The headline is very misleading. The big news here is that there is a Gallium3D back-end that gives tolerable performance for modern AMD cards. Gallium3D is a still-immature hardware abstraction architecture which could do amazing things for the industry if it manages to get over its chicken-and-egg problem.
All-In-One Gestures and MeasureIt are the only extensions I have installed that aren't compatible. Unfortunately I'm a bit too fond of All-In-One to upgrade and be without it just yet.
Off-topic, but I have to ask: are you an evil slayer of monkeys or a slayer of evil monkeys?
Having a button to interact with things, with the nature of the interaction being context-sensitive, is one thing; making the function itself dependent on context is quite another, especially when the functions conflict and the contexts are similar. A good example of this is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. They did a good job overall of giving you the ability to perform a broad range of activities with onle a handlful of keys, but they overdid it with having one button for both functions of the dagger: rewinding and coup-de-grac. This creates a problem: your ability to reverse time at any moment in the game shuts down every now and then, and your attempts to finish off a defeated opponent occasionally resurrect your enemies instead (not to mention deprive you of sand when you were counting on repleneshing it). Using just one more key would have made the game far better.
Of course having a different button for every possible action in the game is silly, but going to the opposite extreme and cramming absolutely everything into one button for the sake of eliminating one or two keys just as bad. As Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.".
Not really. Names are separated by industry too and how they are sold. A laptop sold in retail is significantly different than an operating system being sold wholesale (factories).
But in this case the name of the laptop is a direct reference to the operating system that it uses, so the separation isn't clear, and the only similarity between the names of the two laptops is that they both refer to the name of the same operating system. This doesn't look like a particularly strong case.
RSA is usually 1024 bits or more. 256-bit sounds great if you're used to talking about AES encryption or other similar symmetric algorithms, but it's pretty small for an RSA key. I'm not an expert on cryptology (I haven't even read TFA yet so don't trust anything I say), but this looks like it was an easy target.
Yes, that's what I was thinking too. I recently wrote my own bootloader for a project. It honestly took me less time to do it from scratch (copy kernel from flash to mem, jump to it, done) than to read, understand and customize Coreboot or U-Boot or one of the many everything but the kitchen sink boot projects.
What you made is a second-stage bootloader. All those really need to do is load some other program into memory and then transfer control to it. Coreboot is a primary bootloader - it handles starting up the computer, setting up the memory and CPU modes, testing harware, providing services such as the hard-drive access that your loader would need, and finally loading your secondary loader for you. Your job was easy because there wasn't much left to do.
Coreboot is more complicated than your loader because yours was piggybacking off something else, whereas Coreboot is that something else on which other people's loaders rely.
I'm not sure if I explained that well, but I hope it helped.
Fine for now, but what about the "digital future?" I just downloaded my first digital library book last night to my wife's Nook. Yeah, sure, I stripped the DRM from it as soon as I got it, just to see if I could (it's a geek thing...) but in principle I really have no problem with DRM on a library e-book: you wouldn't *own* the paper version, and you'd have to return it or pay a late fee after a time for it. For library loaners, DRM actually makes sense.
I agree - that this is a very appriate use of DRM. The big problem with DRM is that it is usually used to hold onto control of something after selling it to someone else. The customers then have a strong impetus to break the DRM in order to reclaim what they paid for, and those who aren't inclined to do so tend to build up a sense of resentment toward the supplier. This means making effective DRM is difficult and expensive, and also means you alienate your customers. In the case of a library you would ask to borrow an e-book for a couple of weeks and they give you a DRM'd copy of the work (hopefully made from a non-DRM archive so that they don't just vanish one day) which lasts for 2 weeks after which you can ask for another if you so wish. There's no real reason for someone to feel forced to crack this e-book (even if expiry dates are easier to crack than activation server requirement) or to resent the library or the publisher for not giving you something that lasts for as long as you can look after it (since you're just borrowing it anyway, and therefor have no reasonable expectation of being able to keep it).
