Indebtedness that is the result of certain criminal acts is not usually allowed to be discharged in bankruptcy. If you destroy someone else's property, then declare bankruptcy after being convicted of the crime, you will still owe THAT debt. The risk of not being paid back is supposed to be burdened only by those specifically choosing to do business with the party that might declare bankruptcy. However, this matter still has to be raised in the bankruptcy court. If you are owed money for a criminal act, and the debtor files bankruptcy, and you just sit and do nothing, it could be discharged, and it might not be possible to re-open the bankruptcy (if you knew about it).
Whether spamming falls under this is the big question. I believe there is no case law to test it.
The hardware that is doing the accelerated video decoding is the GPU itself. All that is needed is for NVIDIA to program its video driver properly so the video application that is displaying content on some part of the screen has a means to designate a portion (or all) of that to be the video display, and send the video stream in to be decoded into that space.
This is NOT an issue of Linux. It is an issue of NVIDIA not putting an equal effort into other platforms, or not opening up the interface specs (this does NOT need to open the proprietary insides of the video firmware on the GPU... it only needs to open the way to communicate with it) so the community can develop the driver for them.
It's not about Linux having or not having a unified approach. It already has what is needed. When hardware interface standards are fully open, then development to use that hardware can happen for all operating system platforms on an equal basis. Only then can we truly point a finger at the one that comes in last and say "FAIL". Until then, I point at the closed hardware and say "FAIL".
If NVIDIA would put the effort into making an open codec (such as Dirac) directly in the GPU firmware, and keep their Linux driver updated properly (or just open source it... all the magic is in the GPU so the driver should just be a means to pass data between CPU and GPU), then an HTML5 based video would display well, too.
This is NOT a showing of whether Flash is better than raw video, or not. It's a showing of what secret backroom deals can do to lock out safer, more secure, more open, ways of doing things, and doing them just as fast, if not faster. If speed really is the issue (and it's NOT number one for me), then show it honestly by putting an equal effort into both. They clearly failed to do that in this case.
Exactly. I can sense what my car is doing while driving it, such as gear changes in the automatic transmission, and when the tires are on the edge of small narrow roads. But my father, 25 years older, can't. He also has much slower reaction times. I'm glad he's not driving a Toyota, but I'm still not comfortable with him driving either car we do have.
But, quite obviously, they don't lock them down right. If the smart kids can open 'em back up, and the supposed lock down just inhibits other proper uses, then it's done wrong. The right way would be to lock them down in a way that allows all law abiding activity appropriate for kids of age involved, while prohibiting all else, and done in a way even the smart geek kids know isn't worth bothering to crack. It's the school admins that need much educating if a bunch of kids know more than they do.
This event opened our eyes to the POTENTIAL for abuse by a group of people that typically is known for a greater propensity to be abusive.
And there are issues about even the program itself. For example, requiring kids to use that computer and not the one that they already have at home, which for some can be a space issue (where do I put it). It also imposes property care obligations on people that don't necessarily need to have it. In some cases students cannot leave their school provided laptops at school in the lockers and are required to take them home every day, which may be an environment with a greater chance of being stolen (and then the student be blamed for not taking proper care).
It would just be simpler if the schools would let the program be optional, though opt-in at any time. Let kids use their own computers when and where they like (but the school is not liable for problems with the kids own computers). Accept all known formats for assignment turn-in. Ignorance of teachers (to deal with Open Office formats, which they can do for free on any computer, so money is not an excuse) is no excuse.
And tell the schools to quit whining about budgets unless they are using the lowest cost solutions for their computers.
... selling chips cheaper outside of the USA than inside. That's why there are so many shady distribution channels overseas, to bring the cheap market chips into the USA (where Intel is otherwise boosting the pricing to cover their loses of extreme discounts in other countries). If Intel sold chips directly to retailers like NewEgg at the same price as they sell them everywhere else, with no further volume discounts above the volumes NewEgg and the like buy them in, then there would be no need for NewEgg to buy those chips from questionable distribution channels.
IPEX needs to name their source for those "demo units". That, and fire the guy who made the claim to NewEgg that they were "demo units". They need to cut off their relationship with that source.
