There must be exceptions. I already purchased a couple of songs longer than 10 minutes for $0.99 each. This is not all that uncommon in jazz, there are plenty of songs where in the middle 7 minutes everyone in the band takes a solo.
Who will know the names of the indy bands to go and search for them to find them?
People need to hear it before they like it and likewise buy it. So unless apple offers some kind of deal where you can listen to it for free once or something how can people tell if these bands are good or not?
1. iTunes 4 lets you hear a 30-second preview of a song instantly. I've bought quite a few songs from artists I've never heard of just based on a 30-second preview. (30 seconds is actually quite a bit - enough to tell whether you like someone's voice, like the sound of the band, etc). It's fun to just pick random artists and listen to songs!
2. When you click on an album, the top of the screen shows you "people who bought this album also bought..." - a great way to introduce you to new artists
3. Quite a few bands cover well-known songs. I sometimes discover new bands by listening to one of their covers, and then later discover their original tunes.
So, there are lots of ways for indie bands to get discovered in the iTunes music store.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 5, Informative
1) You're accusing people of putting your secret code into the Linux kernel. 2) You'll show me the secret code in question IFF I sign an NDA. 3) The code for Linux is freely available.
What's in the secret code that I can't see by looking the kernel source?
From what I see, the purpose of the NDA is so that you can't tell other people what the offending lines are, because then they could fix them and SCO wouldn't have a case.
All you're allowed to do is look at their allegations and tell the public "yes, I agree that SCO has a case" or "no, I don't believe them".
I see a number of potential issues with the idea. First of all is the obvious automation of the renewal process which will make it easy to automatically extend the copyright. However, the $1 (or whatever) fee is per work, that is, a fee to keep a single artwork copyrighted. This is all fine and dandy for bookwriters and moviemakers with an expected total of works in the count of 10 to 20 in a lifetime. But consider photographers, who shoot thousands of photos a year, or quite likely much more. Do they have to pay for each of their photos?
Yes, if they still want to claim copyright after 50 years!
If someone is still making a profit off of a photo after 50 years, more power to them. I think it's highly unlikely that they'd feel the need to keep their copyright on the hundreds of thousands of photos they've taken.
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
I know this is incredibly nerdy, but it sounds like some people would appreciate it if the jokes were explained to them...
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do? A: He worked it out with a pencil!
OK, not going to try to explain this one.
Q: What's purple and commutes? A: An Abelian grape.
A group is a set of things (think "numbers", but they could be sides of a cube, or colors, or anything you want) along with an operation defined on them (like addition or multiplication, but it doesn't have to work like those). When the operation on the group happens to be commutative (like 2+4 = 4+2), the group is called Abelian
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television? A: It's two gross.
A "gross" is a dozen dozen, or 144. Not a very mathematical joke.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber? A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
The joke is referring to a Cross Product, an operation defined on two vectors. You can't take the cross-product of a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb? A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
When a mathematician needs to prove that A implies B, they may instead prove that A implies C where "C implies B" was already proved by someone else, or in a previous theorem.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals? A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
The joke is referring to the Cantor Diagonal Argument, a proof technique that Cantor originally used to prove that even if you tried to associate one real number with every integer, there'd still be real numbers left over. (Amazingly, you can "count" the rational numbers - i.e. all of the possible fractional numbers. As a math major to show you sometime, it's a neat trick.)
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? A: Zorn's Lemon.
Zorn's Lemma is a mathematical statement which turns out to be true if the Axiom of Choice is assumed to be true, or false if the Axiom of Choice is assumed to be false.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete? A: A Bananach space.
A is space (a set of numbers with a lot of useful operations defined on them) that has a normalization operator defined, and is "complete", which means that the limits of all sequences you can define using numbers in the space are also in the space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic? A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k? A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
A Sylow p-Subgroup is a certain type of subgroup (see the definition of a group above).
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations? A: the Lacrosse transform.
The is a technique that makes certain differential equations a lot easier to solve - essentially you take a complicated D.E., substitute certain things in place of any derivatives you see by looking them up in a table, then solve the resulting equation using normal algebra, and finally transform it back also by looking up things in a table.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations? A: The Perrier transform.
