You mean digital streaming radio. It's silly to call WCPE's 20 bps stream "HD".
My own favorite source of streams is the Aussie ABC network (90 bps!). Their "classical" channel is particularly refreshing because they define the term very broadly. Also a lot of good podcasts.
If you know of a solution, don't write it in this discussion!
Sigh. The idea that you can hide your anti-DRM activity from OBCOs is absurd. Their minions, both software and carbon-based, have infiltrated every web site, every mailing list, every chat channel. It's just not that hard.
Rather than trying to hide from the OBCOs, people with disapproved knowledge should share their knowledge with as many people as possible. When information exists on a few furtive web sites, it can easily be suppressed. When it's on thousands of web sites, there's no getting rid of it.
Consider the first lyrics server at lyric.ch. When it was the only lyrics server, the IP lawyers were on faster than flies on shit. But now there are thousands of lyrics sites, and the lawyers have given up.
I could argue with every point you're trying to make. But since you've already made up your mind that I'm stupid and hypocritical, there seems to be little point.
But be warned: demonizing people you disagree with is sort of going out of fashion. Nowadays people expect you to make actual arguments.
And I don't see how this level of pattern recognition makes an AI "genuine". Software that can consistently tell you from context when "flies" is a noun or a verb would be more to the point.
It's even useful for big sites that just want to keep out BBS spam. Suppose you want to solicit customer feedback and you don't want to make your customers login. If you put out a simple text form, it will quickly be found by numerous bots that will keep posting comments like "Great site! Check out my web site at www.bigtits.com." These bots aren't really targeting you, they just are too stupid to realize that you're not a BBS. It doesn't even require a good CAPTCHA to keep them out, even a simple thing like making people add two random small integers is effective. The system doesn't have to be tough to beat, because nobody's really interested in beating it (excuse the pun).
Or from failing 999 times out of 1,000. Computers have an infinite amount of patience. Security schemes that don't acknowledge that are doomed to failure.
A don't think a lot of gamers (or other consumers) will want this. A more typical application would be visualization. SGI still does business in this area. Eventually, commodity computers will drive them out of this business, just as they did the workstation business. And fancy graphics cards that fit in standard PCIe slots is part of the reason.
I suffer from memory shock on a daily basis. I work in the x64 part of Sun, and I got into a friendly argument with a SPARC guy about whether our half-terabyte server is better than their.
On the downside: just upgraded my tablet to 4GB, only to discover that Win32 can only handle 3 of them.
There was a big change in the moderator system some years ago. I think it was motivated by exactly the kind of abuse you're talking about. As I understand it, Rob decided to limit mod points to people in the middle of the range of posting rates. People who post a lot never get mod points, neither do people who post very little.
IMHO, this change actually made things worse, because they excluded the regular participants who were most committed to making the community work. People who post haphazardly are exactly the people who should not be moderating; they're the snipers and "oh yeah" types who like to tell others they're FoS, but don't have the attention span to have a serious conversation.
Rob and his editors obviously don't agree. My guess is they've had less occasion to "correct" moderations they consider unfair (because there are much fewer mods to correct) and they see that as evidence that the new system is working.
As for "overrated" and "underrated": these are not supposed to reflect the quality of the comment, they're supposed to be a way of correcting scores that have gotten multiple mod points when only 1 was deserved because two moderators flagged it at the same time. Personally, I don't think this happens often enough to justify two mods with so much potential for abuse. But if we must have it, you should be allowed to apply "overrated" to a post with less than 2 upmods or "underrated" to a post with less than 2 downmods. Ideally, those two mods should come within a few minutes of each other, but I suppose that would be hard to detect.
And whatever the quality of the moderator pool, it would make a lot of difference if people actually understood what the moderations are supposed to mean. The definitions are hard to find and hard to understand. What's the difference between "troll" and "flamebait"? "Interesting" and "insightful"?
(Hey guys, I explain stuff for a living. Give me a call.)
At this point, it would be helpful if one or more of the editors (Rob especially) butted into the conversation, defending their policies and correcting any facts I've gotten wrong. Never seems to happen. I guess they find the resulting flame wars taxing. Understandable, but frustrating.
Is it just me, or does the score filter stop working for everybody when you turn on D2? Hard to understand that they can track what posts I've read, but not which ones are beneath my threshold. D2 is nice, but having to sort though hundreds of trolls and AC snipers is not worth it. Especially now that Slashdotter has caught up with latest HTML changes.
his proven ability to squeeze the most out of a budget.
