1. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source;) " says Timothy of slashdot, home of slack journalism and one-sided reporting. So, I don't believe a word he says, and I won't question the source.
2. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source;) " says Timothy of slashdot, and I believe him. I will question every source. Goto 1.
Eric's was pretty much my only reference for quite a lot of my first year at university (two years ago). It was really painful to have it taken away.
It's a great example of what web publishing can do, and we are lucky that this has not become another example of old media squashing new media. This gives me some hope that the battle for unhampered digital music and film is not lost yet (although not much, all the math publishers together do not come close to a single record label).
As an aside, it's slightly unfortunate that Eric's return from the dead of copyright law is so closely followed by death by slashdot.
Here is my own sarcastic take on the some of the "facts" from the article:
He also conceived the now-famous ``+'' symbol to ensure a message was sent to a designated recipient.
+ was pretty famous for years before that. This is not the 5000th anniversary of addition. And how did they miss the correct symbol by such a margin anyway?
And, the top-of-the-line modem connection at the time operated at a snail-like 300 baud, roughly one-twentieth of the speed of today's standard 56.6 kbps modem.
300*20=6000... 300*200=60000
Calculators are cheap... please get one.
Another major stage in its development came in the mid-90s as the first Web browsers introduced the World Wide Web to the couch potato.
The world wide web must have been fairly lame before the invention of the browser.
I am not sure I quite get the point of this... Most of the time when my other hand is busy I am only using the mouse to close down all those pop-ups.
Still, for those desperate to achieve the Golden-eye pen twiddle and still get decent typing speeds, you can reach speeds of up to 60 wpm with the dvorak one-handed layouts (the keyboards are probably a little bigger than this though).
And given the rapidity at which "spam" has entered the general lexicon in English and several other languages, trademark experts say Hormel would be foolish to fight the trend.
Perhaps we should bear this in mind when we jump on newspaper articles that use the word 'hacker'. A language only means what people use it to mean, and I'm sure it's just as clear what people mean by hacker in context as it is that I don't have pink meat in my inbox.
Here's one of them - recording one program while watching another.
Don't worry guys, I have some prior art... 2 VCRs. I can stick one on record and one on play and everything works fine.
Seriously, this patenting something that does 2 obvious things at once is stupid... or else I should patent my device to hold bread in a vertical position, and make it warm at the same time!
"Remember, I didn't go to M.I.T. or Purdue, but I control the checkbook here."
This is brilliant... truely Dilbert pointy-haired-boss management at its best. In the next few paragraphs she goes on to shoot down the optimization phd guy's quantitive analysis because her hunch is (paraphrase) "it's better for us to incur huge costs storing loadsa books than to only stock popular ones we might have a chance of ever selling".
The fastest way for amazon to turn a profit would be to turf out Ms Blake because distributing books is a numbers game...
They'll get the last laugh in 24 months when no software vendor dares release a game for any other system.
That's right... We should also throw up our hands and stop using linux, because MS is obviously going to beat us here too. There definitely aren't other consoles to provide competition...
Seriously, was there a glitch in the slashdot or something because I thought we didn't see microsoft as invulnerable over here.
Slashdot ran a story "is code art" a while ago. If this guys code is good (and you'd have to hope so after 30 years working on the same program), then his art is making art... This really does my head in. How about if he made AARON produce art in the form of code. That'd really deserve a recursive acronym.
not_cub
PS I'm learning to type with the dvorak layout so my posts are going to have to be short and sweet for a while.
... no one wants to port scan a pigeon, let alone sniff it's packets.
BTW, why are we seeing so many posts moderated so high recently? I only want to see a few posts per article, and now you get 15 at +5. Did Taco make everyone a moderator full-time or something?
Okay, this rocks. Assuming Sony will get this out in multilingual formats, this will *really* help speed acceptance and build an incredible amature developer base for new games and apps.
Quite frankly, I don't think this is going to happen like this. Linux is already available for PCs. Linux running PC-owners have a far higher proportion of programmers with the ability to write games than the ps2. If we were going to see a plethora of games for linux, developed by amateurs, they would already be here. As it is, we have a handful of Loki ports, and a few relatively simplistic games (cannon smash, tux racer etc).
