Google is attempting to provide an experience which enhances the ability to search within books -- thereby increasing one's ability to discover and purchase books. It is a subset of the functionality that you would get by purchasing or borrowing from a library the entire book (or even browsing one in a bookstore) because the service limits the number of pages you can fetch and intentionally leaves a number of pages out.
No doubt there are two problems with this: the first seems to be that authors (to the best of my knowledge) haven't been asked either piecemeal or via organizations like the Authors' Guild for permission. The second is that Google will no doubt be making money as a result of providing this service and everybody else wants a cut.
However, we have reached an unfortunate point with copyright and fair use where we'd rather halt innovation than admit that copyright holders' expectations have reached a point of making it cost- and time-prohibitive to meet their demands and are to the point of stagnating not only the public domain but technologies and services that deliver or even touch upon copyrighted content. In this sense, creating a scenario that is not unlike the movie industry's dire predictions about the VCR in the early 80s.
It would be best, of course, for Google to attempt to work out an amiable solution with authors without crippling their service to an unreasonable extent, but I feel that the intent of fair use (if not its prevailing interpretation) falls in their favor... as does the bottom-line for both Google and the membership of the Authors' Guild.
Why are the handful of people who identify problems and try to get them solved "shrill"?
I'm not taking issue with the submitter because I hear the term applied to liberals alot -- but I wonder when the alternative of stubborn complacency and "going along to get along" became ideals in our democracy.
Because you don't get things fixed thinking like that.
Looks... pretty much the same as everything else.
on
Review: Darkwatch
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Maybe I'm just getting frustrated because I've got money to burn and can't find a decent game to spend it on... but has anybody else noticed a treadmill-like quality to gaming (particularly
PC gaming!) these days? There is plenty of space to innovate on current hardware, but developers insist on pushing polygons over promoting plot.
It's a bit ridiculous when you compare the lifespan of the Playstation or early gaming hardware (EGA/MIDI) against today's consoles and computers, and realize that adding a little memory to a graphics card does not a next-generation system make.
But these things are capable of pumping out heat like never before. An efficient computer would produce no heat, or if designed like a heat pump
could even cool a room, but instead designs seem to be moving in the opposite direction. One which is, based on economic indicators, quite
likely to be unsustainable.
With the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of
computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average
computer uses as much as 1¾ Titanics worth of coal to run on
any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do
without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is
being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the
electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques
such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for
putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to
safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need
a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate
for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it
is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed,
you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you
don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and
longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan
there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there
is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one
compelling reason not to.
Yeah. I'm hopeful that it wasn't something like a dialup PPP account or a new DHCP lease that was formerly used by a pirate, spoofed traffic, or viral activity.
Wouldn't that be embarrassing to get the lawyers all fired up just to find out a technical misinterpretation meant you were putting the wrong person through complete hell over something that's worthless anyway!
I don't think there is a simple way to do what you want under Linux yet. I know it's possible because I've managed it, but the process is confusing (and, at least at the time I did it, buggy -- I had to use one version of a DVD tool to make the menu and an older version of the tool to put the image together because the newer one was causing skips in the video.)
Here's what I did to do the conversion:
Capture video from the TV input card to the disk. As suggested, 'mencoder' is probably the best program for the job. First figure out how to watch a live stream from the TV card using 'mplayer', because once you get that working you can reuse most of those parameters with 'mencoder'. ("mplayer tv://88 -tv driver=v4l2:norm=ntsc:chanlist=us-cable:input=0:al sa" with no break in alsa (thanks Slashdot) gets me channel 88, but you may need to tweak this line depending on your area and Linux version.)
Edit video. The programs I found for this are picky about what video format you're editing, so you'll need to tell mencoder to output something compatible with your video editor in the step above. Cinelerra was too buggy for me at the time, so I went with 'avidemux' -- it was more straightforward for me, but probably far less advanced than this new version of Cinelerra, and I'm sure there are other editors out there.
Convert video to DVD format (if necessary.) If your editor isn't capable of editing MPEG2 video/audio then after you're done cutting you need to convert your finished product to DVD-compatible video. This part was the most awful for me and will probably require the most reading and tweaking. The program 'transcode' ultimately worked out.
Create DVD menu. I followed an online tutorial and did this with a graphics program ('gimp') and composed the result with 'dvdauthor'. I thought the process was ugly but since then GUI menu editors have been released (DVDStyler and Q DVD-Author in particular look pretty good.)