If you read the scripts Whedon wrote for Buffy, they're full of in jokes about his budget woes. One constant complaint: Buffy's house supposedly had three bedrooms, but he didn't have the budget to show all three of them in one episode. Another one has a long description of the hell-factory in the third-season premiere; he talks about huge vats of boiling stuff and strutting hordes of evil demons, and winds up by mentioning (by name) one of his producers, who's standing in a corner tearing his hair out, because Whedon has just blown the season's entire effects budget in one episode.
You obviously know more about DSP than I do (which doesn't say much!) but perhaps the non-mangling has to do with the fact that the signal is not 1200 baud. As I recall, cassette tape interfaces recorded at 110 baud.
An interesting mistake. The author would seem to be somebody who is old enough to remember 1200 bps modems (technically, not 1200 baud, though most people called them that) and just can't conceive of any data channel being slower than that!
A lot? Maybe. (There was an amusing case recently where the thief was caught because he uploaded photos of his tats the the victim's.mac account.) Most? Definitely not. Assuming you actually make your living stealing stuff, and don't just grab the odd laptop off a table at Starbucks, then you have to take your booty to a fence. And the first thing a fence does with any stolen property is to remove any traces of the original owner.
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.
Define your terms, please. It's a client-server application, so by definition there's a central location. As for "proprietary", well, I guess it's cool that the software is open-source, but most of us don't choose software for religious reasons.
This solution is touted as being more privacy-conscious than existing "phone home" solutions, but I don't see it. In theory, use of encryption makes the data inaccessible to anybody but the owner of the laptop. In practice, technology is not a substitute for a well-managed system. I'd rather trust my data to a professionally managed system owned by a company with published privacy policies than to some kludged-up system managed by a hacker for whom it's just a hobby, no matter how "foolproof" the software supposedly is. As they say, fools are fiendishly clever.
Oh yeah, and I want my phone-home software in my BIOS, so that the thieves can't just wipe my hard disk to get rid of it.
Open source does have security advantages over proprietary software, and all other things being equal, I'd choose OSS over proprietary for something like this. But all other things are not equal — not, at least, until hardware manufacturers start burning the Adeona client into the BIOS.
Which is not to run down Adeona itself. It's a notable achievement. But I do get tired of the way every OSS milestone is treated as something we should all switch to, post haste.
Actually, you don't even have to build the stripped-down image. You just install Windows XP Embedded or Window Embedded Standard. (This version of Windows isn't available to the general public; this was an issue during the antitrust trial.) Interesting that it wasn't used for the ATM. Perhaps because the Embedded license fees are a little stiff: $1K for the runtime, and $90 for each machine. I think OEM rates for desktop Windows are much lower than that.
Next time I use an ATM with a touch screen, I am so repeating your experiment!
Nothing is "not connected to the internet", not if it has an IP address — and nowadays all network devices have IP addresses. Even if the network is physically isolated, all you need is somebody plugging in an infected laptop.
That said, I think the security and reliability level for embedded Windows is probably much higher than it is for any desktop version. Less add-on crap, for one thing.
And the simple fact that we are expected to take their word for 'how the law will be enforced' is a problem all by it self.
Well then, don't take their word for it. Go find somebody who knows how to read legal language and get them to interpret it for you, because your interpretation is pretty hopeless. Not even Matt Miller, the lawyer who's trying to get the law overturned, agrees with your interpretation of it:
We've gotten calls from people who say, "Well, if somebody's switching out a hard drive, then that doesn't apply to them, right?" And the answer to that is, yes. It doesn't apply to them. But anyone who is analyzing data in a situation where that data points back to the actions of a third party - so, somebody who is not the computer's owner, or someone who is not the owner of the company - anytime a third party is implicated by data analysis, this law is potentially triggered.
Really, his issue is not with the law itself, but with the state agency that's supposed to enforce it. He claims they plan to interpret it so broadly that it would in fact allow them regulate all computer repair. So it's their regulations we should be arguing about, not the law. Though it's worth noting that nobody except Miller seems to know about these regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't about disposal. During the Apollo missions they just put the, uh, stuff in plastic bags and tossed it out the porthole. Nobody complained.
(During the age of sail, they used to refer to the stuff that surrounded a becalmed ship as "Captain Brown".)
Obviously, they're working on recycling. There's no way that a lengthy lunar mission can carry along enough water without it.
See parent post.
You mean digital streaming radio. It's silly to call WCPE's 20 bps stream "HD".