The Fourier Transform is also used in signal processing, including sound analysis and sound compression algorithms like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
Q:
Idea may lead to new record, not twin prime proof
on
Twin Prime Proof Erroneous
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· Score: 5, Informative
The last paragraph of the "more detailed technical description" is interesting (shown here in LaTeX notation):
The consensus is that the definition of $\gamma_R$ needs to be changed so that terms like this one do not appear. However, it is not obvious how to do this change. Work is continuing by Goldston and Yildirim and others to rectify the problem. It does seem reasonable to believe that an improvement on the current world record for small gaps between primes will be achieved by these methods; however, the more dramatic result $p_{n+1} - p_n < (\log n)^\alpha$ for some $\alpha < 1$ seems less likely.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it would be more clear if they said that the inequality above holds for infinitely many $n$, because it certainly couldn't hold for all $n$.
Essentially they're claiming that it's less likely now that the twin prime conjecture will ever be proved using this method, but there's still a pretty reasonable chance that the proof will result in something along the lines that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes that differ only by x, where x is not quite as small as 2 (which is what the twin primes conjecture says) but x is smaller than any value of x that was previously proven. Which would be cool, but nothing to open champagne over.
I would like to comment on statements that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer made in a recent court case where he is quoted as saying that "DeCSS is a burglary tool".
I am strongly opposed to copyright infringement and I applaud the California Attorney General for doing everything possible to stop both large-scale and small-scale piracy of media, whether digital or otherwise.
But I would ask that the Attorney General please make a distinction between software tools, which can generally be used for both legal and illegal actions, and the actions which are themselves illegal.
I should note at this point that I have a Master's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, I have experience with encryption algorithms, and I have worked in the software engineering field for many years.
DeCSS is a program that decrypts the data stored on a DVD movie. Every DVD player, hardware and software, contains a program functionally identical to the one known as DeCSS. The difference is that all commercial DVD players contain a program (or derivative program) that was originally written by members of the DVD consortium who came up with the format in the first place. DeCSS was written in a "clean room", by talented computer programmers who figured out how the encryption on a DVD works without access to any secret information.
Note that this "reverse engineering" is very common in the field and is completely legal. It's the equivalent to a Ford technician opening the hood of a Honda and studying how the engine works to see how they got such good performance.
DeCSS has many legal uses. The most obvious one is that it lets amateur programmers write their own DVD players, to play the DVD movies that they already own. Some may want to do this so that they can watch DVDs on their favorite operating system that is not supported by any commercial software yet (like Linux), and others may want to build new innovative portable DVD players.
DeCSS is not even necessary to make copies of a DVD! You can make a perfect copy of a DVD simply by copying all of the data encrypted. It does not require decrypting the data to make a copy, any more than it is necessary to understand French for me to make a photocopy of a book written in French.
It is true that DeCSS can be used to share DVD movies over the Internet in a different format (usually smaller size) than the original. However, in this case, DeCSS is one of about a dozen separate software programs that are all involved in the process. It just so happens that in the special case of DVDs, DeCSS was the only missing piece of the puzzle that didn't exist before. But there is nothing about DeCSS that makes it, in and of itself, illegal.
As a computer programmer, I am very concerned at the idea that a program can be labeled as illegal, when it has many legal uses. This threatens to have a chilling effect on the software industry. It's like owning a knife - it can be used for good or for evil. Owning the knife is not illegal, using it to kill someone is.
[Slashdotters: sorry if some of my analogies aren't that good. Feel free to pick them apart, but if you do, please suggest better ones, and I'll use the best I'm aware of in the future when discussing this with friends. Also, if you're complaining, show me the letter YOU wrote...no? I thought so.]
SCO Group Chief Financial Officer Robert Bench sold 7,000 of his 245,000 SCO shares Monday, two business days after the Unix software company's stock price surged on news of a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Sure you can decompile an optimized and symbol-stripped C++ program, but you'd never have it the original compact form of the source as you do with the Java class file decompilers due to the heavy use of inline functions and templates used in C++. A C program, sure, but decompiling C++ is not terribly useful.
Actually if you could deduce the class hierarchy and distinguish objects from other variables, it might be more useful to decompile a C++ program than a C program, because information about encapsulation and inheritance might help you understand the structure of the program.
Yeah, I'm thinking about doing their free trial since I realized they have Karrin Allyson.
What happens if I cancel after my free trial, but want to start my subscription later? Any penalty for doing that? Can I put my subscription on hold at any point or are 3 and 12 months the minimum lengths?
