Ah the audiophile mindset, if someone can't hear the invisible differences I hear then the problem is with them or their gear, because they differences are there I swear it. First of, you've got more than a passing interest if you sit around ABX testing audio codecs for any length of time, people with crap equipment might try it out a round or two but will have left long before they become more than statistical noise. The other good reason is that they tested this, long ago as MP3s were becoming popular. Top people, top equipment, around 256 kbps MP3 they couldn't tell it apart from the CD. Since then we've had better formats (AAC) and better encoders, plenty of edge cases ironed out... if you seriously think you can tell a 256 kbps AAC from iTunes and the CD apart, I'd pay to see you do it under controlled conditions. On a no cure, no pay basis of course - because I seriously doubt you could.
SHA and MD5 are hash algorithms, there's no way to recover the actual password from a hash. And since you need the password to log in, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. The best they could do is some symmetric encryption with the key hardcoded in the software as security through obscurity.
Over 3/4ths support environmental conservation. But a majority also self-identify as moderate-to-conservative. Go figure.
If you ask "Do you want to conserve or destroy the environment?" then very few people will go for "destroy". The question is when it comes to concrete things like are you willing to support measures that'll be a public expense and implicitly lead to higher taxes, lead to higher prices on certain goods, ban environmentally harmful products even though this leads to lower quality or worse products or reduce your own consumption and environmental footprint. Most people will accept some small sacrifices and say "I'm doing my part" and that's the 75%+, then you have the real environmentalists who'd possibly vote for the Green party which are maybe 5%. That's just a figure out of thin air, but for example in the EU parliament there's 6.3% Greens. It's very hard to say if that 75%+ number says anything meaningful at all.
A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made?
The same way as with physical property... you don't. I know someone who ended up with a drug conviction, he told me afterwards they took everything he didn't have a receipt for as being from drug money - including a camera I gave him. Simple as that, you don't own nothing until you can prove you do.
but its public domain right? Nothing illegal about it then right?
Making copies of a copy you have, no. But you still have to get that copy in a legal way, you don't have the right to violate terms of services or laws to get it. In that sense it's irrelevant whether the works he downloaded from JSTOR were copyrighted or not.
At least 7 confirmed killed, 2 seriously injured in the explosion. Also there's been a shooter that the police think is connected, unclear how many are injured/killed but reports suggest 5+ people have been shot there as well.
The guy is worried that Spotify will start cheap and then raise it's prices if successful. And if you cancel you don't get to keep listening to music (unless you figured out a way to make your own copy, like many slashdotters will). Not sure what this guy's point is.
Me neither. I mean if it's a good service now, use it now. If it turns to crap, well then switch service or go back to pirating then. The whole "don't use it now because it might turn crap later" doesn't make sense. It's not a bait and switch any more than a car lease, you have it as long as you pay the lease. Maybe the lease company will hike their rates later, but then you're free do to something else. Just like you are every month before you pay for Spotify. I don't see the problem here...
Large (some estimate 100kg of explosives) bombs against the headquarters of western governments far removed from any local conflict are rather rare. This is the equivalent of someone blowing up the White House or Downing Street in the UK. It might not reach quite up to the UK subway bombing or the Madrid train bombing but this was way more than one man with a suicide vest.
I've been predicting for a while now that when Linux finally arrives on the desktop no home users will have desktops. Already the recycling sites and web sites and streets around where I live are filling up with unwanted computer desks while everyone migrates to PS3s, iPhones or laptops...
Well, you're not getting many psychic points for predicting the move from desktop to laptops, that trend has been going on for years and laptop sales overtook desktops in Q3 2008. But laptops are in every way the traditional "desktop" with desktop software, except with portable hardware. So either you're predicting something that's not very spectacular, indeed has pretty much already happened and wouldn't reduce the potential market anyway, or you're predicting the death of the "desktop" as such and people migrating to PS3s, iPhones and other devices which I find that very hard to believe. The laptop is very much alive and kicking, even if the desktop is relegated to a niche - yet a much bigger niche still than say "Macs" is, just for comparison.
