Let's see, Linux 2.4 is almost out, GNOME 1.4 is due in October, but they're releasing a major new version of RedHat? Isn't it premature? Oh, I forgot, if you buy it now, you can get auto-updated when the new kernel is ready.
So what happens to those of us who like to sometimes reinstall fresh from the media? We reinstall, and then have to wait for all the updates to be downloaded all over again. Unless we can save the update.rpm's and write them onto a copy of our RedHat 7.0 disk in place of the 7.0 files. Now that would be neat.
Software should have a smooth learning curve to take you from beginner to expert. Too much of today's software has bumps in the learning curve.
For example, a beginner in Windows might think that the file hierarchy is rooted at "Desktop" with subfolders "Network Neighboorhood" and "My Computer", and applications like "Control Panel." Microsoft apparently did this to make some items easier to access. However, a user must eventually learn the true layout of the file system in order to make use of file pathnames. This is bound to lead to a step of confusion where the user realizes they have been tricked. If the file pathnames were consistent with the Explorer hierarchy (e.g. "Desktop\My Computer\C\Windows\Paint.exe", the learning curve would be smoother.
On UNIX we have nifty graphical desktops like CDE, KDE and GNOME. At some point the user will realize the power of the GUI is limited. They need more sophisticated capabilities like pipes. Well the only way to use pipes is from the shell. But to use those they have to cross a bump in the learning curve - they need to learn a lot about shell syntax before they can use pipes effectively. It might be nice if the user could get into pipes first via the GUI, by some graphical "connection" metaphor. Then the transition to the shell might be more natural.
In the InfoCom text adventure Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on the Douglas Adams novel, typing the word "thou" resulted in the response "Aaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!"
How can they make digital signatures legally binding without describing what "digital signatures" are? Will there be any minimum standards of key length? Who sets the standards? The federal government? The states? Will we use RSA hashes? A mish-mash of different schemes?
Who issues the keys? Can we make them up ourselves with a random key generator? How do you ensure each person gets exactly one key? Who signs the keys - a web of trust, or some government agency? What happens if that key is compromised?
If the government wants us to use a certain standard, will they release source code for all to work from? I personally would not trust most companies' implementations of digital signature schemes. I would not trust software that implemented digital signatures unless it was open-source, AND thoroughly peer-reviewed. It's far to easy to create security loopholes.
And if we don't watch out, companies could use it to make us sign EULAs, or register software. I'd be wary of any kind of "automatic" signing software. I want to be there at the keyboard verifying it each time with a pass phrase or some such. And I need to be sure that what I'm signing is actually what the computer tells me I'm signing - it would be easy for some software to pull the bait-and-switch.
These issues need to be worked out before the law can be put into effect.
In some of the EULA's, there is some text about states or jurisdictions which "DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES."
Well, you know why these cool features invented 30 years ago haven't made it in today's software? Because Microsoft and others are so busy shoving their pablum down people's throats they don't have time to try something new.
If people knew about the great stuff that we are missing, many of them wouldn't be buying Microsoft.
When I read about this website called "MyVideoGames.com," I thought at first it was a repository for games created by amateurs. Instead it is another consumer-culture rag.
The game culture will be mature when many people are creating their own games, not sucking it up from the billion-dollar industry. Through the open-source development model, we can all build on each others' work and produce some astounding things.
System software research dead? It may only appear so because Microsoft overshadows any attempts at innovation.
For a great new research OS, check out EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System. It is now licensed under the GPL, and it could just be the next great thing after Linux!
This operating system has some features which simplify and improve memory/disk usage and security. For one thing, it has persistent memory - it operates as a collection of objects in RAM, and is backed up every 30 minutes. There is no such thing as a "file" on the disk - just objects. Simple, eh? And you can boot up in about 30 seconds, right to where you left off.
Another nice feature is the capability security model. Most operating systems keep lists of who can access what files, or set blanket permissions on them. Usually a user can access whole groups of files and might easily be given permission to access something they shouldn't. Likewise, user processes are given the same access rights as the user, creating virus problems as we have seen with MS Outleak.