...the max theoretical speed a host can transmit on 100base with ethernet, ip, and tcp overhead is still over 90Mbps.. (I think it's near 97 Mbps, haven't calculated it for a few years). This number is even closer for 10Mbps.. (close to 9.9Mbps)
Nobody ever really kicked up a fuss about this because the speeds are so damn close... but in wireless, they are very different.
The max theoretical speeds for Ethernet may be higher, but everyday speeds with normal software, even under pretty decent conditions, aren't all that close to the theoretical max.
I just tried ftp-ing a medium-sized file across my 100Mbps Ethernet connection - two computers (a Power Mac running OS X and a Linux PC) connected via a Linksys Cable/DSL Router. No other traffic.
71175212 bytes sent in 8.18 secs (8.5e+03 Kbytes/sec) 71175212 bytes sent in 8.01 secs (8.7e+03 Kbytes/sec) 71175212 bytes sent in 8.11 secs (8.6e+03 Kbytes/sec)
Multiply by 8 bits/byte, and you get at BEST 71 Mbits/sec of actual data.
I'm sure it's possible to get 90 Mbits/sec if you stream full-MTU UDP packets from one computer to another over a 3-foot triple-shielded cable, but realistically most people see 30% or more overhead even with standard 100baseT Ethernet.
To me, that makes the 40-50% overhead of wireless seem not that bad.
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
You DO own them. Apple gives them to you encrypted and gives YOU the key to decrypt them. The mechanism they give you for transfering the key is by logging in via your Apple ID, but you can continue to listen to YOUR music when you're not on the Internet.
Furthermore, you can burn the songs you purchased to a CD, and from there you can do anything you want with them.
I would note that you need this for Apples service as well, you need to log in to listen to music on another computer...
Yes, but only ONCE. After that, the second computer doesn't need to be connected to the Internet to listen to that music.
I wish that Apple's service had fewer restrictions, too, but please get your facts straight. And Apple's service has nearly the fewest restrictions of any other service out there today. The only other services that offer unrestricted downloads are subscription-only services, so they're not worth it unless you purchase a large volume of music.
How about emusic? Subscription service, 'unlimited' downloads, and you own the (high quality VBR) MP3s.
I say 'unlimited' because they get upset if you download more than a few thousand tracks a month... still good value though.
I just searched their catalog a bit, and I have to admit, I'm tempted.
The only problem is the startup fee. The minimum you can spend to try it out is $45 (three months at $15) - you have to sign up for at least a year to get the $10/month price.
I love the iTunes music store, but I still buy CD's, and I don't think I'm going to spend $120 there this year. Maybe $40-50.
I estimate that eMusic is a great deal for someone who currently purchases 30 or more CD's a year. I say this because I'm assuming that for someone with varied musical taste, only about half of the albums they want will be on eMusic (though this could get better over time), and that no matter how good eMusic is, they'll want to purchase the CD of some of their favorite artists (to have the liner notes and the higher-quality uncompressed audio).
So eMusic is great for some people - but what's great about Apple's model is that there's no startup cost. Anyone can download ONE song for $.99 just to try it out. That, plus the incredibly great interface of the iTunes music store (way better than eMusic's), is what made Apple so successful (financially).
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
For me, the key word is "pay for spam".
There should be a "national opt-out" spam list that all spam senders must check before sending a message.
Violating these agreements, or sending another message after the user has "opted out" is punishable by a $1000 fine per email sent.
There's a simpler way: make it illegal to send out bulk email (more than 10 recipients) with forged headers. Any violation is punishable by a $1000 fine.
That way, if you do send spam, you do have to pay: your own inbox has to be big enough to hold all of the flaming you'll get in return.
The reason to say more than 10 emails is so that it doesn't specifically target a whistleblower who wants to send an anonymous email to his company. Rare, yet, but it keeps things simpler that way.
Re:Isn't this a security issue?
on
Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 1
You might want to check out the MacRumors Buyer's Guide to help you decide when to purchase which Mac model.
For example, right now they recommend purchasing a LCD, XServe, iBook, iPod, or eMac. They're neutral on iMacs, Powerbooks, and Power Macs.
There's no way you'll see a PowerPC 970 in a 12" Powerbook, so don't wait if you want one of those. The iMac is tricky...my guess is that it'll see faster G4's for a while before it eventually gets a processor upgrade. I'd only wait for sure if you want a Power Mac.
