Everyone should be using their product. These people deserve your support, and supporting free software is more important than your music collection anyway, in the long run.
I'll buy hardware that supports the ogg format, and if I need to I'll build my own. With all the linux PDA's around, it won't be that hard.
Lighten up and take it as a compliment. There are a number of German words that succinctly sum up abstract concepts that do not have an English/French/etc counterpart.
The above statements are false. As someone who works for a weather company and hears a lot of theories, it still very much in question whether manmade greenhouse gasses are causing global warming.
Our current evidence suggests that increased surface temperatures are more likely caused by increased development (ie, asphalt) nearby ground measurement stations. Also, cyclical sunspot activity results in a curve of zipper-pattern fluctations in the radiated energy that reaches the earth over ~11 year period. The above two observations *do* have substantial physical evidence to back them up, and are a better explanation for recent global warming than the greenhouse theory.
As someone who uses many languages in the course of the day, Java included, I might be able to offer some information.
1. Java is a fine development language, and it will help me as a programmer to learn it.
This is dead on. I wish that I learned OOP properly in college. Learning C and other procedural languages actually hurts you in the early stages, because you have to unlearn tactics.
If I were teaching someone OOP in college, I would start with a "pure OOP" language, such as Python or Java, and a book similar to Design Patterns. I sure wish I learned this way.. Design Patterns came out after I graduated and it pretty much changed the way I thought about OOP overnight.
That's not to say that C++ doesn't have its place. It can be fast, and it can be very flexible. However, in an academic environment other priorities are simply more important. Garbage collection is key. Trust me, you don't want to be up all night tracking down a memory leak when all you need to do is implement a certain algorithm. Also extemely important is a free, cross platform development environment. (No, C++ isn't as strong here as java or python due to library implementation differences). I consider C++ a very dangerous language to start learning with because it's so easy to slide back into C. Until you get to the point where you can understand what the consequences of that are for your project, it's a giant boobytrap waiting to snare the unwary.
2. I'm right. Java is a fad, not worth much more than the Windows OS in terms of quality, and my CS faculty is doing me a disservice by cramming it down my throat.
This is a very popular but shortsited viewpoint. Java is stronger than it has every been in the past. It's still in heavy growth mode, with more libraries and extensions being developed for it than I can keep pace with these days. It's going to continue to evolve for quite some time. As the JVMs continue to improve in performance, and CPUs continue to double in speed, the performance difference between Java and C++ is going to become less and less. It's already at the point where I run large java applications like Jext (thank you very much Roman Guy!) on my pentium-III 600 without any noticable slowness.
Java is a very good investment. It's not the best OOP language in every area but it may be the most well rounded. It's certainly not going away, and you can get a lot of useful work done with it.
Java seems to enjoy better support for the corporate world than from the open source community. This is largely because Java is so useful to corporations and they're ready and willing to develop and pay for enterprise class extensions that most lone hackers would consider boring or overkill. Java isn't a zero sum game, however, and there is plenty of room for free software to thrive. I'm glad the the Apache crew recognize this- their Xerces XML parser and their Servlet engine are excellent, excellent examples of free java software. www.gnu.org also lists a large number of useful java libraries and applications. The time is ripe for someone to bring Kaffe or similar free JVM / library up to speed.
If you do decide to get into Java, I would recommend you learn python as well, and then use the embedded scripting language jython (www.jython.org) from within your java apps. It's a killer combination.
Reading the spec of this beast, it looks like the resolution and pitch really stink. You'd be better off using a traditional projector if you didn't need such a rectangular format.
This case is not about black and white stances such as "All intellectual property is wrong" and "All intellectual property is good" as your post implicitly suggests.
This case is about grey areas, and deals with questions such as: Does the DCMA go too far? Are copyright / trademark / existing IP laws adequate? The question is not, as much as you would like it to be, whether all IP is evil and wrong. It's whether the broad new IP powers granted by the DCMA are unconstitutional.
I think you might have an interesting topic for some other debate, but in the context of this story it's BARELY even on topic.
Of course it would help! With the wonders of UTICA and DCMA, you can pretty much put whatever you want in licenses and have it be binding!