My own favorite source of streams is the Aussie ABC network (90 bps!). Their "classical" channel is particularly refreshing because they define the term very broadly. Also a lot of good podcasts.
If you know of a solution, don't write it in this discussion!
Sigh. The idea that you can hide your anti-DRM activity from OBCOs is absurd. Their minions, both software and carbon-based, have infiltrated every web site, every mailing list, every chat channel. It's just not that hard.
Rather than trying to hide from the OBCOs, people with disapproved knowledge should share their knowledge with as many people as possible. When information exists on a few furtive web sites, it can easily be suppressed. When it's on thousands of web sites, there's no getting rid of it.
Consider the first lyrics server at lyric.ch. When it was the only lyrics server, the IP lawyers were on faster than flies on shit. But now there are thousands of lyrics sites, and the lawyers have given up.
I could argue with every point you're trying to make. But since you've already made up your mind that I'm stupid and hypocritical, there seems to be little point.
But be warned: demonizing people you disagree with is sort of going out of fashion. Nowadays people expect you to make actual arguments.
Boredom is something you get when you run out of patience. Computers never get bored because they never run out of patience!
Ten years? Where do you get that figure?
And I don't see how this level of pattern recognition makes an AI "genuine". Software that can consistently tell you from context when "flies" is a noun or a verb would be more to the point.
It's even useful for big sites that just want to keep out BBS spam. Suppose you want to solicit customer feedback and you don't want to make your customers login. If you put out a simple text form, it will quickly be found by numerous bots that will keep posting comments like "Great site! Check out my web site at www.bigtits.com." These bots aren't really targeting you, they just are too stupid to realize that you're not a BBS. It doesn't even require a good CAPTCHA to keep them out, even a simple thing like making people add two random small integers is effective. The system doesn't have to be tough to beat, because nobody's really interested in beating it (excuse the pun).
Or from failing 999 times out of 1,000. Computers have an infinite amount of patience. Security schemes that don't acknowledge that are doomed to failure.
A don't think a lot of gamers (or other consumers) will want this. A more typical application would be visualization. SGI still does business in this area. Eventually, commodity computers will drive them out of this business, just as they did the workstation business. And fancy graphics cards that fit in standard PCIe slots is part of the reason.
I suffer from memory shock on a daily basis. I work in the x64 part of Sun, and I got into a friendly argument with a SPARC guy about whether our half-terabyte server is better than their.
On the downside: just upgraded my tablet to 4GB, only to discover that Win32 can only handle 3 of them.
Then I guess I'm wrong about who gets mod points.
A metamod/post ratio of 1/2-1/3 is actually pretty high. Perhaps that's why you get so many mod points.
There was a big change in the moderator system some years ago. I think it was motivated by exactly the kind of abuse you're talking about. As I understand it, Rob decided to limit mod points to people in the middle of the range of posting rates. People who post a lot never get mod points, neither do people who post very little.
IMHO, this change actually made things worse, because they excluded the regular participants who were most committed to making the community work. People who post haphazardly are exactly the people who should not be moderating; they're the snipers and "oh yeah" types who like to tell others they're FoS, but don't have the attention span to have a serious conversation.
Rob and his editors obviously don't agree. My guess is they've had less occasion to "correct" moderations they consider unfair (because there are much fewer mods to correct) and they see that as evidence that the new system is working.
As for "overrated" and "underrated": these are not supposed to reflect the quality of the comment, they're supposed to be a way of correcting scores that have gotten multiple mod points when only 1 was deserved because two moderators flagged it at the same time. Personally, I don't think this happens often enough to justify two mods with so much potential for abuse. But if we must have it, you should be allowed to apply "overrated" to a post with less than 2 upmods or "underrated" to a post with less than 2 downmods. Ideally, those two mods should come within a few minutes of each other, but I suppose that would be hard to detect.
And whatever the quality of the moderator pool, it would make a lot of difference if people actually understood what the moderations are supposed to mean. The definitions are hard to find and hard to understand. What's the difference between "troll" and "flamebait"? "Interesting" and "insightful"?
(Hey guys, I explain stuff for a living. Give me a call.)
At this point, it would be helpful if one or more of the editors (Rob especially) butted into the conversation, defending their policies and correcting any facts I've gotten wrong. Never seems to happen. I guess they find the resulting flame wars taxing. Understandable, but frustrating.
We should be so lucky!
Is it just me, or does the score filter stop working for everybody when you turn on D2? Hard to understand that they can track what posts I've read, but not which ones are beneath my threshold. D2 is nice, but having to sort though hundreds of trolls and AC snipers is not worth it. Especially now that Slashdotter has caught up with latest HTML changes.
his proven ability to squeeze the most out of a budget.
