I was thinking that too, until I noticed something: it's really a TV. It happens to contain a RGB/DVI adaptor, but from the specs (and the fact that it includes speakers), I think it's really meant to be used as a TV. Which makes a lot more sense - that would be an OK HDTV, but I would agree that it sounds like it would make a really crappy monitor.
The 17" LCD screen I'm currently staring at has a resolution of 1280x1024 - going down to 1024x786 seems a bit of a drop for a 29" monitor. It's probably intended to also allow usage as a kiosk display from a computer, not to be used as a primary monitor.
As I recall, although I can't find the article to prove this, is that these suits would be designed around the idea of a "ad-hoc" wireless network. (I think the term "swarm" has also been used, describing how the nodes would set up the network.) The idea being that the individual suits would be nodes in the network, passing on data between each other. They would set up routes to end-nodes based on their position to other nodes. Even if the main link was severed, the suits themselves would be able to talk to each other, and back to the CO.
However, I don't know this for sure, or know any of the specifics. (I doubt the specifics are unclassified, anyway:).) Who knows - maybe the future will include armored "WAP-robots" that are dropped off along the way to allow a route back to base:)
I don't really care - I doubt anyone else will read this thread anyway:) Anyway, now that my computer boots again...
Yeah, I'm someone at WPI - I doubt my name'll help much - Dan Potter. I think you were playing Dark Cloud in Founders 315 or whatever (across from 312, where I was for C and D term this year). I don't have any pictures of myself (right now), and am too lazy to search for one (that doesn't look horrible).
I don't remember everyone that was there, but several people were there end of D-term 2001, and somehow the topic of body image came up. Started at the pool tables, and moved to the fountain, if that helps.
Then I wound up taking a year off (2002, actually - not enough money), and was back this year to see you play Dark Cloud:). Hopefully I'll be graduating 2004, assuming everything goes well.
Hope that helps - if not, I'll get around to finding a picture or something...
I'm just larger-than-average.
I doubt that... if anything, I'd say average - I dunno, though (not having taken an exaustive survey or anything...)
Heh, I've got another neat effect going on with that image. The screen shot uses ClearType (I'm assuming), so it's optimized to be displayed on an LCD screen based on subpixel rendering. But that's OK, I've got an LCD screen!
Except that the screen I'm looking at has an BGR striping order (while most screens have an RGB striping order) - making the image look funky.
If you're on an LCD, compare these two images of ClearType in the two striping orders (courtesy - or stolen from, or whatever, Microsoft):
Wow - that thing is hard to read. IT'S MOSTLY IN CAPS. It took me a while to realize that it's actually a transcript of a news broadcast, very poorly formatted.
So if you're trying to figure out why a written story is that badly written, it's because it's actually a news piece intermixed with three different interviews. The letters in ALL CAPS are the reporter doing the report, and the various attributed sections are individuals who were interviewed.
Except for the sections where they mix between attributing Crenshaw directly and her voice over. (Presumably the sections with "Crenshaw:" are her talking directly, and the ALL CAPS are voiceovers some other footage. Maybe.)
Still an... interesting... read. It reminds me why I hate "investigative reporting" and much prefer to get my news through NPR:)
I think I'm now sure I know who you are *evil grin*. You had friends across the hall from me this year. You never stopped to say hello:P
Anyway, congrats - you're the first person I actually have met in real life that I know on Slashdot. The others I've only met in Counter-Strike games at WPI... Dubious honor to be sure...
(Ironically enough, when I did first meet you at WPI, the conversation at some point managed to go onto exactly this topic. Weird.)
Er, anyway, you definitely are not fat. (Based not on the pictures but having actually met you in person.) I don't get this "super-model" attraction thing anyway - it's so much more satisfying to go for attraction to nice people:) I mean, I can understand wanting someone who doesn't look like me, but people attacking Aimee for having a gut is just cruel. Especially since based on the MusicPundit link, she doesn't have a gut as much as have abdominal muscles. Oh no.
Oh, and how's Dark Cloud going? I still think the sequel is far better, although I've managed to get distracted onto other games and haven't bothered finishing it. (I wonder what it means that "other games" are Final Fantasy Origins, remakes of the NES Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II...)
Yeah, but most people who have DVDs don't want to watch them on the computer. I play DVDs on my machine, but I do so without DeCSS - since I run Windows XP. Even if I didn't, I still have my PS2, which plays DVDs with TV output. Most people, I would imagine, fall into the category of using a DVD player to watch DVDs. A lot of people now have DVDs - they're better than VHS - but can play them legally on their DVD player or on their Windows computer.
However, there are still a lot of DeCSS and similar (there's another CSS decryption program out there somewhere) for Windows, which rip the VOB files to the harddrive. It can then be easier to watch them if you have a flakey DVD-ROM drive, but that I doubt that's what they are used for. Especially since most of them also include methods of inputting the end results into various utilities that output AVI files through Windows codecs (most notably, DiVX codecs).
It would be interesting to find out though. My post actually was referring to DeCSS derivitives - programs that contain either DeCSS but provided additional features (like a GUI), or programs that had the same functionality as DeCSS. I wasn't actually referring to DeCSS itself. (Not that I made that clear, my bad.)