You seem confused. OP was never intending to make a haiku. Piaku has no relation to haiku other than the shoutout in the name, so claiming that it isn't in haiku form is missing the point. Incidentally, your response is not in haiku form either; you have too many moras in your second line.
But Microsoft does sue companies that make products with names similar to Windows. They sued Lindows. If Microsoft can successfully sue over the Windows trademark, why can't Apple successfully sue over the App Store trademark?
Microsoft couldn't successfully sue over the Windows trademark. Microsoft lost that case [citation], and after 2 more years of trying to appeal the decision they eventually gave up and bought the Lindows trademark for $20 million [citation] instead.
Shouldn't it be possible for the old seasoned professionals to write libraries and tools that make SQL injection all but impossible? Then all you have to do is convince the green new up and comers to use the existing tools. Only downside is that the newbies don't learn the lesson, but this particular lesson is pretty costly to learn the hard way.
It's not only possible, but it's already done in the case of stored procedures and prepared statements. When a newbie first arrives, inform him that his code should access the database using stored procedures and that when he absolutely has to construct statements directly then those statements must be prepared and never constructed from user input. No more SQL injections. If the newbie ever takes a moment to stop and consider why that rule is there then he will most likely (I hope) learn the lesson for himself through contemplation.
Credit cards (or debit cards used as credit cards) do not use a PIN, and now at many places (pay-at-the-pump gas stations, fast food restaurants) don't require a signature either.
My credit card uses a PIN. I have only rarely encountered merchants who accept cards without requesting the PIN, and in those cases a signature is always required. Usually they ask for the PIN and a signature. I'm South African, and it worked the same way in New Zealand when I visited last year (except that they have 4-digit PINs instead of the 5-digit ones we have here).
If you think apple is restrictive in what they allow into the app store, just think about what nintendo would require in terms of certification. Never mind licensing nintendo property like mario to third parties. Nintendo is very much about controlling the user experience on their consoles and keeping it family friendly, remember, the wii is succesfull because it has masses of family appeal with simple and colorfull games. And their own IP games generally also have a high level of quality. Allowing third party nobodies to make just about any game with mario in it would quickyl destroy nintendo's image
I agree with what you say. But then I remember Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64, and now I really don't know what Nintendo's image is supposed to be.
To clarify: What OnLive offers now is completely unlike Steam - when you play an OnLive game it actually runs on an OnLive server and sends each rendered frame to your computer through the Internet. That's great if you have an amazing Internet connection and a terrible computer; that's quite a technical achievement, but I don't feel that the advantages (low hardware requirement) compensate enough for the drawbacks (latency, heavy Internet requirement) and I personally think that a Steam-like delivery mechanism would be a better idea. Of course, then they'd need something like this pricing scheme that they're proposing in order to differentiate themselves from Steam.
Not at all. Well, mostly-not-at-all - they'll probably end up with a similar delivery mechanism to Steam (and not persist with silly ideas like having the games execute remotely), but what this is really all about is the pricing scheme. TFA describes paying a fixed monthly amount to play anything on an entire catelogue. Steam gives you an indefinite subscription with after a seperate once-off payment for each individual game.
I realise that this is somewhat off-topic, but it can't be a good idea to have a dating site with a domain name that reads as "plenty offish". When will people learn to use hyphens in domain names?
The DMCA exemption given by the LoC applies only to wireless phones (and doesn't use the term "jailbreak"):
"Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset."
I'm not certain that GP was suggesting claiming that there is excemption for the PS3, but rather that there is precedent for adding exceptions to the DMCA. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves; the matter at hand is jurisdiction. If California does not have jurisdiction then the DMCA is irrelevant to this whole episode.
That's an interesting article, but I don't buy the conclusion that they're pushing. It blames the economic collapse that began in the 90's on denial of credit starting from 2001, which seems counterintuitive to me. I would attribute causality in the other direction. I also fail to see how financial injections would have helped anyway - none of the problems stemmed from lack of money or infrastructure. But I would be interested to learn more if you have any other references to provide - most of what I know about Zimbabwe comes from Zimbabweans, which has a certain credibility but may well be missing plenty of "big picture" information like this.
