Hmm, let's take that road analogy a little further
Roads: Internet Road owners (local government): ISPs Illegal goods: dodgy song downloads
So, the equivelant of Audible Magic's CopySense to detect infringers is, I guess roadblocks and vehicle checks set up, manned and paid for by the road owners. That does not seem right to me, especially the part about who has to pay.
We don't prosecute the postal service for aiding and abbetting those who send letter bombs. We don't prosecute road owners or car companies for making something that all those getaway drivers using roads and cars can use to getaway from bank robberies. Why should the ISPs pay to monitor this?
I can heartily recommend the Astronomy Hacks book (Amazon Link (no referrer ID)), which is part of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series. Average 5* reviews from 48 reviews.
I infer that you're from the UK. If you are in the UK and you think there's an off-chance that you might go into the city (merchant banking), then there is a tremendous amount of snobbery.
About 5 years ago, the UK IT market was pretty slack, and just about every IT job in the city demanded that your degree was from one of the top five C.S. Uni's in the UK - I can't recall them all, certainly Oxford and Glasgow were two. Your CV (resume) would NOT get beyond the recruitment agent unless you'd been to the right Uni.
I'm the first person to agree that posession of a degree makes little difference to whether you can do a job, but that's how it was. I expect the same condition will return if the market slackens again.
Not only that, but it's a book review for a User's Manual for a Text Editor only available as a binary for Macintosh.
It's not even a book review, as such, half of the text is there to tell us that he/she doesn't like CDs, or advises us how to mark pages with sticky notes, etc. etc, or tells us that that if you are a typeical slashdot reader, then you're probably going to be more interested in the free online stuff than this book.
The message is clear - they need decent book reviews at slashdot, and are so desperate that they will publish anything. Get on your keyboards, slashdotters!
It happened recently. When I was a lad, the BBC and UK schools composed a "domesday book", which was supposed to be a parallel to the original Domesday book, which was a bit more than a cencus from the UK made in 1086.The modern one used the popular home PC the BBC Micro (made by Acorn). It was made on laserdisk, and distributed around the UK to the schools that had compiled the information.
Well, 15 years on, it was useless. The then-proprietary format was not readable on anything modern, and there was not much of the old hardware around either. You can google for it ("UK domesday bbc data" should do it), the first link I saw was on the Guardian Online.
I've still got stuff on floppies, but no-one builds PCs with them anymore. I've got two old laptops with floppy drives, the other three computers have none. (OK, I also have two corpses with floppy drives, and the controllers on two of the new PCs will accept floppy drives, but, please take my point - they're going out of fashion.)
In 20 years time, there will probably be no CD/DVD drives, we'll all be using a new more portable, more backupable, lighter, faster, probably online-only storage medium. Kids won't recognize laserdisks, floppies, or USB ports. They might not recognise keyboards either - who knows?
Why dick around with your own encryption: use AES. Then you can tell your customers that you are using the standard suggested by the US government. There are free implementations available in many languages. You will be doing the best thing for your team and your company.
If you are worried about CPU, memory, etc, remind yourself that the criteria for selecting the AES algorithm included CPU usage, memory usage, and the ability to be implemented on silicon.
Bruce Willis stars as himself in "Laser Bubble", an action movie where terrorists take over the Northrop Skyguard installation at LA International Airport, and threaten to shoot down incoming planes unless their demands for $500,000,000 and an autographed photograph of President Bush are met. Willis is sickened when the terrorists test-fire the system to show that they mean business, and bring down a stork which was delivering a child to an LA family.
As Willis and his wife are expecting their own stork delivery, and Mrs Willis is on a flight circling the airport at this point, Willis decides to neutralise the terrorists. Armed only with a car full of construction tools and the large bowie knife he always carries with him, Willis has 30 minutes to save his wife and their undelivered baby.
Action Thriller. PG Rated. Running time 97 minutes.
There's no way that those old things were more reliable than a modern car. Back then, every driver was an amatuer mechanic, 'cos they broke down so often. This is when breakdown/roadside rescue services really took off, as more people became drivers without the tinkering instinct.
What those cars had was that they were ***easy to fix*** - easy to diagnose, easy to get the parts out and in, easy to obtain the parts, in fact. These days, the simple diagnostic tests do not work or cannot be performed, and as a result, you can't fix your own car. But cars today break down far less than they did back then, at least that's my recollection of it.