Create DVD layout. This is an XML file you feed to 'dvdauthor' that defines your DVD -- the menu, titles, chapters, etc. Looks difficult, but there are sample templates and tutorials out there that you can copy from and tweak for good results.
Create DVD filesystem. 'dvdauthor' again, taking that XML file and those videos and transforming them into a DVD filesystem. After this finishes your output directory will resemble the layout of a DVD.
Test DVD filesystem. 'xine' will let you watch the content of the output directory as if it was a DVD if configured properly. The command is 'xine dvd://(path to dir containing VIDEO_TS)' -- if output is in '/video', 'xine dvd:///video'.
Write image to disk. For me, this is 'growisofs -speed=1 -dvd-compat -Z/dev/cdrom -dvd-video'
You've gotten a few comments since I typed this up, so I might as well add that it wasn't much easier for me to create a VCD or SVCD under Linux than a DVD (given that most of the pain is in getting the video in the correct format). You can create a DVD without a menu and, at least as far as my players go, it's treated the same as an SVCD (video launches on startup, skip back and next will move you through chapters, etc.) so it might be worth trying to make a menuless DVD if you're more interested in quick than fancy.
The way I think it works out now is that if you sign on to the Canadian Do-Not-Call list you will only receive calls from businesses, political parties, polling companies, and charities.
Well, without defending them too much, it is important to keep in mind that any time you're dealing with a large amount of aid you're also dealing with infrastructure (how and when do the items arrive, where do you store them, how do you prioritize the distribution of funds, who installs and maintains donated technology, is it something that integrates into volunteer efforts without too much training or maintainance overhead to be useful, can the volunteer coordinators fit another thing into the schedule, are there strings attached to the gift, etc.)
Point being, if the help can't be deployed in a way that makes progress, it's better to turn it away than have it sit on the shelf useless or, worse, have it detract from other aid efforts that are more productive.
Telecom executives and analysts, though, aren't so sure it's the right time or place.
They had their chance, and handed it to the cable companies by the combined misery of ISDN deployments in the early 90s and DSL deployments in the late 90s. Maybe they can work on correct and complete Caller ID information and shutting down the waves of illegal fax spam until the next communication technology comes around.
Email is a business tool, not a personal messaging system - the use of it in this case was not in any way acceptable, nor is that the way we expect people to treat their work colleagues
Maybe the economy would be a little better if businesses would focus on business instead of finding new and interesting ways of scanning and banning personal Internet use (or a dozen other irrelevant employee-control functions that cost money and time without producing product...)
Different strokes for different folks
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've been a longtime fan of Enlightenment, but from time to time I've looked at the featureset of GNOME and thought about trying it out.
I just wish a little more effort would go into the user-interface aspect, which is really the whole point of a GUI right? It should be flicker-free. When I want to run a program it should come right up rather than changing the mouse pointer and making me wait. The fact that its logo is a foot doesn't help matters any.
Are there any window shells out there that have a little more pizazz than Enlightenment but retain the crisp response to user-input? Because that's what's needed to get the desktop crowd.
I've got my own (more positive) story about the rush to adopt Linux by corporate and can attest to the spiralling development process that can occur when one is fanatical about recycling prior programming effort.
A few years ago, there's a need for a fair to middling department store chain
to develop and deploy an epherimal business monitoring system. The current
in place at six test stores is doing well and promises to provide detailed and
instaneous headcount monitoring data to the central office which, when fully
deployed and combined with sale pricing, inventory and geographical
demographic data, offers an unprecedented degree of feedback to the decision
makers. Consequently, the decision was made to give the project the go ahead.
In a nutshell, the current system listens to the infrared people detectors
that go "bong" when people walk into the store and "bong bong" when people
walk out, and feeds the data over the token ring to the store computer. But
this won't do for the rest of the stores because they're using wireless
networks.
The general idea thus becomes to make these systems wireless and functional
out-of-the-box so that a store clerk can take it out of the packaging and
situate the device near a source of power and within listening range of the
people detectors. And since there was a great deal of buzz about achieving a lower TCO with Linux the company's "Linux on new installations" initiative meant they wanted to switch from Windows (used on the prototype machines) to Linux on the new devices to avoid per-site charges and network worms.
That's when things start going downhill -- not from an inherent flaw in Linux
mind you, but from the fact that the original app was compiled Delphi and the
compiler was in Norway with Jacques, the former IT developer, who returned to
his family to work on their penguin conservation efforts (I imagine a matter
of keeping the penguins fed and the polar bears fed with something else.)
