Probably hardware, possibly software. Looking over GNU Radio (which exists to do signal interpretation in software) I suspect someone could work their own decoder out of that with enough money, time and knowledge -- probably all out of proportion to what one of these pcHDTV cards costs.
I don't think it stops with the broadcast flag, though; once proprietary encryption gets into the mix, there's not going to be a gray area like this with hardware you pick up in the store. Why can't I get a decoder card that works with my digital cable service?
People who enjoy recording TV will have to stoop to the levels of satellite pirates tomorrow to enjoy the same level of use of their service they've got now. With probably the same legal/social connotations, as broadcasters are no doubt seeking to carve new revenue streams out of DRM TV (i.e. "Record to DVD now for only $2.50!").
This brings up a complaint I've got with the way the industry works nowadays, monoculture being something many large companies seem to share.
As a programmer, I feel the continual march of progress in computing has been hampered as of late because of a major misconception in some segments of the software industry. Some would argue that the process of refinement by iterative design, which is the subject of many texts in the field -- extreme programming being the most recent -- demonstrates that applying the theory of
evolution to coding is the most effective model of program 'design'.
But this is erroneous. The problem is that while extremely negative traits are usually stripped away in this model, negative traits that do not
(metaphorically) explicitly interfere with life up until reproduction often remain. Additionally, traits that would be extremely beneficial that are not explicitly necessary for survival fail to come to light. Our ability to think and reason was not the product of evolution, but was deliberately chosen for us. Perhaps this is a thought that should again be applied to the creation of software.
It makes no sense to choose the option of continually hacking at a program until it works as opposed to properly designing it from the start. One only has to compare the security woes of Microsoft or Linux with the rock-solid experience of OpenBSD for an example. It makes little sense from a business perspective as well; it costs up to ten times as much to fix an error by the time it hits the market as it would to catch it during the design. Unfortunately, as much of this cost is borne by consumers and not the companies designing buggy products, it's harder to make the case for proper software engineering -- especially in an environment like Microsoft where one hand may not often be aware of what the other is doing.
Don't be fooled into thinking open source is free of the 'monoculture' mindset, either. While it is perhaps in a better position to take advantage of vibrant and daring new concepts because of the lack of need to meet a marketing deadline or profitability requirement the types of holy wars one might have noticed between KDE/GNOME or Free Software/Open Source demonstrate that there are at least some within every community that feel they hold the monopoly on wisdom.
Even if it isn't on DVD yet, sales of TV series on DVD are absolutely huge, to the point of outstripping movie sales. A good thing, given that advertising dollars are drying up (thanks to the fast-forwarding in Tivo-type devices).
I wish they'd find a way to solve their problems without being outwardly hostile to the Internet, computer users, and/or their customers.
The Spiderman 2 DVD comes out this month as well as the final extended cut in the LOTR series. Guess I'll be in line with the rest of you to fund these lawsuits.
The wierd thing about cosmic rays is that despite their isotropism we noticed a great deal of them coming from our own Sun. Some went so far as to suspect 'dark matter', that theoretical material that accounts for the great chunk of the universe we cannot directly observe, as being either responsible for or made up of rays!
In a way, it makes sense that they'd be partly responsible for the blue in our atmosphere -- the rest comes from the Sun bombarding the layers of gases up there. Sometimes science is just a way of jerryrigging loose facts together to create a plausible test or explanation for strange phenonema.
I don't know. It looks like it's going into what looks like another (approximately) fifty-fifty situation with Bush as president, hopefully without the same debacle as the 2000 election, and all I can think is that (approximately) 50% of voting Americans believe that the ends justify the means.
I'm liberal enough to be dejected about this, but perhaps this is a sign that the country wants to take things in a new direction. There's all sorts of things one can be upset about (no-bid contracts, a more aggressive defense policy, civil rights) but the points about all of these have already been made to U.S. citizens with the results you observe: Republican majority of the House and the Senate and a probable Republican president.
The DNC was so eager to pin their loss in 2000 on Nader. What would the results have been if they didn't put their energies into downplaying Dean and screwing Nader out of ballot spots? I suggest we're screwed not because Bush is about to win, but because things are this close when the Democrats should have been able to hit this one out of the park. The two parties are not as different as we might hope.
Four years of interesting times. And on the bright side, things are divided enough to keep trolling interesting for at least that long.
ontopic BTW: nearly everything election-related that I've visited has been slow as hell or down. verifiedvoting.org has sucked until tonight, which suggests heightened usage of online vote research resources. But we knew that already.