Intelligence is widely assumed to be normally distributed, making the mean the same as the median.
No, it's a statistical measure of what percentile you're in and they renormalize the scale constantly to keep it that way. The only thing you can tell about two people with 90 and 110 in IQ is that there's just as many people between 90 and 100 as it is between 100 and 110, but there's absolutely no measure of how far apart they are in intelligence.
(2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess./speaking from a 60/60 Mbps fiber connection @ $100/mo, no caps. So I am slightly ahead of the curve but almost all large, new buildings now have fiber. They'll deliver me 800/800 Mbps here if I wanted to pay $1100/month, the last mile is no longer the limit.
Well that noise are the massive fans that keep the temperature of the equipment fairly close to ambient. If you quiet down the fans, the room temperature won't change much but power-hungry components will suddenly be way, way above room temperature. I had a really crappy cabinet crammed with back-to-back disks, didn't think much of it until they started dying... checked the SMART data, oh 75C for the top drive... that's 50C or so above the ambient temperature in the room. Better cabinet with more space, more and bigger fans, now it's down to 40-45C. It's not to "pamper" that hardware they do it, it's to do it quietly. If you don't care that your gaming machine sounds like a jet engine taking off, there's no problem.
Hitachi: "Capacity - One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity."
Western Digital: "As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes."
Seagate (PDF product sheets): "When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes."
So no, no and more no. Sometimes there really should be a "-1, Wrong" moderation...
It's too common and too cheap. Napoleon used to serve his most distinguished guests on aluminium platters, the lesser guests on gold. Granite counter tops are nice, but they're more for the aesthetics and bling than because people actually need granite.
Statistically, they are buying things. In fact, more than the average person.
But it doesn't say that they pirate less as a fraction of their total media consumption. A person that watches 10 movies a year and pays for 80% buys less than a person that watches 100 movies a year and pays for 20%, but the last guy is much closer to being a "freeloading, non-contributing jerk".
I think the reason it's pulled is that it shows that people use it as their own price gouge. By pirating some things and buying others you can make the cost be whatever you feel is "right". Or whatever you can justify from your current income. They're not in control anymore, no matter what...
Which is rather like a 100m dash runner saying "I'm not running against the competition, but against the clock." It doesn't make you any less of a competitor, it actually makes you more dangerous since you're not just a bleak copy and you won't respond to distractions or diversions. Many, many project leaders would have started to respond to Microsoft's FUD campaigns and be taunted away from working on the project. Microsoft has been trying to trip Linux up and while they might have succeeded in adoption, the project just keeps going because Linus ignores them. Which is probably the smartest thing he could possibly do.
Yes, because nobody's seen a fake rolex since it's manufactured in Switzerland. Sure, manufacturing makes it easier to get blueprints, machinery, parts, make extra production runs and so on but China will continue to imitate, even if you bring the production home. You'll never be able to sell to China as long as they continue to ignore IP law. They might give it lip service from time to time but on the whole they know ignoring it is good for their economy.
I mean you now need power but really the battery on most desktop replacements is more like a small ups then for one the go use.
Sometimes it just doesn't matter. I had a laptop with defective battery, it lasted just long enough for it to resume and show the "battery critical" warning so you could dive for the outlet. I was only lugging it office to office though so it stayed in service a long time.
A company system might be a grey are (you control it but they own it, and also control to some degree) but the installer doesn't check and no-one really cares.
Since you'd be prohibited from doing work (commercial use) after installing it, I doubt the company would approve. Unless you plan to argue that you don't actually work, you just surf slashdot so it's okay...