Instead, the capability security model gives keys to users and processes to act as permission to access the object in a certain way. The key is essentially a pointer guarded by the OS. Cross-system links can be implemented through CORBA. So the solution to the scripting virus problem is that you only give enough power to the script as you want it to have. If this script is supposed to be able to display something in a little window, or contact a web site for information, you might give it the power to do only that. No need to dole out blanket powers. Standard sets of powers for certain situations could be established to lighten the user's management burden.
If that isn't cool research, I don't know what is.
I'm tired of hearing the argument that we should support patents, because, after all, we wouldn't want to be "ripped off," would we?
That presupposes that inventions are our property and that someone else is harming us by implementing the idea. However, there are several problems with this:
1) An invention is simply someone's mind coming to an understanding of reality.
2) Why is the first person who comes to this understanding (actually, the first person to apply for the patent) enshrined as the "owner" of this concept, while everyone else with the same understanding must pay royalties simply to implement that same understanding?
3) The more people who are able to freely share of this idea, the more the world has been enriched! Actually, a person who is able to claim exclusive rights is the one who is stealing from humankind.
The truth is, patents were created not because some person has an inalienable right to that idea, but as a mechanism of a) encouraging invention and b) encouraging the disclosure of that invention to the public in exchange for "protection" (otherwise it could be kept as a trade secret).
I hardly think that in this day and age, invention needs to be encouraged. People enjoy inventing things and there are plenty of ways of making money off inventions without being exclusive rightsholders. For example, if someone comes up with an idea for a hoozit, they could express their idea, and perhaps a dozen manufacturers might start making hoozits. The manufacturers profit and compete with each other to make the best hoozits. The inventor is honored for being such a clever person, but let's face it - anyone can and will come up with ideas. The inventor doesn't "deserve" loads of money for it - in fact, their reward will be simply to see the product come to be used in the real world.
I know someone is going to ask about the small inventor who can't get any company to take their idea seriously and so needs funding for themself. If they go big time, and another company "steals" the invention, it was all for naught. But I argue that it is much harder for the inventor to get off the ground with this product than it would be for an existing manufacturer to start producing it. In the long run nobody's hurt if it's left to those with the capital.
As for the trade secret problem, that's fine. If it's an obvious invention, everyone else will figure it out anyway and it won't be a secret anymore. If it's not obvious, well we'll all just have to wonder how they do it. And someone else will figure it out eventually.
As for the history of "marvelous inventions" produced by patent law, let's take an example: the light bulb. If Edison hadn't been able to patent it, would he have done it? Perhaps, perhaps not. I tend to think he would be motivated enough by the sheer fun of it all, if he hadn't been turned greedy by the opportunity to patent his work. If not, someone else would have done it.
The problem is, in this great experiment of intellectual property law, that we haven't got a control to compare against. What if IP law didn't exist? Would we be better or worse off? Let's try it. Obviously, the transition would be painful, and could perhaps be attempted gradually. But in the end, I think the world would be better off without it.
Let us not forget that the DMCA has a reverse engineering provision. It is lawful to reverse engineer software for certain specific purposes. One of those purposes is interoperability. Since Microsoft's whole point in protecting it is to prevent interoperability, isn't it legal to circumvent protections for that purpose?
First of all, while I think this is more original that just a symbolic link, it's hardly revolutionary. <P> Secondly, why is this necessary? Wouldn't it be better to just design the layout of the files in the operating system so that nothing need be duplicated? <P> I was highly amused reading about their other "innovations." The text-to-speech thing has been revived more times than Show Boat. SAM on the Apple and C64 did it. The Amiga, for which Microsoft wrote a version of BASIC, had it built in. Even speech recognition, which is technically much more difficult, has been produced in numerous forms.
This is just an injunction. It's just a way of putting things on hold while the case is reviewed. It doesn't mean at all that the judge has decided in the plaintiff's favor. In fact, it says:
As Plaintiff conceded at the hearing on the TRO, once this information gets into the hands of an innocent party, the Plaintiff loses their ability to enjoin the use of their trade secret.