You mean where a politician that we like was privately urging other countries to keep sanctions in place to the detriment of his countries poor in the hope of putting pressure on his political rival while publicly denouncing those same sanctions?
It is absolutely a double edged sword since 2-faced people we like can be exposed lying just like people we don't like.
Exposed of lying? Because the official stance of the government he represents differs from his own personal opinion? When he was elected specifically because he opposes the current government? Wouldn't have been more suspicious if he didn't support the sanctions?
Those sanctions are not to the detriment to the poor - they affect only 7 particular businesses, all owned by government officials. "Detriment to the poor" is when ZANU-PF demolishes hundreds of thousands of homes or sends every skilled agriculturalist in the country into exile so that their farms can be divided amongst Bob's private army. When I first heard about that cable I was glad to see someone sticking to his principles, but now everyone's acting as it it's the exact opposite just because Mugabe made yet another baseless accusation of treason
Wikileaks did not provide any ammunition for Mugabe; he's inventing accusations, just like he would have done without the leak, just like he did the other 5 or so times he had Tsvangirai arrested for treason over the last decade.
If the program hasn't been maintained or updated in 10 years, wouldn't it be classified as Abandonware (much as old PC games get classified by those who want to share them?)
Not exactly. The term "abandonware" refers to software for which there is no legal means of obtaining (other than by resale through the first sale doctrine). Some people are under the impression that abandonware is not subject to copyright, but that's not true at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline is very misleading. The big news here is that there is a Gallium3D back-end that gives tolerable performance for modern AMD cards. Gallium3D is a still-immature hardware abstraction architecture which could do amazing things for the industry if it manages to get over its chicken-and-egg problem.
A compatible version of All-In-One Gestures is available from the developer's site: http://marc.boullet.pagesperso-orange.fr/ext/extensions-en.html
Thanks for sharing that :)
What plugins?
All-In-One Gestures and MeasureIt are the only extensions I have installed that aren't compatible. Unfortunately I'm a bit too fond of All-In-One to upgrade and be without it just yet.
Off-topic, but I have to ask: are you an evil slayer of monkeys or a slayer of evil monkeys?
Having a button to interact with things, with the nature of the interaction being context-sensitive, is one thing; making the function itself dependent on context is quite another, especially when the functions conflict and the contexts are similar. A good example of this is Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. They did a good job overall of giving you the ability to perform a broad range of activities with onle a handlful of keys, but they overdid it with having one button for both functions of the dagger: rewinding and coup-de-grac. This creates a problem: your ability to reverse time at any moment in the game shuts down every now and then, and your attempts to finish off a defeated opponent occasionally resurrect your enemies instead (not to mention deprive you of sand when you were counting on repleneshing it). Using just one more key would have made the game far better.
Of course having a different button for every possible action in the game is silly, but going to the opposite extreme and cramming absolutely everything into one button for the sake of eliminating one or two keys just as bad. As Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.".
Not really. Names are separated by industry too and how they are sold. A laptop sold in retail is significantly different than an operating system being sold wholesale (factories).
But in this case the name of the laptop is a direct reference to the operating system that it uses, so the separation isn't clear, and the only similarity between the names of the two laptops is that they both refer to the name of the same operating system. This doesn't look like a particularly strong case.
Can someone explain the incongruity between these two statements:
"Don't worry, your data is encrypted with 256-bit RSA."
"Computer experts have cracked the encryption."
So why doesn't the fantastic mathematically complex encyption ever work? Why should I trust https? Or any other encrypted transmission?
There's no incongruity between the statements because a simple 256-bit RSA is not a great way to encrypt data.
RSA is usually 1024 bits or more. 256-bit sounds great if you're used to talking about AES encryption or other similar symmetric algorithms, but it's pretty small for an RSA key. I'm not an expert on cryptology (I haven't even read TFA yet so don't trust anything I say), but this looks like it was an easy target.
Because I don't think there's a relevant XKCD for this one.
Aside from this and this.
