Bye Bye Anonymous Coward. I guess we are now losing the most prolific commentor Slashdot has ever seen. The place just won't be the same without Anonymous Coward's wisdom, wit, humor, and twisted points of view.
Well, I'm not a pirate. And the choice between HD-DVD and BR-DVD matters to me. Why? Capacity! I want it for a recording medium. With 15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for BR-DVD, the latter would be the way to go if the pricing between them would be equivalent. Obviously, if BR-DVD stays at twice the price of HD-DVD, then it might not be worth it.
Of course the big market the manufacturers are looking at is the HD video media market, selling new players and licensing the manufacture of all that media being produced for it. But even there, having 25GB instead of 15GB means a better tradeoff between more content vs. less lossy compression. At the same compression, you can get 60-66% more content (or fewer disks for an entire mini-series in HD). For a fixed content, a higher quality level can be chosen for the compression.
One potential risk is that if the level of technology is really the same for both (I really don't know if it is or not) then the more dense format could be subject to more errors, given other things equal. In the end, we'll just have to see what works.
I think it will be a slower uptake. DVD's predecessor was VHS. That was a big difference. The jump from DVD to (HD/BR)-DVD requires a number of factors.
Many people just did buy DVD within the past few years and would be unlikely to dump that "investment" too quickly for something new.
Unlike the switch from VHS to DVD, people also have to buy an HD set/monitor to take advantage of what (HD/BR)-DVD has to offer.
Lots of existing content that was on VHS was remade in DVD and bought for the better quality. But a lot of that content is not HD, so there's no advantage to offer it in (HD/BR)-DVD (except maybe whole mini-series in SD might now fit on one disk).
And then there's the newer more horrific digital restrictions management that's going to eventually be in (HD/BR)-DVD.
I think it will be hard enough to get a large consumer adoption even if there wasn't a format competition. I suspect that a large segment of willing buyers will put it off just to wait out the war and see who wins. Or maybe they are waiting for the less popular content that can't get shelf space in the stores while there are 2 formats of content competing for that shelf space (as well as DVDs).
According to Macromedia/Adobe, it's only 2,3% of all web users who don't have Flash installed.
You need to read the statistics more carefully. It refers to 97,7% of web viewers. That includes all the masses of people that have a Flash Player pre-installed in their computers when they buy them, even if they are an insignificant proportion of internet users (get online maybe once every couple months). And of course this doesn't factor in what percentage of people would disable Flash if they knew how. It also says "reaches"... not "viewed by". I would argue that lots of people ignore the flash, or may well have it turned off in some way that it still "reaches" them in terms of server logs.
Any reasonable solution needs to be based on web standards. There is a lot of flexibility there. For example a number of HTML boxes can be created with apparently random text, and then CSS can separately enable or disable the display of certain boxes to create the effect of text visibility. Combine that with questions that humans can figure out how to answer ("What is the word displayed in the same color as common grass?") and you can make some image-less and Flash-less captchas, at least for a few years until spammers can figure them out. Oh, and be sure to randomize the input form variable names, and add extra dummy input areas that have "display:none;" in CSS.
And most importantly, these statistics come from corporations, who have as their only interest, which they would lie and steal to push, of making ever increasing profits at the cost of everyone, and even the national economy. I don't see any neutrality in this "study".
My solution is simple. It also defeats the "porn server in the middle" attack. Assuming the page is in English, just ask a random English language question about the banner ad at the time of the page. You "kill two birds with one stone" by getting people to prove they are human and read the ads at the same time.
This should work fine for all users that don't block banner... uh... never mind.
I've met quite a number of public school administrators over the years. I'm lucky that most of them where I went to school were actually OK. But I've met so many of them that are just horribly bad, it has convinced me that there is something terribly wrong going on in general. I can't say for sure whether it is a case of this kind of job attracting bad elements, or the job turning them bad. But the end result is that I see a kind of personality in probably at least 50% of public schools which would be best described as "a failed politician". What I mean by that is that the person is someone who really wanted to be a politician so he/she could (at least try to) control other people's lives. But they failed because they were not good enough to control adults, or realized they could not succeed, and instead, pursued their agenda against some of the more vulnerable of our society... our children.
