I just went and looked at the changelogs for Chrome and can't figure out what you're talking about. According to Wikipedia, Safari 5 combines the things added in Chrome 4 and 5 (extensions, enhanced developer tools, improved HTML5 support, performance improvements, improved Javascript performance, Geolocation, web sockets, drag and drop, etc.), and adds additional features like Reader that is built directly into the app.
If software patents aren't important, explain why open-source's answer to H.264 is a format that used to be patented before being abandoned by the parent company. Why don't they just develop superior video compression technology and end the argument once and for all?
The reason is because the software patents protect the effort and research that went into the concepts used in the format, not the lines of code that were used to implement it. If developing those concepts were cheap and/or trivial there'd be much better open-source and non-patented formats out there.
Your example of different TV shows in the same genre is just bizarre. You do realize you're allowed to make your own original codec, right?
Can you give me an example of a closed source company not playing by the rules? Seriously, it makes little sense for large companies (which I'm assuming you're incorrectly linking to "closed source") to sue a loosely-organized group of developers giving their product away for free. Even if they could figure out who to sue and were guaranteed to win (very rare due to the current state of software patents across countries), they'd never recoup the legal costs. That's why VLC can break a million patents and keep on ticking.
If anything, the open-source groups that are releasing patented and licensed technology for free are the ones breaking the rules. It's like spending a few weeks retyping the contents of a Harry Potter book, then claiming that your ability to do so proves that copyrights on written material are bullshit ("it's just a sequence of words!"). It ignores the fact that developing the characters and story took much, much longer than writing the actual words on paper, and that the material wouldn't have been created in the first place without the protections offered by copyrights.
Are you seriously that angry over having to replace like 0.01% of your code base to port it to a different platform? That's just sad, dude.
You also act like the Flash runtime will be 100% consistent across all platforms, even though we already went through this with Java for the past decade and it was neither consistent nor efficient.
Hate to break it to you, but Java and Flash taking so long to go 64-bit on Linux has less to do with them being commercial software and more to do with the relative irrelevance of the OS.
Also, MATLAB beat GNU Octave to a 64-bit version by 18 months.
How did anyone make Linux in the first place if they didn't learn about it in school? You know what, I'm not even sure why I bothered replying to this...
Considering rotoscoping involves manually drawing on top of source video, how does drawing a skeleton prove that it wasn't rotoscoped?
A better argument would be to point out that if it was rotoscoped, the animation would have been a lot less stilted.
The problem here is that you're assuming the term "casual gamer" refers to people who play games casually when it actually refers to people who play casual games. The difference between the two is how interested someone is in learning how to operate two analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, and 4 or more face buttons just to be barely functional in a game.
A few years ago my dad told me that the NES he bought for my brother when we were kids was actually purchased for himself, and that he used to be really into video games back in the days of Pac-Man and Galaga, but he ended up giving the NES to my brother because he couldn't stand the idea of having to learn how to operate a D-pad and multiple buttons with two hands *at the same time*. When I was growing up he would occasionally balk at how games and the controllers are getting more and more complex for seemingly little benefit. These days I think he's addicted to a handful of online puzzle games and turn-based strategy games that only use the mouse. He is a casual gamer.
Casual gamers will generally see hardcore games as needlessly complicated. Hardcore gamers will generally see casual games as overly simple and thus boring. And thus, a divide was born.
I'm pretty sure I read about this exact thing years ago. Weren't there issues with the tongue being "low resolution" and interfering with eating and talking?
...or did the glossy screen option used to cost more? How did they end up making matte cost more now? Are they just making up prices for their hardware instead of correlating it with the actual cost?
You'd just get companies either purchasing the items from themselves using dummy accounts, or you'd have them paying people to buy the item before reviewing.
You know ADD often reaches adulthood and affects women too, right? And that it isn't about just wanting to have fun, but is rather an inability to filter out external stimuli, like a ticking clock, which is sometimes serious enough to impede basic functions like the ability to store information from your short term memory or the ability to safely drive a car, right? Surely someone with an opinion as strong as your own would at least have a clue what they're talking about, right?
Right?
Why don't they put some logic in CAPTCHAs which is easy for a human to understand, but impossible for a bot to get right?
And while we're at it, why don't we come up with a cure for Cancer that leaves the healthy cells alone, but eradicates the Cancer cells completely!
(psst, you do realize that you just described the ultimate goal of CAPTCHAs, right? Saying it is one thing, but actually doing it is something else entirely.)
You could [...] ask for the user to do a simple calculation and post the results.