The current guy, a Linux enthusiast familiar with Wine, figures that instead
of trying to rewrite the application from scratch it'd be quicker to wrap
the Windows binary in a layer of emulation and wrap all that with a layer of
Perl to interpret and route the results over the wireless network.
But the damnedest thing always seems to occur in these situations; it never
takes as much time to rewrite as it does to kludge. Everything looks
right after a week or so, functionwise -- these were embedded systems and
therefore difficult to debug, but the development was done at a workstation
that had a.wav recording of the "bong" sound that could be played into the
unit for testing. The system listens, transmits a byte over the wireless
when it gets a hit, and the central computer tabulates the data. No worries.
Except that nobody seems to be leaving the store. 0 counts for exits, average
stay is 16 hours (from open to close.)
To say the guy was frantic at this point is an understatement. There were
five days to go until the devices needed to be shipped to meet the deadline,
and they're only half functional. To add to the problem there is now no time
to rewrite, he's no good with a disassembler, and the embedded environment
thwarts his further attempts at debugging.
Nevertheless he keeps at it. GCC/GLib are at stable versions, libraries are
properly loaded as are the drivers -- indeed, the device isn't crashing and is
able to speak with the network. He checked LKML, he stopped by #linux on
EFnet, downgraded and upgraded the kernel all to no avail. His last resort
was fervered e-mails to Jacques to see if he knew anything about the situation.
Fortunately, at the last minute Jacques was able to let him know what the
problem was and that, in hindsight, it was both trivial and obvious, and everything ended up working out. But he swears that next
time he'll start with a rewrite and leave the fancy stuff as a last option.
Between this and the iPod story about batteries being built into equipment, I'm becoming quite concerned that we are becoming conditioned to accept a lifespan for computers and electronics that is well below the achievable lifespan (with a little clever engineering) -- leading to an unsustainable future of disposable computing.
With the increasing price of oil, and consequently plastics, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it
is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan
there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
Similarly we should demand quality in design and upgradability in our portable electronics. This comes with a cost, but one that pays dividends in reliability, environment, and sustainable computing.
In the past, I've heard it suggested that anti-spam techniques often go too far, culling good e-mail with the bad and perhaps even curtailing 1st Amendment rights. Clearly this depends on what end of the speculum you're on, but recent developments have given me pause for thought on the matter.
For example, certain spam blacklists would censor more than was strictly necessary (a subjective opinion, I realize) to block a spammer -- sometimes blocking a whole Class C to get one individual. This would cause other innocent users in that netspace to have their e-mail to hosts using the blacklists silently dropped without any option of fixing the problem besides switching ISPs.
This is an extreme example, but most anti-spam approaches have the following characteristics:
They are implemented on a mailserver without fully informing the users of the ramifications (or really informing them at all)
They block messages without notification to the sender, causing things to be silently dropped
Even if the recipient becomes aware of the problem, few or no options are given for the recipient to alter this "service"
Recently I had to fix an installation where daily messages from a particular host stopped appearing in a mailbox. This system was connecting with an ISP that had offered no spam filtering and had been using a client-based Bayesian classifier with great success, but suddenly the mail coming into the system had scaled back by a factor of ten. Sure enough, the ISP installed a server-based spam filter which took out most of the spam and a good deal of the legitimate mail -- they had a (not well publicized) means of accessing the account settings and turning off the filter, and a holding tank for mail classified as spam, but beyond the last two weeks everything was thrown out.
I'm curious about what you think about server-based approaches vs. client-based approaches to spam classification and filtering and if, maybe, the cure is worse than the disease.
Hash algorithms (or #algo in compsci parlance) quite naturally represent duplicable checksums of different source materials because you're rendering large variable-width data as small fixed-width data. That's why the results are often called "fingerprints", which are themselves only mostly reliable, and not "DNA".
The problem is that these algorithms rely on external characteristics of the data sources and render them to a short description. Indeed, a "DNA" approach would look at what makes up the files (binary) rather than the obvious (ASCII characters) and create a profile that could only match that file.
This has been less than practical to this point because of a difference in file formats and transfer protocols. Anybody who uses FTP can attest to how easy it is to transfer binary when you mean ASCII and visa versa, and newline characters and little-endian/big-endian conversions make developing a DNA standard for file comparison difficult at best.
But I think that we're quickly reaching a point where standard fingerprint checksums are running out of usefulness.
This is the kind of thing, ironically, that will hurt Apple's adoption on the x86.
Ubiquitous piracy made Microsoft Windows big and Linux a contender. It's hard enough to get people to try another operating system when it's free.