All this clever is design going into getting the compiler working well, but surely the cleverest parallel code could be ruined by having to share the processor(s) with other tasks/processes/threads.
I wonder what the cost of being pre-empted on one or more processors is. A really clever design might allow the programmer to place hints such as "don't preempt this chunk, it's optimised really nicely" or "dedicate a processor to this code until I tell you otherwise".
Oracle's had this for years. Since v 8, I think? (corrections welcome)
Glad to oblige;-)
Oracle basically chucks it's XML into a LOB, and you can search the lob for strings, etc. What IBM has actually breaks down the XML, creating a tree structure behind the scenes. There may be no out-and-out benefits at the moment, but the solution is a much better implementation than Oracle. The applications will come.
Visit here and have a look at the paper "An Overview of Native XML Support in DB2". Also maybe see "Learn how IBMs new XML technology differs from other XML storage", which is a link to a Register article.
I've had a look at the whitepaper. I think it's a fantastic idea, and Oracle will be gnashing their teeth and fuming. This is way beyond what Oracle do for XML.
I am now boycotting Nokia - I will never buy another Nokia phone. (In fact, I took a couple of Nokia chargers in to work today - I'll never need them again.)
My reason for this is their stance on Software Patents in the EU - they lobbied hard for them. See, for example, The Register or The FFII. I contacted them (by email, IIRC) to tell them my position, but never heard anything back.
For them to launch an open-source website is simply an attempt to gain some PR, or, put another way, some community "kudos". And, for goodness' sake, starting a web site does not require a huge investment. This is a PR exercise, through-and-through.
What Google did, for example, will probably help a lot more.
This didn't happen in my day job office, but a "place of work" of another kind. My wife was chair of a local charity, which is a toy library - it lends toys instead of books. They had wangled a total refurb of their premises from a local firm, who do a project for charity each year. This year, it was our turn, and all we had to do was to clear out all the toys and old shelves to give these guys space to build and paint.
The library has three interconnecting rooms in a shared-use building, all charities. The old shelves were metal, and I went down one night to dismantle them. Just before I left, my wife told me that the place used to be a funeral parlour. Sure enough, one room had metal-lined walls, and there were two enormous metal-lined doors lying in a back corridor.
It was November, the raid was dripping all around, and the heating system was making very strange noises. Very spooky. The shelves were held together by square bolts, so I had to use an adjustable spanner. I soon got into the groove, and had an efficient system for dismantling the shelves. I'd work with the shelves upside down, and the metal shelves would form a tray that I'd keep my tools in.
So, it's night, spooky noises, dull lighting, no music, and my thoughts turn to the fact this used to be a funeral parlour. Then, I get a big suprise: the spanner, which was set to the correct size for the square nuts, was fully open - about 25 mm instead of 10.
Lots of silly thoughts went through my mind, especially curious ghosts examining my tools. I checked where my car keys were, mentally planned my exit route, and, a little spooked, I carried on working.
All was fine for about five minutes, until the spanner didn't fit again - and this time, it was fully closed! I was so, so close to legging it, but I told myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that any tortured spirits would haunt their homes and not the funeral parlour they lay for a few days. So, I stuck it out, although I was very "observant" from then on.
An accident as I packed up provided an explanation. I stepped over a toolbox, and landed on the adjustable spanner. It slid forward and the little adjusting wheel moved - closing the spanner jaws. When I'd been working on the shelves, sometimes my spanner would slide along the shelf, and it must have closed on one occassion, and opened on the other one.
I'm so glad that I didn't run out of there in fear, especially after the spanner moved for the second time. I kept telling myself that there is always a logical explanation for all events, and it turned out that there was!
Well the ironic thing about the Monopoly game is that you go to jail for no good reason. Basically going to jail is just bad luck. This probably captures the mindset of the early American monopolists quite well.
Good idea, but Monopoly was invented in Britain, dude.
"pirate" is the wrong term here. "recorded under our fair use rights" may be better.
Clear your mind and prepare for this: The US has better rights than the UK when it comes to "fair use". In fact, we in the UK have no real concept of it.
For example, it is illegal to record music onto another medium - buy vinyl, you can't put it on cassette for the car. Buy CD, you can't rip them. Not legally, anyway.
