How can you care about the risk of someone faking your finger print when most financial transactions are verified with a signature?
The problem is that if people believe that fingerprints and other biometrics are "more secure" than signatures, they'll rely on them more and more - making it easier for criminals to do more damage, and making it harder for honest people to prove they didn't commit the fraudulent transactions.
Geeks who speak English have little reason to need RealNames.
However, the same can't be said for average computer users whose native language can't be rendered in ASCII (i.e. most of Asia). RealNames made it possible for them to go to websites by typing in words in their native language, instead of words in a character set they may not be familiar with.
If anyone is interested in purchasing clothes that weren't made in sweatshops, you have to check out SweatX.net. Right now they're only selling bulk orders (i.e. 144 or more T-shirts with your logo on them) but they hope to sell to the general public soon.
They make all of their garments in Los Angeles, and their workers get paid a living wage, work in comfortable conditions, and have a say in how their company is run.
As far as sweatshop-free athletic shoes, the least of many evils appears to be New Balance - most of their labor is American, they don't spend any money on product endorsements, and they're committed to product quality. Note that they're privately held, not a publicly traded company, which helps to explain why they don't feel pressured to compromise their ideals in exchange for higher profits.
I'd love to hear about other examples of alternatives to sweatshops if anyone knows of them.
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
While I appreciate the motivation, I don't like the way this reads. I don't want people to be scared by the GPL, I want them to welcome it.
I'm a GPL author. I want people to use my code, and I want them to read through my code and learn from it. I released the source code for free for a reason: so that people will use it and benefit from it.
What I don't want is for someone to take an entire program I've written, and package it and sell it for a profit (unless they release the code, of course). That's why I use the GPL. But the last thing I want to do is discourage people from using my code in a reasonable way, because they're afraid they might inadvertantly violate the GPL be prosecuted for theft.
It looks like the few people who are working on the OS X port are definitely looking at that route: there will actually be two OS X ports, one for X Windows and one for Aqua. The X one should be ready far sooner.
However, there are still very few developers. Unfortunately Mac developers are far too used to developing shareware software, and the Mac community is far too used to paying for it.
Maybe because the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice doesn't exist yet? (So far they only have 90% of the code _compiling_, much less running correctly.)
I love my Mac, but unfortunately the majority of Mac developers are not used to the idea of open source. Hardly anyone is interested in working on this project.
I've been using DreamHost for two years now, and I think that their tech support is phenomenal. They provide web hosting, with email accounts, shell access, secure transactions, etc.
As a rule, they offer no telephone support. All of their support is via email, or a web form in case your email is down. They usually respond within an hour, and always within 24 hours. The people who respond are actual techs, and they actually have the power to fix things if they're broken.
One of the nicest features about their support web form, though is that after you ask your question, there's a little choice control, with the question: "Please select your general expertise in the area of this request:", with options ranging from "Please explain everything to me carefully" to "I have a good understanding of this stuff" and even "Not to be rude, but I probably know more about this than you!".
What a difference it makes! They don't waste their time reminding me to check my caps lock key when typing in my password, and similarly they don't confuse a newbie by talking about IMAP vs. POP3 (they support both, BTW, which rocks!).
I really like this model - I would be willing to give up phone support from any company if their email support worked this well.
And I highly recommend DreamHost for all of your web-hosting needs. And that's not just because if you say that "dmazzoni" referred you, I'll get a discount!
This is totally relevant to the article. The reference Ogg Vorbis encoder is not capable of being run on an iPod. If we want to see Ogg Vorbis on embedded hardware, we need a fixed-point decoder, and if we want a fixed-point decoder, we need complete specs from the Xiph team. That's exactly what Rob Leslie was complaining about.
On the other hand, there's no technical reason why we shouldn't be able to have Ogg decoding in iTunes. It'll use a little more of your processor than MP3, but it'll work fine.
I don't quite follow your argument. Yes, it's good that they've provided binary drivers - better than nothing, right? And they do seem to keep them up to date.
But I have two NVIDIA cards to support dual heads. Unfortunately their driver crashes immediately if you try to use it on both cards simultaneously. The only way I can use two heads is to run NVIDIA's driver on one card (which gives me video acceleration) and the old, open-source driver on the other card, which gives me no acceleration.