This is why the injuction was put in place. However, it's too late. Thousands of innocent people have downloaded this code already.
`(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
In other words, the bit about circumventing copyright enforcement mechanism hasn't taken effect yet. It also states that this bill does not apply retroactively.
Secondly, someone earlier posted a segment of the bill which I am unable to find at the moment. It provided for an exemption from this "defeating technical measures" clause for the purposes of interoperability. This is precisely what the creators were doing - making DVDs interoperate with Linux.
The MPAA also claims that this software is designed to "defeat" copyright measures. Yet its use is indistinguishable from that of existing DVD playing software. Is Xing's player also illegal because it "defeats" copyright measures? Don't all DVD players defeat copyright protection measures? The only difference is that those companies paid a lot of money to the MPAA.
The MPAA doesn't care about piracy here. They are just using that as an excuse because it sounds like a scary word. The real thing that bothers them is that they don't get paid royalties for the use of the LiViD player.
This is false. Identifiable groups tend to have distinctive common interests and bodies of knowledge. Geeky white men tend to have geeky white man views. Non-geeky white men may share part of these, non-white geeky men others, geeky women still others. This is the basis for demographic analysis and niche marketing, among other fields. It is a primarily statistical argument, but that doesn't invalidate it.
I think what Paladeen meant here is not that the Internet has no demographics, but that the distinguishing characteristics of certain social groups are not evident. In the real world, a man might ignore what a woman had to say simply because she is a woman. On a mostly-male Internet discussion group, a woman could present a thoughtful, unique point of view, and the men might actually listen to her.
I can't think of anything more fun! Nowadays you hear the same crappy music everywhere. The Music Industry decides what is Good and pumps it equally to everyone.
Imagine wandering around the city, catching some quirky-sounding DJ spinning a block party. Imagine going to visit another town just to hear the radio station. It's local color restored. It's a break in the corporate stranglehold of preprocessed nonsense. It's community bonding.
You say you have a distaste for the inconsistent availability of such short-range broadcasts. But it is the prefab stuff that is fed to you through a tube. The real gems must be sought out. The weather isn't beautiful every day, because if it were, that would be boring. You take the good with the bad. You listen to the ambient sound and take what you can get. You shouldn't expect wisdom delivered-on-demand - that is the domain of foolishness.
You may argue that the Internet makes this irrelevant, but I argue that every stronghold of the corporate fatcats should be disassembled. Unfortunately, that HR3439 bill introduced may not permit it.
Another thing that would be great, which I don't think even Adobe Premiere can do, is to use the capabilities of your 3D card to accelerate video transition processing. Think about it... all these fades, wipes, blends, flips, and wraps could be done in an instant using a good 3D card. Why not put it to use in processing full-motion video? It should be able to do it in realtime, quite easily.
I have followed the Broadcast 2000 development for a while, and I am both impressed by and thankful for their work. The drivers appear to be the missing link. Unfortunately, on the Broadcast 2000 page, they skip the issue of drivers, simply saying that any "Video4Linux" drivers will work, without so much as providing a link to a Video4Linux project page.
At least it's a good sign that they're sticking to a standard, rather than creating their own drivers. Unfortunately, the driver situation seems to be quite a mess. There's Video4Linux, Video4Linux 2, LiViD, and other projects and I'm not sure how they're related. Most of them seem to support mostly TV-in-a-window cards rather than full-motion video capture.
It looks like work on the Matrox Marvel drivers is coming along, which is good for me because I just bought an Athlon 550 and Matrox Marvel G400-TV! >geek gloatCineGX which seems to have disappeared. The idea was to create a framework for handling video, applying filters and codecs in a pipelike fashion. That would mean that you could, say, stream an AVI file from your disk, and show it as a picture within a live TV feed, showing it on the screen and spitting it into an MPEG2 file on disk all at the same time (provided you have enough processing power and/or hardware assistance). Most editing could be reduced to problems of mixing and matching streams and filters. The editing GUI would exist only to provide a project management function.
