How has the decss lawsuit helped decss? Did this encourage lot's of hackers to work on dvd-players? The only thing that happened was that lot's of people started mirroring a short piece of source code that was almost useless in itself all over the world. If it hadn't been for the lawsuit, we would most likely have several useable and legal dvd-players in every linux-distribution by now.
If you want to rebut us, use an example from the technology sector not pharmaceutics.
Of course: pharmeceutics aren't part of the technology sector anymore. Because to be part of the technology sector you have to do ecommerce, right?
Patents aren't evil, only software patents are. Or to be more precise, software patents aren't evi either, but their current implementation does.
Given that sounds get from your ear to your brain through neurons, could you make a codec which encodes sound as a representation
of which neurons would be fired as you perceive that sound?
I can't possibly imagine how that would take less space than the actual sound. And the encoding would probably have to be for one particular person's ear. How would you want to do playback? By attaching directly to the neurons?
Anyway, there is one rather cool aspect of this idea, by attaching electrodes directly to the neurons, we could induce sound patterns in the brain that could have never existed in reality. Maybe this would just give you a headache, but it could also make pretty weird effects in a computer game or something like that.
Hahaha, yeah right, like there are any lawyers smart enough to grok C!
Personally, I find that very likely. Lawyers are generally very bright people. They actually have much better education than the average hacker. And, the ability to grok C isn't too hard. Most people can pick up C very fast. Even for someone without prior programming experience, half a year would suffice for most people. And lawyers aren't stupid! If they were, they would never managed to become lawyers.
You just have to realize that just because you know something about programming, that doesn't mean you are particularly bright. It just means that at some point in time, you were intrigued by computers (which is likely to be true of a lot of lawyers as well). On the other hand, if you are the leading personality in your field of programming, that definitely means you are bright, but then you would probably not brag about knowing C.
On the other hand, there is the question of whether lawyers understand current audio compression technology good enough to make sense of the Ogg Vorbis source code. I seriously doubt that, as neither does most hackers. And that is the issue at end.
But regardless of this, the most important fact is that no lawyer with his wits clear would do such work himself. After all, just hiring an audio compression expert to do the review would be much better, both in terms of quality of review, and in the amount of money spent, because he would be able to do so much faster.
If I really had something to hide...
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 1
...then I would really know better than to send all my secret data across the Internet, even with encryption. After all, there is no such thing as 100% secure encryption, and chances are, if those government guys really want to, it is possible to crack it. Perhaps not economic, but most likely possible.
It just sounds like it is too much that could go wrong in this scheme. But the biggest objection by far is that by using it, you are advertising to every government official that you have something to hide. Do you really trust current encryption schemes and sealand officials that much?
Something that would seem like a much better solution to the terrorist wannabe would be exactly the same system (a bootable CD, not disrupting your normal setup, and thus impossible to detect if someone seizes your computer), storing all files locally on encrypted removable media. Now, go hide the disk somewhere clever.
If you need to exchange secret data with someone, at least use steganography. The key to not getting detected is to avoid creating suspicion in the first place. This system just does the opposite.
Why bother concentrating on making a light version when there still are other bugs to iron out?
Yeah, why bother putting all the stupid bloat in the first place when they still haven't managed to build a usable browser yet. Is there anyone, I mean anyone at all, that really wanted a built-in mail/news/irc-client in the browser. It would have been so much better and so much easier just to fork some other program. The GUI-stuff seems more forgiveable as it is at least a somewhat interesting project, but it would have been better if they focused on just getting something done in the first placee.
Are they expecting TV-networks to make alternate news-broadcasts for the net. Many broadcasters stream their news shows on the net. I don't think they are going to re-edit each show just because they have paid licenses for showing it on the air, but it's not possible to have a license for streaming it is part of a streaming news show. And what's this part of ensuring locality. TV-broadcasts are often by satellite, so they are not very local anymore.
Considering that this is advertising, it is most likely the current world record. And, considering that 200 words per minute is not unusual on QWERTY keyboards I am not really impressed. Besides, it didn't look something I would carry around with my Palm anyway!
Even if you know Dvorak, you have to know QWERTY anyways if you are going to use somebody elses machine. Also, research shows typing speeds for experienced Dvorak typists almost approaches the typing speeds of experienced QWERT typists. So it's not like it's an actual improvement. And, while it is said to be marginally easier for beginners to get up to acceptable typing speed on Dvorak keybords compared to a QWERTY, no one in their right mind would hand a beginner a Dvorak keyboard anyway...
And this should prove what? That you haven't found a valid use for goto in 5 years, or that goto has no valid uses.
