But last time I checked, all sampled music was PCM, and that's lossy by definition. You're limited in the sampling rate and the bit resolution, which makes is lossy when comparing with the original (i.e. "real-life") source
That's the precision of the sampling and has nothing to do with lossy compression vs non-lossy compresison.
Windows also has a new 'randomization' layer, which slightly changes the memory configuration of every Vista machine to make it harder for co-ordinated attacks to affect scores of machines at the same time.
Huh? What is this, and why would it make any difference whatsoever in preventing exploits?
It means exploits can't hardwire an address and expect it to succeed. It's a common first-line defence against stack overflow attacks. Linux has the same thing.
I've played and finished Beyond Good & Evil. It is a brilliant game and I'm glad I found it at the local store. But I only heard about it this year. It completely slipped under my radar. I bought it from the bargain bin on a whim because the cover art looked interesting.
Psychonauts? I hadn't even heard about this game until the Slashdot story about it being available on Steam. I bought it the same day and it's been very entertaining. It's a little childish and platformers aren't usually my thing but I'm finding it fun anyway. Another one that almost slipped my attention.
Okami? This is the first I've even heard of this game.
The failure in all three cases isn't the game; it's the advertising. I receive gamer newsletters all the time - electronic and paper versions - and none of these games were brought to my attention. Even worse, word of mouth failed as well. Usually I can rely on friends to recommend worthy games but I had to tell them about BG&E and Psychonauts.
Imagine if a movie studio sunk $5 million into a flick and even the movie buffs didn't know the film existed. Yet that is the situation we currently have with $5 million games such as Psychonauts.
You have to be awfully dim not to be able to experiment with your basic assumptions from time to time.
You were a devout Catholic on the path to a Jesuit seminary before you demolished the last proof of the existence of God. That claim alone is laughable.
If I were you I'd make more of an effort to avoid calling other people dim.
On a slight tangent, I find true strong atheism somewhat humorous, and, in a way, not very different from religion. Christians have an unflagging, irrational belief in Jesus Christ and God; atheists have a similarly irrational belief that no god exists.
Most rational people - atheists and theists alike - are agnostic. They admit that the answer to the existence of gods is unknowable. This stems from the way in which gods are typically defined: supernatural beings outside our sphere of observation and understanding.
However this rational decision says nothing about their belief. Belief is not a choice. You can't say "rationally I know that the question of existence of gods is unknowable, therefore I choose to not make a decision about my belief". Your belief is something that you have, not something that you decide.
If you don't believe in the existence of gods - either strongly (belief in non-existence) or weakly (lack of belief) - then you're an atheist. If you agree with the "don't know" argument of agnosticism then you are also an agnostic. They are completely orthogonal so you can be both an atheist and an agnostic.
Most agnostics are actually atheists as well. However they're under the mistaken impression that agnosticism is a rational form of atheism. That's a misunderstanding perpetuated mostly within the USA. In Europe where philosophy was a mandatory subject in middle school, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is better understood.
yet I though that CSS was not broken because they cracked the weak cipher, but rather because whoever made the XING software DVD Player forgot to encrypt the decryption key or something like that.
That was one of the original hacks. Another hack was a graphics driver that scraped the framebuffer in realtime. But the hack everybody uses these days is DeCSS; it brute forces the 40 bit key. The whole process takes a few seconds on any modern machine. The CSS encryption is far too weak.
If you hadn't heard, Sun just open sourced the entire Java compiler, virtual machine, and JIT compiler. That makes Java one of the most popular open source projects in the world. And then there's the tens of millions of lines of code for OpenSolaris. So far, Sun is the largest contributor to both of those.
Well, in the 1970s, PEAK OIL predicted we would be out of oil by the mid 1980s.
PEAK OIL never predicted we would "be out of oil by the mid 1980s". I don't know where you got that nonsensical belief but it is completely wrong. Hubbert's peak oil theory predicted that global production of oil would peak in 1995. That was later revised to 2005 because the world reduced its consumption of oil - partly due to the media attention given to Hubbert's peak oil theory.