So while I appreciate NVIDIA is trying, their drivers are not perfect, and thus they should either open up the source, or the specs.
I didn't like Stephen King's analysis of his downloadable book. Actually, lots and lots of people were paying for it. King wanted 75% or more of downloaders to pay for it, and when they didn't, he canceled the project. While over 80% paid for the first chapter, only 46% of the people who downloaded the last chapter paid for it.
But that's still a lot of people who were willing to pay for it! It also doesn't take into account the number of people who downloaded it maliciously, or those who paid once but downloaded it twice or more (on different computers, for example).
The only real test of e-books would be this: a major author needs to start releasing _all_ of his/her new books in e-book format. Not just an occasional short story, and not one chapter at a time. Now, taking into account that it's much cheaper to sell a book online, is your total profit made from selling the e-book more or less than the total profit made from selling your last paperback?
Lots of people have mentioned reasons why you shouldn't be using Flash, or why it's difficult to write an open-source implementation of Flash.
However, I think the reason there's no complete, stable open-source implementation of Flash is that:
1. It's a very large project 2. With a very small market
The fact is that very few people actually need to create Flash content. Most companies that want a little bit of Flash on their websites are better off paying someone else to build it for them. Therefore, the price ($500) is quite reasonable - it's honestly what Macromedia needs to charge in order to be able to create a product that only a tiny number of people need to own.
Contrast this with Microsoft Word. (Yes, you can still purchase Word without Office; it costs $289, all of Office costs $419). Everyone needs a basic word processor. However, most users only need 10% of Microsoft Word's features, and therefore the price of Microsoft Word is not fair. The fact that everyone needs a basic word processor, plus the fact that the commercial competition is unfairly priced, is what has driven so many open-source developers to create word processors. (My favorites: AbiWord, OpenOffice Write, and KWord. I'm not even counting LaTeX-based tools, which I also enjoy, but aren't for the masses.)
I'm not presuming they don't know about Babelfish; I just think that the end result of their effort will be a great language-to-language dictionary, NOT a useful translator.
Idioms help a little. They don't address more subtle context issues, or grammar.
I would maybe be willing to concede that a system like this could help to improve an existing translator by building up its library of words and phrases. But I think it would be totally useless for a brand-new language: without any a priori hand-coded rules of grammar built into the system, it would never be able to translate more than 10% of queries.
I think it's a great idea to harness the power of millions of people around the world all contributing a few minutes of their time, to create a gigantic any-language to any-language dictionary.
However, this will do nothing to aid in machine translation. You can't simply translate individual words from one language to another, or even short phrases. Translators such as Babelfish
understand the basic rules of grammar in each language in order to handle fundamental differences in the way different languages put sentences together.
But Babelfish and other online translators are still a far cry from doing true translation, because they don't understand the text they're trying to translate.
Check out a commercial software product called Coda SmartMusic Studio - it's intended for students practicing classical music, but it does just that - follows along with you as you play your instrument or sing.
This product was based on the research of Roger Dannenberg, who had auto-accompaniment working years ago. Send him an email if you're interested in working on something similar; he has lots of code he can throw at you and he might want to collaborate.
When my girlfriend and I lived in separate states, our long-distance bill was huge...but we expected that. We were able to minimize it by using calling cards and talking in the evening.
Now my girlfriend and I live together...and our long-distance bill is small. If there was a flat rate for long-distance, it would certainly be higher than I'm paying now. All that would do is anger the 80% of people who use a less than average amount of long distance. (Yes, my math is right - the top 20% of long-distance callers talk five times as long.)
I would actually be willing to pay for cable/DSL by the megabyte. Why? Because that would encourage adoption...my grandma would be able to get DSL for $3 a month because she just checks email. I'd pay $60 a month, but I'd be getting my money's worth. And when I go out of town for two weeks, my bill would reflect it.
Having the option of a flat-rate plan is fine, but I think that it's not best for most people.
>>One thing I have wondered using OpenOffice (and als o Mozilla) is:
>>How do they manage to make them so slow?!
>Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform.
You hit it right on the money. It's extremely difficult to write complicated programs so that they're efficient on multiple platforms. Differences in the windowing system are only part of it - another big part is how the different OS's deal with multiple threads, file I/O, etc. - what's very fast and efficient on one platform might be quite slow on another.
