Oracle is definitely more scalable, etc, but I'd like to attack it from the standpoint of a developer:
There are some big performance features (statement caching, stored procedures, materialized views, etc) that definitely help with large web sites, and there are others that help me get my work done, like subqueries. I haven't used MySQL in about 6 months, and up until then there was no such thing as a subquery, which can be handy at times. Take the following query:
SELECT
a.message_id,
a.message_text,
b.message_count
FROM
messages a,
(select message_id, count(*) from message_hits group by message_id) b
WHERE
a.message_id = b.message_id (+)
Oh, and that reminds me- outer joins too.:) Sure, the above query can be done in mysql, but it would take me more time to write, and possibly mean splitting it up in to two queries. I can't use mysql now that I've gone to oracle.
My question is: does this only apply to material which you own the copyright to and then you encrypt?
To use a parallel in the "real world":
If the police break in to your house without a warrant and find you doing something illegal, they're gonna have a really tough time prosecuting you for it. Makes you wonder if breaking encryption would be covered under "unlawful search and seizure."
Seems like there are a bunch of patents that never would have flown if the patent office had been notified of the fact that there IS prior art. Obviously the company submitting the patent isn't gonna let the USPTO know, so who does? Perhaps we should start a prior art crusade, much like BountyQuest, only as a pre-emptive strike.
This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
You obviously know jack shit about H1 visas. Because of the fact that the ONLY reason someone on an H1 visa is here is because of their employer, they are AT THE MERCY of the employer. Everyone here is talking about how they can just change jobs if the work conditions suck- not so with an H1B. They are with that company for the long haul, no matter how shitty the wages are or how terrible the hours are. Ever heard of those stories of people who pay their life savings to be smuggled to freedom, only to be put in to indentured servitude when they get here? Guess what, H1B's are government-sponsored indentured servitude. Who loses? Guys like you and me, who don't get jobs because some poor schmuck from india is getting paid a pittance to work 80 hours a week.
Call me racist or whatever, but I don't give a rat's ass whether someone here on an H1 visa is fluroescent green, they're being exploited by the companies they work for, at the expense of people who live here. That's not racist, that's pragmatic.
I worked my way up to AP computer science my senior year in high school, and ended up with a teacher that everybody dreaded- mr enenstein. He always ran a very tight class- if he even caught you chewing gum he'd make an example out of you; he would stop class while you went to throw your gum away. The sort of shit students REAALY hate.
I thought I was hot shit, king programmer. I soon learned that was not the case! One of our first assignments was to randomly print the contents of an array. My solution? randomly pick a number between 0 and the length of the array, print that element, and set it to null. If I ever hit a null, try again until I hit something that wasn't null. He took one look at my short, seemingly elegant program, and promptly gave me an F. I was quite puzzled, as the program worked flawlessly. He explained- "Your program may seem to work flawlessly, but it's far from it. What happens if your random number generator is not up to par, and you never end up picking the last element of your array? Your program would be caught in an endless loop."
With that he had me rewrite the whole algorithm to actually shrink the array when it removed elements, so that the random number that was picked would always reference a valid slot in the array. It took shitloads more programming, but it was MUCH more solid than my "monte carlo" approach.
THat's just a small example of the sort of shit I had to endure, and by the end of the year I was so glad to be out of there!! It didn't really hit me until about a year later that he had actually managed to instill in me good coding practices. I'm probably one of the messiest people I know... there's barely enough room on my desk for my keyboard right now, but if you looked at my code you'd never know it. It's spotlessly clean- good indentation, comments, very consistent style. I CANT STAND sloppy code, and I have him to thank for that.:) I never did get a chance to truly thank him for it, but one of these days I will.
Other folks have cited audioreview.com, which is a great place to go for reviews on everything. I always check there before I buy any of my audio stuff.