Two other bonuses are that you reduce the risk that one of the characters is involved in an accident and can no longer play the part. A shorter time frame for filming the three movies means less time for something to happen. A good example is Professor Dumbeldore in the first two Harry Potter movies. He died after the second film while I beleive he was suppose to be in the third and later movies.
Yes, since Dumbledore is in the 3rd and 4th books, one would expect he was supposed to be in those movies, too. Sad.
Also, if the films are shot over a long period of time, characters can change in their appearance, especially young actors. Daniel Radcliffe had a noticeable change from his first Harry Potter from his second one. His voice also changed considerably.
I get your point, but in this case it's a good thing, since the characters are supposed to be a year older.
Isn't this a security issue?
on
Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 1, Interesting
People seem to be saying that this isn't a security issue, but I still think it is.
Of course, if you're running.NET without any protections, and give it full access to your computer, then it doesn't matter.
But.NET is supposed to be able to run in a sandbox if you want it to. Now, in Java, acecss to private class members is strictly forbidden by the JVM, so as long as there are no bugs in the API of the class, the code is secure.
But with.NET, there are many possible exploits. By messing with a class's private variables, it's easy to get the class into a state that would never happen if you just used the public API - and thus it's not hard to imagine getting the class to do something it shouldn't be allowed to do. Since a number of these.NET classes must make Win32 system calls, there's probably a way to trick one of the classes into calling something that it normally shouldn't be able to.
Remember, the virtual machine prevents your actual C# code from accessing the system directly. But a lot of the.NET classes that Microsoft provides are written in C/C++ and have to access the system - and by messing up the private variables in these classes, there's no end to what you could possibly do.
People keep saying that this is no different than C++. I agree - except that C#/.NET is supposed to be able to run in a sandbox, and I think that this means that the sandbox is not all that secure.
Is this a C# or a .NET problem?
on
Hijacking .NET
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Is this a limitation of C# or of.NET?
What does this mean for the security of.NET programs? I thought it was supposed to be possible to run.NET programs in a sandbox, protecting you from malicious code. It seems that being able to access private members in the.NET framework opens up a whole new world of possibilities for security holes...
Yep, just like $3.25 is way too much for a cup of coffee. Nobody will pay that much for "trendy" coffee.
Or like $3.99 is too much for a video rental, when you can buy the movie for $20.
Or like $1.85 is too much for a gallon of gas - I'd rather walk.
Guess what? There are a lot of songs I'd like to buy for $0.99. I'll still buy CD's, and I might still use P2P, especially for things that simply aren't available legally. But you seem to think that they're not offering any value for $0.99, and I think you're wrong.
The way I understand it, SCO is alleging that somebody took a nontrivial amount of code from the Unix source that SCO now owns, and copied it somewhere into the Linux codebase, thereby releasing that code under the GPL.
Now people are worried that because SCO also distributed this same code under the GPL, that somehow "legitimizes" its release, which makes the GPL seem "viral". In other words, because SCO owned the original code, by releasing that code under the GPL they in effect dual-licensed it, even though the Linux contributor who put the code in there didn't have a legal right to do so.
Do people think this will really hold up? In order to release something under the GPL in the first place, you have to own the code or have the right to license that code to begin with. If I steal Microsoft's code and release it under the GPL, that doesn't make the code actually GPL'd, because I never had the right to so license the code.
SCO's case is complicated by the fact that they also distributed the same code after somebody GPL'd it, without their knowledge at the time. But since they stopped releasing the code (relatively soon) after they became aware that it contained some of their own proprietary code, then I think this should effectively kill the GPL on that code. The person who put it in there in the first place didn't have the rights to, and SCO didn't know it was there when they distributed it.
What do you think? Did SCO really lose their rights to their code by "accidentally" releasing it under the GPL, as a result of someone else's illegal licensing of it in the first place? I certainly hope not.
If I give a counterfeit dollar to the U.S. government, and they in turn give it to someone else, not realizing it's fake, that doesn't somehow legitimize that bill. It's still not legal tender.
Same thing with this code. Since SCO wasn't the one to GPL it, the code isn't legally GPL'd.
Slashdot Mirror
There must be exceptions. I already purchased a couple of songs longer than 10 minutes for $0.99 each. This is not all that uncommon in jazz, there are plenty of songs where in the middle 7 minutes everyone in the band takes a solo.