Who knows? I don't think there are that many Linux users out there that watch DVDs using Linux. I don't really know any users (anymore) who watch DVDs using Linux and when I used Linux, I rebooted into Windows to watch DVDs. (It was easier, at the time, due to the vast suckage of all Linux media players.) But I do know that there are a lot of people who actively rip DVDs and there is a community out there willing to explain how to do it.
Then again, I'm a member of the "college piracy croud" that the (MP|RI)AA rails against so frequently, so my views may be colored...
Nevertheless I will risk the claim that 99.9% of the people using DeCSS is doing so to watch DVDs they have purchased for their hard earned cash.
I disagree. Based on the sheer number of FAQs and utilities designed to allow "ripping" of DVDs, I would hazard a guess that maybe 20% of DeCSS usage is only for watching the disc. The remaining 80% are the people who create the DVD rips. I know people who would rent DVDs from the local video store and then rip them to their computer, to increase the GB shared so they could get into the bigger Direct Connect hubs. (That, and to "stick it to the man" or something. Whatever.)
A lot of people here seem to write off piracy as being completely bogus, and that just plain isn't true. You do have to accept that piracy happens and that people are using DeCSS to accomplish it.
Does this make it illegal? I don't think it should. I'm sure all of us have at one time or another seen the services of someone whose legal profession is creating breaking and entering tools. We call them "locksmiths" and they provide quite a useful service when you accidently drop the keys in the car and close the locked door. I mean, I even saw a show were this one guy managed to cut a new key for the ignition of an RV in under a minute based only on a blank and inserting it into the ignition. They then made off with this poor guy's RV.
Well, actually, the poor guy had neglected to pay the loan, and so he no longer owned it, and the person "stealing" it really worked for the repo agency the lender had hired.
It's all questionable anyway, and even though I do believe that piracy is a problem, I do not accept that it is really costing the industry billions. I know that I never would have bought the Boondock Saints without someone asking me to download it for them. I've got the DVD now (that it's been released in the US, which it wasn't when I "pirated" it). I can't stand DRM anyway. Ever since Epic Megagames released the patch that removes the CD check on UT2K3, I've been playing much more of it than before. It's a royal pain to go CD hunting to play a game. I'll accept having to swap CDs on a console, but not on a game that requires 2GB of harddrive space.
I still have problems playing Blizzard games - they usually insist that I'm using a copied CD, even though I'm not. It's quite annoying, not being able to play a game I paid $60+ for, because it thinks I pirated it. (And not being able to return it, because it didn't decide it was pirated until after the return period was over.)
Conclusion: yeah, DeCSS probably is being used as a utility to pirate videos. But I don't think that makes it right to go after the creators any more than I think we should lock up all the locksmiths because they have the skills required to break into my car. Even if people are pirating content, that doesn't make DRM any more palettable - it is usually used as a manner of control more than a manner to protect a work.
Re:Impressive and Glitchy
on
Neuros Review
·
· Score: 2
Nah, something can be quite impressive when it goes wrong. Why do you think people watch Nascar or monster trucks? To watch them crash!
For example, if the program copied the files, but managed to mix them up so that various chunks of music would play within different files, and moved the ID3 data around randomly, that would be pretty impressive. Not impressively correct, but impressive that they decided to ship it like that...
So yeah, something can easily be impressively glitchy - it leaves an impression, doesn't it? (Like, "Why did I buy this?" or "Who do I hate that I can give this to as a birthday present?")
Of course, I didn't bother to read the f'ing article, so I'm just extrapolating ways to be impressively glitchy. But I think it's quite possible. Just like the program I wrote that accidently randomly changed the screen mode. (It was supposed to randomly color text on the screen. I used the wrong AH value.) It was glitchy, but the end results were quite impressively wrong. (Plus, it's the first program I ever wrote that had the ability to destroy hardware. That's impressive.)
Oh, and then there was the program I wrote that I could get to reliably blue-screen my Windows XP machine. The program ran on Linux. On another computer. (Well, the program was smbmounted from the Windows machine, but considering it did no file access, BSODing the machine was quite an impressive glitch.)
In the freeway scene, were they trying to kill anyone?
No, they weren't trying to kill anyone. Just put a good show of doing so, to manipulate the Zion people into attempting to gain access to the Source.
Don't forget what the Architect told Neo - he was the sixth One to be born. They basically now know that their Matrix is imperfect and a One will always continue to be created. Hence, they created a system that utilizes that to their advantage to maintain control.
This system involves accepting a 1% group of humans that go off to form Zion. Once this "resistance" group is born, they must be allowed to fight a battle against the Agents of the system, who are there both to provide an enemy but also to ensure that they never truely succeed. (After all, why can people be unplugged from the Matrix at all? Why not just immediately Agent-ize them? (Why dump them in a pool, alive, and ready to be picked up?) Because a canidate to be freed is already know to the Machines, and they are more useful outside the system than within.)