Commercial software left mere copyright protections behind long ago. Don't ask me why- I personally do not buy the argument that software needs copyright, patent, AND DMCA monopoly grants in order to foster innovation. If anything, it accomplishes just the opposite. What a travesty!
It's to the FSF's moral credit that the (L)GPL uses the most reasonable protection mechanism for software (copyright) and stops at that.
Not to start a filesystem war, but my experience with XFS on linux has been very positive. The install.iso is *polished*. The fs tools are plentiful and high quality. Performance is excellent. If XFS on MIPS is any guide, reliability is top notch too.
I'm glad to see ReiserFS aggressively pushing the technology envelope, but I have nothing but good things to say about XFS, and would recommend it to anyone using a recent kernel who wants a robust journaling filesystem.
As others have said I think there is room for both filesystems going forward.
As someone who has been responsible for securing WinNT boxes on the internet, I would question your claim that they are in any way secure out of the box.
As anyone would know who deals with these beasts, the filepermissions are pre-configured so that many critical system files are open to the world. When it comes to the security vs. convenience tradeoff, MS sides with convenience every time and it's up to you to fix it.
The up-front cost of securing an NT box is very similar to that of securing a *desktop* linux distro. You have to audit the running services and remove the ones that are uneccessary (printer servers anyone?) you can have fix all the broken filepermissions. You should configure ip filtering. You need keep up with the security patch of the week, or of the day if you're running IIS:P.. You need to come up with some mechanism to audit the log files in a regular and tamperproof fashion. Why do microsoft's logs suck so much anyway? It's impossible to analyze them without a third party tool or a syslogd adapter. The log viewer as shipped doesn't scale beyond workgroup use. You also need to install a file integrity checker.
The reason WinNT/2000's security stinks so much is because it's so opaque.. The only way to really tell if it's working is to download a sniffer, l0pthcrack, a scanner, etc etc.. Not that you don
t have to do that with unix either, but at least most of the tools are you need come with the system already (gratis), and in the case of linux you can compile the kernel yourself with what you know are secure settings, whatever additional patches you want, and have fun with/proc.
I don't know very many systems that are secure out of the box, other than openbsd, but in the case of NT it's harder to configure and there's more limitations as to what you can tweak. It's silly to argue that NT is secure out of the box. If there's anything that came out of the recent chinese hacktivism, it's that microsoft's code is too bloated and their release schedules are too aggressive for them to audit it properly by themselves.
It's ludicrous of you to state there is a "hidden" agenda in the GPL. Have you ever read it? It clearly spells out its aim and goals in no uncertain terms before you even get to the legalese. I use the GPL because I strongly agree with its openly stated philosophy.
The report of the vulnerability I read had this interesting quip at the end:
Gartner analyst John Pescatore says a large portion of Windows
2000 users probably have not turned off the affected services and
should either do so or install the patch immediately. Pescatore
says Microsoft made a critical error. "IIS has been a cancer on
Windows 2000," he says. "Including that code in the Windows 2000
base vs. it being a separate application was a huge mistake." -
George V. Hulme
I'm know I'm probably just adding fuel to the fire, but I'm curious how true that sentiment is.
Slashdot Mirror
This story seems like it's asking for opinions, so I hope no one will mind too much if mine happen to be redundant.
I know that someone else has probably said all these things, but I don't have moderator points ans so I can't emphasize the ones that I feel are important.
- One thing I'd really like to see, more than new features and new advertisements, is better stability. It seems that every other day I reload slashdot and get the generic page instead of the one I've customized in my user settings. Eventually if I keep reloading I get my custom page. This started happening two months ago and has been an ongoing problem ever since on ALL the machines I browse slashdot from, regardless of their internet bandwidth. If bandwidth is the issue, then reduce the complexity of the html and find technical ways of speeding up the dynamic code.