Who will know the names of the indy bands to go and search for them to find them?
People need to hear it before they like it and likewise buy it. So unless apple offers some kind of deal where you can listen to it for free once or something how can people tell if these bands are good or not?
1. iTunes 4 lets you hear a 30-second preview of a song instantly. I've bought quite a few songs from artists I've never heard of just based on a 30-second preview. (30 seconds is actually quite a bit - enough to tell whether you like someone's voice, like the sound of the band, etc). It's fun to just pick random artists and listen to songs!
2. When you click on an album, the top of the screen shows you "people who bought this album also bought..." - a great way to introduce you to new artists
3. Quite a few bands cover well-known songs. I sometimes discover new bands by listening to one of their covers, and then later discover their original tunes.
So, there are lots of ways for indie bands to get discovered in the iTunes music store.
1) You're accusing people of putting your secret code into the Linux kernel.
2) You'll show me the secret code in question IFF I sign an NDA.
3) The code for Linux is freely available.
What's in the secret code that I can't see by looking the kernel source?
From what I see, the purpose of the NDA is so that you can't tell other people what the offending lines are, because then they could fix them and SCO wouldn't have a case.
All you're allowed to do is look at their allegations and tell the public "yes, I agree that SCO has a case" or "no, I don't believe them".
I see a number of potential issues with the idea. First of all is the obvious automation of the renewal process which will make it easy to automatically extend the copyright. However, the $1 (or whatever) fee is per work, that is, a fee to keep a single artwork copyrighted. This is all fine and dandy for bookwriters and moviemakers with an expected total of works in the count of 10 to 20 in a lifetime. But consider photographers, who shoot thousands of photos a year, or quite likely much more. Do they have to pay for each of their photos?
Yes, if they still want to claim copyright after 50 years!
If someone is still making a profit off of a photo after 50 years, more power to them. I think it's highly unlikely that they'd feel the need to keep their copyright on the hundreds of thousands of photos they've taken.
I am definitely not flaming Dominic the poster, but if all the moderators that read this post understood it then I'd be real freakin' suprised. "Oh look! symbols! [+1 Informative]
:)
No offense taken!
I know this is incredibly nerdy, but it sounds like some people would appreciate it if the jokes were explained to them...
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do?
A: He worked it out with a pencil!
OK, not going to try to explain this one.
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.
A group is a set of things (think "numbers", but they could be sides of a cube, or colors, or anything you want) along with an operation defined on them (like addition or multiplication, but it doesn't have to work like those). When the operation on the group happens to be commutative (like 2+4 = 4+2), the group is called Abelian
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television?
A: It's two gross.
A "gross" is a dozen dozen, or 144. Not a very mathematical joke.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
The joke is referring to a Cross Product, an operation defined on two vectors. You can't take the cross-product of a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
When a mathematician needs to prove that A implies B, they may instead prove that A implies C where "C implies B" was already proved by someone else, or in a previous theorem.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals?
A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
The joke is referring to the Cantor Diagonal Argument, a proof technique that Cantor originally used to prove that even if you tried to associate one real number with every integer, there'd still be real numbers left over. (Amazingly, you can "count" the rational numbers - i.e. all of the possible fractional numbers. As a math major to show you sometime, it's a neat trick.)
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's Lemon.
Zorn's Lemma is a mathematical statement which turns out to be true if the Axiom of Choice is assumed to be true, or false if the Axiom of Choice is assumed to be false.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.
A is space (a set of numbers with a lot of useful operations defined on them) that has a normalization operator defined, and is "complete", which means that the limits of all sequences you can define using numbers in the space are also in the space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic?
A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k?
A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
A Sylow p-Subgroup is a certain type of subgroup (see the definition of a group above).
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations?
A: the Lacrosse transform.
The is a technique that makes certain differential equations a lot easier to solve - essentially you take a complicated D.E., substitute certain things in place of any derivatives you see by looking them up in a table, then solve the resulting equation using normal algebra, and finally transform it back also by looking up things in a table.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations?
A: The Perrier transform.