Goto has lot's of valid uses. First, it's great for program-generated programs. Second, it is sometimes a convenient and very clean way to avoid carrying around one or more boolean variables around in deeply nested if's and while's. Third, it's sometimes useful as a performance-hack. Fourth, there are lot's of reasons I probably haven't thought about yet, but there is no reason to outlaw something just because you don't like it!
No, you can't. At least you can't compile the output. First you need to do a "grep -v '#line' on the output first. Of course, this makes debugging much harder since it's not possible to get a correct line-number for the error anymore. Besides, the C preprocessor ain't that great either, because it's not really that powerful. Mainly, (1) not being Turing-equivalent, and (2) not knowing anything about C syntax are the idiocies that's knocking me off.
To cope with (1), I've been toying with the idea of using eRuby as a replacement for cpp and general language-independent preprocessor in my projects, but since I've been busy doing other things than C programming lately and the other languages I use doesn't have much use for that, I haven't got any real experiences yet.
On the other hand, I have seen some preprocessors for java that seems pretty darn nice (not that I have used them much, I personally can't stand java myself either). Here I should probably have some URL's handy, but that is not possible because I'm to lazy to look them up, and if you are really interested, you can find them yourselves.
Sure, just use an old version if you want old software. xinetd is actually much better than inetd, but if you refuse progress because you insist on all configuration files remaining themselves, only a shrink can help you.
Regarding the gcc controversy, I am constantly amazed at the number of people who think they know better than the gcc developers themselves. But what do I know...
Here are some objections to the scheme mentioned in the article:
First, how is 10.12345/nov0700-zaret different from 207.46.238.109/nov0700-zaret. Or
msnbc-news/nov0700-zaret different from www.msnbc.com/news/nov0700-zaret. This means that using a handle is no different from using the current DNS scheme to name content.
Second, the article says nothing about how they are planning to solve the persistence problem. If something is deleted, what will your handle point to? Simply implementing some new arbitrary naming scheme doesn't make the problem go away.
What is needed is something much like freenet, but with a different twist. Let's call this system infonet. Now, number one priority on infonet would be that information should never disappear. To make this work, there should always be at least three hosts at different locations storing each file. This should be ensured by infonet software. If one host go down, another should take over. Thus, there will always be redundancy. Furthermore, we need a central organization governing infonet, let's call it infonet-adm. It would have two tasks: (1) managing namespace (usenet is a fine model for this) (2) managing content and ensuring enough machine resources are available. The last task is the most difficult. I see several business models for infonet-adm
charging a one-time fee for each file stored in infonet
charging users for downloading content (probably stupid)
charging ISP's for connecting to infonet
demanding ISP's to set contribute a suitable amount of machine resources to infonet, the amount can be a function of number of users and their average activity on infonet.
A combination of option 1 and 4 sounds most reasonable to me. Note that as long as More's law is in effect, it will be now problem to save the old content forever.
For instance, I've recently encountered two recruiting firms which expect you to submit resumes in Word.doc format.
Then, for god's sake, use another recruiting firm. If they insist on Word, they are probably idiots, and while I don't know about you, I for one will not work for idiots!
This looks much like the classic SF story Ender's game by Orson Scott Card.
In that story, a young computer hacker and excellent gamer is sent to army training, controlling unmanned combat space vehicles in a war with an alien race. He won the war in a very unexpected way. I don't want to spoil the ending for those who haven't read it, but you should!
From http://www.starcd.com/starcd/sound_tech?p_web_sess ion=413048&p_acct=
HOW WE DO IT
*CD uses a patented computer technology to monitor radio broadcasts and identify songs as they air.
Before new music is released, a master recording is obtained from the record companies and scanned into the system's computer --
creating a unique digital fingerprint or "pattern" for that song.
*CD's computers monitor local radio stations every second of the day, every day of the week --
processing the digitized broadcast and comparing it with thousands and thousands of patterns.
Once a song is recognized, the system records the exact time, date, and station on which it played.
You can access this information by calling *CD-the call for music.
This has been a problem for years. Case in point: Netscape and glibc. With the upgrade to glibc, netscape had a lot of errors due to memory-mismanagement. Those particular errors was wrong under old libc too, but didn't cause it to crash.
Another thing was the change from a.out to elf binary format. That caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people. Especially with shared libraries. People used a lot of tricks to make shared libraries and dynamic loading to work. Of course, with elf, there was a standard straightforward relatively simple way to do it and none of the old tricks would work anymore. So people had to rewrite parts of applications that used dynamic loading.
But the fact that an upgrade of some program has now become available in the unstable developer branch of some linux-distribution doesn't really strike me as a story.
Do you think we should have had stories of when xfree 4.0 entered the unstable developer branch of redhat, mandrake, suse, and all the other major distributions as well?