Recievers are quite a bit easier to pick than speakers. Basically you need to find a unit that has the features that you want (DTS decoding, etc) and the power output you want. From your description, it sounds like you want one of the mid to high end recievers. You'll want to shoot for a reciever with a built-in decoder, S-video switching, a whole shitload of inputs, and 70-100W per channel. Power output doesn't necessarily equate to loudness... some speakers require more power than others. You can always turn the volume down, but it's a lot harder to turn it up if your amp can't handle your speakers. When looking at brands of recievers, you'll probably want to look at sony, onkyo, harman kardon, or denon. I tend to like the H/K's because the controls are intuitive, they sound good, and they can drive a shitload of speakers. I had a pro-logic H/K reciever driving 4 main speakers, a center channel, and *4* rear channel speakers. That's right- 9 speakers!!! It never flinched, and always sounded top notch.
As for speakers, I highly recommend the Energy "Take 5" setup. It's composed of 5 small speakers, and a subwoofer you add on. You can get the whole setup there for around $900, and it sounds absolutely awesome. That leaves you $600 to spend on your reciever, and that's more than enough dough. You can get more info on the Take 5 at Energy's site.
And lastly- If you're thinking about getting some bose speakers, check out audioreview.com first. I used to think those speakers were awesome until I realized how much they suck.:) The only thing they're good at reproducing is that light, airy, spanish guitar type of music with ONLY crisp high's and some lower frequencies. Listening to some rock or even watching a movie with any of the bose "acoustimass" speakers leaves a lot to desire.
what they didn't show you is the last page of the series, that shows how to decode TV signals so that they can watch leave it to beaver. In contact they sent plans on how to make a space ship... I'm pretty sure we would send plans on how to make a TV.
Where are you? I have linkline DSL, with the line provided by verizon. I pay $49/mo for static ip with 768k down / 128k up. Depending on the site, I always hit the 768k cap, no matter what time of day it is.
My suggestion is to NEVER go with the telco for your internet service... they usually screw it up pretty well. There are a ton of other providers out there who want your business, and are willing to give you static IP's and such.
Actually, in this case the light DOES travel straight. Multimode fibers bounce light at different frequencies off the edges of the fiber to achieve higher bandwidth. The tradeoff there is that even though you're using total internal reflection- the world's best mirror- some of the light escapes every time it is reflected. In contrast to that, single mode fibers are much smaller, and the light bounces off the sides of the fiber much less. The end result is that a single-mode fiber will support much longer distances. I seem to recall that standard single mode fiber supports distances up to 10km, but that may be different for more recent fibers. They will still have to use a shitload of repeaters though.
Note that this information is only sort of accurate, it's just what I've gleaned from discussions with people who really know what they're talking about. If you'd like to get a more scientific picture of what's going on, go here:
Way to go moderators! This is exactly where moderation fails- when someone uses it to supress an opinion that is contrary to their own. I hope to god I get this one in meta moderation...
obligatory link to slashdot python v perl flamewar
on
Python 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/16/1729227.shtm l
Some very valid and interesting points brought up about both languages. I know this story is about python and not perl, but whenever anybody discusses one the other is bound to come up in conversation.
OS: Windows ME
CPU: TM5600 600MHz
Memory Bus: 100MHz
Memory: 128MB (*1)
Hard Drive: About 20GB
Display: 1024x768 TFT liquid crystal
Modem: 56kbps (V.90/K56flex) (*2)
Stamina: 5/10/17 hours (*3)
i.LINK: Four pins
-DV animation edit
-Video mail
-Live dispatch
-10x Optical zoom
-680,000 pixel CCD
-Blurring correction (jitter corection?)
-Auto focus
(*1) 16mb is used with the system.
(*2) V.90 and K56flex are distinguished automatically and switched. 56kbps is a theory value when data is received. When data is transmitted, 33.6kbps on the standard reaches the maximum value. When Fax is transmitted, [it] becomes 14.4kbps or less. An actual transmission rate changes by the situation of the line quality etc.
(*3) Both battery packing (S)/battery packing (L) (optional)/battery packing (LLL) (optional) of the battery use time are standards at the power saving mode. It is likely to differ from the above-mentioned description time according to the use state and setting, etc.Moreover, battery packing (S)/battery packing (L)/battery packing (LLL) cannot be used together.
(*4) The commodity of the open price does not provide the suggested retail price.
(*5) The screen is a synthesis of all (*hamecomi*).