The Machines knew that they could not kill the Keymaker - his task was not complete yet. So they needed to put up a good fight so that the One could sweep in and save the day. But the fight had to be winable by the One. It's possible that the Agents themselves do not know this, and that they are just further tools of the Architect and whoever he serves.
The Machines are more than capable of whiping out Zion. They are more than capable of destroying the hovercraft and avoiding the EMP. (Hence the bomb being used to destroy the craft in this movie - it keeps the Sentinels outside of EMP range, while forcing the ship to either dodge or EMP prematurely and then be destroyed by the surviving Sentinels while it's dead in the water. It makes sense that they were always capable of this, and always capable of destroying Zion. They were only waiting until the One reappeared, so they could restart the process.)
I don't think you're giving the Wachowski's enough credit. While I do agree that this will not be the greatest or deepest work ever created, I think they deserve credit for bringing a relatively deep and complex plot to the screen. If there's enough action, I think people will be willing to watch, even if the don't understand the deeper meanings.
The Register is not a very trustworthy news source. I used to think they were mostly OK, but then I read Gates: 'Wake up and steal the coffee', which is seven paragraphs slamming Bill Gates for leaving a coffee shop without paying. Followed by three paragraphs saying effectively "oh, the above is false, but we wanted to report it anyway."
I mean, really. A full-page article alledging that Bill Gates is so full of himself that he forgot that he has to pay for things like the rest of us proles, and then three-paragraph correction reporting that the above story isn't true. It's rediculous! At least Slashdot (usually) posts the update to the top paragraph and highlights it. But reporting something that you know isn't true and then containing the correct right within the story is such bad journalism as to border on the rediculous.
I suppose they've been taking the BOFH over-seriously there. Outright lieing is OK for Simon, since he's a fictional character and expected to be a bastard. But for a supposed news article - one that doesn't even have anything to do with technology, only a press conference gone awry, it is just do dishonest to try and libel someone simply because you disagree with his policies.
I lost a lot of confidence in the Register with that story. I know they have an overly mocking style and that they tend to attack everyone and everything simply as part of their style. But doing so with a story you know if false is unfair and lowers you to the level of mindless zealot. - (X)
* I suppose I'm being overly harsh; the story was originally posted without the correction and the correction was only added later after they found out that the story was false. But I still think they should have included a note at the top. Hardly seems fair to mention it only at the very bottom, does it?
IMHO, If you purchase another product because the parent companies are bickering, you need to be flogged.
I don't think that's the tact that MS is going to be using against companies in suggesting that they drop Linux. I think it's going to be more along the lines of:
"You are aware that Linux vendors are currently being sued in court? It seems that SCO found their code in the Linux source. Are you sure you want to stick with a Linux product? The company you bought it from is facing a lawsuit, and may decide to drop the product! If that happens, you could lose out on your support contract, the price for upgrades would become substantially higher, and your Linux vendor would be forced to remove valuable enterprise features that you very well could depend on - and you could be liable for damages if you didn't immediately pay to upgrade for the new, less featureful version. I'd consider sticking with a more stable company that has proven staying power. Windows isn't going away, and we fully license all our code, meaning that you would never be liable for someone else stealing code. Are you sure you can trust your Linux vendor?"
I think it's highly likely that Microsoft would cast doubt on the ability for Linux to remain viable as a product to use if you want to stay keep safe from IP concerns - if you license a product from MS, MS is the target of IP claims, not you. I'd also would expect a kind of side attack, claiming that anyone using Linux is more likely to steal your IP and place it into a GPLed product. Suggest that the GPL virus can infect your developers and sysadmins, so to speak.
I mean, why not? MS has proven that they can win a lawsuit, even if they were doing something illegal and ruled against. IBM failed at that... are you sure you can trust Linux?
How about radio waves?
on
Nanotechnology
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I wonder if it would be possible to power something as small as nanobots using radio waves. If you think about it, all an antenna does is collect radio electromagnetic energy and translate it into electrical energy for the radio to then retranslate into sound.
Nanobots are small - they shouldn't need too much power. I don't know about the real feasibility of this, hardware not being my department:), but I wonder if there is a way to power nanobots "wirelessly".
What exactly does that have to do with my point? You're right, I've never had an atheist come to my house and try and convert me. Instead, they post to Slashdot extolling the virtues of their one true path.
Be an atheist, I don't care. Just don't try and pretend you're superior to non-atheists because of your beliefs, or that you're somehow morally superior because of it.
Or by anonymously suggesting that somehow they know best and are the final authority on some subject and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.
I mean, come on. There are plenty of people who do not believe in God who seem to believe that Not Believing in God is the One True Path, and that everyone else is a poor sheep who have strayed from the Truth. I see this as no different from someone who believes in a God and that all others should come and see the Truth. The atheist believes in nothing, while the other believes in a supernatural being. It's still belief, and it's still invoking a suggestion of superiority due to that belief, as well as making the assumption that what is true for you must be true for everyone.
Let people believe what they want as long as they do not interfere with others abilities to believe what they want. What someone believes, in the end, is not important. Only the actions taken based on that belief. Attack poor actions - not beliefs.