The Fourier Transform is also used in signal processing, including sound analysis and sound compression algorithms like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
Q:
The last paragraph of the "more detailed technical description" is interesting (shown here in LaTeX notation):
The consensus is that the definition of $\gamma_R$ needs to be changed so that terms like this one do not appear. However, it is not obvious how to do this change. Work is continuing by Goldston and Yildirim and others to rectify the problem. It does seem reasonable to believe that an improvement on the current world record for small gaps between primes will be achieved by these methods; however, the more dramatic result $p_{n+1} - p_n < (\log n)^\alpha$ for some $\alpha < 1$ seems less likely.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it would be more clear if they said that the inequality above holds for infinitely many $n$, because it certainly couldn't hold for all $n$.
Essentially they're claiming that it's less likely now that the twin prime conjecture will ever be proved using this method, but there's still a pretty reasonable chance that the proof will result in something along the lines that there are infinitely many pairs of consecutive primes that differ only by x, where x is not quite as small as 2 (which is what the twin primes conjecture says) but x is smaller than any value of x that was previously proven. Which would be cool, but nothing to open champagne over.
Mail form where you can send your own letter
I would like to comment on statements that California Attorney General Bill Lockyer made in a recent court case where he is quoted as saying that "DeCSS is a burglary tool".
I am strongly opposed to copyright infringement and I applaud the California Attorney General for doing everything possible to stop both large-scale and small-scale piracy of media, whether digital or otherwise.
But I would ask that the Attorney General please make a distinction between software tools, which can generally be used for both legal and illegal actions, and the actions which are themselves illegal.
I should note at this point that I have a Master's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, I have experience with encryption algorithms, and I have worked in the software engineering field for many years.
DeCSS is a program that decrypts the data stored on a DVD movie. Every DVD player, hardware and software, contains a program functionally identical to the one known as DeCSS. The difference is that all commercial DVD players contain a program (or derivative program) that was originally written by members of the DVD consortium who came up with the format in the first place. DeCSS was written in a "clean room", by talented computer programmers who figured out how the encryption on a DVD works without access to any secret information.
Note that this "reverse engineering" is very common in the field and is completely legal. It's the equivalent to a Ford technician opening the hood of a Honda and studying how the engine works to see how they got such good performance.
DeCSS has many legal uses. The most obvious one is that it lets amateur programmers write their own DVD players, to play the DVD movies that they already own. Some may want to do this so that they can watch DVDs on their favorite operating system that is not supported by any commercial software yet (like Linux), and others may want to build new innovative portable DVD players.
DeCSS is not even necessary to make copies of a DVD! You can make a perfect copy of a DVD simply by copying all of the data encrypted. It does not require decrypting the data to make a copy, any more than it is necessary to understand French for me to make a photocopy of a book written in French.
It is true that DeCSS can be used to share DVD movies over the Internet in a different format (usually smaller size) than the original. However, in this case, DeCSS is one of about a dozen separate software programs that are all involved in the process. It just so happens that in the special case of DVDs, DeCSS was the only missing piece of the puzzle that didn't exist before. But there is nothing about DeCSS that makes it, in and of itself, illegal.
As a computer programmer, I am very concerned at the idea that a program can be labeled as illegal, when it has many legal uses. This threatens to have a chilling effect on the software industry. It's like owning a knife - it can be used for good or for evil. Owning the knife is not illegal, using it to kill someone is.
[Slashdotters: sorry if some of my analogies aren't that good. Feel free to pick them apart, but if you do, please suggest better ones, and I'll use the best I'm aware of in the future when discussing this with friends. Also, if you're complaining, show me the letter YOU wrote...no? I thought so.]
For more info, check out Dictionary.com's definition of ironic, specifically the "Usage Note".
It's not his fault. He probably learned what "ironic" means from
Alanis Morissette.
SCO Group Chief Financial Officer Robert Bench sold 7,000 of his 245,000 SCO shares Monday, two business days after the Unix software company's stock price surged on news of a billion-dollar lawsuit against IBM, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Have a complaint? Make sure the SEC knows about it.
How to get free food at Taco Bell using a two-dollar bill
Sure you can decompile an optimized and symbol-stripped C++ program, but you'd never have it the original compact form of the source as you do with the Java class file decompilers due to the heavy use of inline functions and templates used in C++. A C program, sure, but decompiling C++ is not terribly useful.
Actually if you could deduce the class hierarchy and distinguish objects from other variables, it might be more useful to decompile a C++ program than a C program, because information about encapsulation and inheritance might help you understand the structure of the program.
Yeah, I'm thinking about doing their free trial since I realized they have Karrin Allyson.