One thing about your comment doesn't quite add up. How can "thirty-one percent" of the American public be "extremists"? Apparently, then, another 31% must be extremists on the opposite end of the spectrum, leaving us with only 38% of the country that range from "moderate" to "strongly opinionated." I don't see how a rational estimation of extremism can include a majority of the population. People throw about the word "extremist" far too easily these days.
I know, I could go look at the source code, but for the benefit of/. readers, could someone explain why a dash at the end of a domain name segment would break telnet and ftp? I understand that a dash at the beginning might be interpreted as a command-line parameter.
Perhaps the US should establish an Intellectual Property Review Board, similar in spirit to the Federal Reserve. Instead of adjusting interest rates to stimulate or check the economy, they would adjust time periods of copyright and patent laws, perhaps adjusting terms independently for different categories of items.
For example, one year electronics patents would be determined to last 15 years, and software patents for 5 years. The next year, they might adjust electronics patents to 13 years and software patents to 3 years.
They would make these determinations on the basis of the economy. If the purpose of IP restrictions is to promote invention, then they should measure the rate of invention and creativity in our society. Then they could determine what the ideal lengths of coverage should be. They will need to balance the incentives to the creators against the freedom of dissemination and usage of the technologies (which exists when terms are short).
By following a set of established rules, this Review Board would not be bullied around by the likes of Disney, as occurred in the recent Copyright Term Extension Act. When this act was passed, it appeared that only the potential profits of creators was considered. This should be weighed against the potential wealth of the public domain.
XML is a wonderful thing, and would be far superior to the current way we store configuration files (haphazardly) in Linux. However, binary files may have an arguable advantage - space and speed. I don't know why everyone is so opposed to copying the Windows Registry idea. Granted, you can edit XML with a text editor, but if every Linux distribution which used a "registry" for configuration came with command-line and GUI tools to edit it, and resonable precautions were made for redundancy and backups to protect the database integrity, who could object? After all, even "text" is really a binary file.
What we do need is a CORBA interface, provided through GNOME (or KDE if you will), which would allow editing of configuration information without knowledge of the specific representation. Then we could use XML or some kind of binary database, and the software using the CORBA Configuration Interface wouldn't care. Software unaware of this CORBA mechanism could do it the old-fashioned way, be it text manipulation of XML files, or libxml, or whatever.
The weak security of most operating systems permits the proliferation of viruses. The weakness is not in external security, but in the blanket access control given to users and the applications they invoke. An application generally has permission to do anything which the user who invoked it could do. Instead, some operating systems such as EROS and KeyKOS implement the capability security model. This allows users to specify which capabilities they will pass along to objects they invoke. Thus, a user does not grant blanket permission to a program to modify other programs, as is required for virus propagation, or to format the hard disk, as some viruses may do. The user simply grants it permission to create a few objects (files) of a particular type in a particular location (directory).
I worked in industry for five years after obtaining my BA in CS from Rice U. Know what? I hate it! I worked at one company where I had quite a bit of freedom in my coding, except that I had to do it in VB. Nobody there really understood CS so I couldn't talk to anyone about my program. They also didn't have any marketing, so they had to can the project after it was finished.
Then I worked at another company doing support and maintenance of their lousy code. Often times it was screaming at me to fix it, but if it wasn't on the list of bugs we were supposed to fix, I couldn't. Some of it was so ugly and I just wanted to improve it, but it was considered too much of a risk.
At Rice I had so much fun because even though I was coding something I was asked to do, I had considerable freedom in the coding itself and could actually talk to other people about what I was doing. Now I spend so much of my time wishing that I could work on this or that dream program of mine. Usually I want to write it to illustrate some kind of principle I have devised. I would get a big kick out of writing detailed documents explaining exactly what my theory is. That's exactly what research is.
I have begun a new job teaching CS at a local community college. Tomorrow is my first day teaching. The salary cut doesn't bother me, despite what some have said above. I have to be doing what I enjoy. If the teaching works out, I think that's a sure sign I need to go back to school. As for GRE scores, I recently trained with the Princeton Review to teach their GRE course. Not a problem. The only thing I'm concerned about is finding faculty recommendations. I might need to take a couple of classes to get to know some more professors.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's see, Linux 2.4 is almost out, GNOME 1.4 is due in October, but they're releasing a major new version of RedHat? Isn't it premature? Oh, I forgot, if you buy it now, you can get auto-updated when the new kernel is ready.