Where it may help is if it is competitive with the native development of ps2 games. A conventional games company looking at developing a game for ps2 would weigh up the points of doing it under linux on ps2 or not, and one point that may swing it is that, "if we do it under linux, we can pick up all those geeks on slashdot too".
For myself, I would rather see something like the dreamcast linux that is currently available. I don't need a hard disk on a console, just a network card. Because I know all I'll use it for is as a sitting room front-end for my real computer to play mp3s, occasionally look at the web etc.. which isn't exciting, but I'd put money it's what a lot of people want.
Recently, there seems to be a trend to get digital devices to do more than their analogue equivalents. In Britain, we have seen the introduction of digital tv (terrestrial and satellite), and digital radio is starting to come in. Both of these have been used not to increase the quality of transmissions, but to increase the number of things that can be transmitted. If you don't believe me, take a look at MTV on OnDigital and look at all the fuzziness in areas of high contrast (satellite is admittedly better but still shows the same faults). Similarly, mp3 players allow people to carry round hours of music, replacing CD players before them. Same deal with loss of quality.
What I want to see is not an increase in quantity going from analogue to digital, but an increase in quality. When CDs replaced tape, the killer feature was the higher sound quality, rather than the fact that you could store 1000 hours of musical fuzz. Taco's box, and most consumer electronics these days, do exactly that. Because "1000 hours of music and it's digital with gizmos" sounds a lot better than "1 hour of music and it's digital and good". I'd rather buy all my music again on SACD than have some whiz-bang box download it off napster.
On a school trip a few years back, the museum tour guide told us that meteorologists looked at Constable's paintings, the cloud formations were so accurately drawn that they could forecast the weather from them. She also noted that the weather forecast was about 60% accurate at the time, so maybe the weather men could look at the actual sky a bit harder.
Nowadays, everything's instantaneous, and people don't realize the fun of waiting. This is a problem with our culture I think. Everything has to be so fast.
I agree. In fact, I agree so strongly that I'd like to improve the quality of life for one lucky slashdot reader, by trading him his Athlon Jillion Mhz with NVidia GEForce for my 266Mhz Pentium II. I am currently running KDE2, so the pleasure of waiting would still remain in my life.
Or alternatively: screw that... No one likes looking at a splash screen for five minutes.
A lot of people don't like the idea of Carnivore. One of the arguments against it I see on slashdot goes roughly as follows:
"With the existing plain old telephone system, the FBI can only tap a few lines at a time. With Carnivore, they can tap everybody's emails all the time, which is unconstitutional/generally bad."
One of the arguments I see on slashdot for napster runs along the lines:
"Bloody RIAA. They can't keep the genie in the bottle. New technology allows people to get there hands on loadsa music."
Now come on people, you can't have it both ways... Is it ok for everybody to exploit new technology as they see fit? FBI included. Or perhaps at least one of these knee-jerk reactions isn't sensible?
"Technology people never gave their stuff away," Schroeder says.
Perhaps not the greatest example. If I remember correctly, both linux and BSD are given away.
Perhaps a different example would be Blockbuster and the MPAA. The MPAA don't seem to have a problem with video rental, since it actually increases their video sales (how many of us would actually buy every latest release they want to see?). Maybe they should stop being so short-sighted. I am certainly not going to be able to buy every book I want to read. If I borrow it from a library, and say, 30 other people do, they have effectively sold 1/30th of a copy to each of us, against a like 0 if we each had to buy it.
Moving into electronic distribution, things are going to have to change, but for now, I don't think pressing against dead-tree libraries is a reasonable move.
Hemos said: We've actually taken on people - but they've all washed out, in terms of actually putting the time in. To actually recognize duplicate stories means watching almost constantly - and that isn't as easy to do as it sounds.
Read constantly? I manage (and I managed when I had a day job;) ). As do the kazillion people who post "we've seen this before" everytime there's a slip-up. If it offends so much, don't press read more.
The article is indeed well-written, but I think a more balanced approach might be better. Sure, patent abuse is harmful, but not having any form of patent system would be equally harmful. Drug companies would have no incentive to invent cures. Artists would have no incentive to create (Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative).
