I'm a Mississippi voter (shut up), and so Trent Lott is my senator. Right after the hearings for the (then) SSSCA with Eisner et al, I wrote a letter to Sen. Lott saying how much I didn't like that bill. I figured, "Hey, he's one of the top Republicans. This bill is sponsored by a Democrat. As much as I dislike Lott, he's bound to agree with me!"
Not quite. I got a letter back three days ago. It was a bit behind the times, still referring to the SSSCA. It basically said, "Yes, there is a bill. Yes, there was testimony. It was very useful. Your opinion is important to me." Considering how reviled the CBPTA eventually became and when the letter was sent, it shouldn't exactly take a lot of political initiative to stand up against that kind of bill. But from the letter it didn't look like he exactly opposed it or anything.
I realized there are lots of problems with Hollings most recent bill, and maybe that's why he's doing that, but I wouldn't call Lott privacy- or tech-friendly by any stretch of the imagination.
We already have the grammar problem cracked--English can be expressed as a regexp.
You're joking, right? Mathematically, a regexp is less powerful than a CFG. A CFG is used to describe a lanuage like HTML or C. English is much more complicated and can't be parsed correctly using a CFG.
Why is that fortunate? If I pay for something, it's nice to actually own it and be able to do what I want with it. Instead, the guy who happened to own it first gets preferential treatment? In the US, when a company founder sells the majority of his shares, he usually becomes an employee of the company, since everyone else has put in more money than he has. Even if he's done a great job and put his blood and sweat into the company, that'll be reflected in the price everyone else has to pay. Why should he be treated specially?
You're really telling me that Kenwood engineers are too damned lazy to build Vorbis for the ARM7 architecture?
Well, the ARM doesn't have support for floating point math, so even if they could build it, it would be too slow to be useful. It's not just a matter of typing "make".
As far as I know, they didn't really sell anything, they just ported the executables of Windows games to Linux.
No, they sold boxed versions of the games with the Linux executables. You couldn't download those separately. The only exception (that I know of) was Quake III, which Loki didn't port (id did). They just distributed it and so it was up to id to release binaries for free or not.
Aces Hardware shows a different story. There, the nForce board from MSI seems to beat out the MSI K7T266 Pro 2 (KT266A chipset) in most of the benchmarks by a good margin. Not to say that I believe one over the other, but they do have widely different results.
Re:The true potential for the XBOX
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
I believe the XBox will only boot off of media they have crytographically signed. Thus, you won't be creating and MP3 box or a PVR or any kind of convergence device without their permission (you sure won't be booting Linux) .
The best-commented code I have ever seen is Doug Lea's malloc, or dlmalloc, the malloc used in glibc, among other places. I had no idea how a malloc would work, and I wanted to write one for my OS class, so we looked at the dlmalloc source code. MAN, that's some well-commented code! Not only does it explain what individual functions do, but it also explains each general part of the algorithm in excellent detail. And it's malloc; it better not have any bugs!
However, in the US the junk mailers get a better rate than everyone else since the 1st class mail subsidizes the junk mail.
I don't think that's true. I've heard that they keep the price of 1st class stamps at pretty much what it costs to send the thing. The post office makes most of its money from junk mail, though, both the sending thereof and the selling of addresses.
I don't have any video game systems, but as soon as I have some free time I'll be all over them:)
My question is how well all of these broadband adapters (I guess this is the first) will deal with NAT (IP Masquerade in Linux). It's becoming increasingly popular, with all those hub-router broadband boxes that people are buying. But games tend to use UDP, which has problems with NAT, being connectionless and all. I can't imagine anyone wanting to unplug their computer from the broadband connection and plug their Dreamcast in instead very often, so NAT seems like the best option. Will it all be painful or smooth? Or will it all be on a game-by-game basis?
It might have been a little ugly, but it was nothing compared to redir's remarks. Josh McCormick considered himself extremely wronged, and redir considered his friend (and website) wronged, yet redir resorted to words such as "lewser" while Josh McCormick managed to get out complete sentences. I can't imagine how mad I'd be if an article I wrote got linked to the front page of Slashdot but was attributed to someone else, and then people wouldn't believe me. I think he did pretty well, considering.
The "billion times faster" statement was a bit of a stretch. Yeah, it may be able to solve some problems a billion times faster, but comparing the speed of a quantum computer and a conventional computer is a bit tricky (it's not just a constant factor or even close).