Equipped with Windows Millennium Edition which makes lifestyle of personal computer pleasant
I could live *quite* happily on roughtly $1000/week... oh, wait, the tax man will take a good portion of that away... hmm...
And could you support a family on that? Honestly now... at least in california, perl developers are making anywhere from $60k - $100k. I think that Mr. Conway would be at the top of the pay scale here. For him to take $55k/yr would be a donation to the community, even more so than his work so far.
Unfortunately it's not gonna be the same with audio- people _just_dont_hear_the_difference_. You're not going to be able to sell someone a super high definition sound system like HDTV; pretty much anyone can look at an HDTV and say "wow, that looks great." Once they get cheap, they'll be flying off the shelves.
However in the rarified world of audio, you can't draw much of a parallel. Most of the listening public are sheep; to them the stock stereo in their honda civic is more than they could ever want, and they can't hear the glaring deficiencies with it. What difference would SCD make for them? Absolutely nothing. _That_ is why 128kbit mp3's are so common.
An illustration:
I was encoding some radio commercials into mp3's at work a while ago so people could e-mail them around. I was going from a studio copy on a burned cd; it was probably taken right off the DAT's. I encoded it at 160kbit, and then again at 48kbit mono and played both for a bunch of people at work on decent stereos and they couldn't tell the difference. To me, the low bitrate one sounded like ass, but they were perfectly happy with the 48kbit one.
This is why you hear the word "audiophile" a lot more than "videophile."
preach on, brother! I've used RH since 5.2 days, and it sounds like the 7.0 release has MAD feature creep. Sounds like it's about time to check out debian, too. The only reason I've stayed with it this long is all the crap I've compiled myself against RH's versions of all of the libs. I know that most of the stuff will work fine with another distribution, but with all of their glibc craziness, you never know.
I too have ventured into the dark underworld of potato weaponry. Our device was constructed of schedule 80 black ABS pipe. The barrel was 1 1/4", with a 4" chamber and a barbequeue ignitor to set it all off. Fuel of choice was AquaNet (TM) hairspray.
Well, we had just finished constructing this beast in my dorm room on a saturday night, and we just HAD to fire it. We had a full can of hairspray and a 10lb bag of hairspray, and a hankerin' for some projectile vegetable fun.
We took our contraption out to the farthest parking lot on campus, waaaay in the back, and proceded to seed the fields back there with our 10lbs of potatoey goodness. It wasn't until we piled back in to my car and started to take off that an officer of the peace spotted us. He happened to be making the rounds, and seeing 3 kids in the middle of an empty parking lot on a saturday night made him a little suspicious.
Long story short, he pulled me over, we tried to give him a bullshit story, fessed up, and he made me break the gun up and throw it away. He had me go find a dumpster so he could watch me destroy and throw away my creation.
HERE is where it gets interesting. Note earlier that I said this beast was made of schedule 80 ABS pipe. It has a burst strength of 400PSI- which means, in short, that you can drive a car over this shit and not dent it. Mr. Nice Officer however wanted me to BREAK this stuff. He stood there as I tried in vain to break this pipe. I'm not a small guy, and I was WAILING on this shit with all my strength.
He stepped in, grabbed the pipe from me, and said "gimme that." I'm thinking to myself- "Does he really know how strong this stuff is?" Apparently not, as he tried repeatedly to break it against the edge of an empty metal dumpster. He utilized the classic cop beatdown stance... and BOY did it make a racket!
My friends were sitting in my car trying to stifle their laughter. Marshall later told me he had considered rolling down the window and yelling "WHY DON'T YOU USE YOUR GUN?" I'm glad he didn't.
The moral of the story kids: Don't shoot your spud gun when the Long Arm of the Law is near by! He notified us that while a potato gun is not a weapon, it is classified as an explosive device- just as illegal.
well, the huge difference is that if you're a lazy ass and watch TV all day, there's no way it could have any impact on your neighbors. If your isp oversold in your area and you're pegged at full utilization 24/7, that's less bandwidth for everybody else. Broadcast services don't really compare well with stuff like internet, gas, electric, water, etc.