That was already solved years ago by OCR software, and distorting the numbers and symbols wouldn't work since we already have software that recognizes distorted symbols better than we do.
You could also give four objects and ask which one doesn't belong with the other three.
Even a random number generator would be right 25% of the time. One goal of CAPTCHAs is to effectively remove the possibility of simply guessing the correct answer. Asking for a color would have the same problem, as there are a limited number of colors that have well-known names. It'd be bypassed in milliseconds.
Instead of having to repeat what is on your screen or speakers, you could ask the user a simple question to verify if the user is indeed human.
That would require a massive database containing hundreds of thousands of questions that are all easily answerable by any English-speaking average Joe and contain all acceptable synonyms. Even a simple and specific question like "what do people normally sleep on" should accept answers like bed, hammock, couch, blankets, and mattresses, and could still easily be cracked by a simple relational database that finds pairings between keywords (like "sleep" and "bed"). You can't demand more complex sentence structures in the answers either since that would only make it increasingly harder for the user to figure out the exact structure and words the server expects them to use.
I think what you don't realize is that all spammers have to do is reach an acceptable (usually very low) success rate for it to be considered cracked. After all, they can attack your CAPTCHA system endlessly using a whole army of computers with IP address spoofers. They are well aware that their system can afford being wrong a few hundred times in a row as long as it gets one right every once in a while.
Unfortunately, that means that even the best of your suggestions would be cracked within hours.
No, it's like telling the football coach that next year is the last year there will be trophies awarded at the championship game. They can still have a team, there just won't be an official ranking.
I agree that the analogy is terrible, but for another reason entirely: memorizing how various algorithms work and performing well on tests hardly makes you a better programmer. The best programmers I knew were the ones who knew very little (and therefore performed poorly on tests and in classes), but were incredibly good at using what little they knew to make great software anyway. You know why that's possible? It's because programming isn't about rote memorization of facts and algorithms; it's about deep and complex critical thinking, a good deal of creativity and hard work, a lot of good judgement and patience, and the openness to learn from your mistakes. Testing can't cover any of that.
Varsity players are generally better than junior varsity players. Performing well on CS tests just means you mastered a nearly irrelevant skill. I'm not saying that performing well on tests means you're a bad programmer, I'm saying there's no correlation between test scores and real-world programming abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
I just went and looked at the changelogs for Chrome and can't figure out what you're talking about. According to Wikipedia, Safari 5 combines the things added in Chrome 4 and 5 (extensions, enhanced developer tools, improved HTML5 support, performance improvements, improved Javascript performance, Geolocation, web sockets, drag and drop, etc.), and adds additional features like Reader that is built directly into the app.
Read the article; it says AT&T will be offering 3G speeds that are faster than 4G.
If software patents aren't important, explain why open-source's answer to H.264 is a format that used to be patented before being abandoned by the parent company. Why don't they just develop superior video compression technology and end the argument once and for all?
The reason is because the software patents protect the effort and research that went into the concepts used in the format, not the lines of code that were used to implement it. If developing those concepts were cheap and/or trivial there'd be much better open-source and non-patented formats out there.
Your example of different TV shows in the same genre is just bizarre. You do realize you're allowed to make your own original codec, right?
Can you give me an example of a closed source company not playing by the rules? Seriously, it makes little sense for large companies (which I'm assuming you're incorrectly linking to "closed source") to sue a loosely-organized group of developers giving their product away for free. Even if they could figure out who to sue and were guaranteed to win (very rare due to the current state of software patents across countries), they'd never recoup the legal costs. That's why VLC can break a million patents and keep on ticking.
If anything, the open-source groups that are releasing patented and licensed technology for free are the ones breaking the rules. It's like spending a few weeks retyping the contents of a Harry Potter book, then claiming that your ability to do so proves that copyrights on written material are bullshit ("it's just a sequence of words!"). It ignores the fact that developing the characters and story took much, much longer than writing the actual words on paper, and that the material wouldn't have been created in the first place without the protections offered by copyrights.
Are you seriously that angry over having to replace like 0.01% of your code base to port it to a different platform? That's just sad, dude. You also act like the Flash runtime will be 100% consistent across all platforms, even though we already went through this with Java for the past decade and it was neither consistent nor efficient.
Hate to break it to you, but Java and Flash taking so long to go 64-bit on Linux has less to do with them being commercial software and more to do with the relative irrelevance of the OS. Also, MATLAB beat GNU Octave to a 64-bit version by 18 months.
How did anyone make Linux in the first place if they didn't learn about it in school? You know what, I'm not even sure why I bothered replying to this...