Yes, that's what I was thinking too. I recently wrote my own bootloader for a project. It honestly took me less time to do it from scratch (copy kernel from flash to mem, jump to it, done) than to read, understand and customize Coreboot or U-Boot or one of the many everything but the kitchen sink boot projects.
What you made is a second-stage bootloader. All those really need to do is load some other program into memory and then transfer control to it. Coreboot is a primary bootloader - it handles starting up the computer, setting up the memory and CPU modes, testing harware, providing services such as the hard-drive access that your loader would need, and finally loading your secondary loader for you. Your job was easy because there wasn't much left to do.
Coreboot is more complicated than your loader because yours was piggybacking off something else, whereas Coreboot is that something else on which other people's loaders rely.
I'm not sure if I explained that well, but I hope it helped.
Fine for now, but what about the "digital future?" I just downloaded my first digital library book last night to my wife's Nook. Yeah, sure, I stripped the DRM from it as soon as I got it, just to see if I could (it's a geek thing...) but in principle I really have no problem with DRM on a library e-book: you wouldn't *own* the paper version, and you'd have to return it or pay a late fee after a time for it. For library loaners, DRM actually makes sense.
I agree - that this is a very appriate use of DRM. The big problem with DRM is that it is usually used to hold onto control of something after selling it to someone else. The customers then have a strong impetus to break the DRM in order to reclaim what they paid for, and those who aren't inclined to do so tend to build up a sense of resentment toward the supplier. This means making effective DRM is difficult and expensive, and also means you alienate your customers. In the case of a library you would ask to borrow an e-book for a couple of weeks and they give you a DRM'd copy of the work (hopefully made from a non-DRM archive so that they don't just vanish one day) which lasts for 2 weeks after which you can ask for another if you so wish. There's no real reason for someone to feel forced to crack this e-book (even if expiry dates are easier to crack than activation server requirement) or to resent the library or the publisher for not giving you something that lasts for as long as you can look after it (since you're just borrowing it anyway, and therefor have no reasonable expectation of being able to keep it).
You seem confused. OP was never intending to make a haiku. Piaku has no relation to haiku other than the shoutout in the name, so claiming that it isn't in haiku form is missing the point. Incidentally, your response is not in haiku form either; you have too many moras in your second line.
I hate to tell you, but haiku have a fixed form: five, seven, and five.
It's piaku,
so:
three, one, and four
But Microsoft does sue companies that make products with names similar to Windows. They sued Lindows. If Microsoft can successfully sue over the Windows trademark, why can't Apple successfully sue over the App Store trademark?
Microsoft couldn't successfully sue over the Windows trademark. Microsoft lost that case [citation], and after 2 more years of trying to appeal the decision they eventually gave up and bought the Lindows trademark for $20 million [citation] instead.
There is no enought 4chan memes to explain how alone this guy is right now.
Personally, I'd use this Homestuck meme for that
Shouldn't it be possible for the old seasoned professionals to write libraries and tools that make SQL injection all but impossible? Then all you have to do is convince the green new up and comers to use the existing tools. Only downside is that the newbies don't learn the lesson, but this particular lesson is pretty costly to learn the hard way.
It's not only possible, but it's already done in the case of stored procedures and prepared statements. When a newbie first arrives, inform him that his code should access the database using stored procedures and that when he absolutely has to construct statements directly then those statements must be prepared and never constructed from user input. No more SQL injections. If the newbie ever takes a moment to stop and consider why that rule is there then he will most likely (I hope) learn the lesson for himself through contemplation.
Credit cards (or debit cards used as credit cards) do not use a PIN, and now at many places (pay-at-the-pump gas stations, fast food restaurants) don't require a signature either.
My credit card uses a PIN. I have only rarely encountered merchants who accept cards without requesting the PIN, and in those cases a signature is always required. Usually they ask for the PIN and a signature. I'm South African, and it worked the same way in New Zealand when I visited last year (except that they have 4-digit PINs instead of the 5-digit ones we have here).
it wouldnt work, especially not for nintendo.