In fact, the last time I looked at it, it was illegal to _lend_ someone music - if I want to let you listen to my CD, I have to bring it to your house and be there while it's played. You can't listen to it if I'm not there.
Time-shifting _is_ allowed, but you cannot keep the recording at watch it again and again.
So, from a UK point of view, almost everyone with an mp3 player (for example) is a "pirate", unless they have bought their music exclusively from online sources with a corresponding license. Grannies (or anyone else) who share recorded TV programmes are pirates too, as are people who lend CDs, cassettes, DVDs, VHS videos, and vinyl records to others.
So, from _my_ p.o.v., there is no "fair use" except time-shifing. Sorry for using the term "pirate", which doesn't really reflect the reality in the USA and probably several other places. I really don't know the europe-wide position on this, and I _suspect_ that Australia has laws at least as strict as ours.
They want to force everybody to switch to digital because only digital technologies support strong DRM restrictions.
Possibly. But probably not. The converter boxes will have to output an analogue signal which can be pirated in the usual ways.
In the UK, the driving force for digital TV is freeing up large proportions of the radio spectrum for other uses. Digital TV requires a fraction of the "bandwidth" (wrong term, but you get the idea) that analogue does. Of course, people will pay for bandwidth licenses. ..
Just be prepared for poorer quality and mpeg artifacts at times. Additionally, when the signal strength is poor, instead of getting a poor image (better than no image, IMO), you simple won't receive the channel anymore.
Progress? Perhaps. I'm still on analogue, and expect that the govt here will have to buy converter boxes for millions of viewers when the analogue system is decomissioned.
Wouldn't it be ironic if iTunes downloads increased after this? I'm now tempted to join and buy music through them, because now[1] I can do what I want with it once I've bought it.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, sorry, my bad. I must have malformed the HTML for that link.
I now present a link to the page on solder that I obviously screwed up in the article submission.
Sorry.
Hmm, let's take that road analogy a little further
Roads: Internet
Road owners (local government): ISPs
Illegal goods: dodgy song downloads
So, the equivelant of Audible Magic's CopySense to detect infringers is, I guess roadblocks and vehicle checks set up, manned and paid for by the road owners. That does not seem right to me, especially the part about who has to pay.
We don't prosecute the postal service for aiding and abbetting those who send letter bombs. We don't prosecute road owners or car companies for making something that all those getaway drivers using roads and cars can use to getaway from bank robberies. Why should the ISPs pay to monitor this?
This is Europe, not the USA!
...Wake me up when you're able to use PCC instead of GCC to do a 'make bzImage'
OK, I agree that it cannot cope with the Linux kernel yet, but I hear they are making very good progres with the Hurd.
I can heartily recommend the Astronomy Hacks book (Amazon Link (no referrer ID)), which is part of O'Reilly's "Hacks" series. Average 5* reviews from 48 reviews.
I infer that you're from the UK. If you are in the UK and you think there's an off-chance that you might go into the city (merchant banking), then there is a tremendous amount of snobbery.
About 5 years ago, the UK IT market was pretty slack, and just about every IT job in the city demanded that your degree was from one of the top five C.S. Uni's in the UK - I can't recall them all, certainly Oxford and Glasgow were two. Your CV (resume) would NOT get beyond the recruitment agent unless you'd been to the right Uni.
I'm the first person to agree that posession of a degree makes little difference to whether you can do a job, but that's how it was. I expect the same condition will return if the market slackens again.
Note that I only observed this in financial jobs.
Not only that, but it's a book review for a User's Manual for a Text Editor only available as a binary for Macintosh.
It's not even a book review, as such, half of the text is there to tell us that he/she doesn't like CDs, or advises us how to mark pages with sticky notes, etc. etc, or tells us that that if you are a typeical slashdot reader, then you're probably going to be more interested in the free online stuff than this book.
The message is clear - they need decent book reviews at slashdot, and are so desperate that they will publish anything. Get on your keyboards, slashdotters!
In the UK, our Professional Contractors Group has just negotiated deals with a leading health insurer or two. I haven't seen the details yet, but it seems relevant to this discussion.
Are there no similar organizations in your country doing this kind of thing?
It happened recently. When I was a lad, the BBC and UK schools composed a "domesday book", which was supposed to be a parallel to the original Domesday book, which was a bit more than a cencus from the UK made in 1086.The modern one used the popular home PC the BBC Micro (made by Acorn). It was made on laserdisk, and distributed around the UK to the schools that had compiled the information.
