How are they going to manage to fit this all onto the faceplate of one multifunction device?
The version of Slashcode currently installed on Slashdot will strip out any plus-or-minus sign (±) that I try to insert. Taco put it on when people were abusing Unicode bidirectionality overrides and making parts of the page look more like Hebrew than English. Thus, when you see a # sign in the following paragraph, imagine an underlined + sign.
It won't be hard to fit the necessary logos on Sony's "DVD#RW" drive, which stands for DVD plus or minus RW. Do you really think it'll be that hard to fit the "COMPACT disc ReWritable High Speed" logo, the "DVD ( o ) RW" logo, and the "RW DVD+ReWritable" logo on the face of the disc tray?
background: people of ethnic minorities tend to live in areas where crime happens; thus they are statistically more likely to commit crimes
AC: is that why they called the movie "Minority Report"?
Heck no. A minority report is a statement of a dissenting opinion. Say you have a panel of nine judges, and six of them decide one way and three the other. The six write the majority report, and the three write the minority report. Saying anything more would be a spoiler.
IMHO they should not bring out another format until they can store 4 hours of video on a disc without resorting to lossy compression.
The way the lossless/lossy distinction is tossed around on Slashdot ("lossy sux0rz, lossless r00lz") bugs me. There's no such thing as "lossless" unless you reproduce the original film atom-for-atom, and even then, quantum effects will screw it up. It becomes a matter of how much loss a fellow is willing to accept. For most users, an 8 Mbit/s stream of MPEG-2 video + AC3 is more than enough, and that's what a DVD offers. If by "lossless" you mean "linear PCM video and audio", then even those aren't lossless, as video is typically quantized down to 8 bits per channel per pixel, and audio rarely goes deeper than 24 bits per channel per sample.
Now, if they decide to stop and give back the money, will they release the code as GPL?
If I remember correctly, the Liquid Audio codec was an implementation of the MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AAC codec developed by Fraunhofer. Unlike the company that makes RTLinux, I don't think Fraunhofer will easily cough up a license to use its patents for software licensed under the GNU GPL.
With the FCC trying to establish low-power radio stations (at one point, I'm not sure whether it's been quashed by ClearChannel or not)
Low-power FM radio is dead, but I cannot state conclusively as to whether Clear Channel Communications was responsible. Applications for low-power FM radio must be filed within a five-day window. The FCC hasn't opened any such windows in over a year and doesn't plan to open any more windows for filing low-power FM radio license applications in the foreseeable future.
Basic cable television service probably doesn't cost that much. dacarr talked abour $40-$80, and in some areas, cable modem service does cost that much, at least in part because some local cable monopolies will offer cable modem service only to basic cable television subscribers.
you should move.
That would cost even more, to the tune of $200,000. Give the poor fellow 30 years to pay it off with interest, and it still costs at least $600 a month.
as it would mean [that Sigma would] have to GPL all the software which is aggregated with it as well).
Wrong. The GNU General Public License "infects" only other code that runs in the same process space, not code that's merely aggregated onto a storage medium with GPL code or code that interacts with GPL code through message-based interprocess communication such as a pipe or socket using a well-defined interface. Read more in this section of the GPL FAQ.
Not all [shell providers have an absurdly small quota] though - not some university accounts.
I have a 100 MB shell account at my university, but it costs $30,000 a year to maintain, and I'll lose it within the next ten months:-(
They can use a 386 laptop to log into a remote machine and compile the software on a state of the art machine.
How much space does a Solaris/SPARC hosted DOS/x86 targeted or GBA/ARM targeted cross-compiler take on a shell account's quota, assuming that it isn't popular enough for the shell server admin to install for everybody? And then how long does it take to download the binary once it's compiled?
Also, when I was on 14.4kbps modem and wanted several articles (totally maybe 4mb) on a page to look at I'd login to the remote shell account, wget the pages quickly, zip them up really same (text compresses really well after all) and then download them from my service provider.
Since then, HTTP has added gzip as a content encoding, and/. uses it.
Last time I checked no-one writes completly bug free code, we had problems with bugs in the tests.
Same thing at Rose-Hulman, for Dr. Anderson's classes (UNIX system programming, and programming language concepts). The students discussed the assigned problems in the course's newsgroup, and often, students would find bugs in the public test suites. That's how it is in any decent-size software engineering endeavour: a cat and mouse game between coders and testers.
[A hard drive that has lost power] probably performs a controlled end-of-write as soon as possible and moves the head into the parking position.