If you read the scripts Whedon wrote for Buffy, they're full of in jokes about his budget woes. One constant complaint: Buffy's house supposedly had three bedrooms, but he didn't have the budget to show all three of them in one episode. Another one has a long description of the hell-factory in the third-season premiere; he talks about huge vats of boiling stuff and strutting hordes of evil demons, and winds up by mentioning (by name) one of his producers, who's standing in a corner tearing his hair out, because Whedon has just blown the season's entire effects budget in one episode.
You obviously know more about DSP than I do (which doesn't say much!) but perhaps the non-mangling has to do with the fact that the signal is not 1200 baud. As I recall, cassette tape interfaces recorded at 110 baud.
An interesting mistake. The author would seem to be somebody who is old enough to remember 1200 bps modems (technically, not 1200 baud, though most people called them that) and just can't conceive of any data channel being slower than that!
Also fast on the draw, since he snarfed up the comments before the server was slashdotted.
A lot? Maybe. (There was an amusing case recently where the thief was caught because he uploaded photos of his tats the the victim's .mac account.) Most? Definitely not. Assuming you actually make your living stealing stuff, and don't just grab the odd laptop off a table at Starbucks, then you have to take your booty to a fence. And the first thing a fence does with any stolen property is to remove any traces of the original owner.
Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.
Define your terms, please. It's a client-server application, so by definition there's a central location. As for "proprietary", well, I guess it's cool that the software is open-source, but most of us don't choose software for religious reasons.
This solution is touted as being more privacy-conscious than existing "phone home" solutions, but I don't see it. In theory, use of encryption makes the data inaccessible to anybody but the owner of the laptop. In practice, technology is not a substitute for a well-managed system. I'd rather trust my data to a professionally managed system owned by a company with published privacy policies than to some kludged-up system managed by a hacker for whom it's just a hobby, no matter how "foolproof" the software supposedly is. As they say, fools are fiendishly clever.
Oh yeah, and I want my phone-home software in my BIOS, so that the thieves can't just wipe my hard disk to get rid of it.
Open source does have security advantages over proprietary software, and all other things being equal, I'd choose OSS over proprietary for something like this. But all other things are not equal — not, at least, until hardware manufacturers start burning the Adeona client into the BIOS.
Which is not to run down Adeona itself. It's a notable achievement. But I do get tired of the way every OSS milestone is treated as something we should all switch to, post haste.
Excellent! That gives me a chance to they out my new RPG!
Did you know that I addressed that very issue in the post you're responding to?
And did you know that some LANs use static IP addresses?
But perhaps you do know that you're a moron.
Actually, you don't even have to build the stripped-down image. You just install Windows XP Embedded or Window Embedded Standard. (This version of Windows isn't available to the general public; this was an issue during the antitrust trial.) Interesting that it wasn't used for the ATM. Perhaps because the Embedded license fees are a little stiff: $1K for the runtime, and $90 for each machine. I think OEM rates for desktop Windows are much lower than that.
Next time I use an ATM with a touch screen, I am so repeating your experiment!
Nothing is "not connected to the internet", not if it has an IP address — and nowadays all network devices have IP addresses. Even if the network is physically isolated, all you need is somebody plugging in an infected laptop.
That said, I think the security and reliability level for embedded Windows is probably much higher than it is for any desktop version. Less add-on crap, for one thing.
Gag. Show some creativity!
Here's my entry: economic pastafarianism.
And the simple fact that we are expected to take their word for 'how the law will be enforced' is a problem all by it self.
Well then, don't take their word for it. Go find somebody who knows how to read legal language and get them to interpret it for you, because your interpretation is pretty hopeless. Not even Matt Miller, the lawyer who's trying to get the law overturned, agrees with your interpretation of it:
We've gotten calls from people who say, "Well, if somebody's switching out a hard drive, then that doesn't apply to them, right?" And the answer to that is, yes. It doesn't apply to them. But anyone who is analyzing data in a situation where that data points back to the actions of a third party - so, somebody who is not the computer's owner, or someone who is not the owner of the company - anytime a third party is implicated by data analysis, this law is potentially triggered.
Really, his issue is not with the law itself, but with the state agency that's supposed to enforce it. He claims they plan to interpret it so broadly that it would in fact allow them regulate all computer repair. So it's their regulations we should be arguing about, not the law. Though it's worth noting that nobody except Miller seems to know about these regulations.