If anyone's thinking of starting development on a cross-platform program now, you should seriously look at wxWindows - it abstracts the GUI, file I/O, networking, and many other things and runs on Windows, Unix/GTK, and all MacOS's...and unlike Mozilla and Qt, it uses native widgets on all platforms! Unfortunately wxWindows wasn't mature and stable enough a few years ago when Mozilla was getting started, or even longer ago when StarOffice was getting started, so they had to invent the wheel themselves.
Sure, he can claim it more easily than most other representatives, but that doesn't make it true.
Schiff represents not just Burbank, but also Glendale and Pasadena, huge technology areas. I wouldn't be surprised if he has ten times as many constituents who work in the tech industry, than who work in the entertainment industry.
Can we fight fire with fire? I think it's time that tech businesses in his district started giving Adam some big donations, too.
Also check out this website where you can purchase emergency cell phones, or reprogram an existing cell phone to work that way. Not only will it dial 911 (as all cell phones do, with or without a service plan), but with a credit card, you can dial ANY number for a little less than $2 a minute - but with no monthly service fee.
If you don't use it, it costs nothing, but if you're really in trouble, you can call any number you want, and pay only for what you use.
I really don't like meat. I'm _also_ an environmentalist, and I admit that I have moral issues with the way animals are raised in factory farms. Of course there are health benefits to not eating lots of meat, too.
But if healthful, cruelty-free meat were to be introduced, I still wouldn't want to eat it. After nearly six years of no meat, I have no desire to go back.
I'm a little worried that people will give me a hard time: "There's no rational objection why you shouldn't eat it! Now you're just being a picky eater..." - as if it wasn't hard enough being a vegetarian in our society already.
Still, I think this is a good idea - in my mind the potential environmental benefit outweighs any other objections I can think of. If people can choose between meat that contributes directly to the destruction of Brazilian rainforests to make room for more cattle, and meat that comes from a lab, some will choose the lab meat. That's one step in the right direction.
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How can you care about the risk of someone faking your finger print when most financial transactions are verified with a signature?
The problem is that if people believe that fingerprints and other biometrics are "more secure" than signatures, they'll rely on them more and more - making it easier for criminals to do more damage, and making it harder for honest people to prove they didn't commit the fraudulent transactions.
Geeks who speak English have little reason to need RealNames.
However, the same can't be said for average computer users whose native language can't be rendered in ASCII (i.e. most of Asia). RealNames made it possible for them to go to websites by typing in words in their native language, instead of words in a character set they may not be familiar with.
If anyone is interested in purchasing clothes that weren't made in sweatshops, you have to check out SweatX.net. Right now they're only selling bulk orders (i.e. 144 or more T-shirts with your logo on them) but they hope to sell to the general public soon.
They make all of their garments in Los Angeles, and their workers get paid a living wage, work in comfortable conditions, and have a say in how their company is run.
As far as sweatshop-free athletic shoes, the least of many evils appears to be New Balance - most of their labor is American, they don't spend any money on product endorsements, and they're committed to product quality. Note that they're privately held, not a publicly traded company, which helps to explain why they don't feel pressured to compromise their ideals in exchange for higher profits.
I'd love to hear about other examples of alternatives to sweatshops if anyone knows of them.
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
While I appreciate the motivation, I don't like the way this reads. I don't want people to be scared by the GPL, I want them to welcome it.
I'm a GPL author. I want people to use my code, and I want them to read through my code and learn from it. I released the source code for free for a reason: so that people will use it and benefit from it.
What I don't want is for someone to take an entire program I've written, and package it and sell it for a profit (unless they release the code, of course). That's why I use the GPL. But the last thing I want to do is discourage people from using my code in a reasonable way, because they're afraid they might inadvertantly violate the GPL be prosecuted for theft.
It looks like the few people who are working on the OS X port are definitely looking at that route: there will actually be two OS X ports, one for X Windows and one for Aqua. The X one should be ready far sooner.
However, there are still very few developers. Unfortunately Mac developers are far too used to developing shareware software, and the Mac community is far too used to paying for it.
I agree with you except for one point: it's okay to cut pay...just not like this.
It's okay to cut everyone's pay by 10% because the company is struggling. It's not okay to suddenly take away half a months' salary.