And WTF is this distribution chain so long? Can't IPEX buy directly from Intel?
I don't block ads. I don't block arstechnica.com, either. Yet I don't see any ads on their site. Why is that? Because I block selected ad servers that have a history of serving abusive ads (including Flash). Apparently, they are using ad services that have less than stellar history.
What Ars Technica needs to do is simply use ad services that have no history of abusive ads (whether such ads ever showed on the Ars Technica site or not), or just serve the ads themselves from their own domain. Or they can arrange to have the ad serving company servers used for serving their ads to have a hostname in their own domain (only the A record matters for how I block ads, so the same server can also serve ads for other sites, too).
Oh, and while we're on the subject of how to improve the Ars Technica site, I also suggest, in addition to a link for logged in users leaving comments, also provide a link for non-logged in users (e.g. those that don't want to register for yet another online account somewhere) to leave comments that run through a moderation queue, as well as a link for leaving feedback to the author (e.g. won't be published) or management.
They don't know it's a battery monitor. All they know is, it has an IP address, and it listens on a port they suspect is SSH, and if they can get in, they can probably use it to get back out to somewhere else using your IP and your bandwidth, to do things ranging from sending out millions of spam to performing denial of service attacks on some target.
FYI, moving the port is (at least for now) more effective than banning them for a few tries. If they get banned, they just share your IP with their friends, who will also try. If they never get a connection, they don't share it. And there are fewer pointless log entries. Simple as that. If adding a "Port" statement in your ~/.ssh/config file is too hard for you, oh well.
Businesses have no right to break the law. PayPal thinks the laws do not apply to them.
We need to be expanding the boycott of PayPal and the boycott of businesses that use PayPal as the only means to pay. Maybe we should also go further and boycott those that merely include PayPal as one of the options.
I agree. For the very small and minimal devices, serial is king. And even for larger devices where the capacity to add USB (gadget side) is present, serial is still a good way to interface quickly, cheaply, and reliably.
The big problem is so many PCs, laptops, and netbooks (well, as far as I can tell, ALL netbooks) lack a real serial port. My Dell docking station at work, oddly enough, adds a serial port. But the docking station is major burden when carrying the laptop around to work with network routers and switches. The USB to serial dongles are less of a burden (but still some burden).
To me, the ideal solution is to keep the serial port on devices where it makes sense, and add a USB gadget port WITH built-in serial emulation. Then you still run a terminal program like telix or minicom to talk to the serial console interface of the device being managed while having just a USB cable between.
Many very small devices might need to stick with only serial as the console. But many other devices could include USB, such as Cisco routers/switches, cable set top boxes (BTDT).
Cisco (and other router/switch/telecom manufacturers) need to add a USB gadget (so it can plug directly to the USB port on a PC/laptop/netbook) console port. FYI, I am NOT saying to get rid of the serial console port that typically has an 8P8C (commonly misunderstood as RJ-45) connector. Just have both. The USB console should work as a serial console (using a widely compatible chip like FTDI). But they can also add additional features such as presenting flash storage on the equipment as a hard drive to the PC (ready to make backups of, or reload firmware and configurations onto, at full USB speeds), and even create a network interface for that PC/laptop to use (ethernet/IP over USB and ethernet/IP over PPP over a 2nd emulated serial port).
My cheap $90 point and shoot camera has a USB gadget port (although with no need for a serial port emulation). Why can't Cisco add that?
Partitioning the right way deals with it. You can use fdisk in Linux to do the partitioning for both Linux and Windows.
First, find out exactly how large the drive is in units of 512 byte sectors. Divide that number by 8192 and round any fractions up. Remember that as the number of cylinders. In fdisk, use the "x" command to enter expert commands. Do "s" to enter the number of sectors per track as 32. Do "h" to enter the number of heads (tracks) per cylinder as 256 (not 255). Do "c" to enter the number of cylinders previously calculated. Do "r" to return from expert mode. Do "u" to change units to exact sectors.
Now allocate space on boundaries of a multiple of 8 sectors (with the "last" sector for any partition being one less than such a multiple). To squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of I/O scheduling and caching, allocate space on larger boundaries. I now allocate on 2048 sector boundaries, which is exactly 1048576 bytes, with the first partition beginning at sector 2048. That leaves plenty of room for big boot loaders.