Nobody of repute disputes the merit of peak oil theory. The disputes are with regards to when the peak will occur and how quickly the production will decrease after the peak. The disputes are because of the unreliability of the input data - are some countries giving false estimates for the quantity of oil in their fields? - and new technology that eases the extraction of oil from previously uneconomical fields.
But even with the disputes there is every indication that the peak did occur in 2005. Two of the three largest oil fields in the world have already peaked; Cantarell has peaked, Burgan has peaked and Ghawar is thought to have peaked. The technology that could delay the global production peak has not yet materialised.
Doesn't matter what he did. I saw the video, and punching the guy several times in the face went far beyond reasonably force, especially as he was already adequately restrained, and in any case it is not the job of the police to hand out punishment.
He obviously was not adequately restrained because they couldn't get the cuffs on him. And despite his claims that he "could not breathe" the fact that he had enough breath to speak proves him a liar.
I see no brutality here. I see two cops in a difficult situation doing their best to cuff a dangerous criminal. What do you think they should have done, got off him and asked him pretty please to put his hands behind his back? Gave him a foot massage while feeding him grapes? I have no sympathy for the criminal here. When two cops are sitting on you and are repeatedly saying "put your arms down" you do NOT fight them. You do as you are told.
Well, no, but it doesn't make the law stupid either. If the court has established as fact that a parent has abused one child, then it's plain common sense to get any other children out of the household until the parent can prove they're responsible enough to look after children.
I don't see that law as bad. Nor do I see it as "presumed guilt". The guilt has already been established with the first abused child. Finding a safe home for the other children is simply avoiding a repeat incident.
1) non-specific information is almost worth than valueless. Let's say you are running a giant worldwide computer network, and I tell you that everything points to the strong conclusion that there "...is going to be a failure in your network. I can't tell you what, where, when, or how big it's going to be - but I'm nearly certain it IS going to happen." Then, months later, when there is a failure in your network, your boss calls you on the carpet to fire you, demanding why in hell you didn't prevent it "since you were warned months ahead of time". Think that's reasonable?
Yes, I do think that's reasonable. If the leading expert for my network tells me that there IS going to be a failure then I damn well listen. I immediately ask him how he came to that conclusion. He then gives me reasons for his "gut feeling" such as lack of performance monitoring, lack of fault detection, lack of redundancy, insufficient training for technical teams, no standardisation for the equipment configurations, incompatible network technologies, overly-complicated network designs, poor documentation, messy wiring, and a bureaucracy that discourages feedback.
I then ponder what he's said and ask "how do I fix this". He suggests documenting what we have, implementing an enterprise-wide network management console, identifying high-risk sections of the network, providing sufficient training to all of the staff, creating a network strategy, designing reusable "blueprints" for the common network problems, etc. I then take action on all those recommendations.
If the network failure still occurs then I can honestly tell my boss "I knew that the failure was likely and I was doing everything in my power to reduce the likelihood". I demonstrate what I was doing and I probably keep my job because I was responsible and proactive.
If instead I demote my network expert, stick my head in the sand, take one month's holiday, and blame my predecessor for the network failure, then I would have no expectation of keeping my job. I would have been negligent in my duties.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. It tries to show how the US (and others) reign in sovereign countries via economic power rather than brute force through use of things like the world bank.
I've read that book and I wish it were true, but I wasn't convinced. Perkins makes extraordinary claims but doesn't support those claims with extraordinary evidence, or even ordinary evidence. The book is light on references and Perkins has this attitude of "trust me, I can't give you evidence but you know what I say is true". That attitude makes me distrustful.
Then to cast further doubt on the reliability of Perkins, another of his published books discusses his experiences of "shape shifting" into various animals. He is also an advocate of South American shaman medicine to reach transcedence - read into that what you will - and there is some hint (perhaps unsubstantiated) that Perkins believes the US government was involved in the assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King and John Lennon.
On the balance, I'm not willing to believe Perkins version of history based solely on his book.
There's been a lot of persecution of religious people by secularists throughout history. Most recently, totalitarian Russia and China offer a plethora of examples.