- Putting more obnoxious advertisements in front of people is a terrible idea. If you need to raise money do some creative (or even not-so-creative) fundraising. There is still a ".org" in slashdot. Since slashdot has traditionally been a community site instead of the usual corporate media outlet, why not try typical community forms of fundraising such as pledges (with hat and T-shirt prizes), donors, etc. Reward people for their generosity by keeping up a list of donors at various levels like libraries do. I have to admit that if slashdot wants to behave like C-net, I'll probably start looking elsewhere. I know that slashdot is owned by a public company, but that doesn't mean that it can't have a concept of "we're doing good enough". Too many companies kill themselves trying to grow beyond their natural market instead of serving it.
- Sticking more ads in front of people (especially this audience) is simply going to increase ad filtering.
- I don't have anything against subscriptions for no ads at all, but I'm against increasing the amount of ads for non-subscribers.
The linked page says that the steg. image found "in the wild" was intentionally done as a demo of steganography and publicized on TV.
Someone please take this article out. It's an embarassment.
That we would integrate a back door in our high-tech weapons that are sold abroad so that they misfire/explode/active a lojack-like device if they are used against us. The government is so back-door-encryption happy that I'm surprised they haven't done this. And, if they haven't done so because of fear that the keys would be compromised, then why would the FBI want to implement such system for civilian encryption?
It clearly says on Loki's web site that Tribes2 and Deus Ex are in the works. How much more mainstream can you get? I've been playing Heavy Gear II for the past few days and think that it is very impressive under linux.
It is a sad, sad day when this story gets posted and none of the top responses as of this comment mention the very obvious and very old problems that everyone should know by now.
- Cash is mostly anonymous and private. I earnestly hope that it never goes away until some electronic form of money has similar qualities. Your credit cards, debit cards, store charge cards are all extremely un-private. Yes, this actually has significant negative consequences. It's such an obvious arguement that I'll simply say EFF. Almost all privacy policies are mis-named. Which leads to...
- Under our current system of credit/debit cards, identity theft becomes a easy and devastating attack. It's much more efficient to script an exploit to get credit card numbers than to rob a bank. Simply getting rid of cash will only exacerbate these problems. I wouldn't be surprised if a good third of the ecommerce sites on the internet got hit with one of various viruses/worms this summer alone.
I know the author was a victim of techno lust and meant well, but people should really be more informed. Civil liberties are too important to foresake for convenience or because of ignorance.
I've run into guys from an company called mission-critical linux www.missioncriticallinux.com at the local LUG meetings. I know that they do custom clusters. Perhaps they can help?
I didn't mean to imply that other news sources are not biased. Of course they are as well, however, they are often biased in a different direction, giving you a better idea of where the truth is.
Also, I think your second paragraph misses the point I was trying to make. Modern biases are often in what is *not* reported and *not* questioned. Many mainstream news sources do a good job on the issues they choose to investigate, but people should realize that there aren't others equally or even more worthy of investigation in the same sphere that are passed over.
Heh, the only thing unusual about this story is that a *hacker* changed the meaning of a story to suit an agenda. It's not as if the news wasn't biased already!
One of the things that worries me greatly when I am brave enough to think about it at length, is how fantastically biased and non-independent our (USA) official news sources are. Almost every traditional media segment (TV, newspapers, radio) are as we speak undergoing a tremendous reorganization, where the vast majority of the markets are controlled by a few private companies whose major line of business isn't journalism.
For an shock for those who haven't done it already, find an international issue and compare how it is covered in the US with how it is covered by far-foreign or minority news sources. You may find the experience similar to discovering Slashdot and Kuroshin after years of Ziff Davis, especially if you read coverage that goes on for a few pages instead of paragraphs. You might not discover the truth but you'll have much better questions.
The bias is subtle to detect without a comparison, because the bias is often in what is *not* reported, or arguments that are *not* published. If you don't mind being being stoned by a flag-waving mob you can even try this experiment with last week's horrible tragedy.
So, as much as I support punishing this hacker for his illegal actions, a part of me also commends him for increasing the average distrust of mainstream news.
I have a Tyan Thunder K7 Rev. B motherboard.. It's the one with an actual heat sink on the north bridge and the plastic socket lever. The BIOS is the latest from Tyan, 2.06 I believe. I'm tried it with both 1 and 2 1.2Ghz Palominos (AthlonMP). I'm using the NMB power supply. The memory is Crucial ECC-registered.. According to Crucial's web site the DIMMs I have are specifically for use with this board.