While this would shurely be great for reviving patients after boat accidents, etc..., the article also mentioned military applications.
Shurely the military want efficient revival methods as well (there usually happens a lot of not so fun stuff to soldiers bodies during warfare), but this could also be used to artificially increase divers tolerance for cold water. Imagine a diver swimming around in cold water, with a computer watching over bodily functions and automatically injecting small doses of EDTA in the bloodstream if the diver experiences cramps, loss of consciousness or other unwanted effects of cold water. This could make it possible to have divers stay much longer under water in a normal dry suit without damaging the mission (or the diver of course, if you care about those sorts of things).
Slashdot Mirror
How has the decss lawsuit helped decss? Did this encourage lot's of hackers to work on dvd-players? The only thing that happened was that lot's of people started mirroring a short piece of source code that was almost useless in itself all over the world. If it hadn't been for the lawsuit, we would most likely have several useable and legal dvd-players in every linux-distribution by now.
Patents aren't evil, only software patents are. Or to be more precise, software patents aren't evi either, but their current implementation does.
I can't possibly imagine how that would take less space than the actual sound. And the encoding would probably have to be for one particular person's ear. How would you want to do playback? By attaching directly to the neurons?
Anyway, there is one rather cool aspect of this idea, by attaching electrodes directly to the neurons, we could induce sound patterns in the brain that could have never existed in reality. Maybe this would just give you a headache, but it could also make pretty weird effects in a computer game or something like that.
Personally, I find that very likely. Lawyers are generally very bright people. They actually have much better education than the average hacker. And, the ability to grok C isn't too hard. Most people can pick up C very fast. Even for someone without prior programming experience, half a year would suffice for most people. And lawyers aren't stupid! If they were, they would never managed to become lawyers.
You just have to realize that just because you know something about programming, that doesn't mean you are particularly bright. It just means that at some point in time, you were intrigued by computers (which is likely to be true of a lot of lawyers as well). On the other hand, if you are the leading personality in your field of programming, that definitely means you are bright, but then you would probably not brag about knowing C.
On the other hand, there is the question of whether lawyers understand current audio compression technology good enough to make sense of the Ogg Vorbis source code. I seriously doubt that, as neither does most hackers. And that is the issue at end.
But regardless of this, the most important fact is that no lawyer with his wits clear would do such work himself. After all, just hiring an audio compression expert to do the review would be much better, both in terms of quality of review, and in the amount of money spent, because he would be able to do so much faster.
It just sounds like it is too much that could go wrong in this scheme. But the biggest objection by far is that by using it, you are advertising to every government official that you have something to hide. Do you really trust current encryption schemes and sealand officials that much?
Something that would seem like a much better solution to the terrorist wannabe would be exactly the same system (a bootable CD, not disrupting your normal setup, and thus impossible to detect if someone seizes your computer), storing all files locally on encrypted removable media. Now, go hide the disk somewhere clever.
If you need to exchange secret data with someone, at least use steganography. The key to not getting detected is to avoid creating suspicion in the first place. This system just does the opposite.
Oh, no! In fact you (Anonymous Coward) are the most active poster on slashdot in all time. You will never fool me there...
Why bother concentrating on making a light version when there still are other bugs to iron out? Yeah, why bother putting all the stupid bloat in the first place when they still haven't managed to build a usable browser yet. Is there anyone, I mean anyone at all, that really wanted a built-in mail/news/irc-client in the browser. It would have been so much better and so much easier just to fork some other program. The GUI-stuff seems more forgiveable as it is at least a somewhat interesting project, but it would have been better if they focused on just getting something done in the first placee.
Are they expecting TV-networks to make alternate news-broadcasts for the net. Many broadcasters stream their news shows on the net. I don't think they are going to re-edit each show just because they have paid licenses for showing it on the air, but it's not possible to have a license for streaming it is part of a streaming news show. And what's this part of ensuring locality. TV-broadcasts are often by satellite, so they are not very local anymore.
Considering that this is advertising, it is most likely the current world record. And, considering that 200 words per minute is not unusual on QWERTY keyboards I am not really impressed. Besides, it didn't look something I would carry around with my Palm anyway!
Even if you know Dvorak, you have to know QWERTY anyways if you are going to use somebody elses machine. Also, research shows typing speeds for experienced Dvorak typists almost approaches the typing speeds of experienced QWERT typists. So it's not like it's an actual improvement. And, while it is said to be marginally easier for beginners to get up to acceptable typing speed on Dvorak keybords compared to a QWERTY, no one in their right mind would hand a beginner a Dvorak keyboard anyway...