What happens if I cancel after my free trial, but want to start my subscription later? Any penalty for doing that? Can I put my subscription on hold at any point or are 3 and 12 months the minimum lengths?
...the max theoretical speed a host can transmit on 100base with ethernet, ip, and tcp overhead is still over 90Mbps.. (I think it's near 97 Mbps, haven't calculated it for a few years). This number is even closer for 10Mbps.. (close to 9.9Mbps)
Nobody ever really kicked up a fuss about this because the speeds are so damn close... but in wireless, they are very different.
The max theoretical speeds for Ethernet may be higher, but everyday speeds with normal software, even under pretty decent conditions, aren't all that close to the theoretical max.
I just tried ftp-ing a medium-sized file across my 100Mbps Ethernet connection - two computers (a Power Mac running OS X and a Linux PC) connected via a Linksys Cable/DSL Router. No other traffic.
71175212 bytes sent in 8.18 secs (8.5e+03 Kbytes/sec)
71175212 bytes sent in 8.01 secs (8.7e+03 Kbytes/sec)
71175212 bytes sent in 8.11 secs (8.6e+03 Kbytes/sec)
Multiply by 8 bits/byte, and you get at BEST 71 Mbits/sec of actual data.
I'm sure it's possible to get 90 Mbits/sec if you stream full-MTU UDP packets from one computer to another over a 3-foot triple-shielded cable, but realistically most people see 30% or more overhead even with standard 100baseT Ethernet.
To me, that makes the 40-50% overhead of wireless seem not that bad.
Parent post seems suspect. Can you give us some links or sources?
If not, should be modded down.
You don't own them, Apple dictate what you can and cannot do with each track.
You DO own them. Apple gives them to you encrypted and gives YOU the key to decrypt them. The mechanism they give you for transfering the key is by logging in via your Apple ID, but you can continue to listen to YOUR music when you're not on the Internet.
Furthermore, you can burn the songs you purchased to a CD, and from there you can do anything you want with them.
I would note that you need this for Apples service as well, you need to log in to listen to music on another computer...
Yes, but only ONCE. After that, the second computer doesn't need to be connected to the Internet to listen to that music.
I wish that Apple's service had fewer restrictions, too, but please get your facts straight. And Apple's service has nearly the fewest restrictions of any other service out there today. The only other services that offer unrestricted downloads are subscription-only services, so they're not worth it unless you purchase a large volume of music.
How about emusic? Subscription service, 'unlimited' downloads, and you own the (high quality VBR) MP3s.
I say 'unlimited' because they get upset if you download more than a few thousand tracks a month... still good value though.
I just searched their catalog a bit, and I have to admit, I'm tempted.
The only problem is the startup fee. The minimum you can spend to try it out is $45 (three months at $15) - you have to sign up for at least a year to get the $10/month price.
I love the iTunes music store, but I still buy CD's, and I don't think I'm going to spend $120 there this year. Maybe $40-50.
I estimate that eMusic is a great deal for someone who currently purchases 30 or more CD's a year. I say this because I'm assuming that for someone with varied musical taste, only about half of the albums they want will be on eMusic (though this could get better over time), and that no matter how good eMusic is, they'll want to purchase the CD of some of their favorite artists (to have the liner notes and the higher-quality uncompressed audio).
So eMusic is great for some people - but what's great about Apple's model is that there's no startup cost. Anyone can download ONE song for $.99 just to try it out. That, plus the incredibly great interface of the iTunes music store (way better than eMusic's), is what made Apple so successful (financially).
For me, the key word is "pay for spam".
There should be a "national opt-out" spam list that all spam senders must check before sending a message.
Violating these agreements, or sending another message after the user has "opted out" is punishable by a $1000 fine per email sent.
There's a simpler way: make it illegal to send out bulk email (more than 10 recipients) with forged headers. Any violation is punishable by a $1000 fine.
That way, if you do send spam, you do have to pay: your own inbox has to be big enough to hold all of the flaming you'll get in return.
The reason to say more than 10 emails is so that it doesn't specifically target a whistleblower who wants to send an anonymous email to his company. Rare, yet, but it keeps things simpler that way.
I stand corrected! Thanks for enlightening me.
You might want to check out the MacRumors Buyer's Guide to help you decide when to purchase which Mac model.
For example, right now they recommend purchasing a LCD, XServe, iBook, iPod, or eMac. They're neutral on iMacs, Powerbooks, and Power Macs.