We need to remove these kinds of people (the politician types) from our schools. This will be hard since there are so many of them. But the effort needs to begin somewhere. It looks to me like the Plainfield School District is as good as any for the next big effort.
If I was already using BDB or the like, what does SQLite really give me? I didn't need SQL if I was using BDB (and many things really don't need it at all).
Larger applications are still going to need the power of a server based DB. There are a lot of choices like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even Oracle when you can finally afford it. But I just don't see SQLite ever breaking through the "embedded library DB" ceiling to bump out MySQL. If Larry wants to destroy MySQL, then he should release a free open source version of "OracleLite" making sure everything written to work on that works w/o change on a full Oracle database. OracleLite wouldn't even need to do all that MySQL does to really put the pressure on.
So now Ticketmaster is providing you a service whereby you don't have to stand in line to get the ticket you want.
Of course, the greed factor here is you have to buy the tickets ahead of determining whether the venue is going to sell well or not. And if it doesn't sell well, you'll have paid more than what you would have through scalpers.
But at least the scalpers won't be losing (counting their time standing in line for you) money on overhyped events.
Remember, in Capitalist United States, what's illegal for people to do, is OK for a monopoly corporation to do.
I think Phil Zimmermann is smart enough about cryptography to know this. So hopefully, authentication will also be a part of this. The focus of Zfone, however, is the fact that the original Session key, which could be subject to forced disclosure, is not kept. If there is no authentication, then a true Man-in-the-middle attack is possible, but requires something more sophisticated than the fiber optic splitters used in the secret "study group" rooms.
Re:I got the CVS cop-out from the cscope maintaine
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
My projects may well go for months with no releases. But that's because there isn't much change going on at times. I do try to make sure no one change languishes for more than 6 months. But that's for changes I find for myself. When there are bugs reported to me by users, I consider those a higher priority and try to cut a release as soon as I can verify the fix probably didn't break other stuff (and if it does, I can either tell people to stay behind by one release, or I can back the change out and re-release). And this is even though my projects are of the "scratch my own itch" type.
I do have a couple advantages over other projects: I do all the development myself, and I don't use CVS.
While validation is generally good, sometimes you do have to hack to get things right. Sometimes it is the fault of the browser (heaven knows IE is a biggie there). Sometimes it is just deficiencies in the standards. I don't know which it is, but the author's own web site has some things gone wrong. It validates strict, but the result isn't good. If there's a way to get the results right, but that requires being non-compliant to do it, then so be it.
Here's how I get that site rendered in Firefox 1.5.0.3:
The 7th top row menu link has spilled onto the next row. That's ugly. I wouldn't accept that as long as there is room to fit them on the row, and there is, even with the waste of space on the sides of the page.
And yes, there is visual space waste on each site. That's perhaps just the style, but I've seen too many webmasters do it because they don't know how to make things fit better.
The "Register A Domain" box has an input field leaking off to the right side. That's really ugly. That's not even acceptable.
The featured site box has text leaking out the bottom. I don't think that's style. I think he just didn't code the box very well.
The three boxes labeled "Web Designs", "Domains", and "Hosting" have a bit of ugliness on the bottom corners of those boxes. Intended presentation? I doubt it.
If I have to make a non-standard hack to get things to work, I will, whether that's a defective browser or just deficient standards.
There are two categories for the errors you described. One is just plain mistakes like leaving unfinished entities. But a lot of others really involve pushing the envelope, such as the animation hacks. These problems aren't just limited to HTML, either. Apparently CSS2 can't do a lot of things people want to do, so they have to resort to hacks even today. If you don't believe me, take a look at the hacks in the default HTML stylesheet for Firefox 1.5. In other words, you can't do what this does for some elements with just the standard CSS properties. How much of this will be fixed in CSS3 remains to be seen. Last I heard, it won't be all of them.
Standards development is not leading to new features; it is following them. It seems like things don't get standardized unless someone first hacks up a non-standard way to get something new (and a lot of people make it popular enough to get the attention of standards developers). I'm not sure that will ever change.
