"If you do want a replacement for lossless JPEG, JPEG2000 is quite good. In lossy mode it doesn't have nearly the problems with artifacting that JPEG does"
True, but JPEG2000 costs a lot more cycles to process (which may not be an issue for desktops, but it may be an issue for PDAs and phones where JPEG2000 may need a hardware accelerator to become useful).
I apt-got it just this week, and just to see how well it's working, I've been reading the headers of the mails in the caughtspam folder. Aargh, spam does work, I'm reading it!
"a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted"
I agree. If it's not illegal yet, it should be. It doesn't even matter whether or not this particular patent is applicable to JPEG, this is yet another case of abuse of the patent law to do things that the law was not intended for. A big part of the problem is that fighting this nonsense required ridiculous amounts of time and money, making it really effective for the "plaintiff" even if they are not holding a valid and applicable patent. And that is just sad.
Agreed that RedHat, Suse, and the others are doing a really nice job.
However, Fyi: Not all Debian users are '13-year old Deb-zealot's. A lot are much more experienced than that. I've been using Linux since there was just slackware, and I've switched a couple of times between RedHat and Debian and now am really comfortable with Debian for the desktops and servers and clean Redhat installs in a vserver context for signoff.
Most experienced Linux users choose their distribution on its technical merits with respect to their needs, not whether or not they think that they should sponsor a particularly nice company. Those two are independent decisions.
I think that's too negative. 3.0 might not have been 'redhat-approved', but it definitely was an important milestone for gcc and represented large improvements.
There have been some really nice changes from 2.95 to 3.0, such as the inliner.
I read through the legalese wording of the first 40 claims and even though it describes an algorithm that uses run lengh coding and huffman-like coding (more generic), the algorithm that is described in this patent is not part of Baseline JPEG as standardized in ITU-T T.81, ISO 10918-1, and MIL-STD-188-198A
Sony never should have paid. I guess that's what happens if you let lawyers run the world and bluff their way around court rooms. IANAL and I feel sorry for those who are.
I've tried iControl twice on the free 'preview' programming, but each time the digital cable box crashed (brzaa) just after I selectted 'confirm order'.
I wouldn't want to get ripped off by that happening when I'm ordering something that results in a charge on the bill, so I'm not using it. It's too expensive anyway.
"When properly configured, nuclear waste can reach a surface temperature of thousands of degrees, and stay close to that temperature for decades without further intervention."
Why aren't they using that instead of looking for mountain ranges to bury it under?
"However, these add-on clustering solutions come from various sources, do not conform to any set standards, and are often implemented on a particular Linux distribution."
What are they talking about?
Hmm, MPI and PVM are standards, more so they are _the_ standards, and are supported in Linux beowulf clusters.
Even if it were true, with Linux clusters in the top50 (not a typo) of supercomputers, whatever they use for clustering is a standard on its own. Beowulf so widely used that it is a de facto standard too.
The MS stuff is not a standard and only implemented on a particular MS distribution...
Actually, LSF runs on RedHat, Suse, OpenLinux, TurboLinux (LSF v4.1), Debian, and Suse. It even says 'tested with', so it doesn't even force you to use one of those. So which particular Linux distribution did they miss (ok, mandrake and gentoo)? And which "potentially financially unstable Linux vendor" does that bind you to if it'd very well possible to run it on the other distributions, just not tested by the supplier?
Maybe MS thinks clustering is mainly failover, but that's much less valid for stable operating systems.
That's what I get when I try to read the story. Only MS IIS gives that message, apache doesn't have that message.
Hehe, that gives a great punch to the story on theregister 'it costs more because its worth more'. Yeah, right, server too busy, it can't even handle a little bit of web load.
You'll be surprised at how much energy it still generated by coal. Obsolete you heat your house doesnt' mean obsolete in the energy industry.
Nuclear waste is material that has been used in a reactor but is discarded because it can't be used anymore to generate power.
Even though it's radiating it doesn't mean it can be used in a reactor. There is a reason why the reactors get rid of it. It's a similar reason as why they are not using human farts to power cars.