Have you never heard of the Xbox 360 or Xbox Live Arcade?
Considering rotoscoping involves manually drawing on top of source video, how does drawing a skeleton prove that it wasn't rotoscoped? A better argument would be to point out that if it was rotoscoped, the animation would have been a lot less stilted.
Sorry chief, but Apple already ran an advertising campaign touting the next iPhone killer, which turned out to be the iPhone 3G.
Also... video? Copy and paste? Do you know *anything* about the iPhone, other than that you hate it and its user base for some reason?
The problem here is that you're assuming the term "casual gamer" refers to people who play games casually when it actually refers to people who play casual games. The difference between the two is how interested someone is in learning how to operate two analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, and 4 or more face buttons just to be barely functional in a game.
A few years ago my dad told me that the NES he bought for my brother when we were kids was actually purchased for himself, and that he used to be really into video games back in the days of Pac-Man and Galaga, but he ended up giving the NES to my brother because he couldn't stand the idea of having to learn how to operate a D-pad and multiple buttons with two hands *at the same time*. When I was growing up he would occasionally balk at how games and the controllers are getting more and more complex for seemingly little benefit. These days I think he's addicted to a handful of online puzzle games and turn-based strategy games that only use the mouse. He is a casual gamer.
Casual gamers will generally see hardcore games as needlessly complicated. Hardcore gamers will generally see casual games as overly simple and thus boring. And thus, a divide was born.
I'm pretty sure I read about this exact thing years ago. Weren't there issues with the tongue being "low resolution" and interfering with eating and talking?
Since we're parading around misguided people's opinions as facts, here's another good one:
http://www.666ismoney.com/HolocaustAds.html
Competitors already exist: torrents. If Hulu screws up, people will give up and go back to pirating shows.
So cleaning the air for 70 years gives someone an extra 5 months of life? I was expecting something a little more significant than that...
...or did the glossy screen option used to cost more? How did they end up making matte cost more now? Are they just making up prices for their hardware instead of correlating it with the actual cost?
You'd just get companies either purchasing the items from themselves using dummy accounts, or you'd have them paying people to buy the item before reviewing.
You know ADD often reaches adulthood and affects women too, right? And that it isn't about just wanting to have fun, but is rather an inability to filter out external stimuli, like a ticking clock, which is sometimes serious enough to impede basic functions like the ability to store information from your short term memory or the ability to safely drive a car, right? Surely someone with an opinion as strong as your own would at least have a clue what they're talking about, right? Right?
Why don't they put some logic in CAPTCHAs which is easy for a human to understand, but impossible for a bot to get right?
And while we're at it, why don't we come up with a cure for Cancer that leaves the healthy cells alone, but eradicates the Cancer cells completely!
(psst, you do realize that you just described the ultimate goal of CAPTCHAs, right? Saying it is one thing, but actually doing it is something else entirely.)
You could [...] ask for the user to do a simple calculation and post the results.
That was already solved years ago by OCR software, and distorting the numbers and symbols wouldn't work since we already have software that recognizes distorted symbols better than we do.
You could also give four objects and ask which one doesn't belong with the other three.
Even a random number generator would be right 25% of the time. One goal of CAPTCHAs is to effectively remove the possibility of simply guessing the correct answer. Asking for a color would have the same problem, as there are a limited number of colors that have well-known names. It'd be bypassed in milliseconds.
Instead of having to repeat what is on your screen or speakers, you could ask the user a simple question to verify if the user is indeed human.
That would require a massive database containing hundreds of thousands of questions that are all easily answerable by any English-speaking average Joe and contain all acceptable synonyms. Even a simple and specific question like "what do people normally sleep on" should accept answers like bed, hammock, couch, blankets, and mattresses, and could still easily be cracked by a simple relational database that finds pairings between keywords (like "sleep" and "bed"). You can't demand more complex sentence structures in the answers either since that would only make it increasingly harder for the user to figure out the exact structure and words the server expects them to use.
I think what you don't realize is that all spammers have to do is reach an acceptable (usually very low) success rate for it to be considered cracked. After all, they can attack your CAPTCHA system endlessly using a whole army of computers with IP address spoofers. They are well aware that their system can afford being wrong a few hundred times in a row as long as it gets one right every once in a while.
Unfortunately, that means that even the best of your suggestions would be cracked within hours.
Varsity players are generally better than junior varsity players. Performing well on CS tests just means you mastered a nearly irrelevant skill. I'm not saying that performing well on tests means you're a bad programmer, I'm saying there's no correlation between test scores and real-world programming abilities.