You will probably never be able to just drop a quantum CPU into your computer and be off and running, since they're a lot more difficult to work with and not necessarily any better than conventional computers for some pretty common problems. For example, Shor's algorithm for factorization on a quantum computer involves a step that's done on conventional computers, since it's short step that isn't worth coming up with a quantum algorithm for.
Quantum computers are best at problems whcih require searching a large problem space, not just crunching a bit of numbers to get a bunch of values that you'll end up using. A problem like factoring numbers, you search many numbers but only end up using maybe 2 of them. With graphics you actually use all of the values computed (pixel values, etc.), so a quantum computer would not be so good.
But crackers call themselves hackers too (I guess it's hax0r5 or something). If both groups call themselves hackers, why should one group insist that they and ONLY they be called hackers?
That reminds me of the only spam I have ever replied to. I received a spam saying basically, "Don't you hate receiving unsolocited email? We all do! Send me $25 and I will send you my book on beating back spam! It really works!"
They included a PO Box in the email, so I sent them a letter saying "Wow, you are so stupid." Sure, it probably didn't bother them that much (maybe I ruined the anticipation of a $25 check), but I felt better.
I read a study (by anti-urban sprawl people, so it was bound to be a bit biased) which suggested that in order for the price of gasoline to take into account all of the social costs that go along with it (big list: subsidized highway construction, pollution, the Gulf War,...), the tax on gasoline (not just the retail price) would be $6.25.
It probably should sound like that, since I make that argument too. I certiainly don't think that brick and mortar stores should be offered any special benefits or protections, but the current situation of brick and mortars having to pay sales tax and internet and mail order not having to pay sales tax is a bias against brick and mortar stores. I think protectionism (I guess this would be domestic protectionism) is really, really bad, but I think it's even worse that the government would in effect prop up internet stores over everything else.
Ok, what's wrong with making mail-order and internet shopping less attractive? You have to pay shipping on the book from fatbrain, becuase they actually have to ship it to you. Taxes, as much as everyone hates them, are artificial but necessary and should not be applied with bias. What if there were no sales taxes at all and fatbrain et al didn't have that unnatural advantage over local stores. Would you suggest taxing local stores so that the places that had to ship things could compete?
Huh? Nachos isn't microkernel based, unless that's changed since I used it (and that's a BIG change); there's no message passing or separate services. It's monolithic.
This is a quote from the VP. He, like most of us here, has no clue how vorbis works. He probably also has no idea how MP3 works, either. All he knows is that his company licenses it and that Vorbis is a potential competitor. Now, there can certainly be trivial lawsuits, but in order to come up with those, one of their lawyers is going to have to find a patent that Vorbis is actually violating, or at least one that can be violated given a stretch of the imagination. Monty, Jack, et al have been very careful about reading the patents and are quite confident that they're not violating any of them (they haven't responded to the messages about this article on the vorbis mailing list; hopefully they're more concerned with their own future livlihood). Somehow I trust the guys who wrote the code and read the patents in a defensive mindframe than the VP of the company that owns rights to the MP3 patents and probably doesn't understand them.
Re:Ancient games should not be copyright released
on
Warez and Abandonware
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· Score: 1
Copyright and trademark are different. If Elite goes into the public domain (copyright expires), then you can copy it all you want, but you can't make a new game called Elite. Actually, Elite is a bad example, since it may not be a trademark. But you couldn't, for example, make a game called Zork if the copyright expired.
The other idea I had is an "expiration" if you will on software copywrites, like patents. After X years, the software's EULA no longer applies and people can do whatever they want with it (including make copies).
This is how it works now, but unfortunately it's for values of X equal to 90 years. That's how it is for everything that's copywritten (musical recordings, books, software, etc.). It used to be 75 years, but it was bumped up thanks to the Sunny Bono Copyright Extension Act, pushed largely by Disney (Steamboat Willy was supposed to go into the public domain recently).
I would consider Japanese easy, English medium, French medium hard, Latin hard, and Russian Chinese German most difficult languages, correct me if I'm wrong.
Having taken 3 years of Japanese and 5 of Latin, I'd have to say Japanese is harder. Latin grammar is very regular and unambiguous (Japanese is too, but Latin moreso) and the vocabulary is much easier to learn (since the words are often visually similar to English words with similar meanings). Of course, Latin is essentially a read-only language, so the real comparison would be how easy each is to read. If you compare reading Latin and reading Japanese, you'd have a pretty hard time arguing that Latin's harder!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a Mississippi voter (shut up), and so Trent Lott is my senator. Right after the hearings for the (then) SSSCA with Eisner et al, I wrote a letter to Sen. Lott saying how much I didn't like that bill. I figured, "Hey, he's one of the top Republicans. This bill is sponsored by a Democrat. As much as I dislike Lott, he's bound to agree with me!"