If you need to do a three-column layout it will be much easier and give cleaner code to just use a table
The thing is, it's not easier or cleaner. In fact, it's usually the opposite. With CSS, you develop the layout code once, and apply it to all the pages on your site simultaneously. With tables, you have to hack up stupid <tr>s and <td>s for each and every page you do. Mindless, boring, repetitive work.
Maybe it's not easier or cleaner for you, but it is for me and apparently a lot of other folks. Of course, that could be because it isn't obvious how to make other methods work out the same way (e.g. to get the same presentation). As it turns out, either way involves the same number of elements to organize the content into the appropriate relations that can be handled in CSS, whether doing it by floats or by tables. But with tables, you do have a choice to do it in CSS (against div elements) or in HTML (the old way). But tables in CSS isn't supported by the current release of IE which so many people still use. Maybe IE7 will fix that. Maybe they can switch to FF. But until those things happen, the web developer has to deal with the reality of her particular audience, whatever that might happen to be. In the end, using tables works.
Most home Internet use is in brief bursts -- an e-mail here, a Web page there. If people start watching streaming video like they watch TV -- for hours at a time -- that puts a strain on the Internet that it wasn't designed for, ISPs say, and beefing up the Internet's capacity to prevent that will be expensive.
To offset that cost, ISPs want to start charging content providers to ensure delivery of large video files, for example.
No... they should be charging their own customers. The content provider's ISP should be charging the content provider.
This is just another ploy for certain ISPs to try to drive away competetive content providers so they can be the exclusive gatekeeper to people's homes.
It's call paranoia. And in most cases it's management, not the workers, that are scared and afraid. If the IT department is still on US soil, then they are even afraid of sending it off to India.
So tell us, who do you work for? I'm sure some hacker out there could use some more zombies.
If that "contract-to-perm" job is really going to become a permanent job for sure, then there is no reason to make it work that way for the employee. I've never taken one of those kinds of jobs. But a few friends have, and in most cases they got screwed one way or another. The two cases where they didn't were also the cases where they decided they didn't want the job and moved on (basically, there were issues there that explained the employer's desire to hire anyone that came along). It was the best they could do to hang in there for the contract term and then just decline the "perm offer". Anyway, I will not take one of those. If the employer wants loyalty from their people, they need to show a willingness to grant that as well. They should either hire direct, or pay the fee to the recruiter if they don't want to do it themselves. I don't play games when considering a new job, and I don't take jobs from employers that play games. That doesn't mean I don't take contract positions; I do (and have, twice). It means at the end of the contract period, we either renew the contract, or I'm gone. And if it was through a third party (e.g. the one that writes the checks and sends me the 1099), then it stays that way, or I'm gone.
Cohn said ISPs would better serve users by quarantining suspect spam messages in special mailboxes. That way, recipients would have the option of checking for false positives. If an ISP does block an e-mail, she says the sender and recipient should be notified and told why.
That doesn't do much good in practice. If someone finds they are not getting some email they want, they have to end up checking the spam box, which is often huge. And ISPs end up having to incur the costs (which they pass on to customers and/or advertisers) of receiving, accepting, processing, and storing all that spam (which spamware does not need to do).
People who are actually paying for email services should have the option to elect a service which does not accept any email whatsoever from any known spammer, or from any network known to continue to allow spammers to operate... with a reduction in price equivalent to the reduction in costs involved. How many people do you think would elect to pay a couple dollars more a month to have a box where all the spam goes into? Some will. I suspect most won't.
I don't know the specifics of the protocol, but I'd bet encryption could be added, anyway, without touching the firmware. The other party would need to be doing the same thing. At some point when you dial direct IP to IP, it has to be making a connection (TCP or SCTP) or sending a datagram (UDP or DDRP). This traffic would be routed through the encryption machine which would encrypt it by a select means and forward it on to the destination. One fairly obvious form of encryption would IPsec. Linux also supports, through netfilter, intercepting TCP connections intended for elsewhere, with an ioctl() to get the address info where it should be going. Then the intercept process can open a real connection to there and pass traffic along, encrypting what is sent, and decrypting what is received.