They were talking about atheism, not secularism. While it's true that the genocides in Russia and China were secularist acts, it's completely wrong to claim that the primary reason was to persecute religious people. Those governments were trying to establish power and religious organisations were in strong opposition; the genocides were mostly political. In any event, it's a frivolous claim that the genocides were secularist, because anything which isn't religious is secularist. The majority of things that happen in this world are secularist activities. Secularist governments are the most sought after - the US government is an example of a secularist government. Secularism simply means making decisions without consideration of religious beliefs.
Back to atheism. That atheism had anything to do with the horrors in China and Russia is a nonsense taught during the McCarthy era. McCarthy used that rhetoric to promote distrust of China and Russia by implying they were "godless heathens" and that godlessness led to evil acts. It's not true. China was Buddhist during the 1900s, now tending towards Christianity. Russia was and is Orthodox. It's true that neither country had a state-sponsored religion. It's also true that both country's governments persecuted minority religions. In both respects that is exactly the same as the USA back then and even now.
The horrors in those countries were a direct result of totalitarian fascist governments. Guess which superpower is exhibiting those same qualities today.
I use a Centameter. The measuring device is installed in the meter box. You carry around a wireless LCD display that shows power usage in either kWh or A. I managed to reduce my house standby power usage from 0.44kWh to 0.21kWh because I discovered some appliances with atrocious standby usage; they're now turned off when not in use. That's going to save me $282 per year - I pay 14c/kWh - so the meter has paid for itself already.
I have a Mac and it's great. Unfortunately the majority of Mac users are an embarrassment. I sometimes cringe when I read the comments on Mac blogs - the Mac users make Linux fans look humble and Windows users look intelligent.
I work in the IT security industry and I'm perfectly willing to accept that this exploit is for real. The pattern of events is not abnormal: the exploit will be demonstrated at a conference but because of NDA the details remain under wraps until the manufacturer releases a patch. I've seen delays of 12-18 months before details are released for Windows exploits, despite seeing the exploit demonstrated in person at blackhat conferences. A delay of a few weeks for an Apple exploit doesn't even raise my eyebrows.
The only difference here is that Apple users are so goddamn fanatical that they'll rabidly attack anybody who says their platform is any less than perfect. They don't know the security field, they don't understand the technical discussion - those quotes Johnny provided of clueless Mac users were riotous - yet they feel qualified to give opinion. I used to work with this guy who was brilliant at finding and exploiting security holes. He took a G3 Mac running stock standard OSX and proceeded to demonstrate exploit after exploit; not based on his OSX skill but purely on his knowledge of the underlying free software. I was at a blackhat conference where they demonstrated a local privilege escalation exploit that existed all the way up to Tiger - they had told Apple about it years previously but it wasn't until they broke their NDA and went public that Apple fixed the fault. The same presentation at that conference demonstrated an OSX kernel exploit that still exists today.
Mac users are in for a rude shock. They've told each other their platform is secure. The rumor mills repeated the "OSX is secure" mantra. But the mantra has no foundation in reality. Most Mac users do not run AV, do not shutdown services, and run with wide-open wifi and bluetooth settings. They have an undeserved complacency regarding security and it will lead to a fall.
Really? It's not illegal to put razor blades in your own lunch.
Yes, it is illegal, because the intent is obviously to cause somebody (the thief) harm. It's the same reason that it's illegal to put boobytraps in your own home. If a burglar is hurt you WILL be prosecuted.
If someone steals from you, he or she is committing a crime and is entirely responsible for the consequences of that action.
Right, but you don't get to dictate those consequences. That's for a judge (or magistrate) to decide. You inflicting punishment is called vigilantism and it's extremely illegal. You can potentially go to prison for putting razor blades in a sandwich.
This is all first-year legal studies stuff. I didn't even do law but the single law class that I did take spent a week on this very topic. You can't boobytrap, poison or bait something with the expectation of harming a criminal.
I use telephone voice recognition systems regularly and I have no trouble at all. The clunky touch tone menu systems make you listen to 30 seconds of options before you reach the option you need. The voice system is both faster and easier.