I quick look through other book reviews find that most of them contain a Slashdot link at the end:
$AUTHOR is the author of $OTHER_REVIEWED_BOOK. You can purchase $BOOK from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The first sentence only applies to authors who have already been reviewed on Slashdot, but with very few exceptions (of which Dancing Barefoot, the review immediately prior to this, is one), Slashdot adds the buy link to bn.com as shown in the little template above. I don't think this was anything against you - it's something they do for all book reviews.
Whether or not it was the right or moral thing to do, I won't judge. Just that it isn't anything against you specifically, it's just part of the standard book review template that Slashdot uses.
Execs? No. Poor little smuck who's job it is to look for these files? Yes.
This is America (TM). Executives are never wrong, only their underlings. (Except when they are wrong, in which case it is an issolated incident. Even if it happens multiple times in a row in many different companies.)
(Of course, secret government sites should be a bit better secured than to allow accidental snooping... Seeing as any secret government website should not be on the Internet; they have special private networks for that. Any site that's on the Internet by definition should allow public viewing - otherwise, it shouldn't be there...)
I think you're wrong. The public API spec says nothing about the huge memory cost that can be incurred by calling toString() on a StringBuffer. Look at the API spec and tell me where the StringBuffer API says that toString() maintains the original buffer size. In fact, the JDK 1.4.1 documentation says, regarding the StringBuffer.toString() method: "A new String object is allocated and initialized to contain the character sequence currently represented by this string buffer."
That suggests to me that calling StringBuffer.toString() would allocate a copy of the buffer into the new String. It says nothing about the fact that this new String will silently carry over the internal StringBuffer allocated memory space. But - surprise! - it does.
The problem that is occurring was basically that a StringBuffer was being used to build various strings. Such a StringBuffer is usually treated as - well, as a buffer. So say the first string was 1024 characters long. The string buffer grows to hold it. (Worst case, a 1023 character buffer having a single character appended would cause a 2050 character buffer. Starting from a new StringBuffer() and building the buffer a character at a time would result in a 1150 character buffer.) The call to StringBuffer.toString() would create a new String that maintains this memory.
JDOM would then reset the StringBuffer length to 0, on the theory that the StringBuffer already contains the scratch space to deal with incoming data. This assumption is wrong - the StringBuffer allocates a new character array of the size it originally had. So the new 5 character string will wind up in a String object that maintains 1145 useless additional characters. Remembering that a Java character is two bytes, we can see that this can easily add up fast, especially with the way StringBuffers are expanded.
While assuming that reusing a StringBuffer saves time/memory is an implementation assumption, assuming that the size of StringBufferand the size of the resulting String should not correlate is not really an implementation assumption - the docs seem to suggest that a brand new String is allocated that contains only the needed characters. (As opposed to a brand new String that contains the entire memory buffer of the StringBuffer.) This is not the case, and instead new String(stringBuffer.toString()) needs to be used to cause the String to only contain the requested characters.
I would clearly lay the blame on Sun for changing the implementation from what their own API docs dictate.
XP Home defaults as having everyone run as an Administrator. In the home edition they are really intended to allow different users to have different settings. (So one user can have a mountain wallpaper and another can have a garden wallpaper.) This is why by default accounts have no passwords and trying to set a password on the account offers up a scary dialog box asking if the user wants to proceed.
For home users, always running at "root" level is the right thing to do. The computer is supposed to be a tool for them, it shouldn't be restricting what they can do with "Permission denied" messages. (These just scare users, anyway. It's hard to teach users the idea of "privileged" accounts, and even if you do, most just demand having their normal account elevated in privilege. After all, it's their computer and they would never do something to harm it...)
Besides, I always run as Administrator on my XP Pro machine anyway. It's far too much of a hassle not to since every half of all programs demand Administrator rights anyway. (And of the remaining half, half of them actually require Administrator rights but just fail silently, or crash outright.) Of course, of all of these, maybe 10% actually require them...
The security features available in XP are mainly intended to be used in a buisness setting. At work where computers are managed by IT, they make sense. But locking people out of their home computers frustrates users more than giving them full access to use and possibly destroy their machines. It'll take time to educate people about how to protect themselves by taking full advantage of the security options their OS offers. But while many simple programs require Administrator privileges (like CD-burning programs, most games (attention publishers who add copy protection schemes to games that otherwise wouldn't require Admin privileges...) and other types of software (Winamp 3 requires "Power Users" or higher, or else it crashes without an error message)...), people will need to be given full access to their computer so that they can use it.
I used to run as a "User" in Win2k, but gave up when half the things I did required me to Run As Administrator anyway. (That and I had to elevate myself to "Power User" to use Winamp3, as mentioned above. I mean, c'mon!)
While running as Administrator/root may not be the most intelligent idea, it is far easier for home computers that Lindows is targetted at. Users want full control over their PC - it's their PC, it's there to do their bidding, and they're going to demand control over it. As long as it can be overridden by users who want that added bit of security, I don't see a problem with having the normal user running as root. It may be "safer" not to, but users want control over their computer.