If you think apple is restrictive in what they allow into the app store, just think about what nintendo would require in terms of certification. Never mind licensing nintendo property like mario to third parties. Nintendo is very much about controlling the user experience on their consoles and keeping it family friendly, remember, the wii is succesfull because it has masses of family appeal with simple and colorfull games. And their own IP games generally also have a high level of quality. Allowing third party nobodies to make just about any game with mario in it would quickyl destroy nintendo's image
I agree with what you say. But then I remember Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64, and now I really don't know what Nintendo's image is supposed to be.
To clarify: What OnLive offers now is completely unlike Steam - when you play an OnLive game it actually runs on an OnLive server and sends each rendered frame to your computer through the Internet. That's great if you have an amazing Internet connection and a terrible computer; that's quite a technical achievement, but I don't feel that the advantages (low hardware requirement) compensate enough for the drawbacks (latency, heavy Internet requirement) and I personally think that a Steam-like delivery mechanism would be a better idea. Of course, then they'd need something like this pricing scheme that they're proposing in order to differentiate themselves from Steam.
Isn't this what Steam is already ... ?
Not at all. Well, mostly-not-at-all - they'll probably end up with a similar delivery mechanism to Steam (and not persist with silly ideas like having the games execute remotely), but what this is really all about is the pricing scheme. TFA describes paying a fixed monthly amount to play anything on an entire catelogue. Steam gives you an indefinite subscription with after a seperate once-off payment for each individual game.
I realise that this is somewhat off-topic, but it can't be a good idea to have a dating site with a domain name that reads as "plenty offish". When will people learn to use hyphens in domain names?
The DMCA exemption given by the LoC applies only to wireless phones (and doesn't use the term "jailbreak"): "Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset."
I'm not certain that GP was suggesting claiming that there is excemption for the PS3, but rather that there is precedent for adding exceptions to the DMCA. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves; the matter at hand is jurisdiction. If California does not have jurisdiction then the DMCA is irrelevant to this whole episode.
That's an interesting article, but I don't buy the conclusion that they're pushing. It blames the economic collapse that began in the 90's on denial of credit starting from 2001, which seems counterintuitive to me. I would attribute causality in the other direction. I also fail to see how financial injections would have helped anyway - none of the problems stemmed from lack of money or infrastructure. But I would be interested to learn more if you have any other references to provide - most of what I know about Zimbabwe comes from Zimbabweans, which has a certain credibility but may well be missing plenty of "big picture" information like this.
You mean where a politician that we like was privately urging other countries to keep sanctions in place to the detriment of his countries poor in the hope of putting pressure on his political rival while publicly denouncing those same sanctions?
It is absolutely a double edged sword since 2-faced people we like can be exposed lying just like people we don't like.
Exposed of lying? Because the official stance of the government he represents differs from his own personal opinion? When he was elected specifically because he opposes the current government? Wouldn't have been more suspicious if he didn't support the sanctions?
Those sanctions are not to the detriment to the poor - they affect only 7 particular businesses, all owned by government officials. "Detriment to the poor" is when ZANU-PF demolishes hundreds of thousands of homes or sends every skilled agriculturalist in the country into exile so that their farms can be divided amongst Bob's private army. When I first heard about that cable I was glad to see someone sticking to his principles, but now everyone's acting as it it's the exact opposite just because Mugabe made yet another baseless accusation of treason
Wikileaks did not provide any ammunition for Mugabe; he's inventing accusations, just like he would have done without the leak, just like he did the other 5 or so times he had Tsvangirai arrested for treason over the last decade.
If the program hasn't been maintained or updated in 10 years, wouldn't it be classified as Abandonware (much as old PC games get classified by those who want to share them?)
Not exactly. The term "abandonware" refers to software for which there is no legal means of obtaining (other than by resale through the first sale doctrine). Some people are under the impression that abandonware is not subject to copyright, but that's not true at all.
I've also heard it suggested that ostrich would be a pretty sustainable replacement.
I like that idea. Ostrich meat is delicious.