.rpm's and write them onto a copy of our RedHat 7.0 disk in place of the 7.0 files. Now that would be neat.
So what happens to those of us who like to sometimes reinstall fresh from the media? We reinstall, and then have to wait for all the updates to be downloaded all over again. Unless we can save the update
- Quantum Seep
Software should have a smooth learning curve to take you from beginner to expert. Too much of today's software has bumps in the learning curve.
For example, a beginner in Windows might think that the file hierarchy is rooted at "Desktop" with subfolders "Network Neighboorhood" and "My Computer", and applications like "Control Panel." Microsoft apparently did this to make some items easier to access. However, a user must eventually learn the true layout of the file system in order to make use of file pathnames. This is bound to lead to a step of confusion where the user realizes they have been tricked. If the file pathnames were consistent with the Explorer hierarchy (e.g. "Desktop\My Computer\C\Windows\Paint.exe", the learning curve would be smoother.
On UNIX we have nifty graphical desktops like CDE, KDE and GNOME. At some point the user will realize the power of the GUI is limited. They need more sophisticated capabilities like pipes. Well the only way to use pipes is from the shell. But to use those they have to cross a bump in the learning curve - they need to learn a lot about shell syntax before they can use pipes effectively. It might be nice if the user could get into pipes first via the GUI, by some graphical "connection" metaphor. Then the transition to the shell might be more natural.
OK this was a bizarre one...
In the InfoCom text adventure Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which was based on the Douglas Adams novel, typing the word "thou" resulted in the response "Aaaaaaaaaarrrrgh!"
How can they make digital signatures legally binding without describing what "digital signatures" are? Will there be any minimum standards of key length? Who sets the standards? The federal government? The states? Will we use RSA hashes? A mish-mash of different schemes?
Who issues the keys? Can we make them up ourselves with a random key generator? How do you ensure each person gets exactly one key? Who signs the keys - a web of trust, or some government agency? What happens if that key is compromised?
If the government wants us to use a certain standard, will they release source code for all to work from? I personally would not trust most companies' implementations of digital signature schemes. I would not trust software that implemented digital signatures unless it was open-source, AND thoroughly peer-reviewed. It's far to easy to create security loopholes.
And if we don't watch out, companies could use it to make us sign EULAs, or register software. I'd be wary of any kind of "automatic" signing software. I want to be there at the keyboard verifying it each time with a pass phrase or some such. And I need to be sure that what I'm signing is actually what the computer tells me I'm signing - it would be easy for some software to pull the bait-and-switch.
These issues need to be worked out before the law can be put into effect.
In some of the EULA's, there is some text about states or jurisdictions which "DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES."
Which states/jurisdictions are these?
Well, you know why these cool features invented 30 years ago haven't made it in today's software? Because Microsoft and others are so busy shoving their pablum down people's throats they don't have time to try something new.
If people knew about the great stuff that we are missing, many of them wouldn't be buying Microsoft.
When I read about this website called "MyVideoGames.com," I thought at first it was a repository for games created by amateurs. Instead it is another consumer-culture rag.
The game culture will be mature when many people are creating their own games, not sucking it up from the billion-dollar industry. Through the open-source development model, we can all build on each others' work and produce some astounding things.
For a great new research OS, check out EROS, the Extremely Reliable Operating System. It is now licensed under the GPL, and it could just be the next great thing after Linux!
This operating system has some features which simplify and improve memory/disk usage and security. For one thing, it has persistent memory - it operates as a collection of objects in RAM, and is backed up every 30 minutes. There is no such thing as a "file" on the disk - just objects. Simple, eh? And you can boot up in about 30 seconds, right to where you left off.
Another nice feature is the capability security model. Most operating systems keep lists of who can access what files, or set blanket permissions on them. Usually a user can access whole groups of files and might easily be given permission to access something they shouldn't. Likewise, user processes are given the same access rights as the user, creating virus problems as we have seen with MS Outleak.