Particularly where OpenBSD is concerned, where every inch of the code has been scrutinized for security holes, encouraging the use and distribution of binary-only drivers sounds like a quick way to lose the status of never having a security hole in the installation. There's got to be a hardware manufacturer that's willing to release source (though the hardware might cost a little more).
There is a problem with traditional RPG puzzles; MMORPGs allow collaboration or walkthroughs and the pressure to advance with your peers means that the individual player will most likely take the easy way out of puzzles to keep up, robbing him of the satisfaction of thinking things over and working at his own pace.
A Tale In The Desert takes an interesting approach where community-wide advancement and shaping of the game world is possible and encouraged, but the advancement of the individual character is a little flat (gather items to build stuff or travel someplace to get another skill.) In a way, this is a "life simulator".
Finding some means of bringing the two together is the way to go -- a potential future MMORPG would work out a system that randomizes the puzzles for each character, discover a way to permit characters with a wide range of 'levels' to adventure together meaningfully, and permit a very dynamic game world where players build their own towns and outposts and PvP becomes a little more epic.
Like many other Slashdotters, I was moved by the touching salute by many City of Hero players to Christopher Reeve.
Have there been any thoughts to incorporate his character or his message in your MMORPG in a more permanent way, perhaps allowing players to discover in-game through a quest or discussion with an NPC the merits of what he was proposing in real-life (making health research a priority, investigating the potential of stem cells, etc.)?
Stratellite is the wave of the future...
on
Broadband Bits
·
· Score: 1
Literally. Geostationary stratospheric 'satellites' sandwiching low-high frequency transmissions to give high-bandwidth/low-latency communications to urban and remote locations alike.
The current problem with satellites is that because of the distance involved and the use of radio waves (substantially slower than the speed of light communications we get with cables) the latency is horrible. But stratellites stand a good chance of becoming a permanent and useful part of the Internet and its backbone, particularly transatlantic/transpacific communications. Good stuff.
Well, the problem is that we're looking at each individual XSS exploit as a vulnerability when we should be looking at XSS itself as an unwholesome feature in general.
Like when we started treating e-mail as a file transfer protocol, or when documents began to contain executable content, XSS gives an avenue of attack by adding a new and unrequested behavior to something that used to be secure. We need to reduce these channels of exploitation if computers are going to become secure -- especially as we head towards a homogenized environment on the Internet with regards to executable code (.NET/Java).
Expansion packs are bad enough when you're buying a game for $50, but why do people put up with it with MMORPGS where you're paying a monthly fee as well as the initial cost of the software?
If it's about combining the social thing with your gaming, there's gotta be a good MUD out there somewhere. MMORPGS are basically MUDs with chrome and a billing system.
Although I'm probably going to be right out there with the rest of you picking this up, am I the only one that's a bit concerned about seeing all the parents buying the game for their kids?
Supposedly the ESRB stuff is supposed to stop retailers from selling the game to people under 18, but I know that many parents don't have the time or the willpower to look into what media their children consume. And I know this series gets pretty bad, with things like picking up prostitutes, car theft, and massacre being rewarded in what some have termed a "pornography of violence".
As fun as the game is, maybe this is something that should be hidden behind the counter or maybe only sold in adult venues/online. We all know where to find it, and we're old enough not to be profoundly affected by murder simulations, but apparently there are still a bunch of chuckleheads out there that are completely unable to determine what's appropriate for their kids. And society pays the price.
If the fastest way to compute this is really the mathematical method, or if a technique like evolutionary programming might expose a quicker means of arriving at the result (i.e. a simpler mathematical method).
I've been around the Internet for a long time -- since the early 90s in
fact -- and am thus quite aware of the ruinous activities it has been
subjected to by the typical user since then. You know, things like people
popping into a random USENET group and treating it like a tech support
line, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire network is
there to serve as some form of entertainment.
When I started, the USENET application would inform me that my message would
be spread across tens of thousands of computers at immeasurable cost as
a subtle hint to keep things interesting, and Internet Chat required some
basic knowledge of Makefiles and attention to documentation before you could
run a client. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the Internet
was made accessible to anybody with a web browser; anybody who's been around
this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with exploits, virii
and worms are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of x86 assembly used to be
a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak
the sort of havoc that today requires fifteen minutes and an Effective
VBScript In Fifteen Minutes manual. Every document is now a program, and
e-mail doubles as FTP.