Not that I'm supporting piracy, because I'm not, but at this point you'd have to be a nut to grab something like this (not necessarily stable, anybody could have altered it) and install it on your system, with the risk of losing whatever else you've got on there. The kind of nut that could be an excellent customer down the road if Apple capitalized on this fanaticism and offered legit demos of the technology in lieu of the illegal downloads already out there.
I suppose it wouldn't jive with their strategy of keeping their innovations under wraps until release, but as long as the toothpaste is out of the tube you get better results with the carrot than the stick.
Before the advent of the automated recording and transfer process the OAH Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) conducted hearings using their PBX built-in conference features and recording using a desktop phone recording system. While functional, the system was not able to grow to match the OAH's needs. By utilizing a combination of existing conference bridge infrastructure and open source software, DVS was able to provide a feature-rich centralized solution for minimal expense.
One of the great things about open source is that it offers a way for business and non-business organizations and individuals to leverage the power of existing equipment for very little additional expense (to wit, additional peripherals or upgrades necessary to run the software) rather than investing the money into a solution they're just going to have to throw away shortly down the road.
With the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of
computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average
computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on
any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do
without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is
being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the
electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques
such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for
putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to
safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need
a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate
for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it
is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed,
you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you
don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that, between the advances in open source and the levelling off of true innovation in hardware design, I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and
longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan
there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there
is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one
compelling reason not to.
I mean, I don't want to say "so what" when someone comes up with something new that doesn't apply to my computing experience, but why can't encryption be built into the ACPI interface to the drive rather than having to jump through hoops like this.
The computer industry seems to be moving at different speeds. Today, for example, you can buy a 64-bit CPU that operates at 3gHz, 32-bit memory that operates at 400mHz, and a 128-bit graphics card with 300mHz RAMDAC. Nobody seems interested in designing a complete system in the PC industry -- instead all the "progress" is in optimizing or extending components and hoping they work when you throw them together.
For example, common computing principles show that your computer is only as fast as its slowest component at any given point -- if your memory
takes seven clock cycles to perform a read and your CPU needs the results of that operation, it will sit for six cycles doing nothing. In essence, your CPU runs as fast as your memory, and in this case you are only getting 1/7 of your CPU when you use your system. If the memory people and the CPU people get together and work out a faster interface and memory access, everything works more efficiently.
We need to eliminate bottlenecks, and while this sounds like an interesting hack I wish more focus would be placed on making the entire platform secure.
True, it's got some simple advantages for casebuilding. It's lightweight, shiny, and probably the best metal for heat dissipation (assuming a room cooler than your system, of course). No corrosion either.
But let's take a look at the chemistry. Anybody in plumbing or wiring will tell you to avoid connecting two different metals -- and I don't think it's a coincidence that computer cases until now have either been plastic or largely built from the same metals as your ICs.
Iron has four energy levels, but aluminum only has three; this would suggest to the average person that aluminum would shield components better from electrical interference, but that's not the case at all. Additionally, iron has four known stable isotopes while aluminum only has one, and most computer builders prefer to build as much stability into their systems as possible.
I prefer plastic above the rest, as while it is more synthetic and prone to generating static electricity if rubbed with a wool cloth it generally works well and offers a greater degree of artistic freedom to the case designer.
I don't know where the line of thinking comes from on things like RFID or recent overbearing legislation that suggests that the only people who have a right to express concern about potential abuses must have already suffered a direct and forceful negative experience as a result of said technology or legislation.
In my case, you're quite likely correct that nobody that would have access to these tools would care about tracking me, personally, throughout my day. But do consider the possibility of a small town or two where the local enforcement occasionally finds itself poking in everybody's business, perhaps sweeping parking lots of bars where "odd" people hang out or looking for out-of-towners to ticket.
And then even figuring I'm a pretty uninteresting individual, take into account that protestors and politicians aren't. If this gets integrated in any way with traffic cameras or toll booths or they decide to toss routine scans from a cruiser into a log, the information could be used to quash dissent or held over our representatives to steer their decisions. Who knows how long this information is retained for, either? Ten years down the road you might run for office only to have logs of your vehicle regularly parked outside a porn shop turn up in the paper from an anonymous source.
What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't have to directly affect us to affect us. It's a threat, albeit one still waiting for implementation to demonstrate how benign or dangerous it is to our privacy. It also seems redundant in light of license plates, except for the fact that it would make casual electronic scans of masses of vehicles much easier than visually inspecting each plate.
The Order is limited to facilities-based broadband Internet access service providers and
VoIP providers that offer services permitting users to receive calls from, and place calls to, the
public switched telephone network. These VoIP providers are called interconnected VoIP
providers.