Why can't such a drive be fitted with a capacitor or something to store just enough power to be able to commit the controller's cached data to disk? Does the motor use too much current for that to be practical?
Got a 20mb file that you want a couple friends to check out.
Not if a free shell provider (the subject of this article; pay shell providers are possibly -1, Offtopic) limits you to 5 MB. Besides, according to my reading of this reply to one of my other comments, if I want "a couple friends" to see a copyrighted and not freely licensed file, I'm apparently supposed to invite them into my home.
my server at home
You keep mentioning logging into your computer at home from work through SSH and X11 forwarding. Is what you're talking about practical on my dial-up connection?
I also play boggle remotely.
Have you tried playing anything like Super Mario Bros. remotely, over dial-up?
1. I called several stations and tried to request some of the songs on the albums from which they regularly play songs, and the DJ said: "Sorry, we don't have those songs because they were not released as a single."[1]
2. The sound quality of radio is no indicator of the sound quality of the CD itself because of all the dynamic squeezing the engineers do to fit the sound within the limited dynamic range of FM radio. Many CDs sound like crap because they're mastered to sound louder than other CDs, not to sound better than other CDs.
MTV, VH1, CMT
For one thing, music videos are made only for singles, so we're back to the same problem as radio if an album has only one or two singles. For another, if I don't have the money to buy an album based on one song, how can I have the money for cable television?
friends who have a copy of the CD
Most of my friends live far away from me and often aren't willing to mail me their copy. Is this normal?
concerts
Should I be expected to be willing to drive 200 miles (320 km) to a venue where 1. the band is playing, and 2. no alcoholic beverages are served? Many bands play mostly at bars, and not all people in my exact situation are old enough to enter bars in their home jurisdiction.
commercials on TV for SamGoody
Again, the problem of only singles.
CowboyNeal Karaoke Night
Again, the problem of geographical distance.
[1] My favorite song (nine inch nails - into the void) on one of the albums I have bought on recommendation from one of the few friends who live near me (nine inch nails - the fragile) was not released as a single in the United States.
Maybe not. But Adobe publishing software does happen to be available only for platforms where Microsoft Office is available.
And to the original question: "Since when was Photoshop a Microsoft product?"
I replied: "Adobe is the Microsoft of publishing software." Does Adobe have competitors that can match its market share? Or does it have Market Power(tm) in one or more of its markets, such as high-end photo editing software?
Shell accounts... have one major use that I can think of right now; people without permanant internet access can use them to run - say - an eggdrop.
Yes, I understand that shell accounts are useful for running services, but that's no help if the most prominent free shell account providers prohibit running such services in their acceptable use policies. For example, according to this list of shells, a prominent shell provider "doesn't allow bots. Don't even bother downloading stuff like Eggdrop, BitchX, psybnc, etc. since [the provider] has filters that won't let them run, and the admins will chase down the files and remove them."
The placement and content of your post certainly indicated that the anon. cowturd was right in saying people don't own the copyright to works they create. Maybe you should take a look at the Copyright Office's website
That wasn't exactly what I meant. What I meant was that a person may not own the copyright to a work he claims to have created because he did not actually create the entire work; he copied substantial portions (four notes) from another work. I don't want to leave plaintiffs any room to maneuver because I don't have any money for legal representation.
and getting Nazi laws passed
What's a "Nazi law"? There are no National Socialists in the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate.
absurd little technicalities that were used 80 years ago.
But has Congress repealed such technicalities, such as four notes equaling substantial copying? If not, the precedent remains on the case-law books.
Before buying a record[1], how do you expect to know whether you will like a recording or not, except by sampling a few singles through file-sharing networks? I'm not claiming that this justifies abuse of P2P technology, but what other solution is there?
[1] USA copyright law defines "phonorecord" to refer to a slab of vinyl, a CD, or any other medium in which a sound recording has been fixed.
The thought process is that since you have so little bandwidth and probably less power, disk space, memory, etc. at home that there's not much point in using that computer as anything but a glass terminal, and doing interesting things only on the remote system.
I'm still unclear on some of the uses of a shell account. Let's cross-check your thought process against your list of applications:
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Not according to the AUPs of most of the free shell providers I've seen. (Free shell providers are the subject of this Slashdot article.)
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Which is limited by the speed of the eyeballs and fingers. How is reading mail over SSH any better than reading mail over SSL'd IMAP? And unless you run a mailing list, why would sending mail need a lot of server bandwidth?