Well, what's the best way to make the big companies that we all hate at slashdot so much to play fair? Obviously to withhold money from them when they get out of line. This goes not only for not buying CDs. We also need to stop investing in them. I'm sure lots of slashdot readers now have their pensions in ethical funds that do not invest in firearms, tobacco etc... Now what if you phone up the company that manages your pensions and ask if they invest in companies that abuse IP? What if everyone reading slashdot and interested in these issues did this? Pretty soon I'm sure somebody would cotton on and start a special ethical fund.
If you don't buy a few CDs, the no-one won't care. If an advert for a large pension fund denounces the RIAA for being unethical, that'd be better.
Julien Stern is a PhD student in cryptology at the Laboratoire de recherche en informatique, Orsay
Julien Boeuf is a masters student in multimedia, images and sound at the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications, Paris
Yeah, I fully expect to see toddlers cracking SDMI any minute now. And possibly some pissed off French hackers turning up at Hemos's house to have a word:)
It was just one of those little tidbits of information: lastminute.com, a company that offers special, last-minute deals on a great variety of goods and services, has decided to close its UK Web site for the Christmas season and will use a printed catalog to promote its deals instead
Has the internet peaked? It seems to me, the web has peaked in the form that the.coms currently envisage. There are far too many sites out there just like the lastminute site that are just brochures for the company. That's been said before and so has "content is king". But it is undoubtedly true. Recently, I needed to check some settings for my hi-fi, which I found easily on the yamaha site. That, to my mind is the future of the web. Most information created by companies now that is available in dead-tree format was created on computers, and that's what I want to see on the web. Not some pretty page designed by a jumped up brochure designer.
So, my take: web brochures are dying... maybe we could think about getting real information on here.
not_cub
Re:I have a question...
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 1
So what does one say to the people that decry "You oppose the RIP act, so therefore you support pornography/child abuse/whatever" ?
Similarly, if a law were proposed to lock everybody in individual cells, with Tony Blaire to bring us food and water, this would stop all law infringements dead. Obviously, this is a bit of a downer for everybody except Tony.
Seriously, it's been said a lot before (maybe I will get modded down as redundant then), but there has to be a balance between personal liberty and laws to ensure the bad guys don't take over. As it stands at the moment, I can send physical objects securely without them being routinely intercepted. I don't know about you but I like it that way. These proposals are equivalent to having policemen at your local post office to open every parcel and letter. *That* strikes me as a less acceptable way of living.
Ok, so if I'm in my own house, sending files from my camera via wireless ethernet is not much easier than transferring them to a computer via IR, where I can actually do something useful with them.
If I'm in a friend's house I have to configure my camera to be on his network before I can make anything work. That's assuming he even has a network.
In fact, I am hard pushed to think of a way that this is more useful than having the same web-enabled functionality on my toaster ("to: root@camera Subject: toast is done").
Come on guys, I might want to hook my computer up to my hifi to play mp3s. I might want a computer in my tv to show me schedules. I only need one way to get pictures from my camera to my computer/paper, and this isn't any easier.
not_cub
Let's get some linux-only games
on
Linux Sin Demo
·
· Score: 1
If we really want gaming for linux to take off we need to have linux-only games. It's all very well porting the last greatest thing to linux, but why would your average Joe switch to linux for something he already has under windows. Simply put, he won't.
Now you often hear that open source development is great except that it only attracts people to glamourous projects. If this is the case, how come there aren't developers springing up all over the place to create open source games. It should not be too hard to attract at least some graphic artists and designers for such projects.
Hell, maybe these projects already exist. If they do they need some attention... Slashdot articles:)
Slashdot Mirror
2. "Goes to show, in a large group of people you can probably find at least some who fit nearly any premise. As always, question the source
It's a great example of what web publishing can do, and we are lucky that this has not become another example of old media squashing new media. This gives me some hope that the battle for unhampered digital music and film is not lost yet (although not much, all the math publishers together do not come close to a single record label).
As an aside, it's slightly unfortunate that Eric's return from the dead of copyright law is so closely followed by death by slashdot.
Anyway, welcome back Eric, and Thanks.
not_cub
He also conceived the now-famous ``+'' symbol to ensure a message was sent to a designated recipient.
+ was pretty famous for years before that. This is not the 5000th anniversary of addition. And how did they miss the correct symbol by such a margin anyway?