I have not tested starting at sector 2048 with Windows, but I did test starting at sector 64 with Windows several years ago and that worked fine. I can't see why it would not work at 2048 if it worked at 64. But I do recommend letting Windows do the filesystem formatting for any Windows partitions.
It's basically an implementation issue. The algorithms may be fine as intended... in linear space. The programmers that implemented them didn't understand linear vs. gamma, or didn't care, or had a fire breathing PHB on their back. Hence we get junk software.
At least all MY image processing code always works in linear space. Bu merely converting 8-bit gamma to 8-bit linear is no good because that now introduces some serious quantizing artifacts (major banding effects happen). So I convert the 8-bit gammas to at least 30 or 31 bit integer if I need processing speed, or all the way to double precision floating point if I need as close to correct as possible. After processing, then I convert back to 8-bit gammas. Even then, you can't totally eliminate some banding effects that result from being in 8-bit. If you can get more bits from the raw images from your camera, that's the best to use. Apparently many JPEG compressors are also doing their DCT calculations in the non-unit gamma space instead of the linear space, too (which reduces the effectiveness of the compression somewhat, and may add more compression artifacts).
No course should have any greater opportunity for "death by mistake" than is already commonplace. THIS course was far more dangerous than typical. The IOC knew that and FAILED to act initially. Then tragedy! Then they finally acted to make some improvements. Then they tried to do a coverup.
Let's see if the school actually produces the photographic evidence in court (even if WE are not allowed to see it for privacy reasons). If they do, the defense will have the right to know where that evidence came from and how the school acquired it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indebtedness that is the result of certain criminal acts is not usually allowed to be discharged in bankruptcy. If you destroy someone else's property, then declare bankruptcy after being convicted of the crime, you will still owe THAT debt. The risk of not being paid back is supposed to be burdened only by those specifically choosing to do business with the party that might declare bankruptcy. However, this matter still has to be raised in the bankruptcy court. If you are owed money for a criminal act, and the debtor files bankruptcy, and you just sit and do nothing, it could be discharged, and it might not be possible to re-open the bankruptcy (if you knew about it).
Whether spamming falls under this is the big question. I believe there is no case law to test it.
For more information, see "Chapter 7 - Liquidation Under the Bankruptcy Code". The relevant paragraphs are near the end, just above "NOTES".
And how does that work for HTTPS?
The hardware that is doing the accelerated video decoding is the GPU itself. All that is needed is for NVIDIA to program its video driver properly so the video application that is displaying content on some part of the screen has a means to designate a portion (or all) of that to be the video display, and send the video stream in to be decoded into that space.
This is NOT an issue of Linux. It is an issue of NVIDIA not putting an equal effort into other platforms, or not opening up the interface specs (this does NOT need to open the proprietary insides of the video firmware on the GPU ... it only needs to open the way to communicate with it) so the community can develop the driver for them.
It's not about Linux having or not having a unified approach. It already has what is needed. When hardware interface standards are fully open, then development to use that hardware can happen for all operating system platforms on an equal basis. Only then can we truly point a finger at the one that comes in last and say "FAIL". Until then, I point at the closed hardware and say "FAIL".
If NVIDIA would put the effort into making an open codec (such as Dirac) directly in the GPU firmware, and keep their Linux driver updated properly (or just open source it ... all the magic is in the GPU so the driver should just be a means to pass data between CPU and GPU), then an HTML5 based video would display well, too.
This is NOT a showing of whether Flash is better than raw video, or not. It's a showing of what secret backroom deals can do to lock out safer, more secure, more open, ways of doing things, and doing them just as fast, if not faster. If speed really is the issue (and it's NOT number one for me), then show it honestly by putting an equal effort into both. They clearly failed to do that in this case.
Exactly. I can sense what my car is doing while driving it, such as gear changes in the automatic transmission, and when the tires are on the edge of small narrow roads. But my father, 25 years older, can't. He also has much slower reaction times. I'm glad he's not driving a Toyota, but I'm still not comfortable with him driving either car we do have.