Well, 15 years on, it was useless. The then-proprietary format was not readable on anything modern, and there was not much of the old hardware around either. You can google for it ("UK domesday bbc data" should do it), the first link I saw was on the Guardian Online.
I've still got stuff on floppies, but no-one builds PCs with them anymore. I've got two old laptops with floppy drives, the other three computers have none. (OK, I also have two corpses with floppy drives, and the controllers on two of the new PCs will accept floppy drives, but, please take my point - they're going out of fashion.)
In 20 years time, there will probably be no CD/DVD drives, we'll all be using a new more portable, more backupable, lighter, faster, probably online-only storage medium. Kids won't recognize laserdisks, floppies, or USB ports. They might not recognise keyboards either - who knows?
Why dick around with your own encryption: use AES. Then you can tell your customers that you are using the standard suggested by the US government. There are free implementations available in many languages. You will be doing the best thing for your team and your company.
If you are worried about CPU, memory, etc, remind yourself that the criteria for selecting the AES algorithm included CPU usage, memory usage, and the ability to be implemented on silicon.
Bruce Willis stars as himself in "Laser Bubble", an action movie where terrorists take over the Northrop Skyguard installation at LA International Airport, and threaten to shoot down incoming planes unless their demands for $500,000,000 and an autographed photograph of President Bush are met. Willis is sickened when the terrorists test-fire the system to show that they mean business, and bring down a stork which was delivering a child to an LA family.
As Willis and his wife are expecting their own stork delivery, and Mrs Willis is on a flight circling the airport at this point, Willis decides to neutralise the terrorists. Armed only with a car full of construction tools and the large bowie knife he always carries with him, Willis has 30 minutes to save his wife and their undelivered baby.
Action Thriller. PG Rated. Running time 97 minutes.
Or even a spy rock(TM).
What those cars had was that they were ***easy to fix*** - easy to diagnose, easy to get the parts out and in, easy to obtain the parts, in fact. These days, the simple diagnostic tests do not work or cannot be performed, and as a result, you can't fix your own car. But cars today break down far less than they did back then, at least that's my recollection of it.
All this clever is design going into getting the compiler working well, but surely the cleverest parallel code could be ruined by having to share the processor(s) with other tasks/processes/threads.
I wonder what the cost of being pre-empted on one or more processors is. A really clever design might allow the programmer to place hints such as "don't preempt this chunk, it's optimised really nicely" or "dedicate a processor to this code until I tell you otherwise".
Oracle's had this for years. Since v 8, I think? (corrections welcome)
;-)
Glad to oblige
Oracle basically chucks it's XML into a LOB, and you can search the lob for strings, etc.
What IBM has actually breaks down the XML, creating a tree structure behind the scenes. There may be no out-and-out benefits at the moment, but the solution is a much better implementation than Oracle. The applications will come.
Visit here and have a look at the paper "An Overview of Native XML Support in DB2". Also maybe see "Learn how IBMs new XML technology differs from other XML storage", which is a link to a Register article.
I've had a look at the whitepaper. I think it's a fantastic idea, and Oracle will be gnashing their teeth and fuming. This is way beyond what Oracle do for XML.
I am now boycotting Nokia - I will never buy another Nokia phone. (In fact, I took a couple of Nokia chargers in to work today - I'll never need them again.)
My reason for this is their stance on Software Patents in the EU - they lobbied hard for them. See, for example, The Register or The FFII. I contacted them (by email, IIRC) to tell them my position, but never heard anything back.
For them to launch an open-source website is simply an attempt to gain some PR, or, put another way, some community "kudos". And, for goodness' sake, starting a web site does not require a huge investment. This is a PR exercise, through-and-through.
What Google did, for example, will probably help a lot more.
This didn't happen in my day job office, but a "place of work" of another kind. My wife was chair of a local charity, which is a toy library - it lends toys instead of books. They had wangled a total refurb of their premises from a local firm, who do a project for charity each year. This year, it was our turn, and all we had to do was to clear out all the toys and old shelves to give these guys space to build and paint.
The library has three interconnecting rooms in a shared-use building, all charities. The old shelves were metal, and I went down one night to dismantle them. Just before I left, my wife told me that the place used to be a funeral parlour. Sure enough, one room had metal-lined walls, and there were two enormous metal-lined doors lying in a back corridor.