Yup... the bandwidth isn't really the issue here- it's how many hits per second the box can handle. Assuming when they say "per day" they're talking about a 24 hour period, that's 200 000 / (24 * 60 * 60) = 2.31 hits per second... miniscule. I'm not sure how big people are going with apache these dayys, but i'm assuming 50-100 hits per second is doable, even with mod_perl and stuff like that.
Even if they were talking about an 8-hour business day, that still only brings the number up to 7 hits per second.
shop around. I found a couple DSL providers that don't require one year contracts. Currently I'm using linkline, but I think they're only in the southern california area. I had a hell of a time getting my service sorted out with them... I was supposed to have 768k sdsl, but I was getting 256k/64k adsl. It took about 10 calls within a 2 day period to get it all sorted out, but it works great now. If you're having a problem with your DSL, call early and call often!! If you're waiting for action on an open ticket, call every 4 hours or so to check status. That's the ONLY way I actually got anything done dealing with them. If you can, try to find a provider in your area that will allow you to do a self-install. I got my modem shipped to me within a week of my order, and it was turned on two days later. Waiting for an appointment for a DSL guy to show up can take MONTHS.
You can get to try to break their stuff with almost total privacy (all but your IP address), and you don't have to give up any of your rights if you don't want the money.
I believe you're missing the point. The point is not anonymity, it's not doing their dirty work for them. SDMI is in place to prevent people like you and me from doing what we do. Am I gonna step up and help their efforts?
Also, you don't give them expertise, as nothing forces you to explain how you hacked their stuff if you did.
That doesn't matter. You have to demonstrate that you circumvented their security measures, and that means explaining WHAT you exploited to get past it. That's enough for them to unleash their people on that one portion of the software. Take SSH1 for example. Let's say there was a similar challenge, and you found that kerberos bug that made it vulnerable. Stating that you used a bug in SSH1's kerberos stuff narrows the field down quite a bit. They end up having A LOT less code to check.
Whether you like the idea that SDMI are trying to implement or not, a public challenge is always a good thing. And they are actually giving up a rather convenient and powerful way to test their algorithms...
Not when the public challenge will be supporting something that is inherently evil! Would we have helped the germans debug their enigma machines? Ok, so maybe the SDMI folks aren't nazis, but you get the idea.:)
Finally, the best way to prevent SDMI from existing is certainly to undertake their challenge and to break the schemes. Otherwise, they'll implement it, and maybe it will be broken afterward, but bypassing it then may involve more complicated legal issues...
I don't think it is possible to make SDMI airtight, but let's assume for a moment that it is. If that's the case and we find every bug in it now and make it flawless, then they will release a theoretically perfect version. It's not like they are gonna throw their hands up and say "oh well, we had some bugs, lets scrap the project." HOWEVER, if we were to wait until SDMI is out there, in LOTS of software and maybe even hardware for that matter and THEN find the bugs in it, the results are much more devastating. It becomes evident that they released a technology with some serious problems. Do you consider CSS and SDMI to be similar? Sure, later on we could be mired in the same sort of legal battles, but in the end DeCSS got out there and it's gonna stay out there.
Well, now that would be awfully convenient. "Honey, you about to give birth? How bout we take a vacation to the 'states?" She has the kid, and hey, whaddya know- it's an american citizen. What do we do in that case?
*ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM* What the hell was that? Oh, it was this conversation *flying over my head*. I never knew that anyone who knew this much about quantum mechanics had time to read slashdot.:)
Second, has anyone contacted Bruce Perens and asked him to intervene?
Tsk, tsk- RTFA!
From the article:
A gaping hole has been discovered in the GNU General Public License (GPL), the legal document at the heart of open source, and dear Sun has driven a Mack truck named Solaris x86 straight through it.
At least that's how open source demigod Bruce Perens assesses the situation and he's the primary author of the "Open Source Definition," the philosophical basis of the open source movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Oracle is definitely more scalable, etc, but I'd like to attack it from the standpoint of a developer:
:) Sure, the above query can be done in mysql, but it would take me more time to write, and possibly mean splitting it up in to two queries. I can't use mysql now that I've gone to oracle.