If you are having trouble with voice recognition then perhaps you should enunciate your words more clearly.
admit the concept is similar, but western heroes are generally considered to be those who gave their lives fighting against an enemy who wanted to kill them (us). No matter how you stretch it, women and children on a plane are no threat whatsoever to the Islamic nations or their people.
I disagree. The fallen Western heroes you speak of were defending their loved ones from physical attack. The "insane" Islamic "terrorists" you decry are defending their loves ones from spiritual and cultural attack from the West. The women and children are part of that cultural onslaught even though individually they are non-violent.
If anything, the "terrorists" are more intellectually advanced than you are. They can see attacks that are non-physical as threats to their lives. You can only recognise physical attacks as being life threatening.
Time Machine will be a huge aid to developers. It will be even more awesome if there's a way to integrate it with source control systems.
Xcode already integrates with Subversion. Time Machine would be borderline useless to a developer because (from what we've seen so far) it doesn't show diffs or have version tagging.
I have been working on Mac's for over 10 years (including new Intel based), and I have never seen pink and green vertical lines on the screen fixedby setting the startup disk. I have gotten blank white screens, black screens, screens with question marks, but never pink and green lines. I have the feeling there was more to this then booting off the CD and setting your startup disk back to the hard disk.
Well if you've never seen it then it mustn't be true./rollseyes
Read this link. It happened to my brother's Macbook and was fixed by setting the Startup Disk.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the precision of the sampling and has nothing to do with lossy compression vs non-lossy compresison.
It means exploits can't hardwire an address and expect it to succeed. It's a common first-line defence against stack overflow attacks. Linux has the same thing.
I've played and finished Beyond Good & Evil. It is a brilliant game and I'm glad I found it at the local store. But I only heard about it this year. It completely slipped under my radar. I bought it from the bargain bin on a whim because the cover art looked interesting.
Psychonauts? I hadn't even heard about this game until the Slashdot story about it being available on Steam. I bought it the same day and it's been very entertaining. It's a little childish and platformers aren't usually my thing but I'm finding it fun anyway. Another one that almost slipped my attention.
Okami? This is the first I've even heard of this game.
The failure in all three cases isn't the game; it's the advertising. I receive gamer newsletters all the time - electronic and paper versions - and none of these games were brought to my attention. Even worse, word of mouth failed as well. Usually I can rely on friends to recommend worthy games but I had to tell them about BG&E and Psychonauts.
Imagine if a movie studio sunk $5 million into a flick and even the movie buffs didn't know the film existed. Yet that is the situation we currently have with $5 million games such as Psychonauts.
You were a devout Catholic on the path to a Jesuit seminary before you demolished the last proof of the existence of God. That claim alone is laughable.
If I were you I'd make more of an effort to avoid calling other people dim.
Most rational people - atheists and theists alike - are agnostic. They admit that the answer to the existence of gods is unknowable. This stems from the way in which gods are typically defined: supernatural beings outside our sphere of observation and understanding.
However this rational decision says nothing about their belief. Belief is not a choice. You can't say "rationally I know that the question of existence of gods is unknowable, therefore I choose to not make a decision about my belief". Your belief is something that you have, not something that you decide.
If you don't believe in the existence of gods - either strongly (belief in non-existence) or weakly (lack of belief) - then you're an atheist. If you agree with the "don't know" argument of agnosticism then you are also an agnostic. They are completely orthogonal so you can be both an atheist and an agnostic.
Most agnostics are actually atheists as well. However they're under the mistaken impression that agnosticism is a rational form of atheism. That's a misunderstanding perpetuated mostly within the USA. In Europe where philosophy was a mandatory subject in middle school, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is better understood.
Some of us are trying very hard to forget.
That was one of the original hacks. Another hack was a graphics driver that scraped the framebuffer in realtime. But the hack everybody uses these days is DeCSS; it brute forces the 40 bit key. The whole process takes a few seconds on any modern machine. The CSS encryption is far too weak.
And OpenOffice.
PEAK OIL never predicted we would "be out of oil by the mid 1980s". I don't know where you got that nonsensical belief but it is completely wrong. Hubbert's peak oil theory predicted that global production of oil would peak in 1995. That was later revised to 2005 because the world reduced its consumption of oil - partly due to the media attention given to Hubbert's peak oil theory.