Actually, under Windows and UNIX and almost every OS I know about memory location 0 is mapped. It's mapped to the kernel. (Hense the talk of "user space" vs "kernel space".) Attempting to read or write to this location will cause an access violation on the resulting page fault, whatever the OS chooses to call the error. UNIX calls it a segmentation fault, and Windows calls it a general protection fault. (XP calls it "a problem.")
This is a good thing. NULL is generically used to indicate that a pointer is invalid. Attempting to read or write to a NULL pointer is always a bug and should cause the application to be stopped. Writing and reading from random memory address is a sure fire way to cause interesting results. Enforcing such restrictions helps to force programmers to ensure their programs are at least less buggy in that respect.
MacOS 9 allowing location 0 read/write is a bug, not a feature. (Well... probably not, really. MacOS 9 and prior probably allowed 0 as a valid userspace location.) When a program attempts to read or write to NULL, it should be terminated, as this is an error condition. This would be like ignoring the low oil pressure light on your car - you might be able to keep running for a while, but disaster could strike further down the road.
I have Pac-Man on my cell. They can stop waiting. It's $5.99 for a permenant license, at least through Sprint. Works fine on my little Samsung A500. Quite nice while waiting around...
Re:jjayson on kuro5hin.org got ripped off
on
Krawtchouk's Mind
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd like to hear what Hemos has to say, the editorial integrity issues need to be addressed.
But, apparently, won't be. Why was this modded down? It's not offtopic, it isn't trolling, and it isn't flamebait. (And it's hard to be overrated when starting at 0.) It's a statement of someone's opinion, and a rather reasonable one at that. Slashdot has been caught plagarizing another site. So some questions arize: Did the editors really get an anonymous submission and hense didn't know it was plagarized? Or, did the author of the original piece also post to Slashdot? Or, did the authors willingly and knowingly plagarize the article?
A simple acknowledgement of the fact that the story in on Kuro5hin and an explanation of why would do well to calm any conspiracy theorists. Simply ignoring the issue doesn't help and just raises resentment against the editors, who really seem to have an "I don't care" attitude about a site they want us to pay to use.
It's a useless step that just trains you to hold down the 'y' key after doing an 'rm' command.
Nah, UNIX has that covered too:
yes | rm -irf/
Oh, crap, my finger slipped! SHIFT, not ENTER! SHIFT-C! Delete/C!!! AAAA!
(Anyone else ever accidently manage to create a file named * and then without thinking do an rm -f *? The correct method is of course rm -f "*"... guess which side I'm on...)
Slashdot Mirror
The 17" LCD screen I'm currently staring at has a resolution of 1280x1024 - going down to 1024x786 seems a bit of a drop for a 29" monitor. It's probably intended to also allow usage as a kiosk display from a computer, not to be used as a primary monitor.
However, I don't know this for sure, or know any of the specifics. (I doubt the specifics are unclassified, anyway :).) Who knows - maybe the future will include armored "WAP-robots" that are dropped off along the way to allow a route back to base :)
Yeah, I'm someone at WPI - I doubt my name'll help much - Dan Potter. I think you were playing Dark Cloud in Founders 315 or whatever (across from 312, where I was for C and D term this year). I don't have any pictures of myself (right now), and am too lazy to search for one (that doesn't look horrible).
I don't remember everyone that was there, but several people were there end of D-term 2001, and somehow the topic of body image came up. Started at the pool tables, and moved to the fountain, if that helps.
Then I wound up taking a year off (2002, actually - not enough money), and was back this year to see you play Dark Cloud :). Hopefully I'll be graduating 2004, assuming everything goes well.
Hope that helps - if not, I'll get around to finding a picture or something...
I'm just larger-than-average.
I doubt that... if anything, I'd say average - I dunno, though (not having taken an exaustive survey or anything...)
Except that the screen I'm looking at has an BGR striping order (while most screens have an RGB striping order) - making the image look funky.
If you're on an LCD, compare these two images of ClearType in the two striping orders (courtesy - or stolen from, or whatever, Microsoft):
One of them will look wrong, and you should be able to see what I'm talking about.
But whatever :)
So if you're trying to figure out why a written story is that badly written, it's because it's actually a news piece intermixed with three different interviews. The letters in ALL CAPS are the reporter doing the report, and the various attributed sections are individuals who were interviewed.
Except for the sections where they mix between attributing Crenshaw directly and her voice over. (Presumably the sections with "Crenshaw:" are her talking directly, and the ALL CAPS are voiceovers some other footage. Maybe.)
Still an ... interesting ... read. It reminds me why I hate "investigative reporting" and much prefer to get my news through NPR :)
Anyway, congrats - you're the first person I actually have met in real life that I know on Slashdot. The others I've only met in Counter-Strike games at WPI... Dubious honor to be sure...
(Ironically enough, when I did first meet you at WPI, the conversation at some point managed to go onto exactly this topic. Weird.)
Er, anyway, you definitely are not fat. (Based not on the pictures but having actually met you in person.) I don't get this "super-model" attraction thing anyway - it's so much more satisfying to go for attraction to nice people :) I mean, I can understand wanting someone who doesn't look like me, but people attacking Aimee for having a gut is just cruel. Especially since based on the MusicPundit link, she doesn't have a gut as much as have abdominal muscles. Oh no.