Those hydrocarbons, in oil form, will become a lot more expensive as the remaining deposits get harder and harder to get to. And as the reserves deplete I think you'll see OPEC selling them at ever increasing prices.
As gasoline prices go up, suddenly the interest in alternatives will increase.
The main question I have is: hydrogen is just an energy transport system, allowing hydrogen 'fuel' to be loaded into a vehicle 300miles at a time. But somewhere, somehow, that hydrogen had to be generated, with an energy source... Solar? Wind? Nuclear?... Hydrocarbons?
I don't want to drive a car the size of a mailbox either, but where will the energy come from?
A motorcyclist once told me that he and a lot of his buddies put those loud mufflers on their bikes for a similar reason, but reversed: So that car drivers can hear them when they're close by. He claimed it saves bikers' lives. I believe him.
So now if my enterprise app makes an error under WinXP that it doesn't make in win2k, will MS pay for the damages they caused by forcing the 'upgrade'?
Slashdot Mirror
"If you do want a replacement for lossless JPEG, JPEG2000 is quite good. In lossy mode it doesn't have nearly the problems with artifacting that JPEG does"
True, but JPEG2000 costs a lot more cycles to process (which may not be an issue for desktops, but it may be an issue for PDAs and phones where JPEG2000 may need a hardware accelerator to become useful).
It's good to know that I wasn't the only one who came to that conclusion after reading the patent text.
Forgent is a bunch of crooks trying to abuse the patent laws. Sell your stocks today.
Hihi,
You've been watching too much The simpsons shows.
You're right. For years now, I've been seeing a pattern of spam volume going up during school holidays.
I apt-got it just this week, and just to see how well it's working, I've been reading the headers of the mails in the caughtspam folder. Aargh, spam does work, I'm reading it!
"a company whose business plan involves sitting on a patent for eleven years, then springing back to life to collect, doesn't just need to be stopped. They need to be prosecuted"
I agree. If it's not illegal yet, it should be. It doesn't even matter whether or not this particular patent is applicable to JPEG, this is yet another case of abuse of the patent law to do things that the law was not intended for. A big part of the problem is that fighting this nonsense required ridiculous amounts of time and money, making it really effective for the "plaintiff" even if they are not holding a valid and applicable patent. And that is just sad.
Agreed that RedHat, Suse, and the others are doing a really nice job.
However, Fyi: Not all Debian users are '13-year old Deb-zealot's. A lot are much more experienced than that. I've been using Linux since there was just slackware, and I've switched a couple of times between RedHat and Debian and now am really comfortable with Debian for the desktops and servers and clean Redhat installs in a vserver context for signoff.
Most experienced Linux users choose their distribution on its technical merits with respect to their needs, not whether or not they think that they should sponsor a particularly nice company. Those two are independent decisions.
"the ill-fated 3.0 compiler"
I think that's too negative. 3.0 might not have been 'redhat-approved', but it definitely was an important milestone for gcc and represented large improvements.
There have been some really nice changes from 2.95 to 3.0, such as the inliner.
Plus there have been many releases since: 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, and 3.1 release since 3.0. And 3.1 is as much faster than 3.0 as 3.0 is faster than 2.95.
I'm not rusty on the JPEG algorithm.
I read through the legalese wording of the first 40 claims and even though it describes an algorithm that uses run lengh coding and huffman-like coding (more generic), the algorithm that is described in this patent is not part of Baseline JPEG as standardized in ITU-T T.81, ISO 10918-1, and MIL-STD-188-198A
Sony never should have paid. I guess that's what happens if you let lawyers run the world and bluff their way around court rooms. IANAL and I feel sorry for those who are.
I'd sell my Forgent stocks asap.
They charge extra for things you want to watch on iControl. Plus it only carries a hundred or so movies in my region.
I've tried iControl twice on the free 'preview' programming, but each time the digital cable box crashed (brzaa) just after I selectted 'confirm order'.
I wouldn't want to get ripped off by that happening when I'm ordering something that results in a charge on the bill, so I'm not using it. It's too expensive anyway.
"When properly configured, nuclear waste can reach a surface temperature of thousands of degrees, and stay close to that temperature for decades without further intervention."
Why aren't they using that instead of looking for mountain ranges to bury it under?