Instead, the capability security model gives keys to users and processes to act as permission to access the object in a certain way. The key is essentially a pointer guarded by the OS. Cross-system links can be implemented through CORBA. So the solution to the scripting virus problem is that you only give enough power to the script as you want it to have. If this script is supposed to be able to display something in a little window, or contact a web site for information, you might give it the power to do only that. No need to dole out blanket powers. Standard sets of powers for certain situations could be established to lighten the user's management burden.
If that isn't cool research, I don't know what is.
That presupposes that inventions are our property and that someone else is harming us by implementing the idea. However, there are several problems with this:
1) An invention is simply someone's mind coming to an understanding of reality.
2) Why is the first person who comes to this understanding (actually, the first person to apply for the patent) enshrined as the "owner" of this concept, while everyone else with the same understanding must pay royalties simply to implement that same understanding?
3) The more people who are able to freely share of this idea, the more the world has been enriched! Actually, a person who is able to claim exclusive rights is the one who is stealing from humankind.
The truth is, patents were created not because some person has an inalienable right to that idea, but as a mechanism of a) encouraging invention and b) encouraging the disclosure of that invention to the public in exchange for "protection" (otherwise it could be kept as a trade secret).
I hardly think that in this day and age, invention needs to be encouraged. People enjoy inventing things and there are plenty of ways of making money off inventions without being exclusive rightsholders. For example, if someone comes up with an idea for a hoozit, they could express their idea, and perhaps a dozen manufacturers might start making hoozits. The manufacturers profit and compete with each other to make the best hoozits. The inventor is honored for being such a clever person, but let's face it - anyone can and will come up with ideas. The inventor doesn't "deserve" loads of money for it - in fact, their reward will be simply to see the product come to be used in the real world.
I know someone is going to ask about the small inventor who can't get any company to take their idea seriously and so needs funding for themself. If they go big time, and another company "steals" the invention, it was all for naught. But I argue that it is much harder for the inventor to get off the ground with this product than it would be for an existing manufacturer to start producing it. In the long run nobody's hurt if it's left to those with the capital.
As for the trade secret problem, that's fine. If it's an obvious invention, everyone else will figure it out anyway and it won't be a secret anymore. If it's not obvious, well we'll all just have to wonder how they do it. And someone else will figure it out eventually.
As for the history of "marvelous inventions" produced by patent law, let's take an example: the light bulb. If Edison hadn't been able to patent it, would he have done it? Perhaps, perhaps not. I tend to think he would be motivated enough by the sheer fun of it all, if he hadn't been turned greedy by the opportunity to patent his work. If not, someone else would have done it.
The problem is, in this great experiment of intellectual property law, that we haven't got a control to compare against. What if IP law didn't exist? Would we be better or worse off? Let's try it. Obviously, the transition would be painful, and could perhaps be attempted gradually. But in the end, I think the world would be better off without it.
Let us not forget that the DMCA has a reverse engineering provision. It is lawful to reverse engineer software for certain specific purposes. One of those purposes is interoperability. Since Microsoft's whole point in protecting it is to prevent interoperability, isn't it legal to circumvent protections for that purpose?
First of all, while I think this is more original that just a symbolic link, it's hardly revolutionary.
<P>
Secondly, why is this necessary? Wouldn't it be better to just design the layout of the files in the operating system so that nothing need be duplicated?
<P>
I was highly amused reading about their other "innovations." The text-to-speech thing has been revived more times than Show Boat. SAM on the Apple and C64 did it. The Amiga, for which Microsoft wrote a version of BASIC, had it built in. Even speech recognition, which is technically much more difficult, has been produced in numerous forms.
This is just an injunction. It's just a way of putting things on hold while the case is reviewed. It doesn't mean at all that the judge has decided in the plaintiff's favor. In fact, it says:
As Plaintiff conceded at the hearing on the TRO, once this information gets into the hands of an innocent party, the Plaintiff loses their ability to enjoin the use of their trade secret.