If you go hiking, carrying 4.5 kg for hours is absolutely nothing. Most "road warriors" only cover a tiny bit on foot, mostly it's by car, bus, tram, subway or train - they very rarely actually carry their laptop all day. I've asked for the biggest, baddest laptop they issued because I essentially needed a "server in a laptop format" to lug around, GPU wasn't important but CPU, memory and HDD performance was. I'm guessing it weighed 3-4 kg, and the main reason I didn't go for one more extreme is because I'd have to go outside the normal procurement process. I'd typically be at one to three clients a day - anything more is too inefficient, so moving it two-four times a day, typically 5-10 minutes at each end of the move. That's 20-80 minutes total, I could easily have carried 10 or 20 kg as long as setting it up and packing it down is just as easy. It's more about how many actually have the need than the downside of the weight IMO. My impression is that designers mostly work out of their office, they don't go offsite to design. Then again, many want their laptop handy when they get inspired so I guess it's possible...
You don't come across a broken printer driver and say "Hey, I want to fix this. Where's the source code for it?" without being something of a geek. He wrote a Lisp interpreter, if that's not geeky then I don't know what is. I don't know how much of the GNU project he wrote himself, but I doubt he said "Everyone else you write the code, I'll lead." to get it started. And a life dedicated to software and source code, that sure sounds like a fanatic geek to me. Of course he's no Linus kind of geek, but then again most geeks couldn't fill his shoes if they tried. I mean I see a lot of ways RMS could have been the random irrelevant weirdo geek. He's still a weirdo, but the license he made and the relentless advocacy he did for it is pretty damn important. You can argue that he's not exactly talking well to corporations or the average joe, but apparently he convinced enough other geeks - like Linus - to use his license. And without code you don't have users at all, simple as that. He got the snowball rolling, even though he can hardly take credit for the whole avalanche.
I think he's said many stupid things, like his criticism of the Creative Commons licenses. His world is just extremely black and white. But on some things I think the critics are a bit unfair, like with DRM. It was obvious, however implied, that the idea of getting source code was to fix your device - in his original case, his printer. Not that someone else could make a different printer with that code, because the original printer wouldn't run any modified unsigned code. If he had been a little more precise when he wrote the GPLv2, it would have been covered as for him it's always about the user's freedom, not just the developer's freedom to use it for his own projects. That has been clear since he wrote about the "four freedoms" in 1986, long before the GPL. As such maybe he was a little lucky, because it doesn't seem Linus sees it that way and if he'd made that clear maybe Linus would have rejected his license. It wouldn't take much of a butterfly effect for it to all end differently...
XP may be officially "unsupported" in 2014, but China, and corporate users in other countries will keep it going for decades to come. Too bad Ubuntu/Gnome didn't "get the hint" and create a usable interface like XP instead of Unity/Gnome-Shell or they could of got some of the market share. IE6/XP is this centuries' COBOL.
Those who subscribe to the "it works, don't change it" mantra won't ever change unless they absolutely have to. And if they do have to change, they choose the smallest possible change which would be a Windows upgrade. The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.
In short, I don't think the "alternative browser" revolution ever happened in China. About 86% still use IE, the Chinese web is built for IE. They're really in a class of their own here, compare it to say India which is another country that is big and will be ridiculously huge as everybody gets online (July estimates):
IE: 33.48% FF: 32.86% Chrome: 29.78%
It's pretty much the same with search engines, everywhere but China Google has about 90%. In China it's 65% Baidu, 31% Google. They are on the Internet in the sense that they have an IP address but most Chinese are practically on their own net using their own tools and don't know or care what goes on in the "outside" world. Even if you call the US navel gazing, at least there's a helluva lot of foreigners that speak English and surf English-language sites that'll give you the international opinion. There's not a lot of non-Chinese that browse Chinese sites and the expat Chinese would like to visit or go back and still be on good terms with the government. Not saying it's perfect everywhere else either but it's still a fairly closed society, Internet or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah the audiophile mindset, if someone can't hear the invisible differences I hear then the problem is with them or their gear, because they differences are there I swear it. First of, you've got more than a passing interest if you sit around ABX testing audio codecs for any length of time, people with crap equipment might try it out a round or two but will have left long before they become more than statistical noise. The other good reason is that they tested this, long ago as MP3s were becoming popular. Top people, top equipment, around 256 kbps MP3 they couldn't tell it apart from the CD. Since then we've had better formats (AAC) and better encoders, plenty of edge cases ironed out... if you seriously think you can tell a 256 kbps AAC from iTunes and the CD apart, I'd pay to see you do it under controlled conditions. On a no cure, no pay basis of course - because I seriously doubt you could.