Not quite. I got a letter back three days ago. It was a bit behind the times, still referring to the SSSCA. It basically said, "Yes, there is a bill. Yes, there was testimony. It was very useful. Your opinion is important to me." Considering how reviled the CBPTA eventually became and when the letter was sent, it shouldn't exactly take a lot of political initiative to stand up against that kind of bill. But from the letter it didn't look like he exactly opposed it or anything.
I realized there are lots of problems with Hollings most recent bill, and maybe that's why he's doing that, but I wouldn't call Lott privacy- or tech-friendly by any stretch of the imagination.
Even, better the OED, which lists the first usage of "piracy" in the copyright sense as 1771. Jack Velenti is not quite that old.
We already have the grammar problem cracked--English can be expressed as a regexp.
You're joking, right? Mathematically, a regexp is less powerful than a CFG. A CFG is used to describe a lanuage like HTML or C. English is much more complicated and can't be parsed correctly using a CFG.
Why is that fortunate? If I pay for something, it's nice to actually own it and be able to do what I want with it. Instead, the guy who happened to own it first gets preferential treatment? In the US, when a company founder sells the majority of his shares, he usually becomes an employee of the company, since everyone else has put in more money than he has. Even if he's done a great job and put his blood and sweat into the company, that'll be reflected in the price everyone else has to pay. Why should he be treated specially?
You're really telling me that Kenwood engineers are too damned lazy to build Vorbis for the ARM7 architecture?
Well, the ARM doesn't have support for floating point math, so even if they could build it, it would be too slow to be useful. It's not just a matter of typing "make".
As far as I know, they didn't really sell anything, they just ported the executables of Windows games to Linux.
No, they sold boxed versions of the games with the Linux executables. You couldn't download those separately. The only exception (that I know of) was Quake III, which Loki didn't port (id did). They just distributed it and so it was up to id to release binaries for free or not.
Aces Hardware shows a different story. There, the nForce board from MSI seems to beat out the MSI K7T266 Pro 2 (KT266A chipset) in most of the benchmarks by a good margin. Not to say that I believe one over the other, but they do have widely different results.
I believe the XBox will only boot off of media they have crytographically signed. Thus, you won't be creating and MP3 box or a PVR or any kind of convergence device without their permission (you sure won't be booting Linux) .
No, in the case of patents, cleanroom doesn't matter at all. It's still a violation. Cleanroom is to protect from copyright violations.
The best-commented code I have ever seen is Doug Lea's malloc, or dlmalloc, the malloc used in glibc, among other places. I had no idea how a malloc would work, and I wanted to write one for my OS class, so we looked at the dlmalloc source code. MAN, that's some well-commented code! Not only does it explain what individual functions do, but it also explains each general part of the algorithm in excellent detail. And it's malloc; it better not have any bugs!
However, in the US the junk mailers get a better rate than everyone else since the 1st class mail subsidizes the junk mail.
I don't think that's true. I've heard that they keep the price of 1st class stamps at pretty much what it costs to send the thing. The post office makes most of its money from junk mail, though, both the sending thereof and the selling of addresses.
I don't have any video game systems, but as soon as I have some free time I'll be all over them :)
My question is how well all of these broadband adapters (I guess this is the first) will deal with NAT (IP Masquerade in Linux). It's becoming increasingly popular, with all those hub-router broadband boxes that people are buying. But games tend to use UDP, which has problems with NAT, being connectionless and all. I can't imagine anyone wanting to unplug their computer from the broadband connection and plug their Dreamcast in instead very often, so NAT seems like the best option. Will it all be painful or smooth? Or will it all be on a game-by-game basis?
It might have been a little ugly, but it was nothing compared to redir's remarks. Josh McCormick considered himself extremely wronged, and redir considered his friend (and website) wronged, yet redir resorted to words such as "lewser" while Josh McCormick managed to get out complete sentences. I can't imagine how mad I'd be if an article I wrote got linked to the front page of Slashdot but was attributed to someone else, and then people wouldn't believe me. I think he did pretty well, considering.
The "billion times faster" statement was a bit of a stretch. Yeah, it may be able to solve some problems a billion times faster, but comparing the speed of a quantum computer and a conventional computer is a bit tricky (it's not just a constant factor or even close).