It was November, the raid was dripping all around, and the heating system was making very strange noises. Very spooky. The shelves were held together by square bolts, so I had to use an adjustable spanner. I soon got into the groove, and had an efficient system for dismantling the shelves. I'd work with the shelves upside down, and the metal shelves would form a tray that I'd keep my tools in.
So, it's night, spooky noises, dull lighting, no music, and my thoughts turn to the fact this used to be a funeral parlour. Then, I get a big suprise: the spanner, which was set to the correct size for the square nuts, was fully open - about 25 mm instead of 10.
Lots of silly thoughts went through my mind, especially curious ghosts examining my tools. I checked where my car keys were, mentally planned my exit route, and, a little spooked, I carried on working.
All was fine for about five minutes, until the spanner didn't fit again - and this time, it was fully closed! I was so, so close to legging it, but I told myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that any tortured spirits would haunt their homes and not the funeral parlour they lay for a few days. So, I stuck it out, although I was very "observant" from then on.
An accident as I packed up provided an explanation. I stepped over a toolbox, and landed on the adjustable spanner. It slid forward and the little adjusting wheel moved - closing the spanner jaws. When I'd been working on the shelves, sometimes my spanner would slide along the shelf, and it must have closed on one occassion, and opened on the other one.
I'm so glad that I didn't run out of there in fear, especially after the spanner moved for the second time. I kept telling myself that there is always a logical explanation for all events, and it turned out that there was!
*blushes* Oops!
Well the ironic thing about the Monopoly game is that you go to jail for no good reason. Basically going to jail is just bad luck. This probably captures the mindset of the early American monopolists quite well.
Good idea, but Monopoly was invented in Britain, dude.
Bruce Schneier's Password Safe.
Did anyone else notice the Intel advert for "Hyper Threading Linux" at the top of the google ads on the article page?
I wonder how much revenue he'll get from this announcement?
And I note that if you are a SCO user, you always had disabled hyper threading anyway. Not sure what to make of that.
"pirate" is the wrong term here. "recorded under our fair use rights" may be better.
Clear your mind and prepare for this: The US has better rights than the UK when it comes to "fair use". In fact, we in the UK have no real concept of it.
For example, it is illegal to record music onto another medium - buy vinyl, you can't put it on cassette for the car. Buy CD, you can't rip them. Not legally, anyway.
In fact, the last time I looked at it, it was illegal to _lend_ someone music - if I want to let you listen to my CD, I have to bring it to your house and be there while it's played. You can't listen to it if I'm not there.
Time-shifting _is_ allowed, but you cannot keep the recording at watch it again and again.
So, from a UK point of view, almost everyone with an mp3 player (for example) is a "pirate", unless they have bought their music exclusively from online sources with a corresponding license. Grannies (or anyone else) who share recorded TV programmes are pirates too, as are people who lend CDs, cassettes, DVDs, VHS videos, and vinyl records to others.
So, from _my_ p.o.v., there is no "fair use" except time-shifing. Sorry for using the term "pirate", which doesn't really reflect the reality in the USA and probably several other places. I really don't know the europe-wide position on this, and I _suspect_ that Australia has laws at least as strict as ours.
They want to force everybody to switch to digital because only digital technologies support strong DRM restrictions.
.
Possibly. But probably not. The converter boxes will have to output an analogue signal which can be pirated in the usual ways.
In the UK, the driving force for digital TV is freeing up large proportions of the radio spectrum for other uses. Digital TV requires a fraction of the "bandwidth" (wrong term, but you get the idea) that analogue does. Of course, people will pay for bandwidth licenses. .
Just be prepared for poorer quality and mpeg artifacts at times. Additionally, when the signal strength is poor, instead of getting a poor image (better than no image, IMO), you simple won't receive the channel anymore.
Progress? Perhaps. I'm still on analogue, and expect that the govt here will have to buy converter boxes for millions of viewers when the analogue system is decomissioned.
You could do what you wanted before, with Hymn.
.
I never knew about that, either. I guess I just don't read enough online news. .
I've just checked out Hymn, it really does *just* remove the DRM, not decode/play/capture/re-encode. Cool.
Wouldn't it be ironic if iTunes downloads increased after this? I'm now tempted to join and buy music through them, because now[1] I can do what I want with it once I've bought it.
[1] Until iTunes closes this loophole