Goto has lot's of valid uses. First, it's great for program-generated programs. Second, it is sometimes a convenient and very clean way to avoid carrying around one or more boolean variables around in deeply nested if's and while's. Third, it's sometimes useful as a performance-hack. Fourth, there are lot's of reasons I probably haven't thought about yet, but there is no reason to outlaw something just because you don't like it!
No, you can't. At least you can't compile the output. First you need to do a "grep -v '#line' on the output first. Of course, this makes debugging much harder since it's not possible to get a correct line-number for the error anymore. Besides, the C preprocessor ain't that great either, because it's not really that powerful. Mainly, (1) not being Turing-equivalent, and (2) not knowing anything about C syntax are the idiocies that's knocking me off.
To cope with (1), I've been toying with the idea of using eRuby as a replacement for cpp and general language-independent preprocessor in my projects, but since I've been busy doing other things than C programming lately and the other languages I use doesn't have much use for that, I haven't got any real experiences yet.
On the other hand, I have seen some preprocessors for java that seems pretty darn nice (not that I have used them much, I personally can't stand java myself either). Here I should probably have some URL's handy, but that is not possible because I'm to lazy to look them up, and if you are really interested, you can find them yourselves.
No that's not strange. You can have some from me as well...
O
oOooooO
ooOoOOOOOO
Regarding the gcc controversy, I am constantly amazed at the number of people who think they know better than the gcc developers themselves. But what do I know...
Too bad they aren't using the DjVu format so they could save some bandwith. Would be a nice demonstration of it's capabilities me think...
What is needed is something much like freenet, but with a different twist. Let's call this system infonet. Now, number one priority on infonet would be that information should never disappear. To make this work, there should always be at least three hosts at different locations storing each file. This should be ensured by infonet software. If one host go down, another should take over. Thus, there will always be redundancy. Furthermore, we need a central organization governing infonet, let's call it infonet-adm. It would have two tasks: (1) managing namespace (usenet is a fine model for this) (2) managing content and ensuring enough machine resources are available. The last task is the most difficult. I see several business models for infonet-adm
- charging a one-time fee for each file stored in infonet
- charging users for downloading content (probably stupid)
- charging ISP's for connecting to infonet
- demanding ISP's to set contribute a suitable amount of machine resources to infonet, the amount can be a function of number of users and their average activity on infonet.
A combination of option 1 and 4 sounds most reasonable to me. Note that as long as More's law is in effect, it will be now problem to save the old content forever.Then, for god's sake, use another recruiting firm. If they insist on Word, they are probably idiots, and while I don't know about you, I for one will not work for idiots!
In that story, a young computer hacker and excellent gamer is sent to army training, controlling unmanned combat space vehicles in a war with an alien race. He won the war in a very unexpected way. I don't want to spoil the ending for those who haven't read it, but you should!
*CD uses a patented computer technology to monitor radio broadcasts and identify songs as they air.
Before new music is released, a master recording is obtained from the record companies and scanned into the system's computer -- creating a unique digital fingerprint or "pattern" for that song.
*CD's computers monitor local radio stations every second of the day, every day of the week -- processing the digitized broadcast and comparing it with thousands and thousands of patterns.
Once a song is recognized, the system records the exact time, date, and station on which it played.
You can access this information by calling *CD-the call for music.
Internet History Log Files. Is this a common abbreviation, or is it just that lawyers speak that way.
Another thing was the change from a.out to elf binary format. That caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people. Especially with shared libraries. People used a lot of tricks to make shared libraries and dynamic loading to work. Of course, with elf, there was a standard straightforward relatively simple way to do it and none of the old tricks would work anymore. So people had to rewrite parts of applications that used dynamic loading.
But the fact that an upgrade of some program has now become available in the unstable developer branch of some linux-distribution doesn't really strike me as a story.
Do you think we should have had stories of when xfree 4.0 entered the unstable developer branch of redhat, mandrake, suse, and all the other major distributions as well?
Well, if you are having problems getting rid of those old 700Mhz systems, I can probably offer you a fair price. Let's say $100 a piece?
After all, they are nearly useless nowadays anyway.
Shurely the military want efficient revival methods as well (there usually happens a lot of not so fun stuff to soldiers bodies during warfare), but this could also be used to artificially increase divers tolerance for cold water. Imagine a diver swimming around in cold water, with a computer watching over bodily functions and automatically injecting small doses of EDTA in the bloodstream if the diver experiences cramps, loss of consciousness or other unwanted effects of cold water. This could make it possible to have divers stay much longer under water in a normal dry suit without damaging the mission (or the diver of course, if you care about those sorts of things).
Hey, I found that book extremely funny (although I prefer the online version: jargon.txt). What was it you didn't like?