Attached I have an ATA-33 12GB hard drive, and two 18GB SCSI-160 IBM ultrastars attached to the onboard SCSI-160 A controller.
I've tested both with the onboard ATI video, and with an AGP GeForce3. I've also tested both with an without an SB-Live! sound card.
In every single possible combination of the above parts, I get severe data corruption when using the onboard IDE controller. Although it correctly detects my IDE hard drive it generates constant ATA timeout errors and slows the system to a crawl. This happens even when I dumb down the bios to use older PIO (non-DMA) modes.
Eventually I became so frustrated with it that I disabled the onboard IDE ports and stuck in a Promise ATA-100 controller. Bada-bing, the problem is solved. The the system screams *and* is quite stable. It's good enough for me this way, but I would have expected a 500$ motherboard to have worked out of the box.
The only problem I may have is keeping the CPU's cool. Even with thermosonic thermoengine heatsinks with good fans the CPU temp is still 50 deg C. Of course, part of that might be the 32 C room temperature...
I was trying to check out CNN for my regular dose of corporate-friendly news and it appeared to be down.
"No problem" I think, and head back to Slashdot. The newest story on Slashdot links to CNN. *Grin*
I agree that it's not practical to re-encode mp3's to oggs. You only want to re-encode if you have the originals or the quality will suffer badly.
:) In economic terms you're creating a demand.
To answer your question about anyone caring if you re-encode, that's easy to answer. If you start encoding with Ogg, then you will be receptive to products that support Ogg in the future, so you will probably end up supporting hardware vendors who pick up the format. If you never use Oggs, you'll be less likely to notice/reward the makers of Ogg hardware
You don't sound like a troll, so I'll keep going.
.gif graphics format being the most famous example). Again, ogg is the only tool in its class that protects you from this.
The political goals of Ogg are to provide a free, high quality digital music compression tool. There are no other encoders in the world that are free. When I say free I'm talking about the "free as in speech" cliche that protects you from company X suddenly deciding to extort money from a market via patent and copyright enforcement once it attains a sufficient size. This happens all the time (the
It is an important thing that people be able to space-shift audio, especially audio that they already own. Being able to do this gives you, the user, control and flexibility to listen to your media as you see fit. Space-shifting is a a fair-use right that has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Space shifting has numerous legitimate uses that far outweigh the "piracy angle".
Again, Ogg is the only tool in its class that legally *guarantees* the user the ability to space-shift audio into the future. You can be sure that corporate interests, even as we speak, are using technology to control how we use media to increase their profits. They would like to prevent, or charge money for the "priviledge" of space-shifting. Once again, Ogg is the only tool in its class that protects you from this kind of extortion.
Most people do care about this, but are too lazy to do anything about it, even something so small as re-encoding their music in the Ogg format to show others that they will not willingly set themselves up for space-shifting extortion. Other people are too shortsighted to see that something as small as a music format *will* effect the amount of control they have over media in the future. A few people aren't lazy or shortsighted- they simple don't care, usually because they are unaccostumed to caring about anything that affects someone outside their immediate family.
So no, I strongly disagree that use of Ogg, even in the face of technically better alternatives is bullshit politics. I think it's very important. I also think that Ogg is a technically superior product than mp3 encoders. As time goes on, the difference will grow even more.
I don't consider myself a zealot, simply an informed consumer with an understanding of history and the ability to extrapolate into the future.
Ogg is as good, if not better technically. The political motivation is *not* bullshit.
For me, the issues at stake are just a bit more important than my existing mp3 collection. It's sad that so many people are so lazy and shortsighted.
... is that my ISP is on top of it. I just gave them a call because I know that I'm on Rhythms, and the last time my CLEC shut down (NorthPoint) my old ISP (Empire.net) simply dropped all their customers, and I was without a decent internet
connection for a month.
Anyway, I gave my current ISP (GalaxyDSL.net) a call because of the Rhythms news, and they have already started transitioning customers over to other providers. They said that they expected minimal, if any, downtime, and that I would be contacted shortly to make an appointment for a new router installation. Apparently they have dealt with this situation before from when HarvardNet closed down, and they are well prepared. The tech said that it was likely that I would be switched over sometime next week. Amazing!