How many people have a service like that? It looks like they want to retain their wiretap capability for voice communication as we move into VoIP, not monitor everything you do.
A popular theme on the Internet going back to at least the days of Napster (when cracking down on "piracy" on the Internet began to become popular) is the idea that technology will always provide ways to download and enjoy movies, music, books and software illegally.
I have my doubts. For one thing the large interests that produce the media in question are, with the implementation of hardware DRM in PCs, on the verge of an unprecedented level of authority over our hardware creating the potential (and likelihood) of communication with your computer that you will have no ability to monitor or control. For another, I noticed in a Supreme Court transcript from MGM v. Grokster an interesting section regarding the concept of "willful ignorance" that suggested to me that should something like Freenet come under scrutiny its days would be numbered.
If encryption is illegal, steganography would be no answer for trying to continue the P2P party. You can't hide a ton of shit in a one pound sack.
The way I see it, the only effective way of fighting is to stop supporting the people that are harming you. If everybody would choose to buy used or from independent artists/developers the message would be a lot clearer. It has the benefit of being legal and in some cases you can directly support people who believe in the same ideals you do.
If the users of Slashdot patiently explained to everybody they knew the reasons why these laws are awful, that the media companies are pushing them, and ways in which people could legally get the entertainment they wanted without supporting the media companies pushing these laws I think we'd notice the effect. You know, harness the bitching that normally gets fed into this forum for the powers of good. But it's no more likely to happen than your suggestion because it's too much work.
After a hearty discussion in AI class about the famous 3 robot rules, our professor related an interesting metaphor for why artifical sentience must be restrained.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S./.ers) there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down, ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many others. I think it was California, but it could have been Oregon or someplace similar -- well, the location isn't really relevant to the story but if you're
interested you may be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically, while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take
pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the spittoon and hefted it off of the floor. Before the bartender could stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismay, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had
finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground,
wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt there are two problems with this: the first seems to be that authors (to the best of my knowledge) haven't been asked either piecemeal or via organizations like the Authors' Guild for permission. The second is that Google will no doubt be making money as a result of providing this service and everybody else wants a cut.
However, we have reached an unfortunate point with copyright and fair use where we'd rather halt innovation than admit that copyright holders' expectations have reached a point of making it cost- and time-prohibitive to meet their demands and are to the point of stagnating not only the public domain but technologies and services that deliver or even touch upon copyrighted content. In this sense, creating a scenario that is not unlike the movie industry's dire predictions about the VCR in the early 80s.
It would be best, of course, for Google to attempt to work out an amiable solution with authors without crippling their service to an unreasonable extent, but I feel that the intent of fair use (if not its prevailing interpretation) falls in their favor... as does the bottom-line for both Google and the membership of the Authors' Guild.
Not good enough he's a kernel developer and Red Hat fellow, now he had to go and add an l to his name?
I'm not taking issue with the submitter because I hear the term applied to liberals alot -- but I wonder when the alternative of stubborn complacency and "going along to get along" became ideals in our democracy.
Because you don't get things fixed thinking like that.
But these things are capable of pumping out heat like never before. An efficient computer would produce no heat, or if designed like a heat pump could even cool a room, but instead designs seem to be moving in the opposite direction. One which is, based on economic indicators, quite likely to be unsustainable.
With the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as 1¾ Titanics worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
Wouldn't that be embarrassing to get the lawyers all fired up just to find out a technical misinterpretation meant you were putting the wrong person through complete hell over something that's worthless anyway!
Here's what I did to do the conversion:
- Capture video from the TV input card to the disk. As suggested, 'mencoder' is probably the best program for the job. First figure out how to watch a live stream from the TV card using 'mplayer', because once you get that working you can reuse most of those parameters with 'mencoder'. ("mplayer tv://88 -tv driver=v4l2:norm=ntsc:chanlist=us-cable:input=0:a
l sa" with no break in alsa (thanks Slashdot) gets me channel 88, but you may need to tweak this line depending on your area and Linux version.)
- Edit video. The programs I found for this are picky about what video format you're editing, so you'll need to tell mencoder to output something compatible with your video editor in the step above. Cinelerra was too buggy for me at the time, so I went with 'avidemux' -- it was more straightforward for me, but probably far less advanced than this new version of Cinelerra, and I'm sure there are other editors out there.