There's no way you'll see a PowerPC 970 in a 12" Powerbook, so don't wait if you want one of those. The iMac is tricky...my guess is that it'll see faster G4's for a while before it eventually gets a processor upgrade. I'd only wait for sure if you want a Power Mac.
Two other bonuses are that you reduce the risk that one of the characters is involved in an accident and can no longer play the part. A shorter time frame for filming the three movies means less time for something to happen. A good example is Professor Dumbeldore in the first two Harry Potter movies. He died after the second film while I beleive he was suppose to be in the third and later movies.
Yes, since Dumbledore is in the 3rd and 4th books, one would expect he was supposed to be in those movies, too. Sad.
Also, if the films are shot over a long period of time, characters can change in their appearance, especially young actors. Daniel Radcliffe had a noticeable change from his first Harry Potter from his second one. His voice also changed considerably.
I get your point, but in this case it's a good thing, since the characters are supposed to be a year older.
People seem to be saying that this isn't a security issue, but I still think it is.
.NET without any protections, and give it full access to your computer, then it doesn't matter.
.NET is supposed to be able to run in a sandbox if you want it to. Now, in Java, acecss to private class members is strictly forbidden by the JVM, so as long as there are no bugs in the API of the class, the code is secure.
.NET, there are many possible exploits. By messing with a class's private variables, it's easy to get the class into a state that would never happen if you just used the public API - and thus it's not hard to imagine getting the class to do something it shouldn't be allowed to do. Since a number of these .NET classes must make Win32 system calls, there's probably a way to trick one of the classes into calling something that it normally shouldn't be able to.
.NET classes that Microsoft provides are written in C/C++ and have to access the system - and by messing up the private variables in these classes, there's no end to what you could possibly do.
Of course, if you're running
But
But with
Remember, the virtual machine prevents your actual C# code from accessing the system directly. But a lot of the
People keep saying that this is no different than C++. I agree - except that C#/.NET is supposed to be able to run in a sandbox, and I think that this means that the sandbox is not all that secure.
Is this a limitation of C# or of .NET?
.NET programs? I thought it was supposed to be possible to run .NET programs in a sandbox, protecting you from malicious code. It seems that being able to access private members in the .NET framework opens up a whole new world of possibilities for security holes...
What does this mean for the security of
99 cents for a song is too much
Yep, just like $3.25 is way too much for a cup of coffee. Nobody will pay that much for "trendy" coffee.
Or like $3.99 is too much for a video rental, when you can buy the movie for $20.
Or like $1.85 is too much for a gallon of gas - I'd rather walk.
Guess what? There are a lot of songs I'd like to buy for $0.99. I'll still buy CD's, and I might still use P2P, especially for things that simply aren't available legally. But you seem to think that they're not offering any value for $0.99, and I think you're wrong.
The way I understand it, SCO is alleging that somebody took a nontrivial amount of code from the Unix source that SCO now owns, and copied it somewhere into the Linux codebase, thereby releasing that code under the GPL.
Now people are worried that because SCO also distributed this same code under the GPL, that somehow "legitimizes" its release, which makes the GPL seem "viral". In other words, because SCO owned the original code, by releasing that code under the GPL they in effect dual-licensed it, even though the Linux contributor who put the code in there didn't have a legal right to do so.
Do people think this will really hold up? In order to release something under the GPL in the first place, you have to own the code or have the right to license that code to begin with. If I steal Microsoft's code and release it under the GPL, that doesn't make the code actually GPL'd, because I never had the right to so license the code.
SCO's case is complicated by the fact that they also distributed the same code after somebody GPL'd it, without their knowledge at the time. But since they stopped releasing the code (relatively soon) after they became aware that it contained some of their own proprietary code, then I think this should effectively kill the GPL on that code. The person who put it in there in the first place didn't have the rights to, and SCO didn't know it was there when they distributed it.
What do you think? Did SCO really lose their rights to their code by "accidentally" releasing it under the GPL, as a result of someone else's illegal licensing of it in the first place? I certainly hope not.
If I give a counterfeit dollar to the U.S. government, and they in turn give it to someone else, not realizing it's fake, that doesn't somehow legitimize that bill. It's still not legal tender.
Same thing with this code. Since SCO wasn't the one to GPL it, the code isn't legally GPL'd.
IANAL.