I've lived in and around Boston for most of my life and have had accounts with almost every ISP in the area since ISP's existed. I've never seen such great technical support and customer service as with galaxydsl.net. They've been on top of the code red problems, the cisco router vulnerabilities, and now the Rhythms shutdown. When I call for support I get right through to an actual technician. They are a great alternative to Verizon/Time Warner if anyone's looking for one.
No, I am not affiliated with them in any way, just pleasantly surprised by the service.
-OT
Well I'll be a good little slashdotter and add my probably redundant reply to the pile.
All karma-whoring aside, however, I've been playing around with mp3's for as long as anyone but haven't bothered to rip my entire collection. The only time I ripped my own CDs where to make compilations for other people. After I was done I needed the hard drive space to install my Nth operating system and wiped the mp3's. I used bladenc for a long time and then switched to lame when it was more supported and higher quality.
Now I'm finally getting around to ripping my large CD collection and yes, I'm using ogg. I encode at 256kbps, and ogg does VBR. It sounds good to me on my vanilla stereo equipment, and it's a hell of a lot better than ANY of the poor quality MP3's that I've downloaded. This isn't a slam against the MP3 format, just about the morons who gave it a bad name by encoding at 128bit with awful encoders.
No, I'm not expecting to walk into Best Buy and pick up a portable ogg players, but that's not an issue for me. I believe in the ogg project because they are doing the right thing with regards to their licensing. It's as simple as that. Everyone should be using their product. These people deserve your support, and supporting free software is more important than your music collection anyway, in the long run.
I'll buy hardware that supports the ogg format, and if I need to I'll build my own. With all the linux PDA's around, it won't be that hard.
Lighten up and take it as a compliment. There are a number of German words that succinctly sum up abstract concepts that do not have an English/French/etc counterpart.
The above statements are false. As someone who works for a weather company and hears a lot of theories, it still very much in question whether manmade greenhouse gasses are causing global warming.
Our current evidence suggests that increased surface temperatures are more likely caused by increased development (ie, asphalt) nearby ground measurement stations. Also, cyclical sunspot activity results in a curve of zipper-pattern fluctations in the radiated energy that reaches the earth over ~11 year period. The above two observations *do* have substantial physical evidence to back them up, and are a better explanation for recent global warming than the greenhouse theory.
As someone who uses many languages in the course of the day, Java included, I might be able to offer some information.
This is dead on. I wish that I learned OOP properly in college. Learning C and other procedural languages actually hurts you in the early stages, because you have to unlearn tactics.If I were teaching someone OOP in college, I would start with a "pure OOP" language, such as Python or Java, and a book similar to Design Patterns. I sure wish I learned this way.. Design Patterns came out after I graduated and it pretty much changed the way I thought about OOP overnight.
That's not to say that C++ doesn't have its place. It can be fast, and it can be very flexible. However, in an academic environment other priorities are simply more important. Garbage collection is key. Trust me, you don't want to be up all night tracking down a memory leak when all you need to do is implement a certain algorithm. Also extemely important is a free, cross platform development environment. (No, C++ isn't as strong here as java or python due to library implementation differences). I consider C++ a very dangerous language to start learning with because it's so easy to slide back into C. Until you get to the point where you can understand what the consequences of that are for your project, it's a giant boobytrap waiting to snare the unwary.
This is a very popular but shortsited viewpoint. Java is stronger than it has every been in the past. It's still in heavy growth mode, with more libraries and extensions being developed for it than I can keep pace with these days. It's going to continue to evolve for quite some time. As the JVMs continue to improve in performance, and CPUs continue to double in speed, the performance difference between Java and C++ is going to become less and less. It's already at the point where I run large java applications like Jext (thank you very much Roman Guy!) on my pentium-III 600 without any noticable slowness.Java is a very good investment. It's not the best OOP language in every area but it may be the most well rounded. It's certainly not going away, and you can get a lot of useful work done with it.