You will probably never be able to just drop a quantum CPU into your computer and be off and running, since they're a lot more difficult to work with and not necessarily any better than conventional computers for some pretty common problems. For example, Shor's algorithm for factorization on a quantum computer involves a step that's done on conventional computers, since it's short step that isn't worth coming up with a quantum algorithm for.
Quantum computers are best at problems whcih require searching a large problem space, not just crunching a bit of numbers to get a bunch of values that you'll end up using. A problem like factoring numbers, you search many numbers but only end up using maybe 2 of them. With graphics you actually use all of the values computed (pixel values, etc.), so a quantum computer would not be so good.
But crackers call themselves hackers too (I guess it's hax0r5 or something). If both groups call themselves hackers, why should one group insist that they and ONLY they be called hackers?
That reminds me of the only spam I have ever replied to. I received a spam saying basically, "Don't you hate receiving unsolocited email? We all do! Send me $25 and I will send you my book on beating back spam! It really works!"
They included a PO Box in the email, so I sent them a letter saying "Wow, you are so stupid." Sure, it probably didn't bother them that much (maybe I ruined the anticipation of a $25 check), but I felt better.
I read a study (by anti-urban sprawl people, so it was bound to be a bit biased) which suggested that in order for the price of gasoline to take into account all of the social costs that go along with it (big list: subsidized highway construction, pollution, the Gulf War, ...), the tax on gasoline (not just the retail price) would be $6.25.
Of course, those "other platforms" include Gameboy Color, so I'll believe it when I see it.
It probably should sound like that, since I make that argument too. I certiainly don't think that brick and mortar stores should be offered any special benefits or protections, but the current situation of brick and mortars having to pay sales tax and internet and mail order not having to pay sales tax is a bias against brick and mortar stores. I think protectionism (I guess this would be domestic protectionism) is really, really bad, but I think it's even worse that the government would in effect prop up internet stores over everything else.
Ok, what's wrong with making mail-order and internet shopping less attractive? You have to pay shipping on the book from fatbrain, becuase they actually have to ship it to you. Taxes, as much as everyone hates them, are artificial but necessary and should not be applied with bias. What if there were no sales taxes at all and fatbrain et al didn't have that unnatural advantage over local stores. Would you suggest taxing local stores so that the places that had to ship things could compete?
Huh? Nachos isn't microkernel based, unless that's changed since I used it (and that's a BIG change); there's no message passing or separate services. It's monolithic.
This is a quote from the VP. He, like most of us here, has no clue how vorbis works. He probably also has no idea how MP3 works, either. All he knows is that his company licenses it and that Vorbis is a potential competitor. Now, there can certainly be trivial lawsuits, but in order to come up with those, one of their lawyers is going to have to find a patent that Vorbis is actually violating, or at least one that can be violated given a stretch of the imagination. Monty, Jack, et al have been very careful about reading the patents and are quite confident that they're not violating any of them (they haven't responded to the messages about this article on the vorbis mailing list; hopefully they're more concerned with their own future livlihood). Somehow I trust the guys who wrote the code and read the patents in a defensive mindframe than the VP of the company that owns rights to the MP3 patents and probably doesn't understand them.
Copyright and trademark are different. If Elite goes into the public domain (copyright expires), then you can copy it all you want, but you can't make a new game called Elite. Actually, Elite is a bad example, since it may not be a trademark. But you couldn't, for example, make a game called Zork if the copyright expired.
The other idea I had is an "expiration" if you will on software copywrites, like patents. After X years, the software's EULA no longer applies and people can do whatever they want with it (including make copies).
This is how it works now, but unfortunately it's for values of X equal to 90 years. That's how it is for everything that's copywritten (musical recordings, books, software, etc.). It used to be 75 years, but it was bumped up thanks to the Sunny Bono Copyright Extension Act, pushed largely by Disney (Steamboat Willy was supposed to go into the public domain recently).
I would consider Japanese easy, English medium, French medium hard, Latin hard, and Russian Chinese German most difficult languages, correct me if I'm wrong.
Having taken 3 years of Japanese and 5 of Latin, I'd have to say Japanese is harder. Latin grammar is very regular and unambiguous (Japanese is too, but Latin moreso) and the vocabulary is much easier to learn (since the words are often visually similar to English words with similar meanings). Of course, Latin is essentially a read-only language, so the real comparison would be how easy each is to read. If you compare reading Latin and reading Japanese, you'd have a pretty hard time arguing that Latin's harder!