There are some big performance features (statement caching, stored procedures, materialized views, etc) that definitely help with large web sites, and there are others that help me get my work done, like subqueries. I haven't used MySQL in about 6 months, and up until then there was no such thing as a subquery, which can be handy at times. Take the following query:
SELECT
a.message_id,
a.message_text,
b.message_count
FROM
messages a,
(select message_id, count(*) from message_hits group by message_id) b
WHERE
a.message_id = b.message_id (+)
Oh, and that reminds me- outer joins too.
My question is: does this only apply to material which you own the copyright to and then you encrypt?
To use a parallel in the "real world":
If the police break in to your house without a warrant and find you doing something illegal, they're gonna have a really tough time prosecuting you for it. Makes you wonder if breaking encryption would be covered under "unlawful search and seizure."
Seems like there are a bunch of patents that never would have flown if the patent office had been notified of the fact that there IS prior art. Obviously the company submitting the patent isn't gonna let the USPTO know, so who does? Perhaps we should start a prior art crusade, much like BountyQuest, only as a pre-emptive strike.
This sounds racist to me. If other people are willing to do your job for less, and they're just as capable as you, why shouldn't they get the job? Because their skin is a different colour?
You obviously know jack shit about H1 visas. Because of the fact that the ONLY reason someone on an H1 visa is here is because of their employer, they are AT THE MERCY of the employer. Everyone here is talking about how they can just change jobs if the work conditions suck- not so with an H1B. They are with that company for the long haul, no matter how shitty the wages are or how terrible the hours are. Ever heard of those stories of people who pay their life savings to be smuggled to freedom, only to be put in to indentured servitude when they get here? Guess what, H1B's are government-sponsored indentured servitude. Who loses? Guys like you and me, who don't get jobs because some poor schmuck from india is getting paid a pittance to work 80 hours a week.
Call me racist or whatever, but I don't give a rat's ass whether someone here on an H1 visa is fluroescent green, they're being exploited by the companies they work for, at the expense of people who live here. That's not racist, that's pragmatic.
I worked my way up to AP computer science my senior year in high school, and ended up with a teacher that everybody dreaded- mr enenstein. He always ran a very tight class- if he even caught you chewing gum he'd make an example out of you; he would stop class while you went to throw your gum away. The sort of shit students REAALY hate.
:) I never did get a chance to truly thank him for it, but one of these days I will.
I thought I was hot shit, king programmer. I soon learned that was not the case! One of our first assignments was to randomly print the contents of an array. My solution? randomly pick a number between 0 and the length of the array, print that element, and set it to null. If I ever hit a null, try again until I hit something that wasn't null. He took one look at my short, seemingly elegant program, and promptly gave me an F. I was quite puzzled, as the program worked flawlessly. He explained- "Your program may seem to work flawlessly, but it's far from it. What happens if your random number generator is not up to par, and you never end up picking the last element of your array? Your program would be caught in an endless loop."
With that he had me rewrite the whole algorithm to actually shrink the array when it removed elements, so that the random number that was picked would always reference a valid slot in the array. It took shitloads more programming, but it was MUCH more solid than my "monte carlo" approach.
THat's just a small example of the sort of shit I had to endure, and by the end of the year I was so glad to be out of there!! It didn't really hit me until about a year later that he had actually managed to instill in me good coding practices. I'm probably one of the messiest people I know... there's barely enough room on my desk for my keyboard right now, but if you looked at my code you'd never know it. It's spotlessly clean- good indentation, comments, very consistent style. I CANT STAND sloppy code, and I have him to thank for that.
Other folks have cited audioreview.com, which is a great place to go for reviews on everything. I always check there before I buy any of my audio stuff.
:) The only thing they're good at reproducing is that light, airy, spanish guitar type of music with ONLY crisp high's and some lower frequencies. Listening to some rock or even watching a movie with any of the bose "acoustimass" speakers leaves a lot to desire.