Nobody of repute disputes the merit of peak oil theory. The disputes are with regards to when the peak will occur and how quickly the production will decrease after the peak. The disputes are because of the unreliability of the input data - are some countries giving false estimates for the quantity of oil in their fields? - and new technology that eases the extraction of oil from previously uneconomical fields.
But even with the disputes there is every indication that the peak did occur in 2005. Two of the three largest oil fields in the world have already peaked; Cantarell has peaked, Burgan has peaked and Ghawar is thought to have peaked. The technology that could delay the global production peak has not yet materialised.
He obviously was not adequately restrained because they couldn't get the cuffs on him. And despite his claims that he "could not breathe" the fact that he had enough breath to speak proves him a liar.
I see no brutality here. I see two cops in a difficult situation doing their best to cuff a dangerous criminal. What do you think they should have done, got off him and asked him pretty please to put his hands behind his back? Gave him a foot massage while feeding him grapes? I have no sympathy for the criminal here. When two cops are sitting on you and are repeatedly saying "put your arms down" you do NOT fight them. You do as you are told.
Well, no, but it doesn't make the law stupid either. If the court has established as fact that a parent has abused one child, then it's plain common sense to get any other children out of the household until the parent can prove they're responsible enough to look after children.
I don't see that law as bad. Nor do I see it as "presumed guilt". The guilt has already been established with the first abused child. Finding a safe home for the other children is simply avoiding a repeat incident.
Yes, I do think that's reasonable. If the leading expert for my network tells me that there IS going to be a failure then I damn well listen. I immediately ask him how he came to that conclusion. He then gives me reasons for his "gut feeling" such as lack of performance monitoring, lack of fault detection, lack of redundancy, insufficient training for technical teams, no standardisation for the equipment configurations, incompatible network technologies, overly-complicated network designs, poor documentation, messy wiring, and a bureaucracy that discourages feedback.
I then ponder what he's said and ask "how do I fix this". He suggests documenting what we have, implementing an enterprise-wide network management console, identifying high-risk sections of the network, providing sufficient training to all of the staff, creating a network strategy, designing reusable "blueprints" for the common network problems, etc. I then take action on all those recommendations.
If the network failure still occurs then I can honestly tell my boss "I knew that the failure was likely and I was doing everything in my power to reduce the likelihood". I demonstrate what I was doing and I probably keep my job because I was responsible and proactive.
If instead I demote my network expert, stick my head in the sand, take one month's holiday, and blame my predecessor for the network failure, then I would have no expectation of keeping my job. I would have been negligent in my duties.
I've read that book and I wish it were true, but I wasn't convinced. Perkins makes extraordinary claims but doesn't support those claims with extraordinary evidence, or even ordinary evidence. The book is light on references and Perkins has this attitude of "trust me, I can't give you evidence but you know what I say is true". That attitude makes me distrustful.
Then to cast further doubt on the reliability of Perkins, another of his published books discusses his experiences of "shape shifting" into various animals. He is also an advocate of South American shaman medicine to reach transcedence - read into that what you will - and there is some hint (perhaps unsubstantiated) that Perkins believes the US government was involved in the assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King and John Lennon.
On the balance, I'm not willing to believe Perkins version of history based solely on his book.
They were talking about atheism, not secularism. While it's true that the genocides in Russia and China were secularist acts, it's completely wrong to claim that the primary reason was to persecute religious people. Those governments were trying to establish power and religious organisations were in strong opposition; the genocides were mostly political. In any event, it's a frivolous claim that the genocides were secularist, because anything which isn't religious is secularist. The majority of things that happen in this world are secularist activities. Secularist governments are the most sought after - the US government is an example of a secularist government. Secularism simply means making decisions without consideration of religious beliefs.
Back to atheism. That atheism had anything to do with the horrors in China and Russia is a nonsense taught during the McCarthy era. McCarthy used that rhetoric to promote distrust of China and Russia by implying they were "godless heathens" and that godlessness led to evil acts. It's not true. China was Buddhist during the 1900s, now tending towards Christianity. Russia was and is Orthodox. It's true that neither country had a state-sponsored religion. It's also true that both country's governments persecuted minority religions. In both respects that is exactly the same as the USA back then and even now.