This is why the injuction was put in place. However, it's too late. Thousands of innocent people have downloaded this code already.
First of all, the DMCA says that:
`(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.
In other words, the bit about circumventing copyright enforcement mechanism hasn't taken effect yet. It also states that this bill does not apply retroactively.
Secondly, someone earlier posted a segment of the bill which I am unable to find at the moment. It provided for an exemption from this "defeating technical measures" clause for the purposes of interoperability. This is precisely what the creators were doing - making DVDs interoperate with Linux.
The MPAA also claims that this software is designed to "defeat" copyright measures. Yet its use is indistinguishable from that of existing DVD playing software. Is Xing's player also illegal because it "defeats" copyright measures? Don't all DVD players defeat copyright protection measures? The only difference is that those companies paid a lot of money to the MPAA.
The MPAA doesn't care about piracy here. They are just using that as an excuse because it sounds like a scary word. The real thing that bothers them is that they don't get paid royalties for the use of the LiViD player.
-- The Internet is in most respects genderless.
This is false. Identifiable groups tend to have distinctive common interests and bodies of knowledge. Geeky white men tend to have geeky white man views. Non-geeky white men may share part of these, non-white geeky men others, geeky women still others. This is the basis for demographic analysis and niche marketing, among other fields. It is a primarily statistical argument, but that doesn't invalidate it.
I think what Paladeen meant here is not that the Internet has no demographics, but that the distinguishing characteristics of certain social groups are not evident. In the real world, a man might ignore what a woman had to say simply because she is a woman. On a mostly-male Internet discussion group, a woman could present a thoughtful, unique point of view, and the men might actually listen to her.
I can't think of anything more fun! Nowadays you hear the same crappy music everywhere. The Music Industry decides what is Good and pumps it equally to everyone.
Imagine wandering around the city, catching some quirky-sounding DJ spinning a block party. Imagine going to visit another town just to hear the radio station. It's local color restored. It's a break in the corporate stranglehold of preprocessed nonsense. It's community bonding.
You say you have a distaste for the inconsistent availability of such short-range broadcasts. But it is the prefab stuff that is fed to you through a tube. The real gems must be sought out. The weather isn't beautiful every day, because if it were, that would be boring. You take the good with the bad. You listen to the ambient sound and take what you can get. You shouldn't expect wisdom delivered-on-demand - that is the domain of foolishness.
You may argue that the Internet makes this irrelevant, but I argue that every stronghold of the corporate fatcats should be disassembled. Unfortunately, that HR3439 bill introduced may not permit it.
Apparently you have not read the GPL. It does not prohibit charging for the software itself.
Another thing that would be great, which I don't think even Adobe Premiere can do, is to use the capabilities of your 3D card to accelerate video transition processing. Think about it... all these fades, wipes, blends, flips, and wraps could be done in an instant using a good 3D card. Why not put it to use in processing full-motion video? It should be able to do it in realtime, quite easily.
Whoops... inadvertent tag generation. I meant to say, I saw a neat project called CineGX which seems to have disappeared....
I have followed the Broadcast 2000 development for a while, and I am both impressed by and thankful for their work. The drivers appear to be the missing link. Unfortunately, on the Broadcast 2000 page, they skip the issue of drivers, simply saying that any "Video4Linux" drivers will work, without so much as providing a link to a Video4Linux project page.
At least it's a good sign that they're sticking to a standard, rather than creating their own drivers. Unfortunately, the driver situation seems to be quite a mess. There's Video4Linux, Video4Linux 2, LiViD, and other projects and I'm not sure how they're related. Most of them seem to support mostly TV-in-a-window cards rather than full-motion video capture.
It looks like work on the Matrox Marvel drivers is coming along, which is good for me because I just bought an Athlon 550 and Matrox Marvel G400-TV! >geek gloatCineGX which seems to have disappeared. The idea was to create a framework for handling video, applying filters and codecs in a pipelike fashion. That would mean that you could, say, stream an AVI file from your disk, and show it as a picture within a live TV feed, showing it on the screen and spitting it into an MPEG2 file on disk all at the same time (provided you have enough processing power and/or hardware assistance). Most editing could be reduced to problems of mixing and matching streams and filters. The editing GUI would exist only to provide a project management function.