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big.jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.
The shell account is the network pc taken one step further, and is effective even with fairly slow networks.
Unless you want to run anything that's image or audio based and interactive. Take too much intelligence off the client, and you run the risk of having the cumulative effects of long-haul latency (speed of light across a big country such as the United States) and last-mile latency (slow dial-up connection) ruin the interactive experience. Has X11 been optimized to run efficiently over 48 kbps down, 24 kbps up?
Still, if you didn't think thin client computing was a good idea, you probably don't find shell accounts useful either.
Makers of modern network computers recognize that thin client does not mean as thin as a teletype machine's paper. They try to achieve a compromise between the shell account setup (all intelligence on the shell server; client is just a terminal or X server) and the PC setup (all intelligence on the client; only data is shared across the network) by using applets compiled to a cross-platform bytecode and run across the network. For more about this approach, look at Java(tm) technology or its competition.
Yes, you could do most of those things on your own system, but chances are pretty good that you have less bandwidth. This is especially true if you can only afford or only have access to dialup network access.
Then how would you transfer large files from your shell account to your own system?
Proprietary (especially box shifted) software tends to go for a monolithic throw in everything including the kitchen sink type of approach, whereas open source tends to go for a more modular and structured design.
Slashdot Mirror
Coca-Cola, Inc. announces it is discontinuing its "New Coke" line of products.
New Coke was renamed to "Coke II" in 1990. Apparently, Coca-Cola Co. still sells Coke II in some metropolitan areas.
--
ENJOY COCAINE!
How are they going to manage to fit this all onto the faceplate of one multifunction device?
The version of Slashcode currently installed on Slashdot will strip out any plus-or-minus sign (±) that I try to insert. Taco put it on when people were abusing Unicode bidirectionality overrides and making parts of the page look more like Hebrew than English. Thus, when you see a # sign in the following paragraph, imagine an underlined + sign.
It won't be hard to fit the necessary logos on Sony's "DVD#RW" drive, which stands for DVD plus or minus RW. Do you really think it'll be that hard to fit the "COMPACT disc ReWritable High Speed" logo, the "DVD ( o ) RW" logo, and the "RW DVD+ReWritable" logo on the face of the disc tray?
background: people of ethnic minorities tend to live in areas where crime happens; thus they are statistically more likely to commit crimes
AC: is that why they called the movie "Minority Report"?
Heck no. A minority report is a statement of a dissenting opinion. Say you have a panel of nine judges, and six of them decide one way and three the other. The six write the majority report, and the three write the minority report. Saying anything more would be a spoiler.
IMHO they should not bring out another format until they can store 4 hours of video on a disc without resorting to lossy compression.
The way the lossless/lossy distinction is tossed around on Slashdot ("lossy sux0rz, lossless r00lz") bugs me. There's no such thing as "lossless" unless you reproduce the original film atom-for-atom, and even then, quantum effects will screw it up. It becomes a matter of how much loss a fellow is willing to accept. For most users, an 8 Mbit/s stream of MPEG-2 video + AC3 is more than enough, and that's what a DVD offers. If by "lossless" you mean "linear PCM video and audio", then even those aren't lossless, as video is typically quantized down to 8 bits per channel per pixel, and audio rarely goes deeper than 24 bits per channel per sample.
Define your usage of lossless.
Now, if they decide to stop and give back the money, will they release the code as GPL?
If I remember correctly, the Liquid Audio codec was an implementation of the MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AAC codec developed by Fraunhofer. Unlike the company that makes RTLinux, I don't think Fraunhofer will easily cough up a license to use its patents for software licensed under the GNU GPL.
With the FCC trying to establish low-power radio stations (at one point, I'm not sure whether it's been quashed by ClearChannel or not)
Low-power FM radio is dead, but I cannot state conclusively as to whether Clear Channel Communications was responsible. Applications for low-power FM radio must be filed within a five-day window. The FCC hasn't opened any such windows in over a year and doesn't plan to open any more windows for filing low-power FM radio license applications in the foreseeable future.
If basic cable in your area costs $80
Basic cable television service probably doesn't cost that much. dacarr talked abour $40-$80, and in some areas, cable modem service does cost that much, at least in part because some local cable monopolies will offer cable modem service only to basic cable television subscribers.
you should move.
That would cost even more, to the tune of $200,000. Give the poor fellow 30 years to pay it off with interest, and it still costs at least $600 a month.
Or you could just ask your friend for the URL...