Have you tried browsing profiles with the age selection set to 90-100? I haven't found any seniors there, yet. And this is with the current restrictions.
Just try browsing MySpace profiles with the setting for ages 90-100. See who you really find. A few even admit their age (some under 13). In many cases, pictures don't lie. I haven't found any seniors there, yet.
Wal-Mart's entry into a category can raise alarms because the retailer's persistent price-cutting pressures competitors' profit margins. It has been blamed for bankruptcies in sectors ranging from groceries and toys.
But when will Wal-Mart get into the gasoline retail business?
Apparently, the RIAA wants to get universities to use filtering software on their networks to detect student filesharing. The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission. The article goes on to predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require use of anti-filesharing filtering technologies at universities.
As soon as everything gets encrypted with a public key system, the filters won't be any good. This can work in a closed environment where people know each other (sort of) and can trade keys ahead of time. But I do wonder how well these filters will work if the sharing uses protocols like NFS, SMB, FTP, RSYNC, and some obscure thing called HTTPS. Of course the RIAA will still be able to see what's happening through the use of spyware and such. Then the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require the universities to prohibit Linux and BSD.
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Bye Bye Anonymous Coward. I guess we are now losing the most prolific commentor Slashdot has ever seen. The place just won't be the same without Anonymous Coward's wisdom, wit, humor, and twisted points of view.
Post a patch.
Well, I'm not a pirate. And the choice between HD-DVD and BR-DVD matters to me. Why? Capacity! I want it for a recording medium. With 15GB for HD-DVD and 25GB for BR-DVD, the latter would be the way to go if the pricing between them would be equivalent. Obviously, if BR-DVD stays at twice the price of HD-DVD, then it might not be worth it.
Of course the big market the manufacturers are looking at is the HD video media market, selling new players and licensing the manufacture of all that media being produced for it. But even there, having 25GB instead of 15GB means a better tradeoff between more content vs. less lossy compression. At the same compression, you can get 60-66% more content (or fewer disks for an entire mini-series in HD). For a fixed content, a higher quality level can be chosen for the compression.
One potential risk is that if the level of technology is really the same for both (I really don't know if it is or not) then the more dense format could be subject to more errors, given other things equal. In the end, we'll just have to see what works.
I think it will be a slower uptake. DVD's predecessor was VHS. That was a big difference. The jump from DVD to (HD/BR)-DVD requires a number of factors.
I think it will be hard enough to get a large consumer adoption even if there wasn't a format competition. I suspect that a large segment of willing buyers will put it off just to wait out the war and see who wins. Or maybe they are waiting for the less popular content that can't get shelf space in the stores while there are 2 formats of content competing for that shelf space (as well as DVDs).
You need to read the statistics more carefully. It refers to 97,7% of web viewers. That includes all the masses of people that have a Flash Player pre-installed in their computers when they buy them, even if they are an insignificant proportion of internet users (get online maybe once every couple months). And of course this doesn't factor in what percentage of people would disable Flash if they knew how. It also says "reaches" ... not "viewed by". I would argue that lots of people ignore the flash, or may well have it turned off in some way that it still "reaches" them in terms of server logs.
Any reasonable solution needs to be based on web standards. There is a lot of flexibility there. For example a number of HTML boxes can be created with apparently random text, and then CSS can separately enable or disable the display of certain boxes to create the effect of text visibility. Combine that with questions that humans can figure out how to answer ("What is the word displayed in the same color as common grass?") and you can make some image-less and Flash-less captchas, at least for a few years until spammers can figure them out. Oh, and be sure to randomize the input form variable names, and add extra dummy input areas that have "display:none;" in CSS.
And most importantly, these statistics come from corporations, who have as their only interest, which they would lie and steal to push, of making ever increasing profits at the cost of everyone, and even the national economy. I don't see any neutrality in this "study".
Flash is even worse than Captchas.
Yeah, I can see how that would stop all the spam.
My solution is simple. It also defeats the "porn server in the middle" attack. Assuming the page is in English, just ask a random English language question about the banner ad at the time of the page. You "kill two birds with one stone" by getting people to prove they are human and read the ads at the same time.
This should work fine for all users that don't block banner ... uh ... never mind.