Maybe because the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice doesn't exist yet? (So far they only have 90% of the code _compiling_, much less running correctly.)
I love my Mac, but unfortunately the majority of Mac developers are not used to the idea of open source. Hardly anyone is interested in working on this project.
As a rule, they offer no telephone support. All of their support is via email, or a web form in case your email is down. They usually respond within an hour, and always within 24 hours. The people who respond are actual techs, and they actually have the power to fix things if they're broken.
One of the nicest features about their support web form, though is that after you ask your question, there's a little choice control, with the question: "Please select your general expertise in the area of this request:", with options ranging from "Please explain everything to me carefully" to "I have a good understanding of this stuff" and even "Not to be rude, but I probably know more about this than you!".
What a difference it makes! They don't waste their time reminding me to check my caps lock key when typing in my password, and similarly they don't confuse a newbie by talking about IMAP vs. POP3 (they support both, BTW, which rocks!).
I really like this model - I would be willing to give up phone support from any company if their email support worked this well.
And I highly recommend DreamHost for all of your web-hosting needs. And that's not just because if you say that "dmazzoni" referred you, I'll get a discount!
This is totally relevant to the article. The reference Ogg Vorbis encoder is not capable of being run on an iPod. If we want to see Ogg Vorbis on embedded hardware, we need a fixed-point decoder, and if we want a fixed-point decoder, we need complete specs from the Xiph team. That's exactly what Rob Leslie was complaining about.
On the other hand, there's no technical reason why we shouldn't be able to have Ogg decoding in iTunes. It'll use a little more of your processor than MP3, but it'll work fine.
> How does MAD compare to mpg123 ? Is it much better?
MAD is more portable, higher quality (outputs 24-bit samples instead of 16-bit samples if you want) and an order of magnitude faster.
Is that good enough for you?
I don't quite follow your argument. Yes, it's good that they've provided binary drivers - better than nothing, right? And they do seem to keep them up to date.
But I have two NVIDIA cards to support dual heads. Unfortunately their driver crashes immediately if you try to use it on both cards simultaneously. The only way I can use two heads is to run NVIDIA's driver on one card (which gives me video acceleration) and the old, open-source driver on the other card, which gives me no acceleration.
So while I appreciate NVIDIA is trying, their drivers are not perfect, and thus they should either open up the source, or the specs.
I didn't like Stephen King's analysis of his downloadable book. Actually, lots and lots of people were paying for it. King wanted 75% or more of downloaders to pay for it, and when they didn't, he canceled the project. While over 80% paid for the first chapter, only 46% of the people who downloaded the last chapter paid for it.
But that's still a lot of people who were willing to pay for it! It also doesn't take into account the number of people who downloaded it maliciously, or those who paid once but downloaded it twice or more (on different computers, for example).
The only real test of e-books would be this: a major author needs to start releasing _all_ of his/her new books in e-book format. Not just an occasional short story, and not one chapter at a time. Now, taking into account that it's much cheaper to sell a book online, is your total profit made from selling the e-book more or less than the total profit made from selling your last paperback?
Lots of people have mentioned reasons why you shouldn't be using Flash, or why it's difficult to write an open-source implementation of Flash.
However, I think the reason there's no complete, stable open-source implementation of Flash is that:
1. It's a very large project
2. With a very small market
The fact is that very few people actually need to create Flash content. Most companies that want a little bit of Flash on their websites are better off paying someone else to build it for them. Therefore, the price ($500) is quite reasonable - it's honestly what Macromedia needs to charge in order to be able to create a product that only a tiny number of people need to own.
Contrast this with Microsoft Word. (Yes, you can still purchase Word without Office; it costs $289, all of Office costs $419). Everyone needs a basic word processor. However, most users only need 10% of Microsoft Word's features, and therefore the price of Microsoft Word is not fair. The fact that everyone needs a basic word processor, plus the fact that the commercial competition is unfairly priced, is what has driven so many open-source developers to create word processors. (My favorites: AbiWord, OpenOffice Write, and KWord. I'm not even counting LaTeX-based tools, which I also enjoy, but aren't for the masses.)
I did read the article.
I'm not presuming they don't know about Babelfish; I just think that the end result of their effort will be a great language-to-language dictionary, NOT a useful translator.