Oh, and how's Dark Cloud going? I still think the sequel is far better, although I've managed to get distracted onto other games and haven't bothered finishing it. (I wonder what it means that "other games" are Final Fantasy Origins, remakes of the NES Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II...)
However, there are still a lot of DeCSS and similar (there's another CSS decryption program out there somewhere) for Windows, which rip the VOB files to the harddrive. It can then be easier to watch them if you have a flakey DVD-ROM drive, but that I doubt that's what they are used for. Especially since most of them also include methods of inputting the end results into various utilities that output AVI files through Windows codecs (most notably, DiVX codecs).
It would be interesting to find out though. My post actually was referring to DeCSS derivitives - programs that contain either DeCSS but provided additional features (like a GUI), or programs that had the same functionality as DeCSS. I wasn't actually referring to DeCSS itself. (Not that I made that clear, my bad.)
Who knows? I don't think there are that many Linux users out there that watch DVDs using Linux. I don't really know any users (anymore) who watch DVDs using Linux and when I used Linux, I rebooted into Windows to watch DVDs. (It was easier, at the time, due to the vast suckage of all Linux media players.) But I do know that there are a lot of people who actively rip DVDs and there is a community out there willing to explain how to do it.
Then again, I'm a member of the "college piracy croud" that the (MP|RI)AA rails against so frequently, so my views may be colored...
I disagree. Based on the sheer number of FAQs and utilities designed to allow "ripping" of DVDs, I would hazard a guess that maybe 20% of DeCSS usage is only for watching the disc. The remaining 80% are the people who create the DVD rips. I know people who would rent DVDs from the local video store and then rip them to their computer, to increase the GB shared so they could get into the bigger Direct Connect hubs. (That, and to "stick it to the man" or something. Whatever.)
A lot of people here seem to write off piracy as being completely bogus, and that just plain isn't true. You do have to accept that piracy happens and that people are using DeCSS to accomplish it.
Does this make it illegal? I don't think it should. I'm sure all of us have at one time or another seen the services of someone whose legal profession is creating breaking and entering tools. We call them "locksmiths" and they provide quite a useful service when you accidently drop the keys in the car and close the locked door. I mean, I even saw a show were this one guy managed to cut a new key for the ignition of an RV in under a minute based only on a blank and inserting it into the ignition. They then made off with this poor guy's RV.
Well, actually, the poor guy had neglected to pay the loan, and so he no longer owned it, and the person "stealing" it really worked for the repo agency the lender had hired.
It's all questionable anyway, and even though I do believe that piracy is a problem, I do not accept that it is really costing the industry billions. I know that I never would have bought the Boondock Saints without someone asking me to download it for them. I've got the DVD now (that it's been released in the US, which it wasn't when I "pirated" it). I can't stand DRM anyway. Ever since Epic Megagames released the patch that removes the CD check on UT2K3, I've been playing much more of it than before. It's a royal pain to go CD hunting to play a game. I'll accept having to swap CDs on a console, but not on a game that requires 2GB of harddrive space.
I still have problems playing Blizzard games - they usually insist that I'm using a copied CD, even though I'm not. It's quite annoying, not being able to play a game I paid $60+ for, because it thinks I pirated it. (And not being able to return it, because it didn't decide it was pirated until after the return period was over.)
Conclusion: yeah, DeCSS probably is being used as a utility to pirate videos. But I don't think that makes it right to go after the creators any more than I think we should lock up all the locksmiths because they have the skills required to break into my car. Even if people are pirating content, that doesn't make DRM any more palettable - it is usually used as a manner of control more than a manner to protect a work.
For example, if the program copied the files, but managed to mix them up so that various chunks of music would play within different files, and moved the ID3 data around randomly, that would be pretty impressive. Not impressively correct, but impressive that they decided to ship it like that...
So yeah, something can easily be impressively glitchy - it leaves an impression, doesn't it? (Like, "Why did I buy this?" or "Who do I hate that I can give this to as a birthday present?")
Of course, I didn't bother to read the f'ing article, so I'm just extrapolating ways to be impressively glitchy. But I think it's quite possible. Just like the program I wrote that accidently randomly changed the screen mode. (It was supposed to randomly color text on the screen. I used the wrong AH value.) It was glitchy, but the end results were quite impressively wrong. (Plus, it's the first program I ever wrote that had the ability to destroy hardware. That's impressive.)
Oh, and then there was the program I wrote that I could get to reliably blue-screen my Windows XP machine. The program ran on Linux. On another computer. (Well, the program was smbmounted from the Windows machine, but considering it did no file access, BSODing the machine was quite an impressive glitch.)
(Spoilers, duh)
In the freeway scene, were they trying to kill anyone?
No, they weren't trying to kill anyone. Just put a good show of doing so, to manipulate the Zion people into attempting to gain access to the Source.
Don't forget what the Architect told Neo - he was the sixth One to be born. They basically now know that their Matrix is imperfect and a One will always continue to be created. Hence, they created a system that utilizes that to their advantage to maintain control.