Recievers are quite a bit easier to pick than speakers. Basically you need to find a unit that has the features that you want (DTS decoding, etc) and the power output you want. From your description, it sounds like you want one of the mid to high end recievers. You'll want to shoot for a reciever with a built-in decoder, S-video switching, a whole shitload of inputs, and 70-100W per channel. Power output doesn't necessarily equate to loudness... some speakers require more power than others. You can always turn the volume down, but it's a lot harder to turn it up if your amp can't handle your speakers. When looking at brands of recievers, you'll probably want to look at sony, onkyo, harman kardon, or denon. I tend to like the H/K's because the controls are intuitive, they sound good, and they can drive a shitload of speakers. I had a pro-logic H/K reciever driving 4 main speakers, a center channel, and *4* rear channel speakers. That's right- 9 speakers!!! It never flinched, and always sounded top notch.
As for speakers, I highly recommend the Energy "Take 5" setup. It's composed of 5 small speakers, and a subwoofer you add on. You can get the whole setup there for around $900, and it sounds absolutely awesome. That leaves you $600 to spend on your reciever, and that's more than enough dough. You can get more info on the Take 5 at Energy's site.
And lastly- If you're thinking about getting some bose speakers, check out audioreview.com first. I used to think those speakers were awesome until I realized how much they suck.
what they didn't show you is the last page of the series, that shows how to decode TV signals so that they can watch leave it to beaver. In contact they sent plans on how to make a space ship... I'm pretty sure we would send plans on how to make a TV.
Where are you? I have linkline DSL, with the line provided by verizon. I pay $49/mo for static ip with 768k down / 128k up. Depending on the site, I always hit the 768k cap, no matter what time of day it is.
My suggestion is to NEVER go with the telco for your internet service... they usually screw it up pretty well. There are a ton of other providers out there who want your business, and are willing to give you static IP's and such.
Actually, in this case the light DOES travel straight. Multimode fibers bounce light at different frequencies off the edges of the fiber to achieve higher bandwidth. The tradeoff there is that even though you're using total internal reflection- the world's best mirror- some of the light escapes every time it is reflected. In contrast to that, single mode fibers are much smaller, and the light bounces off the sides of the fiber much less. The end result is that a single-mode fiber will support much longer distances. I seem to recall that standard single mode fiber supports distances up to 10km, but that may be different for more recent fibers. They will still have to use a shitload of repeaters though.
Note that this information is only sort of accurate, it's just what I've gleaned from discussions with people who really know what they're talking about. If you'd like to get a more scientific picture of what's going on, go here:
http://www.testmark.com/de vel op/fiber/fiberoptic.html
Way to go moderators! This is exactly where moderation fails- when someone uses it to supress an opinion that is contrary to their own. I hope to god I get this one in meta moderation...
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/16/1729227.shtm l
Some very valid and interesting points brought up about both languages. I know this story is about python and not perl, but whenever anybody discusses one the other is bound to come up in conversation.
Open price Sale schedule on November 18
OS: Windows ME
CPU: TM5600 600MHz
Memory Bus: 100MHz
Memory: 128MB (*1)
Hard Drive: About 20GB
Display: 1024x768 TFT liquid crystal
Modem: 56kbps (V.90/K56flex) (*2)
Stamina: 5/10/17 hours (*3)
i.LINK: Four pins
-DV animation edit
-Video mail
-Live dispatch
-10x Optical zoom
-680,000 pixel CCD
-Blurring correction (jitter corection?)
-Auto focus
(*1) 16mb is used with the system.
(*2) V.90 and K56flex are distinguished automatically and switched. 56kbps is a theory value when data is received. When data is transmitted, 33.6kbps on the standard reaches the maximum value. When Fax is transmitted, [it] becomes 14.4kbps or less. An actual transmission rate changes by the situation of the line quality etc.
(*3) Both battery packing (S)/battery packing (L) (optional)/battery packing (LLL) (optional) of the battery use time are standards at the power saving mode. It is likely to differ from the above-mentioned description time according to the use state and setting, etc.Moreover, battery packing (S)/battery packing (L)/battery packing (LLL) cannot be used together.
(*4) The commodity of the open price does not provide the suggested retail price.
(*5) The screen is a synthesis of all (*hamecomi*).
Equipped with Windows Millennium Edition which makes lifestyle of personal computer pleasant
I like the last bit there...