But, quite obviously, they don't lock them down right. If the smart kids can open 'em back up, and the supposed lock down just inhibits other proper uses, then it's done wrong. The right way would be to lock them down in a way that allows all law abiding activity appropriate for kids of age involved, while prohibiting all else, and done in a way even the smart geek kids know isn't worth bothering to crack. It's the school admins that need much educating if a bunch of kids know more than they do.
This event opened our eyes to the POTENTIAL for abuse by a group of people that typically is known for a greater propensity to be abusive.
And there are issues about even the program itself. For example, requiring kids to use that computer and not the one that they already have at home, which for some can be a space issue (where do I put it). It also imposes property care obligations on people that don't necessarily need to have it. In some cases students cannot leave their school provided laptops at school in the lockers and are required to take them home every day, which may be an environment with a greater chance of being stolen (and then the student be blamed for not taking proper care).
It would just be simpler if the schools would let the program be optional, though opt-in at any time. Let kids use their own computers when and where they like (but the school is not liable for problems with the kids own computers). Accept all known formats for assignment turn-in. Ignorance of teachers (to deal with Open Office formats, which they can do for free on any computer, so money is not an excuse) is no excuse.
And tell the schools to quit whining about budgets unless they are using the lowest cost solutions for their computers.
... no more having to mow the lawn.
... selling chips cheaper outside of the USA than inside. That's why there are so many shady distribution channels overseas, to bring the cheap market chips into the USA (where Intel is otherwise boosting the pricing to cover their loses of extreme discounts in other countries). If Intel sold chips directly to retailers like NewEgg at the same price as they sell them everywhere else, with no further volume discounts above the volumes NewEgg and the like buy them in, then there would be no need for NewEgg to buy those chips from questionable distribution channels.
IPEX needs to name their source for those "demo units". That, and fire the guy who made the claim to NewEgg that they were "demo units". They need to cut off their relationship with that source.
And WTF is this distribution chain so long? Can't IPEX buy directly from Intel?
They'd have to read the reader's feedback to be in a position to make this deal. Thus, it will never happen.
I don't block ads. I don't block arstechnica.com, either. Yet I don't see any ads on their site. Why is that? Because I block selected ad servers that have a history of serving abusive ads (including Flash). Apparently, they are using ad services that have less than stellar history.
What Ars Technica needs to do is simply use ad services that have no history of abusive ads (whether such ads ever showed on the Ars Technica site or not), or just serve the ads themselves from their own domain. Or they can arrange to have the ad serving company servers used for serving their ads to have a hostname in their own domain (only the A record matters for how I block ads, so the same server can also serve ads for other sites, too).
Oh, and while we're on the subject of how to improve the Ars Technica site, I also suggest, in addition to a link for logged in users leaving comments, also provide a link for non-logged in users (e.g. those that don't want to register for yet another online account somewhere) to leave comments that run through a moderation queue, as well as a link for leaving feedback to the author (e.g. won't be published) or management.
They don't know it's a battery monitor. All they know is, it has an IP address, and it listens on a port they suspect is SSH, and if they can get in, they can probably use it to get back out to somewhere else using your IP and your bandwidth, to do things ranging from sending out millions of spam to performing denial of service attacks on some target.
FYI, moving the port is (at least for now) more effective than banning them for a few tries. If they get banned, they just share your IP with their friends, who will also try. If they never get a connection, they don't share it. And there are fewer pointless log entries. Simple as that. If adding a "Port" statement in your ~/.ssh/config file is too hard for you, oh well.
Businesses have no right to break the law. PayPal thinks the laws do not apply to them.
We need to be expanding the boycott of PayPal and the boycott of businesses that use PayPal as the only means to pay. Maybe we should also go further and boycott those that merely include PayPal as one of the options.
The following code (indenting lost):
when compiled with a standards compliant compiler, will produce the (unexpected to many programmers) output:
See 6.3.1.8 in the C99 standard.
I agree. For the very small and minimal devices, serial is king. And even for larger devices where the capacity to add USB (gadget side) is present, serial is still a good way to interface quickly, cheaply, and reliably.