Uniform Resource Locators were not designed to be easily pronounced in situations such as giving a URL over the radio or over the telephone. Canonical example: hotel tango tango papa colon slash slash Slashdot dot org. A natural language keyword system, such as what DNS has mutated into, produces better results for name spaces that are restricted by the phonotactics of a spoken natural language (go to Google.com, as in Barney Google, and type in Slashdot, all one word).
[Unlike DNS,] LDAP is for searching through and accessing categorized directories.
But is there a popular free public LDAP server that covers the whole Internet? Or is LDAP designed primarily for use on a company LAN?
as it would mean [that Sigma would] have to GPL all the software which is aggregated with it as well).
Wrong. The GNU General Public License "infects" only other code that runs in the same process space, not code that's merely aggregated onto a storage medium with GPL code or code that interacts with GPL code through message-based interprocess communication such as a pipe or socket using a well-defined interface. Read more in this section of the GPL FAQ.
Not all [shell providers have an absurdly small quota] though - not some university accounts.
I have a 100 MB shell account at my university, but it costs $30,000 a year to maintain, and I'll lose it within the next ten months :-(
They can use a 386 laptop to log into a remote machine and compile the software on a state of the art machine.
How much space does a Solaris/SPARC hosted DOS/x86 targeted or GBA/ARM targeted cross-compiler take on a shell account's quota, assuming that it isn't popular enough for the shell server admin to install for everybody? And then how long does it take to download the binary once it's compiled?
Also, when I was on 14.4kbps modem and wanted several articles (totally maybe 4mb) on a page to look at I'd login to the remote shell account, wget the pages quickly, zip them up really same (text compresses really well after all) and then download them from my service provider.
Since then, HTTP has added gzip as a content encoding, and /. uses it.
Last time I checked no-one writes completly bug free code, we had problems with bugs in the tests.
Same thing at Rose-Hulman, for Dr. Anderson's classes (UNIX system programming, and programming language concepts). The students discussed the assigned problems in the course's newsgroup, and often, students would find bugs in the public test suites. That's how it is in any decent-size software engineering endeavour: a cat and mouse game between coders and testers.
Mac OS X is proprietary, but does not have the steep licensing fees that windows does.
Yes it does. Mac OS X is a $100 OS with a $1000 hardware key. (I make no statement about the TCO, only the initial cost of hardware and OS per seat.)
[A hard drive that has lost power] probably performs a controlled end-of-write as soon as possible and moves the head into the parking position.
Why can't such a drive be fitted with a capacitor or something to store just enough power to be able to commit the controller's cached data to disk? Does the motor use too much current for that to be practical?
Got a 20mb file that you want a couple friends to check out.
Not if a free shell provider (the subject of this article; pay shell providers are possibly -1, Offtopic) limits you to 5 MB. Besides, according to my reading of this reply to one of my other comments, if I want "a couple friends" to see a copyrighted and not freely licensed file, I'm apparently supposed to invite them into my home.
my server at home
You keep mentioning logging into your computer at home from work through SSH and X11 forwarding. Is what you're talking about practical on my dial-up connection?
I also play boggle remotely.
Have you tried playing anything like Super Mario Bros. remotely, over dial-up?
Radio
1. I called several stations and tried to request some of the songs on the albums from which they regularly play songs, and the DJ said: "Sorry, we don't have those songs because they were not released as a single."[1]
2. The sound quality of radio is no indicator of the sound quality of the CD itself because of all the dynamic squeezing the engineers do to fit the sound within the limited dynamic range of FM radio. Many CDs sound like crap because they're mastered to sound louder than other CDs, not to sound better than other CDs.
MTV, VH1, CMT
For one thing, music videos are made only for singles, so we're back to the same problem as radio if an album has only one or two singles. For another, if I don't have the money to buy an album based on one song, how can I have the money for cable television?
friends who have a copy of the CD
Most of my friends live far away from me and often aren't willing to mail me their copy. Is this normal?
concerts
Should I be expected to be willing to drive 200 miles (320 km) to a venue where 1. the band is playing, and 2. no alcoholic beverages are served? Many bands play mostly at bars, and not all people in my exact situation are old enough to enter bars in their home jurisdiction.
commercials on TV for SamGoody
Again, the problem of only singles.
CowboyNeal Karaoke Night
Again, the problem of geographical distance.
[1] My favorite song (nine inch nails - into the void) on one of the albums I have bought on recommendation from one of the few friends who live near me (nine inch nails - the fragile) was not released as a single in the United States.