Many experts believe should raise the barrier of entry by requiring
programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do
no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field.
It used to take years to do what kids today can do in months; additionally, a
would-be programmer who spends a few months picking up Visual Basic or
whatever has hardly learned the fundamentals of programming any more than
someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser engineer.
I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly
enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and
with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros
or other executable content from documents.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think
about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to
educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform
as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone
who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult
when it comes to computers?
I've been working on a three week RMA where I had to hunt for contacts for an hour, spend a couple of hours filling out a support request only to get a form letter back, make three toll calls before reaching someone because the office hours were wrong on the contact page as well as their phone menu system, make another after a half-hour on hold to get the RMA, pay freight one-way then wait a couple of weeks for a board that may or may not work.
Better to pay twice as much to get something that works right in the first place than to go through the above (where you'll be buying a second board to use during the RMA anyway). Even if you had to run GNU/Linux on it, you'd still be ahead of the game for office applications.
If the emulator is holding a lock on the drive despite the installer requesting a disc change, perhaps TransGaming could put in a 'override' keycombo that would request the software to close anything that's currently open on the drive.
Handling unmount/mount with a keycombo would be useful too, such as in a fullscreen CD-swap environment. I haven't used it though so maybe this kind of stuff is in there in some form already...
A couple of decades ago, journalism relied on the efforts of hardworking individuals who would go to great lengths for a story. Sometimes to the point of sacrificing their liberty for refusing to name a source or even their lives for walking into places that could only be described as Hell on Earth -- where even the ones fortunate enough to leave physically whole were not unscathed.
BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power
I sometimes wonder if this is one of those situations in Open Source where more is not better.
There is exactly one GNU/Linux, which is occasionally altered by others to meet needs, but which is ultimately designed by one team. It's a jack-of-all-trades, which is probably the best overall strategy for acceptance and survival.
BSD, on the other hand, has fragmented into a set of extremes. OpenBSD for security, FreeBSD for a Linux-workalike with ports, NetBSD for portability. Each can be useful if you're looking for one solution to one problem.
But the computing world isn't like that. Almost every system is put to multiple tasks -- particularly desktops, but occasionally servers may have their purpose redefined one or more times over their lifespan. And I think this undercuts the possible success of the different BSDs, as does the fact that one must switch his online community if he wants a different BSD but only his distribution if he wants a different GNU/Linux.
I would like to suggest that Firefox won't be the player until it can properly render most of the web, broken or not.
After all, the W3C standards are effectively recommendations. We're all using something that isn't fully-conformant. So it's really up to the Firefox team to put together something that can properly interpret what's out there rather than to wait for what's out there to become perfect or at least not crash their browser at every sixth page.
One of the coolest things I've seen on TV since O'Reilly vs. Franken on C-Span BookTV.
Journalism standards have gone down the toilet. Kudos to Stewart for giving these folks a metaphorical kick to the nuts on live television -- wasn't a fan before, starting to become one now.
He's just so right; when a satirical news program on a minor cable channel meets or exceeds the journalistic bar in this country, to the point of winning awards and in many cases being the only news people will watch, you get an idea of just why things are so screwed and why so many people continue to buy into the two-party system. The media isn't conservative, and it certainly isn't liberal... it's simply profitable.
BPL will bring communications on par or better than amateur radio to the areas in which it's deployed. You won't need a license to use it, and you can do much more with it.
So long as it doesn't interfere with emergency freqs, it's a net gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it stops with the broadcast flag, though; once proprietary encryption gets into the mix, there's not going to be a gray area like this with hardware you pick up in the store. Why can't I get a decoder card that works with my digital cable service?
People who enjoy recording TV will have to stoop to the levels of satellite pirates tomorrow to enjoy the same level of use of their service they've got now. With probably the same legal/social connotations, as broadcasters are no doubt seeking to carve new revenue streams out of DRM TV (i.e. "Record to DVD now for only $2.50!").
As a programmer, I feel the continual march of progress in computing has been hampered as of late because of a major misconception in some segments of the software industry. Some would argue that the process of refinement by iterative design, which is the subject of many texts in the field -- extreme programming being the most recent -- demonstrates that applying the theory of evolution to coding is the most effective model of program 'design'.