"but I don't think any of them have tried yet."
That's because the TTPT (Total Times Password is Typed) is already much less in Linux due to the largely reduced number of reboots.
btw I use ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the LAN and have SSO that way.
"However, these add-on clustering solutions come from various sources, do not conform to any set standards, and are often implemented on a particular Linux distribution."
What are they talking about?
Hmm, MPI and PVM are standards, more so they are _the_ standards, and are supported in Linux beowulf clusters.
Even if it were true, with Linux clusters in the top50 (not a typo) of supercomputers, whatever they use for clustering is a standard on its own. Beowulf so widely used that it is a de facto standard too.
The MS stuff is not a standard and only implemented on a particular MS distribution...
Actually, LSF runs on RedHat, Suse, OpenLinux, TurboLinux (LSF v4.1), Debian, and Suse. It even says 'tested with', so it doesn't even force you to use one of those. So which particular Linux distribution did they miss (ok, mandrake and gentoo)? And which "potentially financially unstable Linux vendor" does that bind you to if it'd very well possible to run it on the other distributions, just not tested by the supplier?
Maybe MS thinks clustering is mainly failover, but that's much less valid for stable operating systems.
This new page will not survive long either.
That's what I get when I try to read the story. Only MS IIS gives that message, apache doesn't have that message.
Hehe, that gives a great punch to the story on theregister 'it costs more because its worth more'. Yeah, right, server too busy, it can't even handle a little bit of web load.
You'll be surprised at how much energy it still generated by coal. Obsolete you heat your house doesnt' mean obsolete in the energy industry.
Nuclear waste is material that has been used in a reactor but is discarded because it can't be used anymore to generate power.
Even though it's radiating it doesn't mean it can be used in a reactor. There is a reason why the reactors get rid of it. It's a similar reason as why they are not using human farts to power cars.
"You don't need to be sitting on top of a huge patch of oil to make hydrogen fuel."
Where would you get the humongous amount of energy needed to power hundreds of millions of cars?
Coal is in limited supply too you know, and we don't even know where to store our current nuclear waste.
Solar, Wind? Something will have to be improved a lot. Fuel cells will just be step 1, an enabler, but step 2 must be better energy sources.
<cliche>
1. Fuel cells
2. ???
3. Profit!
</cliche>
"Blowing up a motor 300km east-south-east of Wolfe Creek Crater [wa.gov.au] is not a heart-stopping issue"
But cracking the fuell cell is... Note the article mentions that fuel cells are not robust wrt rough terrain.
"so long as hydrocarbons exit to burn."
... Hydrocarbons?
Fundamental law of society: Money talks.
Those hydrocarbons, in oil form, will become a lot more expensive as the remaining deposits get harder and harder to get to. And as the reserves deplete I think you'll see OPEC selling them at ever increasing prices.
As gasoline prices go up, suddenly the interest in alternatives will increase.
The main question I have is: hydrogen is just an energy transport system, allowing hydrogen 'fuel' to be loaded into a vehicle 300miles at a time. But somewhere, somehow, that hydrogen had to be generated, with an energy source... Solar? Wind? Nuclear?
I don't want to drive a car the size of a mailbox either, but where will the energy come from?
A motorcyclist once told me that he and a lot of his buddies put those loud mufflers on their bikes for a similar reason, but reversed: So that car drivers can hear them when they're close by. He claimed it saves bikers' lives. I believe him.
Such technology asks for whole new filesystems.
Instant-snapshot logging filesystem
Nothing ever gets deleted and any file ever written can always be retrieved.
Put a new medium in the drive once a month and you've got full backups too.
Who needs a versioning system then?
"The blocked ports were always blocked."
According to my logs, I get incoming port 137 and 139 connections on roadrunner (denied on my firewall, of course).
Q.E.D.
"Turn off all services except ssh."
That's a way to do it, just make sure you're running openssh version 3.4 with privilege separation.
"Are they 'forcing' the upgrade?"
Guess what. I need more machines that run that particular app. Where else can I buy w2k licenses?
So now if my enterprise app makes an error under WinXP that it doesn't make in win2k, will MS pay for the damages they caused by forcing the 'upgrade'?