- Convert video to DVD format (if necessary.) If your editor isn't capable of editing MPEG2 video/audio then after you're done cutting you need to convert your finished product to DVD-compatible video. This part was the most awful for me and will probably require the most reading and tweaking. The program 'transcode' ultimately worked out.
- Create DVD menu. I followed an online tutorial and did this with a graphics program ('gimp') and composed the result with 'dvdauthor'. I thought the process was ugly but since then GUI menu editors have been released (DVDStyler and Q DVD-Author in particular look pretty good.)
- Create DVD layout. This is an XML file you feed to 'dvdauthor' that defines your DVD -- the menu, titles, chapters, etc. Looks difficult, but there are sample templates and tutorials out there that you can copy from and tweak for good results.
- Create DVD filesystem. 'dvdauthor' again, taking that XML file and those videos and transforming them into a DVD filesystem. After this finishes your output directory will resemble the layout of a DVD.
- Test DVD filesystem. 'xine' will let you watch the content of the output directory as if it was a DVD if configured properly. The command is 'xine dvd://(path to dir containing VIDEO_TS)' -- if output is in '/video', 'xine dvd:///video'.
- Write image to disk. For me, this is 'growisofs -speed=1 -dvd-compat -Z
/dev/cdrom -dvd-video'
You've gotten a few comments since I typed this up, so I might as well add that it wasn't much easier for me to create a VCD or SVCD under Linux than a DVD (given that most of the pain is in getting the video in the correct format). You can create a DVD without a menu and, at least as far as my players go, it's treated the same as an SVCD (video launches on startup, skip back and next will move you through chapters, etc.) so it might be worth trying to make a menuless DVD if you're more interested in quick than fancy.The way I think it works out now is that if you sign on to the Canadian Do-Not-Call list you will only receive calls from businesses, political parties, polling companies, and charities.
Point being, if the help can't be deployed in a way that makes progress, it's better to turn it away than have it sit on the shelf useless or, worse, have it detract from other aid efforts that are more productive.
They had their chance, and handed it to the cable companies by the combined misery of ISDN deployments in the early 90s and DSL deployments in the late 90s. Maybe they can work on correct and complete Caller ID information and shutting down the waves of illegal fax spam until the next communication technology comes around.
Maybe the economy would be a little better if businesses would focus on business instead of finding new and interesting ways of scanning and banning personal Internet use (or a dozen other irrelevant employee-control functions that cost money and time without producing product...)
I just wish a little more effort would go into the user-interface aspect, which is really the whole point of a GUI right? It should be flicker-free. When I want to run a program it should come right up rather than changing the mouse pointer and making me wait. The fact that its logo is a foot doesn't help matters any.
Are there any window shells out there that have a little more pizazz than Enlightenment but retain the crisp response to user-input? Because that's what's needed to get the desktop crowd.
Two "bongs" don't make a byte.
A few years ago, there's a need for a fair to middling department store chain to develop and deploy an epherimal business monitoring system. The current in place at six test stores is doing well and promises to provide detailed and instaneous headcount monitoring data to the central office which, when fully deployed and combined with sale pricing, inventory and geographical demographic data, offers an unprecedented degree of feedback to the decision makers. Consequently, the decision was made to give the project the go ahead.
In a nutshell, the current system listens to the infrared people detectors that go "bong" when people walk into the store and "bong bong" when people walk out, and feeds the data over the token ring to the store computer. But this won't do for the rest of the stores because they're using wireless networks.
The general idea thus becomes to make these systems wireless and functional out-of-the-box so that a store clerk can take it out of the packaging and situate the device near a source of power and within listening range of the people detectors. And since there was a great deal of buzz about achieving a lower TCO with Linux the company's "Linux on new installations" initiative meant they wanted to switch from Windows (used on the prototype machines) to Linux on the new devices to avoid per-site charges and network worms.
That's when things start going downhill -- not from an inherent flaw in Linux mind you, but from the fact that the original app was compiled Delphi and the compiler was in Norway with Jacques, the former IT developer, who returned to his family to work on their penguin conservation efforts (I imagine a matter of keeping the penguins fed and the polar bears fed with something else.) The current guy, a Linux enthusiast familiar with Wine, figures that instead of trying to rewrite the application from scratch it'd be quicker to wrap the Windows binary in a layer of emulation and wrap all that with a layer of Perl to interpret and route the results over the wireless network.
But the damnedest thing always seems to occur in these situations; it never takes as much time to rewrite as it does to kludge. Everything looks right after a week or so, functionwise -- these were embedded systems and therefore difficult to debug, but the development was done at a workstation that had a .wav recording of the "bong" sound that could be played into the
unit for testing. The system listens, transmits a byte over the wireless
when it gets a hit, and the central computer tabulates the data. No worries.