One thing about your comment doesn't quite add up. How can "thirty-one percent" of the American public be "extremists"? Apparently, then, another 31% must be extremists on the opposite end of the spectrum, leaving us with only 38% of the country that range from "moderate" to "strongly opinionated." I don't see how a rational estimation of extremism can include a majority of the population. People throw about the word "extremist" far too easily these days.
I know, I could go look at the source code, but for the benefit of /. readers, could someone explain why a dash at the end of a domain name segment would break telnet and ftp? I understand that a dash at the beginning might be interpreted as a command-line parameter.
Perhaps the US should establish an Intellectual Property Review Board, similar in spirit to the Federal Reserve. Instead of adjusting interest rates to stimulate or check the economy, they would adjust time periods of copyright and patent laws, perhaps adjusting terms independently for different categories of items.
For example, one year electronics patents would be determined to last 15 years, and software patents for 5 years. The next year, they might adjust electronics patents to 13 years and software patents to 3 years.
They would make these determinations on the basis of the economy. If the purpose of IP restrictions is to promote invention, then they should measure the rate of invention and creativity in our society. Then they could determine what the ideal lengths of coverage should be. They will need to balance the incentives to the creators against the freedom of dissemination and usage of the technologies (which exists when terms are short).
By following a set of established rules, this Review Board would not be bullied around by the likes of Disney, as occurred in the recent Copyright Term Extension Act. When this act was passed, it appeared that only the potential profits of creators was considered. This should be weighed against the potential wealth of the public domain.
XML is a wonderful thing, and would be far superior to the current way we store configuration files (haphazardly) in Linux. However, binary files may have an arguable advantage - space and speed. I don't know why everyone is so opposed to copying the Windows Registry idea. Granted, you can edit XML with a text editor, but if every Linux distribution which used a "registry" for configuration came with command-line and GUI tools to edit it, and resonable precautions were made for redundancy and backups to protect the database integrity, who could object? After all, even "text" is really a binary file.
What we do need is a CORBA interface, provided through GNOME (or KDE if you will), which would allow editing of configuration information without knowledge of the specific representation. Then we could use XML or some kind of binary database, and the software using the CORBA Configuration Interface wouldn't care. Software unaware of this CORBA mechanism could do it the old-fashioned way, be it text manipulation of XML files, or libxml, or whatever.
The weak security of most operating systems permits the proliferation of viruses. The weakness is not in external security, but in the blanket access control given to users and the applications they invoke. An application generally has permission to do anything which the user who invoked it could do. Instead, some operating systems such as EROS and KeyKOS implement the capability security model. This allows users to specify which capabilities they will pass along to objects they invoke. Thus, a user does not grant blanket permission to a program to modify other programs, as is required for virus propagation, or to format the hard disk, as some viruses may do. The user simply grants it permission to create a few objects (files) of a particular type in a particular location (directory).
Then I worked at another company doing support and maintenance of their lousy code. Often times it was screaming at me to fix it, but if it wasn't on the list of bugs we were supposed to fix, I couldn't. Some of it was so ugly and I just wanted to improve it, but it was considered too much of a risk.
At Rice I had so much fun because even though I was coding something I was asked to do, I had considerable freedom in the coding itself and could actually talk to other people about what I was doing. Now I spend so much of my time wishing that I could work on this or that dream program of mine. Usually I want to write it to illustrate some kind of principle I have devised. I would get a big kick out of writing detailed documents explaining exactly what my theory is. That's exactly what research is.
I have begun a new job teaching CS at a local community college. Tomorrow is my first day teaching. The salary cut doesn't bother me, despite what some have said above. I have to be doing what I enjoy. If the teaching works out, I think that's a sure sign I need to go back to school. As for GRE scores, I recently trained with the Princeton Review to teach their GRE course. Not a problem. The only thing I'm concerned about is finding faculty recommendations. I might need to take a couple of classes to get to know some more professors.