Idioms help a little. They don't address more subtle context issues, or grammar.
I would maybe be willing to concede that a system like this could help to improve an existing translator by building up its library of words and phrases. But I think it would be totally useless for a brand-new language: without any a priori hand-coded rules of grammar built into the system, it would never be able to translate more than 10% of queries.
However, this will do nothing to aid in machine translation. You can't simply translate individual words from one language to another, or even short phrases. Translators such as Babelfish understand the basic rules of grammar in each language in order to handle fundamental differences in the way different languages put sentences together.
But Babelfish and other online translators are still a far cry from doing true translation, because they don't understand the text they're trying to translate.
OK, I totally missed your point.
That is funny!
This product was based on the research of Roger Dannenberg, who had auto-accompaniment working years ago. Send him an email if you're interested in working on something similar; he has lots of code he can throw at you and he might want to collaborate.
Hang on...not everything should be flat-rate.
When my girlfriend and I lived in separate states, our long-distance bill was huge...but we expected that. We were able to minimize it by using calling cards and talking in the evening.
Now my girlfriend and I live together...and our long-distance bill is small. If there was a flat rate for long-distance, it would certainly be higher than I'm paying now. All that would do is anger the 80% of people who use a less than average amount of long distance. (Yes, my math is right - the top 20% of long-distance callers talk five times as long.)
I would actually be willing to pay for cable/DSL by the megabyte. Why? Because that would encourage adoption...my grandma would be able to get DSL for $3 a month because she just checks email. I'd pay $60 a month, but I'd be getting my money's worth. And when I go out of town for two weeks, my bill would reflect it.
Having the option of a flat-rate plan is fine, but I think that it's not best for most people.
>>How do they manage to make them so slow?!
>Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform.
You hit it right on the money. It's extremely difficult to write complicated programs so that they're efficient on multiple platforms. Differences in the windowing system are only part of it - another big part is how the different OS's deal with multiple threads, file I/O, etc. - what's very fast and efficient on one platform might be quite slow on another.
If anyone's thinking of starting development on a cross-platform program now, you should seriously look at wxWindows - it abstracts the GUI, file I/O, networking, and many other things and runs on Windows, Unix/GTK, and all MacOS's...and unlike Mozilla and Qt, it uses native widgets on all platforms! Unfortunately wxWindows wasn't mature and stable enough a few years ago when Mozilla was getting started, or even longer ago when StarOffice was getting started, so they had to invent the wheel themselves.
Sure, he can claim it more easily than most other representatives, but that doesn't make it true.
Schiff represents not just Burbank, but also Glendale and Pasadena, huge technology areas. I wouldn't be surprised if he has ten times as many constituents who work in the tech industry, than who work in the entertainment industry.
Can we fight fire with fire? I think it's time that tech businesses in his district started giving Adam some big donations, too.
If you don't use it, it costs nothing, but if you're really in trouble, you can call any number you want, and pay only for what you use.
I'm a vegetarian.
I really don't like meat. I'm _also_ an environmentalist, and I admit that I have moral issues with the way animals are raised in factory farms. Of course there are health benefits to not eating lots of meat, too.
But if healthful, cruelty-free meat were to be introduced, I still wouldn't want to eat it. After nearly six years of no meat, I have no desire to go back.
I'm a little worried that people will give me a hard time: "There's no rational objection why you shouldn't eat it! Now you're just being a picky eater..." - as if it wasn't hard enough being a vegetarian in our society already.
Still, I think this is a good idea - in my mind the potential environmental benefit outweighs any other objections I can think of. If people can choose between meat that contributes directly to the destruction of Brazilian rainforests to make room for more cattle, and meat that comes from a lab, some will choose the lab meat. That's one step in the right direction.
Professor Moody really enjoys his puns and other wordplay - when I was at Harvey Mudd, some other fun math talks included:
A lecture on "Pi" - followed by pie.
A lecture on the mathematics of juggling by Ron Graham - followed by graham crackers.
A lecture on math (I can't remember what the topic was) by Ed Burger - followed by Baskin Robbins Chilly Brrrgers.
Your discrete math book is wrong.
Either that or you misunderstood it.
Hooray for dabbrev-expand!!!
If there are any emacs users reading this who don't know what dabbrev-expand is, try it now. It works like magic!