The big problem is so many PCs, laptops, and netbooks (well, as far as I can tell, ALL netbooks) lack a real serial port. My Dell docking station at work, oddly enough, adds a serial port. But the docking station is major burden when carrying the laptop around to work with network routers and switches. The USB to serial dongles are less of a burden (but still some burden).
To me, the ideal solution is to keep the serial port on devices where it makes sense, and add a USB gadget port WITH built-in serial emulation. Then you still run a terminal program like telix or minicom to talk to the serial console interface of the device being managed while having just a USB cable between.
Many very small devices might need to stick with only serial as the console. But many other devices could include USB, such as Cisco routers/switches, cable set top boxes (BTDT).
Cisco (and other router/switch/telecom manufacturers) need to add a USB gadget (so it can plug directly to the USB port on a PC/laptop/netbook) console port. FYI, I am NOT saying to get rid of the serial console port that typically has an 8P8C (commonly misunderstood as RJ-45) connector. Just have both. The USB console should work as a serial console (using a widely compatible chip like FTDI). But they can also add additional features such as presenting flash storage on the equipment as a hard drive to the PC (ready to make backups of, or reload firmware and configurations onto, at full USB speeds), and even create a network interface for that PC/laptop to use (ethernet/IP over USB and ethernet/IP over PPP over a 2nd emulated serial port).
My cheap $90 point and shoot camera has a USB gadget port (although with no need for a serial port emulation). Why can't Cisco add that?
The two I bought were only $11.14 each and worked in Ubuntu 9.10. I haven't tried BSD or Windows, yet. Well, OK, there is also shipping.
Partitioning the right way deals with it. You can use fdisk in Linux to do the partitioning for both Linux and Windows.
First, find out exactly how large the drive is in units of 512 byte sectors. Divide that number by 8192 and round any fractions up. Remember that as the number of cylinders. In fdisk, use the "x" command to enter expert commands. Do "s" to enter the number of sectors per track as 32. Do "h" to enter the number of heads (tracks) per cylinder as 256 (not 255). Do "c" to enter the number of cylinders previously calculated. Do "r" to return from expert mode. Do "u" to change units to exact sectors.
Now allocate space on boundaries of a multiple of 8 sectors (with the "last" sector for any partition being one less than such a multiple). To squeeze a tiny bit more performance out of I/O scheduling and caching, allocate space on larger boundaries. I now allocate on 2048 sector boundaries, which is exactly 1048576 bytes, with the first partition beginning at sector 2048. That leaves plenty of room for big boot loaders.
I have not tested starting at sector 2048 with Windows, but I did test starting at sector 64 with Windows several years ago and that worked fine. I can't see why it would not work at 2048 if it worked at 64. But I do recommend letting Windows do the filesystem formatting for any Windows partitions.
It's basically an implementation issue. The algorithms may be fine as intended ... in linear space. The programmers that implemented them didn't understand linear vs. gamma, or didn't care, or had a fire breathing PHB on their back. Hence we get junk software.
At least all MY image processing code always works in linear space. Bu merely converting 8-bit gamma to 8-bit linear is no good because that now introduces some serious quantizing artifacts (major banding effects happen). So I convert the 8-bit gammas to at least 30 or 31 bit integer if I need processing speed, or all the way to double precision floating point if I need as close to correct as possible. After processing, then I convert back to 8-bit gammas. Even then, you can't totally eliminate some banding effects that result from being in 8-bit. If you can get more bits from the raw images from your camera, that's the best to use. Apparently many JPEG compressors are also doing their DCT calculations in the non-unit gamma space instead of the linear space, too (which reduces the effectiveness of the compression somewhat, and may add more compression artifacts).
No course should have any greater opportunity for "death by mistake" than is already commonplace. THIS course was far more dangerous than typical. The IOC knew that and FAILED to act initially. Then tragedy! Then they finally acted to make some improvements. Then they tried to do a coverup.
That warning is more likely to really mean "It might not work in IE4 or IE5 so you better upgrade to IE6 now".
Wow, a museum piece!
Let's see if the school actually produces the photographic evidence in court (even if WE are not allowed to see it for privacy reasons). If they do, the defense will have the right to know where that evidence came from and how the school acquired it.
And their response is essentially "We didn't do anything wrong and we promise not to do it again".