I could live *quite* happily on roughtly $1000/week... oh, wait, the tax man will take a good portion of that away... hmm...
And could you support a family on that? Honestly now... at least in california, perl developers are making anywhere from $60k - $100k. I think that Mr. Conway would be at the top of the pay scale here. For him to take $55k/yr would be a donation to the community, even more so than his work so far.
Unfortunately it's not gonna be the same with audio- people _just_dont_hear_the_difference_. You're not going to be able to sell someone a super high definition sound system like HDTV; pretty much anyone can look at an HDTV and say "wow, that looks great." Once they get cheap, they'll be flying off the shelves.
However in the rarified world of audio, you can't draw much of a parallel. Most of the listening public are sheep; to them the stock stereo in their honda civic is more than they could ever want, and they can't hear the glaring deficiencies with it. What difference would SCD make for them? Absolutely nothing. _That_ is why 128kbit mp3's are so common.
An illustration:
I was encoding some radio commercials into mp3's at work a while ago so people could e-mail them around. I was going from a studio copy on a burned cd; it was probably taken right off the DAT's. I encoded it at 160kbit, and then again at 48kbit mono and played both for a bunch of people at work on decent stereos and they couldn't tell the difference. To me, the low bitrate one sounded like ass, but they were perfectly happy with the 48kbit one.
This is why you hear the word "audiophile" a lot more than "videophile."
preach on, brother! I've used RH since 5.2 days, and it sounds like the 7.0 release has MAD feature creep. Sounds like it's about time to check out debian, too. The only reason I've stayed with it this long is all the crap I've compiled myself against RH's versions of all of the libs. I know that most of the stuff will work fine with another distribution, but with all of their glibc craziness, you never know.
I too have ventured into the dark underworld of potato weaponry. Our device was constructed of schedule 80 black ABS pipe. The barrel was 1 1/4", with a 4" chamber and a barbequeue ignitor to set it all off. Fuel of choice was AquaNet (TM) hairspray.
Well, we had just finished constructing this beast in my dorm room on a saturday night, and we just HAD to fire it. We had a full can of hairspray and a 10lb bag of hairspray, and a hankerin' for some projectile vegetable fun.
We took our contraption out to the farthest parking lot on campus, waaaay in the back, and proceded to seed the fields back there with our 10lbs of potatoey goodness. It wasn't until we piled back in to my car and started to take off that an officer of the peace spotted us. He happened to be making the rounds, and seeing 3 kids in the middle of an empty parking lot on a saturday night made him a little suspicious.
Long story short, he pulled me over, we tried to give him a bullshit story, fessed up, and he made me break the gun up and throw it away. He had me go find a dumpster so he could watch me destroy and throw away my creation.
HERE is where it gets interesting. Note earlier that I said this beast was made of schedule 80 ABS pipe. It has a burst strength of 400PSI- which means, in short, that you can drive a car over this shit and not dent it. Mr. Nice Officer however wanted me to BREAK this stuff. He stood there as I tried in vain to break this pipe. I'm not a small guy, and I was WAILING on this shit with all my strength.
He stepped in, grabbed the pipe from me, and said "gimme that." I'm thinking to myself- "Does he really know how strong this stuff is?" Apparently not, as he tried repeatedly to break it against the edge of an empty metal dumpster. He utilized the classic cop beatdown stance... and BOY did it make a racket!
My friends were sitting in my car trying to stifle their laughter. Marshall later told me he had considered rolling down the window and yelling "WHY DON'T YOU USE YOUR GUN?" I'm glad he didn't.
The moral of the story kids: Don't shoot your spud gun when the Long Arm of the Law is near by! He notified us that while a potato gun is not a weapon, it is classified as an explosive device- just as illegal.
I had no problems viewing all of the clips with the latest version of xanim. Open mouth, insert foot...
well, the huge difference is that if you're a lazy ass and watch TV all day, there's no way it could have any impact on your neighbors. If your isp oversold in your area and you're pegged at full utilization 24/7, that's less bandwidth for everybody else. Broadcast services don't really compare well with stuff like internet, gas, electric, water, etc.