I've met quite a number of public school administrators over the years. I'm lucky that most of them where I went to school were actually OK. But I've met so many of them that are just horribly bad, it has convinced me that there is something terribly wrong going on in general. I can't say for sure whether it is a case of this kind of job attracting bad elements, or the job turning them bad. But the end result is that I see a kind of personality in probably at least 50% of public schools which would be best described as "a failed politician". What I mean by that is that the person is someone who really wanted to be a politician so he/she could (at least try to) control other people's lives. But they failed because they were not good enough to control adults, or realized they could not succeed, and instead, pursued their agenda against some of the more vulnerable of our society ... our children.
We need to remove these kinds of people (the politician types) from our schools. This will be hard since there are so many of them. But the effort needs to begin somewhere. It looks to me like the Plainfield School District is as good as any for the next big effort.
If I was already using BDB or the like, what does SQLite really give me? I didn't need SQL if I was using BDB (and many things really don't need it at all).
Larger applications are still going to need the power of a server based DB. There are a lot of choices like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and even Oracle when you can finally afford it. But I just don't see SQLite ever breaking through the "embedded library DB" ceiling to bump out MySQL. If Larry wants to destroy MySQL, then he should release a free open source version of "OracleLite" making sure everything written to work on that works w/o change on a full Oracle database. OracleLite wouldn't even need to do all that MySQL does to really put the pressure on.
So now Ticketmaster is providing you a service whereby you don't have to stand in line to get the ticket you want.
Of course, the greed factor here is you have to buy the tickets ahead of determining whether the venue is going to sell well or not. And if it doesn't sell well, you'll have paid more than what you would have through scalpers.
But at least the scalpers won't be losing (counting their time standing in line for you) money on overhyped events.
Remember, in Capitalist United States, what's illegal for people to do, is OK for a monopoly corporation to do.
Tapping and recording the bit stream is not a case of Man-in-the-middle attack. This is just simple Eavesdropping. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange is in fact vulnerable to a Man-in-the-middle attack. To address this, what is needed is some form of authentication, such as Public-key cryptography or Password-authenticated key agreement.
I think Phil Zimmermann is smart enough about cryptography to know this. So hopefully, authentication will also be a part of this. The focus of Zfone, however, is the fact that the original Session key, which could be subject to forced disclosure, is not kept. If there is no authentication, then a true Man-in-the-middle attack is possible, but requires something more sophisticated than the fiber optic splitters used in the secret "study group" rooms.
My projects may well go for months with no releases. But that's because there isn't much change going on at times. I do try to make sure no one change languishes for more than 6 months. But that's for changes I find for myself. When there are bugs reported to me by users, I consider those a higher priority and try to cut a release as soon as I can verify the fix probably didn't break other stuff (and if it does, I can either tell people to stay behind by one release, or I can back the change out and re-release). And this is even though my projects are of the "scratch my own itch" type.
I do have a couple advantages over other projects: I do all the development myself, and I don't use CVS.
While validation is generally good, sometimes you do have to hack to get things right. Sometimes it is the fault of the browser (heaven knows IE is a biggie there). Sometimes it is just deficiencies in the standards. I don't know which it is, but the author's own web site has some things gone wrong. It validates strict, but the result isn't good. If there's a way to get the results right, but that requires being non-compliant to do it, then so be it.
Here's how I get that site rendered in Firefox 1.5.0.3:
If I have to make a non-standard hack to get things to work, I will, whether that's a defective browser or just deficient standards.
There are two categories for the errors you described. One is just plain mistakes like leaving unfinished entities. But a lot of others really involve pushing the envelope, such as the animation hacks. These problems aren't just limited to HTML, either. Apparently CSS2 can't do a lot of things people want to do, so they have to resort to hacks even today. If you don't believe me, take a look at the hacks in the default HTML stylesheet for Firefox 1.5. In other words, you can't do what this does for some elements with just the standard CSS properties. How much of this will be fixed in CSS3 remains to be seen. Last I heard, it won't be all of them.
Standards development is not leading to new features; it is following them. It seems like things don't get standardized unless someone first hacks up a non-standard way to get something new (and a lot of people make it popular enough to get the attention of standards developers). I'm not sure that will ever change.