And, the top-of-the-line modem connection at the time operated at a snail-like 300 baud, roughly one-twentieth of the speed of today's standard 56.6 kbps modem.
300*20=6000
Calculators are cheap... please get one.
Another major stage in its development came in the mid-90s as the first Web browsers introduced the World Wide Web to the couch potato.
The world wide web must have been fairly lame before the invention of the browser.
not_cub
Still, for those desperate to achieve the Golden-eye pen twiddle and still get decent typing speeds, you can reach speeds of up to 60 wpm with the dvorak one-handed layouts (the keyboards are probably a little bigger than this though).
not_cub
Perhaps we should bear this in mind when we jump on newspaper articles that use the word 'hacker'. A language only means what people use it to mean, and I'm sure it's just as clear what people mean by hacker in context as it is that I don't have pink meat in my inbox.
not_cub
Don't worry guys, I have some prior art... 2 VCRs. I can stick one on record and one on play and everything works fine.
Seriously, this patenting something that does 2 obvious things at once is stupid... or else I should patent my device to hold bread in a vertical position, and make it warm at the same time!
not_cub
This is brilliant... truely Dilbert pointy-haired-boss management at its best. In the next few paragraphs she goes on to shoot down the optimization phd guy's quantitive analysis because her hunch is (paraphrase) "it's better for us to incur huge costs storing loadsa books than to only stock popular ones we might have a chance of ever selling".
The fastest way for amazon to turn a profit would be to turf out Ms Blake because distributing books is a numbers game...
not_cub
That's right... We should also throw up our hands and stop using linux, because MS is obviously going to beat us here too. There definitely aren't other consoles to provide competition...
Seriously, was there a glitch in the slashdot or something because I thought we didn't see microsoft as invulnerable over here.
not_cub
not_cub
PS I'm learning to type with the dvorak layout so my posts are going to have to be short and sweet for a while.
not_cub
BTW, why are we seeing so many posts moderated so high recently? I only want to see a few posts per article, and now you get 15 at +5. Did Taco make everyone a moderator full-time or something?
not_cub
Quite frankly, I don't think this is going to happen like this. Linux is already available for PCs. Linux running PC-owners have a far higher proportion of programmers with the ability to write games than the ps2. If we were going to see a plethora of games for linux, developed by amateurs, they would already be here. As it is, we have a handful of Loki ports, and a few relatively simplistic games (cannon smash, tux racer etc).
Where it may help is if it is competitive with the native development of ps2 games. A conventional games company looking at developing a game for ps2 would weigh up the points of doing it under linux on ps2 or not, and one point that may swing it is that, "if we do it under linux, we can pick up all those geeks on slashdot too".
For myself, I would rather see something like the dreamcast linux that is currently available. I don't need a hard disk on a console, just a network card. Because I know all I'll use it for is as a sitting room front-end for my real computer to play mp3s, occasionally look at the web etc.. which isn't exciting, but I'd put money it's what a lot of people want.
not_cub
What I want to see is not an increase in quantity going from analogue to digital, but an increase in quality. When CDs replaced tape, the killer feature was the higher sound quality, rather than the fact that you could store 1000 hours of musical fuzz. Taco's box, and most consumer electronics these days, do exactly that. Because "1000 hours of music and it's digital with gizmos" sounds a lot better than "1 hour of music and it's digital and good". I'd rather buy all my music again on SACD than have some whiz-bang box download it off napster.
Anyway, rant over.
not_cub
not_cub
On a school trip a few years back, the museum tour guide told us that meteorologists looked at Constable's paintings, the cloud formations were so accurately drawn that they could forecast the weather from them. She also noted that the weather forecast was about 60% accurate at the time, so maybe the weather men could look at the actual sky a bit harder.
not_cub
I agree. In fact, I agree so strongly that I'd like to improve the quality of life for one lucky slashdot reader, by trading him his Athlon Jillion Mhz with NVidia GEForce for my 266Mhz Pentium II. I am currently running KDE2, so the pleasure of waiting would still remain in my life.
Or alternatively: screw that... No one likes looking at a splash screen for five minutes.
not_cub
"With the existing plain old telephone system, the FBI can only tap a few lines at a time. With Carnivore, they can tap everybody's emails all the time, which is unconstitutional/generally bad."