Except that nobody seems to be leaving the store. 0 counts for exits, average stay is 16 hours (from open to close.)
To say the guy was frantic at this point is an understatement. There were five days to go until the devices needed to be shipped to meet the deadline, and they're only half functional. To add to the problem there is now no time to rewrite, he's no good with a disassembler, and the embedded environment thwarts his further attempts at debugging.
Nevertheless he keeps at it. GCC/GLib are at stable versions, libraries are properly loaded as are the drivers -- indeed, the device isn't crashing and is able to speak with the network. He checked LKML, he stopped by #linux on EFnet, downgraded and upgraded the kernel all to no avail. His last resort was fervered e-mails to Jacques to see if he knew anything about the situation.
Fortunately, at the last minute Jacques was able to let him know what the problem was and that, in hindsight, it was both trivial and obvious, and everything ended up working out. But he swears that next time he'll start with a rewrite and leave the fancy stuff as a last option.
With the increasing price of oil, and consequently plastics, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as two circus tents worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
Similarly we should demand quality in design and upgradability in our portable electronics. This comes with a cost, but one that pays dividends in reliability, environment, and sustainable computing.
For example, certain spam blacklists would censor more than was strictly necessary (a subjective opinion, I realize) to block a spammer -- sometimes blocking a whole Class C to get one individual. This would cause other innocent users in that netspace to have their e-mail to hosts using the blacklists silently dropped without any option of fixing the problem besides switching ISPs.
This is an extreme example, but most anti-spam approaches have the following characteristics:
Recently I had to fix an installation where daily messages from a particular host stopped appearing in a mailbox. This system was connecting with an ISP that had offered no spam filtering and had been using a client-based Bayesian classifier with great success, but suddenly the mail coming into the system had scaled back by a factor of ten. Sure enough, the ISP installed a server-based spam filter which took out most of the spam and a good deal of the legitimate mail -- they had a (not well publicized) means of accessing the account settings and turning off the filter, and a holding tank for mail classified as spam, but beyond the last two weeks everything was thrown out.
I'm curious about what you think about server-based approaches vs. client-based approaches to spam classification and filtering and if, maybe, the cure is worse than the disease.
The problem is that these algorithms rely on external characteristics of the data sources and render them to a short description. Indeed, a "DNA" approach would look at what makes up the files (binary) rather than the obvious (ASCII characters) and create a profile that could only match that file.
This has been less than practical to this point because of a difference in file formats and transfer protocols. Anybody who uses FTP can attest to how easy it is to transfer binary when you mean ASCII and visa versa, and newline characters and little-endian/big-endian conversions make developing a DNA standard for file comparison difficult at best.
But I think that we're quickly reaching a point where standard fingerprint checksums are running out of usefulness.
Ubiquitous piracy made Microsoft Windows big and Linux a contender. It's hard enough to get people to try another operating system when it's free.
Not that I'm supporting piracy, because I'm not, but at this point you'd have to be a nut to grab something like this (not necessarily stable, anybody could have altered it) and install it on your system, with the risk of losing whatever else you've got on there. The kind of nut that could be an excellent customer down the road if Apple capitalized on this fanaticism and offered legit demos of the technology in lieu of the illegal downloads already out there.
I suppose it wouldn't jive with their strategy of keeping their innovations under wraps until release, but as long as the toothpaste is out of the tube you get better results with the carrot than the stick.
One of the great things about open source is that it offers a way for business and non-business organizations and individuals to leverage the power of existing equipment for very little additional expense (to wit, additional peripherals or upgrades necessary to run the software) rather than investing the money into a solution they're just going to have to throw away shortly down the road.
With the increasing price of oil, I can't help wondering what the face of computing is going to look like five or ten years down the line. The average computer uses as much as seventeen swimming pools worth of coal to run on any given day. Much of this is spent on wasteful peripherals we could do without, such as fancy 3D graphics cards or optical mice, but even more is being spent on processing power well beyond the needs of the average user.
Inefficiencies in microcomponent fabrication mean that a great deal of the electricity that goes into your computer is given off as heat. Techniques such as reversible or quantum computing hold much promise in the future for putting more energy into computation but today it is up to the consumer to safeguard the environment.
In a way, the argument is the same as with vehicles -- most people don't need a SUV or a top-of-the-line system but many choose to get them to compensate for inadequacies or because of marketing -- but with computers at least it is impossible to argue you are "safer" for having a faster system. Indeed, you are more likely to run viruses or worms without realizing it because you don't notice the hit in operating performance.