OS X is NOT an MS platform in any way
Maybe not. But Adobe publishing software does happen to be available only for platforms where Microsoft Office is available.
And to the original question: "Since when was Photoshop a Microsoft product?"
I replied: "Adobe is the Microsoft of publishing software." Does Adobe have competitors that can match its market share? Or does it have Market Power(tm) in one or more of its markets, such as high-end photo editing software?
Shell accounts ... have one major use that I can think of right now; people without permanant internet access can use them to run - say - an eggdrop.
Yes, I understand that shell accounts are useful for running services, but that's no help if the most prominent free shell account providers prohibit running such services in their acceptable use policies. For example, according to this list of shells, a prominent shell provider "doesn't allow bots. Don't even bother downloading stuff like Eggdrop, BitchX, psybnc, etc. since [the provider] has filters that won't let them run, and the admins will chase down the files and remove them."
The placement and content of your post certainly indicated that the anon. cowturd was right in saying people don't own the copyright to works they create. Maybe you should take a look at the Copyright Office's website
That wasn't exactly what I meant. What I meant was that a person may not own the copyright to a work he claims to have created because he did not actually create the entire work; he copied substantial portions (four notes) from another work. I don't want to leave plaintiffs any room to maneuver because I don't have any money for legal representation.
and getting Nazi laws passed
What's a "Nazi law"? There are no National Socialists in the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate.
absurd little technicalities that were used 80 years ago.
But has Congress repealed such technicalities, such as four notes equaling substantial copying? If not, the precedent remains on the case-law books.
if you don't like it - don't buy it
Before buying a record[1], how do you expect to know whether you will like a recording or not, except by sampling a few singles through file-sharing networks? I'm not claiming that this justifies abuse of P2P technology, but what other solution is there?
[1] USA copyright law defines "phonorecord" to refer to a slab of vinyl, a CD, or any other medium in which a sound recording has been fixed.
[With a shell account,] you wouldn't need to [haul big files] very often - you do most of your work in your shell account on the remote box, right?
Much of my current work involves image editing, audio editing, and development of interactive graphical simulations. Do those work well over SSH?
The thought process is that since you have so little bandwidth and probably less power, disk space, memory, etc. at home that there's not much point in using that computer as anything but a glass terminal, and doing interesting things only on the remote system.
I'm still unclear on some of the uses of a shell account. Let's cross-check your thought process against your list of applications:
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Not according to the AUPs of most of the free shell providers I've seen. (Free shell providers are the subject of this Slashdot article.)
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Which is limited by the speed of the eyeballs and fingers. How is reading mail over SSH any better than reading mail over SSL'd IMAP? And unless you run a mailing list, why would sending mail need a lot of server bandwidth?
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big .jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.
The shell account is the network pc taken one step further, and is effective even with fairly slow networks.
Unless you want to run anything that's image or audio based and interactive. Take too much intelligence off the client, and you run the risk of having the cumulative effects of long-haul latency (speed of light across a big country such as the United States) and last-mile latency (slow dial-up connection) ruin the interactive experience. Has X11 been optimized to run efficiently over 48 kbps down, 24 kbps up?
Still, if you didn't think thin client computing was a good idea, you probably don't find shell accounts useful either.
Makers of modern network computers recognize that thin client does not mean as thin as a teletype machine's paper. They try to achieve a compromise between the shell account setup (all intelligence on the shell server; client is just a terminal or X server) and the PC setup (all intelligence on the client; only data is shared across the network) by using applets compiled to a cross-platform bytecode and run across the network. For more about this approach, look at Java(tm) technology or its competition.
The other problem is twenty years ago you could not get a patent on software.
Almost. The case allowing software to be patented in the USA was in 1981. Twenty years ago was August 1982.
Yes, you could do most of those things on your own system, but chances are pretty good that you have less bandwidth. This is especially true if you can only afford or only have access to dialup network access.
Then how would you transfer large files from your shell account to your own system?
Proprietary (especially box shifted) software tends to go for a monolithic throw in everything including the kitchen sink type of approach, whereas open source tends to go for a more modular and structured design.
Most rules have an exception, and it is Emacs.
Where's Bourne shell??? Where's vi, sed, and egrep???
Here.
How do I get GUI applications to display over the network???
With this.
How do I read a PostScript file???
With this.
I know that many of these things can be done on Windows eventually
Red Hat Cygwin. The future is now.
No, Red Hat is not paying me to plug Cygwin.