This system involves accepting a 1% group of humans that go off to form Zion. Once this "resistance" group is born, they must be allowed to fight a battle against the Agents of the system, who are there both to provide an enemy but also to ensure that they never truely succeed. (After all, why can people be unplugged from the Matrix at all? Why not just immediately Agent-ize them? (Why dump them in a pool, alive, and ready to be picked up?) Because a canidate to be freed is already know to the Machines, and they are more useful outside the system than within.)
The Machines knew that they could not kill the Keymaker - his task was not complete yet. So they needed to put up a good fight so that the One could sweep in and save the day. But the fight had to be winable by the One. It's possible that the Agents themselves do not know this, and that they are just further tools of the Architect and whoever he serves.
The Machines are more than capable of whiping out Zion. They are more than capable of destroying the hovercraft and avoiding the EMP. (Hence the bomb being used to destroy the craft in this movie - it keeps the Sentinels outside of EMP range, while forcing the ship to either dodge or EMP prematurely and then be destroyed by the surviving Sentinels while it's dead in the water. It makes sense that they were always capable of this, and always capable of destroying Zion. They were only waiting until the One reappeared, so they could restart the process.)
I don't think you're giving the Wachowski's enough credit. While I do agree that this will not be the greatest or deepest work ever created, I think they deserve credit for bringing a relatively deep and complex plot to the screen. If there's enough action, I think people will be willing to watch, even if the don't understand the deeper meanings.
Mmm... backroynms...
(Actually, the military is also just as happy to take an acroynm and figure out a pronunciation by inserting implied values.)
It was a spoof on the Register - I think I get creative license there :)
I mean, really. A full-page article alledging that Bill Gates is so full of himself that he forgot that he has to pay for things like the rest of us proles, and then three-paragraph correction reporting that the above story isn't true. It's rediculous! At least Slashdot (usually) posts the update to the top paragraph and highlights it. But reporting something that you know isn't true and then containing the correct right within the story is such bad journalism as to border on the rediculous.
I suppose they've been taking the BOFH over-seriously there. Outright lieing is OK for Simon, since he's a fictional character and expected to be a bastard. But for a supposed news article - one that doesn't even have anything to do with technology, only a press conference gone awry, it is just do dishonest to try and libel someone simply because you disagree with his policies.
I lost a lot of confidence in the Register with that story. I know they have an overly mocking style and that they tend to attack everyone and everything simply as part of their style. But doing so with a story you know if false is unfair and lowers you to the level of mindless zealot. - (X)
* I suppose I'm being overly harsh; the story was originally posted without the correction and the correction was only added later after they found out that the story was false. But I still think they should have included a note at the top. Hardly seems fair to mention it only at the very bottom, does it?
I don't think that's the tact that MS is going to be using against companies in suggesting that they drop Linux. I think it's going to be more along the lines of:
I think it's highly likely that Microsoft would cast doubt on the ability for Linux to remain viable as a product to use if you want to stay keep safe from IP concerns - if you license a product from MS, MS is the target of IP claims, not you. I'd also would expect a kind of side attack, claiming that anyone using Linux is more likely to steal your IP and place it into a GPLed product. Suggest that the GPL virus can infect your developers and sysadmins, so to speak.
I mean, why not? MS has proven that they can win a lawsuit, even if they were doing something illegal and ruled against. IBM failed at that... are you sure you can trust Linux?
Nanobots are small - they shouldn't need too much power. I don't know about the real feasibility of this, hardware not being my department :), but I wonder if there is a way to power nanobots "wirelessly".
Be an atheist, I don't care. Just don't try and pretend you're superior to non-atheists because of your beliefs, or that you're somehow morally superior because of it.
I mean, come on. There are plenty of people who do not believe in God who seem to believe that Not Believing in God is the One True Path, and that everyone else is a poor sheep who have strayed from the Truth. I see this as no different from someone who believes in a God and that all others should come and see the Truth. The atheist believes in nothing, while the other believes in a supernatural being. It's still belief, and it's still invoking a suggestion of superiority due to that belief, as well as making the assumption that what is true for you must be true for everyone.
Let people believe what they want as long as they do not interfere with others abilities to believe what they want. What someone believes, in the end, is not important. Only the actions taken based on that belief. Attack poor actions - not beliefs.
The first sentence only applies to authors who have already been reviewed on Slashdot, but with very few exceptions (of which Dancing Barefoot, the review immediately prior to this, is one), Slashdot adds the buy link to bn.com as shown in the little template above. I don't think this was anything against you - it's something they do for all book reviews.
Whether or not it was the right or moral thing to do, I won't judge. Just that it isn't anything against you specifically, it's just part of the standard book review template that Slashdot uses.
This is America (TM). Executives are never wrong, only their underlings. (Except when they are wrong, in which case it is an issolated incident. Even if it happens multiple times in a row in many different companies.)
(Of course, secret government sites should be a bit better secured than to allow accidental snooping... Seeing as any secret government website should not be on the Internet; they have special private networks for that. Any site that's on the Internet by definition should allow public viewing - otherwise, it shouldn't be there...)