I've noticed that, between the advances in open source and the levelling off of true innovation in hardware design, I've been holding on to computer equipment longer and longer these days. Oh sure, I have to fix a power supply here and a fan there, but besides slack engineering standards from software companies there is little reason to keep up with the hardware treadmill... and at least one compelling reason not to.
The computer industry seems to be moving at different speeds. Today, for example, you can buy a 64-bit CPU that operates at 3gHz, 32-bit memory that operates at 400mHz, and a 128-bit graphics card with 300mHz RAMDAC. Nobody seems interested in designing a complete system in the PC industry -- instead all the "progress" is in optimizing or extending components and hoping they work when you throw them together.
For example, common computing principles show that your computer is only as fast as its slowest component at any given point -- if your memory takes seven clock cycles to perform a read and your CPU needs the results of that operation, it will sit for six cycles doing nothing. In essence, your CPU runs as fast as your memory, and in this case you are only getting 1/7 of your CPU when you use your system. If the memory people and the CPU people get together and work out a faster interface and memory access, everything works more efficiently.
We need to eliminate bottlenecks, and while this sounds like an interesting hack I wish more focus would be placed on making the entire platform secure.
Maybe it's time to start looking into that again.
But let's take a look at the chemistry. Anybody in plumbing or wiring will tell you to avoid connecting two different metals -- and I don't think it's a coincidence that computer cases until now have either been plastic or largely built from the same metals as your ICs.
Iron has four energy levels, but aluminum only has three; this would suggest to the average person that aluminum would shield components better from electrical interference, but that's not the case at all. Additionally, iron has four known stable isotopes while aluminum only has one, and most computer builders prefer to build as much stability into their systems as possible.
I prefer plastic above the rest, as while it is more synthetic and prone to generating static electricity if rubbed with a wool cloth it generally works well and offers a greater degree of artistic freedom to the case designer.
In my case, you're quite likely correct that nobody that would have access to these tools would care about tracking me, personally, throughout my day. But do consider the possibility of a small town or two where the local enforcement occasionally finds itself poking in everybody's business, perhaps sweeping parking lots of bars where "odd" people hang out or looking for out-of-towners to ticket.
And then even figuring I'm a pretty uninteresting individual, take into account that protestors and politicians aren't. If this gets integrated in any way with traffic cameras or toll booths or they decide to toss routine scans from a cruiser into a log, the information could be used to quash dissent or held over our representatives to steer their decisions. Who knows how long this information is retained for, either? Ten years down the road you might run for office only to have logs of your vehicle regularly parked outside a porn shop turn up in the paper from an anonymous source.
What I'm trying to say is that it doesn't have to directly affect us to affect us. It's a threat, albeit one still waiting for implementation to demonstrate how benign or dangerous it is to our privacy. It also seems redundant in light of license plates, except for the fact that it would make casual electronic scans of masses of vehicles much easier than visually inspecting each plate.
How many people have a service like that? It looks like they want to retain their wiretap capability for voice communication as we move into VoIP, not monitor everything you do.
Sheesh.
I have my doubts. For one thing the large interests that produce the media in question are, with the implementation of hardware DRM in PCs, on the verge of an unprecedented level of authority over our hardware creating the potential (and likelihood) of communication with your computer that you will have no ability to monitor or control. For another, I noticed in a Supreme Court transcript from MGM v. Grokster an interesting section regarding the concept of "willful ignorance" that suggested to me that should something like Freenet come under scrutiny its days would be numbered.
If encryption is illegal, steganography would be no answer for trying to continue the P2P party. You can't hide a ton of shit in a one pound sack.
The way I see it, the only effective way of fighting is to stop supporting the people that are harming you. If everybody would choose to buy used or from independent artists/developers the message would be a lot clearer. It has the benefit of being legal and in some cases you can directly support people who believe in the same ideals you do.
If the users of Slashdot patiently explained to everybody they knew the reasons why these laws are awful, that the media companies are pushing them, and ways in which people could legally get the entertainment they wanted without supporting the media companies pushing these laws I think we'd notice the effect. You know, harness the bitching that normally gets fed into this forum for the powers of good. But it's no more likely to happen than your suggestion because it's too much work.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S. /.ers) there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down, ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many others. I think it was California, but it could have been Oregon or someplace similar -- well, the location isn't really relevant to the story but if you're
interested you may be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically, while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the spittoon and hefted it off of the floor. Before the bartender could stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismay, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground, wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."