One of the arguments I see on slashdot for napster runs along the lines:
"Bloody RIAA. They can't keep the genie in the bottle. New technology allows people to get there hands on loadsa music."
Now come on people, you can't have it both ways... Is it ok for everybody to exploit new technology as they see fit? FBI included. Or perhaps at least one of these knee-jerk reactions isn't sensible?
not_cub
"Technology people never gave their stuff away," Schroeder says.
Perhaps not the greatest example. If I remember correctly, both linux and BSD are given away.
Perhaps a different example would be Blockbuster and the MPAA. The MPAA don't seem to have a problem with video rental, since it actually increases their video sales (how many of us would actually buy every latest release they want to see?). Maybe they should stop being so short-sighted. I am certainly not going to be able to buy every book I want to read. If I borrow it from a library, and say, 30 other people do, they have effectively sold 1/30th of a copy to each of us, against a like 0 if we each had to buy it.
Moving into electronic distribution, things are going to have to change, but for now, I don't think pressing against dead-tree libraries is a reasonable move.
not_cub
Read constantly? I manage (and I managed when I had a day job ;) ). As do the kazillion people who post "we've seen this before" everytime there's a slip-up. If it offends so much, don't press read more.
not_cub
Well, what's the best way to make the big companies that we all hate at slashdot so much to play fair? Obviously to withhold money from them when they get out of line. This goes not only for not buying CDs. We also need to stop investing in them. I'm sure lots of slashdot readers now have their pensions in ethical funds that do not invest in firearms, tobacco etc... Now what if you phone up the company that manages your pensions and ask if they invest in companies that abuse IP? What if everyone reading slashdot and interested in these issues did this? Pretty soon I'm sure somebody would cotton on and start a special ethical fund.
If you don't buy a few CDs, the no-one won't care. If an advert for a large pension fund denounces the RIAA for being unethical, that'd be better.
Any thoughts?
not_cub
Julien Stern is a PhD student in cryptology at the Laboratoire de recherche en informatique, Orsay
Julien Boeuf is a masters student in multimedia, images and sound at the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications, Paris
Yeah, I fully expect to see toddlers cracking SDMI any minute now. And possibly some pissed off French hackers turning up at Hemos's house to have a word :)
not_cub
Has the internet peaked? It seems to me, the web has peaked in the form that the .coms currently envisage. There are far too many sites out there just like the lastminute site that are just brochures for the company. That's been said before and so has "content is king". But it is undoubtedly true. Recently, I needed to check some settings for my hi-fi, which I found easily on the yamaha site. That, to my mind is the future of the web. Most information created by companies now that is available in dead-tree format was created on computers, and that's what I want to see on the web. Not some pretty page designed by a jumped up brochure designer.
So, my take: web brochures are dying... maybe we could think about getting real information on here.
not_cub
Similarly, if a law were proposed to lock everybody in individual cells, with Tony Blaire to bring us food and water, this would stop all law infringements dead. Obviously, this is a bit of a downer for everybody except Tony.
Seriously, it's been said a lot before (maybe I will get modded down as redundant then), but there has to be a balance between personal liberty and laws to ensure the bad guys don't take over. As it stands at the moment, I can send physical objects securely without them being routinely intercepted. I don't know about you but I like it that way. These proposals are equivalent to having policemen at your local post office to open every parcel and letter. *That* strikes me as a less acceptable way of living.
not_cub
If I'm in a friend's house I have to configure my camera to be on his network before I can make anything work. That's assuming he even has a network.
In fact, I am hard pushed to think of a way that this is more useful than having the same web-enabled functionality on my toaster ("to: root@camera Subject: toast is done").
Come on guys, I might want to hook my computer up to my hifi to play mp3s. I might want a computer in my tv to show me schedules. I only need one way to get pictures from my camera to my computer/paper, and this isn't any easier.
not_cub
Now you often hear that open source development is great except that it only attracts people to glamourous projects. If this is the case, how come there aren't developers springing up all over the place to create open source games. It should not be too hard to attract at least some graphic artists and designers for such projects.
Hell, maybe these projects already exist. If they do they need some attention... Slashdot articles :)
Anyway, enough random rambling.
not_cub