That suggests to me that calling StringBuffer.toString() would allocate a copy of the buffer into the new String. It says nothing about the fact that this new String will silently carry over the internal StringBuffer allocated memory space. But - surprise! - it does.
The problem that is occurring was basically that a StringBuffer was being used to build various strings. Such a StringBuffer is usually treated as - well, as a buffer. So say the first string was 1024 characters long. The string buffer grows to hold it. (Worst case, a 1023 character buffer having a single character appended would cause a 2050 character buffer. Starting from a new StringBuffer() and building the buffer a character at a time would result in a 1150 character buffer.) The call to StringBuffer.toString() would create a new String that maintains this memory.
JDOM would then reset the StringBuffer length to 0, on the theory that the StringBuffer already contains the scratch space to deal with incoming data. This assumption is wrong - the StringBuffer allocates a new character array of the size it originally had. So the new 5 character string will wind up in a String object that maintains 1145 useless additional characters. Remembering that a Java character is two bytes, we can see that this can easily add up fast, especially with the way StringBuffers are expanded.
While assuming that reusing a StringBuffer saves time/memory is an implementation assumption, assuming that the size of StringBuffer and the size of the resulting String should not correlate is not really an implementation assumption - the docs seem to suggest that a brand new String is allocated that contains only the needed characters. (As opposed to a brand new String that contains the entire memory buffer of the StringBuffer.) This is not the case, and instead new String(stringBuffer.toString()) needs to be used to cause the String to only contain the requested characters.
I would clearly lay the blame on Sun for changing the implementation from what their own API docs dictate.
For home users, always running at "root" level is the right thing to do. The computer is supposed to be a tool for them, it shouldn't be restricting what they can do with "Permission denied" messages. (These just scare users, anyway. It's hard to teach users the idea of "privileged" accounts, and even if you do, most just demand having their normal account elevated in privilege. After all, it's their computer and they would never do something to harm it...)
Besides, I always run as Administrator on my XP Pro machine anyway. It's far too much of a hassle not to since every half of all programs demand Administrator rights anyway. (And of the remaining half, half of them actually require Administrator rights but just fail silently, or crash outright.) Of course, of all of these, maybe 10% actually require them...
The security features available in XP are mainly intended to be used in a buisness setting. At work where computers are managed by IT, they make sense. But locking people out of their home computers frustrates users more than giving them full access to use and possibly destroy their machines. It'll take time to educate people about how to protect themselves by taking full advantage of the security options their OS offers. But while many simple programs require Administrator privileges (like CD-burning programs, most games (attention publishers who add copy protection schemes to games that otherwise wouldn't require Admin privileges...) and other types of software (Winamp 3 requires "Power Users" or higher, or else it crashes without an error message)...), people will need to be given full access to their computer so that they can use it.
I used to run as a "User" in Win2k, but gave up when half the things I did required me to Run As Administrator anyway. (That and I had to elevate myself to "Power User" to use Winamp3, as mentioned above. I mean, c'mon!)
While running as Administrator/root may not be the most intelligent idea, it is far easier for home computers that Lindows is targetted at. Users want full control over their PC - it's their PC, it's there to do their bidding, and they're going to demand control over it. As long as it can be overridden by users who want that added bit of security, I don't see a problem with having the normal user running as root. It may be "safer" not to, but users want control over their computer.
This is a good thing. NULL is generically used to indicate that a pointer is invalid. Attempting to read or write to a NULL pointer is always a bug and should cause the application to be stopped. Writing and reading from random memory address is a sure fire way to cause interesting results. Enforcing such restrictions helps to force programmers to ensure their programs are at least less buggy in that respect.
MacOS 9 allowing location 0 read/write is a bug, not a feature. (Well... probably not, really. MacOS 9 and prior probably allowed 0 as a valid userspace location.) When a program attempts to read or write to NULL, it should be terminated, as this is an error condition. This would be like ignoring the low oil pressure light on your car - you might be able to keep running for a while, but disaster could strike further down the road.
I have Pac-Man on my cell. They can stop waiting. It's $5.99 for a permenant license, at least through Sprint. Works fine on my little Samsung A500. Quite nice while waiting around...
But, apparently, won't be. Why was this modded down? It's not offtopic, it isn't trolling, and it isn't flamebait. (And it's hard to be overrated when starting at 0.) It's a statement of someone's opinion, and a rather reasonable one at that. Slashdot has been caught plagarizing another site. So some questions arize: Did the editors really get an anonymous submission and hense didn't know it was plagarized? Or, did the author of the original piece also post to Slashdot? Or, did the authors willingly and knowingly plagarize the article?
A simple acknowledgement of the fact that the story in on Kuro5hin and an explanation of why would do well to calm any conspiracy theorists. Simply ignoring the issue doesn't help and just raises resentment against the editors, who really seem to have an "I don't care" attitude about a site they want us to pay to use.
Nah, UNIX has that covered too:
yes | rm -irf /
Oh, crap, my finger slipped! SHIFT, not ENTER! SHIFT-C! Delete /C!!! AAAA!
(Anyone else ever accidently manage to create a file named * and then without thinking do an rm -f *? The correct method is of course rm -f "*"... guess which side I'm on...)