Maybe it's not easier or cleaner for you, but it is for me and apparently a lot of other folks. Of course, that could be because it isn't obvious how to make other methods work out the same way (e.g. to get the same presentation). As it turns out, either way involves the same number of elements to organize the content into the appropriate relations that can be handled in CSS, whether doing it by floats or by tables. But with tables, you do have a choice to do it in CSS (against div elements) or in HTML (the old way). But tables in CSS isn't supported by the current release of IE which so many people still use. Maybe IE7 will fix that. Maybe they can switch to FF. But until those things happen, the web developer has to deal with the reality of her particular audience, whatever that might happen to be. In the end, using tables works.
RTFAing ...
No... they should be charging their own customers. The content provider's ISP should be charging the content provider.
This is just another ploy for certain ISPs to try to drive away competetive content providers so they can be the exclusive gatekeeper to people's homes.
It's call paranoia. And in most cases it's management, not the workers, that are scared and afraid. If the IT department is still on US soil, then they are even afraid of sending it off to India.
So tell us, who do you work for? I'm sure some hacker out there could use some more zombies.
If that "contract-to-perm" job is really going to become a permanent job for sure, then there is no reason to make it work that way for the employee. I've never taken one of those kinds of jobs. But a few friends have, and in most cases they got screwed one way or another. The two cases where they didn't were also the cases where they decided they didn't want the job and moved on (basically, there were issues there that explained the employer's desire to hire anyone that came along). It was the best they could do to hang in there for the contract term and then just decline the "perm offer". Anyway, I will not take one of those. If the employer wants loyalty from their people, they need to show a willingness to grant that as well. They should either hire direct, or pay the fee to the recruiter if they don't want to do it themselves. I don't play games when considering a new job, and I don't take jobs from employers that play games. That doesn't mean I don't take contract positions; I do (and have, twice). It means at the end of the contract period, we either renew the contract, or I'm gone. And if it was through a third party (e.g. the one that writes the checks and sends me the 1099), then it stays that way, or I'm gone.
That doesn't do much good in practice. If someone finds they are not getting some email they want, they have to end up checking the spam box, which is often huge. And ISPs end up having to incur the costs (which they pass on to customers and/or advertisers) of receiving, accepting, processing, and storing all that spam (which spamware does not need to do).
People who are actually paying for email services should have the option to elect a service which does not accept any email whatsoever from any known spammer, or from any network known to continue to allow spammers to operate ... with a reduction in price equivalent to the reduction in costs involved. How many people do you think would elect to pay a couple dollars more a month to have a box where all the spam goes into? Some will. I suspect most won't.
I don't know the specifics of the protocol, but I'd bet encryption could be added, anyway, without touching the firmware. The other party would need to be doing the same thing. At some point when you dial direct IP to IP, it has to be making a connection (TCP or SCTP) or sending a datagram (UDP or DDRP). This traffic would be routed through the encryption machine which would encrypt it by a select means and forward it on to the destination. One fairly obvious form of encryption would IPsec. Linux also supports, through netfilter, intercepting TCP connections intended for elsewhere, with an ioctl() to get the address info where it should be going. Then the intercept process can open a real connection to there and pass traffic along, encrypting what is sent, and decrypting what is received.
... against kids whose parents don't have credit cards.
Have you tried browsing profiles with the age selection set to 90-100? I haven't found any seniors there, yet. And this is with the current restrictions.
Just try browsing MySpace profiles with the setting for ages 90-100. See who you really find. A few even admit their age (some under 13). In many cases, pictures don't lie. I haven't found any seniors there, yet.
But when will Wal-Mart get into the gasoline retail business?
As soon as everything gets encrypted with a public key system, the filters won't be any good. This can work in a closed environment where people know each other (sort of) and can trade keys ahead of time. But I do wonder how well these filters will work if the sharing uses protocols like NFS, SMB, FTP, RSYNC, and some obscure thing called HTTPS. Of course the RIAA will still be able to see what's happening through the use of spyware and such. Then the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require the universities to prohibit Linux and BSD.