Java seems to enjoy better support for the corporate world than from the open source community. This is largely because Java is so useful to corporations and they're ready and willing to develop and pay for enterprise class extensions that most lone hackers would consider boring or overkill. Java isn't a zero sum game, however, and there is plenty of room for free software to thrive. I'm glad the the Apache crew recognize this- their Xerces XML parser and their Servlet engine are excellent, excellent examples of free java software. www.gnu.org also lists a large number of useful java libraries and applications. The time is ripe for someone to bring Kaffe or similar free JVM / library up to speed.
If you do decide to get into Java, I would recommend you learn python as well, and then use the embedded scripting language jython (www.jython.org) from within your java apps. It's a killer combination.
Reading the spec of this beast, it looks like the resolution and pitch really stink. You'd be better off using a traditional projector if you didn't need such a rectangular format.
This case is not about black and white stances such as "All intellectual property is wrong" and "All intellectual property is good" as your post implicitly suggests.
This case is about grey areas, and deals with questions such as: Does the DCMA go too far? Are copyright / trademark / existing IP laws adequate? The question is not, as much as you would like it to be, whether all IP is evil and wrong. It's whether the broad new IP powers granted by the DCMA are unconstitutional.
I think you might have an interesting topic for some other debate, but in the context of this story it's BARELY even on topic.
Of course it would help! With the wonders of UTICA and DCMA, you can pretty much put whatever you want in licenses and have it be binding!
Commercial software left mere copyright protections behind long ago. Don't ask me why- I personally do not buy the argument that software needs copyright, patent, AND DMCA monopoly grants in order to foster innovation. If anything, it accomplishes just the opposite. What a travesty!
It's to the FSF's moral credit that the (L)GPL uses the most reasonable protection mechanism for software (copyright) and stops at that.
Not to start a filesystem war, but my experience with XFS on linux has been very positive. The install .iso is *polished*. The fs tools are plentiful and high quality. Performance is excellent. If XFS on MIPS is any guide, reliability is top notch too.
I'm glad to see ReiserFS aggressively pushing the technology envelope, but I have nothing but good things to say about XFS, and would recommend it to anyone using a recent kernel who wants a robust journaling filesystem.
As others have said I think there is room for both filesystems going forward.
As someone who has been responsible for securing WinNT boxes on the internet, I would question your claim that they are in any way secure out of the box.
:P.. You need to come up with some mechanism to audit the log files in a regular and tamperproof fashion. Why do microsoft's logs suck so much anyway? It's impossible to analyze them without a third party tool or a syslogd adapter. The log viewer as shipped doesn't scale beyond workgroup use. You also need to install a file integrity checker.
/proc.
As anyone would know who deals with these beasts, the filepermissions are pre-configured so that many critical system files are open to the world. When it comes to the security vs. convenience tradeoff, MS sides with convenience every time and it's up to you to fix it.
The up-front cost of securing an NT box is very similar to that of securing a *desktop* linux distro. You have to audit the running services and remove the ones that are uneccessary (printer servers anyone?) you can have fix all the broken filepermissions. You should configure ip filtering. You need keep up with the security patch of the week, or of the day if you're running IIS
The reason WinNT/2000's security stinks so much is because it's so opaque.. The only way to really tell if it's working is to download a sniffer, l0pthcrack, a scanner, etc etc.. Not that you don
t have to do that with unix either, but at least most of the tools are you need come with the system already (gratis), and in the case of linux you can compile the kernel yourself with what you know are secure settings, whatever additional patches you want, and have fun with
I don't know very many systems that are secure out of the box, other than openbsd, but in the case of NT it's harder to configure and there's more limitations as to what you can tweak. It's silly to argue that NT is secure out of the box. If there's anything that came out of the recent chinese hacktivism, it's that microsoft's code is too bloated and their release schedules are too aggressive for them to audit it properly by themselves.
-OT
It's ludicrous of you to state there is a "hidden" agenda in the GPL. Have you ever read it? It clearly spells out its aim and goals in no uncertain terms before you even get to the legalese. I use the GPL because I strongly agree with its openly stated philosophy.
Stop with the fear-mongering.
I'm know I'm probably just adding fuel to the fire, but I'm curious how true that sentiment is.
-OT