But this is erroneous. The problem is that while extremely negative traits are usually stripped away in this model, negative traits that do not (metaphorically) explicitly interfere with life up until reproduction often remain. Additionally, traits that would be extremely beneficial that are not explicitly necessary for survival fail to come to light. Our ability to think and reason was not the product of evolution, but was deliberately chosen for us. Perhaps this is a thought that should again be applied to the creation of software.
It makes no sense to choose the option of continually hacking at a program until it works as opposed to properly designing it from the start. One only has to compare the security woes of Microsoft or Linux with the rock-solid experience of OpenBSD for an example. It makes little sense from a business perspective as well; it costs up to ten times as much to fix an error by the time it hits the market as it would to catch it during the design. Unfortunately, as much of this cost is borne by consumers and not the companies designing buggy products, it's harder to make the case for proper software engineering -- especially in an environment like Microsoft where one hand may not often be aware of what the other is doing.
Don't be fooled into thinking open source is free of the 'monoculture' mindset, either. While it is perhaps in a better position to take advantage of vibrant and daring new concepts because of the lack of need to meet a marketing deadline or profitability requirement the types of holy wars one might have noticed between KDE/GNOME or Free Software/Open Source demonstrate that there are at least some within every community that feel they hold the monopoly on wisdom.
I wish they'd find a way to solve their problems without being outwardly hostile to the Internet, computer users, and/or their customers.
The Spiderman 2 DVD comes out this month as well as the final extended cut in the LOTR series. Guess I'll be in line with the rest of you to fund these lawsuits.
In a way, it makes sense that they'd be partly responsible for the blue in our atmosphere -- the rest comes from the Sun bombarding the layers of gases up there. Sometimes science is just a way of jerryrigging loose facts together to create a plausible test or explanation for strange phenonema.
I'm liberal enough to be dejected about this, but perhaps this is a sign that the country wants to take things in a new direction. There's all sorts of things one can be upset about (no-bid contracts, a more aggressive defense policy, civil rights) but the points about all of these have already been made to U.S. citizens with the results you observe: Republican majority of the House and the Senate and a probable Republican president.
The DNC was so eager to pin their loss in 2000 on Nader. What would the results have been if they didn't put their energies into downplaying Dean and screwing Nader out of ballot spots? I suggest we're screwed not because Bush is about to win, but because things are this close when the Democrats should have been able to hit this one out of the park. The two parties are not as different as we might hope.
Four years of interesting times. And on the bright side, things are divided enough to keep trolling interesting for at least that long.
ontopic BTW: nearly everything election-related that I've visited has been slow as hell or down. verifiedvoting.org has sucked until tonight, which suggests heightened usage of online vote research resources. But we knew that already.
Particularly where OpenBSD is concerned, where every inch of the code has been scrutinized for security holes, encouraging the use and distribution of binary-only drivers sounds like a quick way to lose the status of never having a security hole in the installation. There's got to be a hardware manufacturer that's willing to release source (though the hardware might cost a little more).
A Tale In The Desert takes an interesting approach where community-wide advancement and shaping of the game world is possible and encouraged, but the advancement of the individual character is a little flat (gather items to build stuff or travel someplace to get another skill.) In a way, this is a "life simulator".
Finding some means of bringing the two together is the way to go -- a potential future MMORPG would work out a system that randomizes the puzzles for each character, discover a way to permit characters with a wide range of 'levels' to adventure together meaningfully, and permit a very dynamic game world where players build their own towns and outposts and PvP becomes a little more epic.
Have there been any thoughts to incorporate his character or his message in your MMORPG in a more permanent way, perhaps allowing players to discover in-game through a quest or discussion with an NPC the merits of what he was proposing in real-life (making health research a priority, investigating the potential of stem cells, etc.)?
The current problem with satellites is that because of the distance involved and the use of radio waves (substantially slower than the speed of light communications we get with cables) the latency is horrible. But stratellites stand a good chance of becoming a permanent and useful part of the Internet and its backbone, particularly transatlantic/transpacific communications. Good stuff.
Like when we started treating e-mail as a file transfer protocol, or when documents began to contain executable content, XSS gives an avenue of attack by adding a new and unrequested behavior to something that used to be secure. We need to reduce these channels of exploitation if computers are going to become secure -- especially as we head towards a homogenized environment on the Internet with regards to executable code (.NET/Java).
just a bit irresponsible to be coming out with this before Google has had a chance to fix it?
If it's about combining the social thing with your gaming, there's gotta be a good MUD out there somewhere. MMORPGS are basically MUDs with chrome and a billing system.