Yup... the bandwidth isn't really the issue here- it's how many hits per second the box can handle. Assuming when they say "per day" they're talking about a 24 hour period, that's 200 000 / (24 * 60 * 60) = 2.31 hits per second... miniscule. I'm not sure how big people are going with apache these dayys, but i'm assuming 50-100 hits per second is doable, even with mod_perl and stuff like that.
Even if they were talking about an 8-hour business day, that still only brings the number up to 7 hits per second.
http://partners.nytim es. com/2000/10/04/science/04BLOO.html
schweet... too bad they canned the cypherpunks/cypherpunks account there, but as long as this works who cares. No annoying banners or anything...
shop around. I found a couple DSL providers that don't require one year contracts. Currently I'm using linkline, but I think they're only in the southern california area. I had a hell of a time getting my service sorted out with them... I was supposed to have 768k sdsl, but I was getting 256k/64k adsl. It took about 10 calls within a 2 day period to get it all sorted out, but it works great now. If you're having a problem with your DSL, call early and call often!! If you're waiting for action on an open ticket, call every 4 hours or so to check status. That's the ONLY way I actually got anything done dealing with them. If you can, try to find a provider in your area that will allow you to do a self-install. I got my modem shipped to me within a week of my order, and it was turned on two days later. Waiting for an appointment for a DSL guy to show up can take MONTHS.
You can get to try to break their stuff with almost total privacy (all but your IP address), and you don't have to give up any of your rights if you don't want the money.
:)
I believe you're missing the point. The point is not anonymity, it's not doing their dirty work for them. SDMI is in place to prevent people like you and me from doing what we do. Am I gonna step up and help their efforts?
Also, you don't give them expertise, as nothing forces you to explain how you hacked their stuff if you did.
That doesn't matter. You have to demonstrate that you circumvented their security measures, and that means explaining WHAT you exploited to get past it. That's enough for them to unleash their people on that one portion of the software. Take SSH1 for example. Let's say there was a similar challenge, and you found that kerberos bug that made it vulnerable. Stating that you used a bug in SSH1's kerberos stuff narrows the field down quite a bit. They end up having A LOT less code to check.
Whether you like the idea that SDMI are trying to implement or not, a public challenge is always a good thing. And they are actually giving up a rather convenient and powerful way to test their algorithms...
Not when the public challenge will be supporting something that is inherently evil! Would we have helped the germans debug their enigma machines? Ok, so maybe the SDMI folks aren't nazis, but you get the idea.
Finally, the best way to prevent SDMI from existing is certainly to undertake their challenge and to break the schemes. Otherwise, they'll implement it, and maybe it will be broken afterward, but bypassing it then may involve more complicated legal issues...
I don't think it is possible to make SDMI airtight, but let's assume for a moment that it is. If that's the case and we find every bug in it now and make it flawless, then they will release a theoretically perfect version. It's not like they are gonna throw their hands up and say "oh well, we had some bugs, lets scrap the project." HOWEVER, if we were to wait until SDMI is out there, in LOTS of software and maybe even hardware for that matter and THEN find the bugs in it, the results are much more devastating. It becomes evident that they released a technology with some serious problems. Do you consider CSS and SDMI to be similar? Sure, later on we could be mired in the same sort of legal battles, but in the end DeCSS got out there and it's gonna stay out there.
Well, now that would be awfully convenient. "Honey, you about to give birth? How bout we take a vacation to the 'states?" She has the kid, and hey, whaddya know- it's an american citizen. What do we do in that case?
*ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM* What the hell was that? Oh, it was this conversation *flying over my head*. I never knew that anyone who knew this much about quantum mechanics had time to read slashdot. :)
Second, has anyone contacted Bruce Perens and asked him to intervene?
Tsk, tsk- RTFA!
From the article:
A gaping hole has been discovered in the GNU General Public License (GPL), the legal document at the heart of open source, and dear Sun has driven a Mack truck named Solaris x86 straight through it.
At least that's how open source demigod Bruce Perens assesses the situation and he's the primary author of the "Open Source Definition," the philosophical basis of the open source movement.
That's the first two paragraphs of the article.