The horrors in those countries were a direct result of totalitarian fascist governments. Guess which superpower is exhibiting those same qualities today.
I use a Centameter. The measuring device is installed in the meter box. You carry around a wireless LCD display that shows power usage in either kWh or A. I managed to reduce my house standby power usage from 0.44kWh to 0.21kWh because I discovered some appliances with atrocious standby usage; they're now turned off when not in use. That's going to save me $282 per year - I pay 14c/kWh - so the meter has paid for itself already.
To complement the movie downloads from iTMS.
Most Mac users insult their own intelligence.
I have a Mac and it's great. Unfortunately the majority of Mac users are an embarrassment. I sometimes cringe when I read the comments on Mac blogs - the Mac users make Linux fans look humble and Windows users look intelligent.
I work in the IT security industry and I'm perfectly willing to accept that this exploit is for real. The pattern of events is not abnormal: the exploit will be demonstrated at a conference but because of NDA the details remain under wraps until the manufacturer releases a patch. I've seen delays of 12-18 months before details are released for Windows exploits, despite seeing the exploit demonstrated in person at blackhat conferences. A delay of a few weeks for an Apple exploit doesn't even raise my eyebrows.
The only difference here is that Apple users are so goddamn fanatical that they'll rabidly attack anybody who says their platform is any less than perfect. They don't know the security field, they don't understand the technical discussion - those quotes Johnny provided of clueless Mac users were riotous - yet they feel qualified to give opinion. I used to work with this guy who was brilliant at finding and exploiting security holes. He took a G3 Mac running stock standard OSX and proceeded to demonstrate exploit after exploit; not based on his OSX skill but purely on his knowledge of the underlying free software. I was at a blackhat conference where they demonstrated a local privilege escalation exploit that existed all the way up to Tiger - they had told Apple about it years previously but it wasn't until they broke their NDA and went public that Apple fixed the fault. The same presentation at that conference demonstrated an OSX kernel exploit that still exists today.
Mac users are in for a rude shock. They've told each other their platform is secure. The rumor mills repeated the "OSX is secure" mantra. But the mantra has no foundation in reality. Most Mac users do not run AV, do not shutdown services, and run with wide-open wifi and bluetooth settings. They have an undeserved complacency regarding security and it will lead to a fall.
That should be their new slogan.
I read this bit of your post.
And commented on your mistake.
Yes, it is illegal, because the intent is obviously to cause somebody (the thief) harm. It's the same reason that it's illegal to put boobytraps in your own home. If a burglar is hurt you WILL be prosecuted.
Right, but you don't get to dictate those consequences. That's for a judge (or magistrate) to decide. You inflicting punishment is called vigilantism and it's extremely illegal. You can potentially go to prison for putting razor blades in a sandwich.
This is all first-year legal studies stuff. I didn't even do law but the single law class that I did take spent a week on this very topic. You can't boobytrap, poison or bait something with the expectation of harming a criminal.
I use telephone voice recognition systems regularly and I have no trouble at all. The clunky touch tone menu systems make you listen to 30 seconds of options before you reach the option you need. The voice system is both faster and easier.
If you are having trouble with voice recognition then perhaps you should enunciate your words more clearly.
I disagree. The fallen Western heroes you speak of were defending their loved ones from physical attack. The "insane" Islamic "terrorists" you decry are defending their loves ones from spiritual and cultural attack from the West. The women and children are part of that cultural onslaught even though individually they are non-violent.
If anything, the "terrorists" are more intellectually advanced than you are. They can see attacks that are non-physical as threats to their lives. You can only recognise physical attacks as being life threatening.
Let this thread Finnish, please!
Xcode already integrates with Subversion. Time Machine would be borderline useless to a developer because (from what we've seen so far) it doesn't show diffs or have version tagging.
Well if you've never seen it then it mustn't be true. /rollseyes
Read this link. It happened to my brother's Macbook and was fixed by setting the Startup Disk.