Supposedly the ESRB stuff is supposed to stop retailers from selling the game to people under 18, but I know that many parents don't have the time or the willpower to look into what media their children consume. And I know this series gets pretty bad, with things like picking up prostitutes, car theft, and massacre being rewarded in what some have termed a "pornography of violence".
As fun as the game is, maybe this is something that should be hidden behind the counter or maybe only sold in adult venues/online. We all know where to find it, and we're old enough not to be profoundly affected by murder simulations, but apparently there are still a bunch of chuckleheads out there that are completely unable to determine what's appropriate for their kids. And society pays the price.
I sure can't wait to play it, though.
If the fastest way to compute this is really the mathematical method, or if a technique like evolutionary programming might expose a quicker means of arriving at the result (i.e. a simpler mathematical method).
When I started, the USENET application would inform me that my message would be spread across tens of thousands of computers at immeasurable cost as a subtle hint to keep things interesting, and Internet Chat required some basic knowledge of Makefiles and attention to documentation before you could run a client. Frankly, things became unmanageable at the point the Internet was made accessible to anybody with a web browser; anybody who's been around this long knows what I'm talking about.
It's a short hop to realizing that the problems we're experiencing with exploits, virii and worms are the same problem. Intimate knowledge of x86 assembly used to be a requirement -- along with a malcontent-type disposition -- in order to wreak the sort of havoc that today requires fifteen minutes and an Effective VBScript In Fifteen Minutes manual. Every document is now a program, and e-mail doubles as FTP.
Many experts believe should raise the barrier of entry by requiring programmers to undergo education, certification, and maybe even an oath to do no harm as part of the certification process if going into a security field. It used to take years to do what kids today can do in months; additionally, a would-be programmer who spends a few months picking up Visual Basic or whatever has hardly learned the fundamentals of programming any more than someone who reads a manual about his DVD player has become a laser engineer. I suggest that the field and the general user experience would be greatly enhanced by limiting access to compilers/assemblers (by means of pricing and with the cooperation of the open source community) and by separating macros or other executable content from documents.
It makes more sense than trying to go out and educate every user. Think about it; in what other field do we "educate" "users"? We don't try to educate people with electrical outlets and let any curious individual perform as a licensed electrician. We don't "educate" passengers and let anyone who cares be a bus driver give it a try. Why are things always so difficult when it comes to computers?
Better to pay twice as much to get something that works right in the first place than to go through the above (where you'll be buying a second board to use during the RMA anyway). Even if you had to run GNU/Linux on it, you'd still be ahead of the game for office applications.
Handling unmount/mount with a keycombo would be useful too, such as in a fullscreen CD-swap environment. I haven't used it though so maybe this kind of stuff is in there in some form already...
Chumps.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of those situations in Open Source where more is not better.
There is exactly one GNU/Linux, which is occasionally altered by others to meet needs, but which is ultimately designed by one team. It's a jack-of-all-trades, which is probably the best overall strategy for acceptance and survival.
BSD, on the other hand, has fragmented into a set of extremes. OpenBSD for security, FreeBSD for a Linux-workalike with ports, NetBSD for portability. Each can be useful if you're looking for one solution to one problem.
But the computing world isn't like that. Almost every system is put to multiple tasks -- particularly desktops, but occasionally servers may have their purpose redefined one or more times over their lifespan. And I think this undercuts the possible success of the different BSDs, as does the fact that one must switch his online community if he wants a different BSD but only his distribution if he wants a different GNU/Linux.
After all, the W3C standards are effectively recommendations. We're all using something that isn't fully-conformant. So it's really up to the Firefox team to put together something that can properly interpret what's out there rather than to wait for what's out there to become perfect or at least not crash their browser at every sixth page.
Journalism standards have gone down the toilet. Kudos to Stewart for giving these folks a metaphorical kick to the nuts on live television -- wasn't a fan before, starting to become one now.
He's just so right; when a satirical news program on a minor cable channel meets or exceeds the journalistic bar in this country, to the point of winning awards and in many cases being the only news people will watch, you get an idea of just why things are so screwed and why so many people continue to buy into the two-party system. The media isn't conservative, and it certainly isn't liberal... it's simply profitable.
Of course all that really matters is Air America Radio, and that's on all day.
Anyway, despite my quibbles this sounds like a pretty solid device. Why are they only releasing in Japan?
So long as it doesn't interfere with emergency freqs, it's a net gain.