SHA and MD5 are hash algorithms, there's no way to recover the actual password from a hash. And since you need the password to log in, that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. The best they could do is some symmetric encryption with the key hardcoded in the software as security through obscurity.
Over 3/4ths support environmental conservation. But a majority also self-identify as moderate-to-conservative. Go figure.
If you ask "Do you want to conserve or destroy the environment?" then very few people will go for "destroy". The question is when it comes to concrete things like are you willing to support measures that'll be a public expense and implicitly lead to higher taxes, lead to higher prices on certain goods, ban environmentally harmful products even though this leads to lower quality or worse products or reduce your own consumption and environmental footprint. Most people will accept some small sacrifices and say "I'm doing my part" and that's the 75%+, then you have the real environmentalists who'd possibly vote for the Green party which are maybe 5%. That's just a figure out of thin air, but for example in the EU parliament there's 6.3% Greens. It's very hard to say if that 75%+ number says anything meaningful at all.
A deep issue that no one seems to be talking about is that ultimately, how can you "prove" you have legal access to any digital pattern at all, or "prove" that you do not have patterns you should not -- without a complete review of every financial and informational transaction you have ever made?
The same way as with physical property... you don't. I know someone who ended up with a drug conviction, he told me afterwards they took everything he didn't have a receipt for as being from drug money - including a camera I gave him. Simple as that, you don't own nothing until you can prove you do.
but its public domain right? Nothing illegal about it then right?
Making copies of a copy you have, no. But you still have to get that copy in a legal way, you don't have the right to violate terms of services or laws to get it. In that sense it's irrelevant whether the works he downloaded from JSTOR were copyrighted or not.
At least 7 confirmed killed, 2 seriously injured in the explosion. Also there's been a shooter that the police think is connected, unclear how many are injured/killed but reports suggest 5+ people have been shot there as well.
The guy is worried that Spotify will start cheap and then raise it's prices if successful. And if you cancel you don't get to keep listening to music (unless you figured out a way to make your own copy, like many slashdotters will). Not sure what this guy's point is.
Me neither. I mean if it's a good service now, use it now. If it turns to crap, well then switch service or go back to pirating then. The whole "don't use it now because it might turn crap later" doesn't make sense. It's not a bait and switch any more than a car lease, you have it as long as you pay the lease. Maybe the lease company will hike their rates later, but then you're free do to something else. Just like you are every month before you pay for Spotify. I don't see the problem here...
Large (some estimate 100kg of explosives) bombs against the headquarters of western governments far removed from any local conflict are rather rare. This is the equivalent of someone blowing up the White House or Downing Street in the UK. It might not reach quite up to the UK subway bombing or the Madrid train bombing but this was way more than one man with a suicide vest.
*raises hand* In fact, I've walked past ground zero twice a day for the last couple of years.
I've been predicting for a while now that when Linux finally arrives on the desktop no home users will have desktops. Already the recycling sites and web sites and streets around where I live are filling up with unwanted computer desks while everyone migrates to PS3s, iPhones or laptops...
Well, you're not getting many psychic points for predicting the move from desktop to laptops, that trend has been going on for years and laptop sales overtook desktops in Q3 2008. But laptops are in every way the traditional "desktop" with desktop software, except with portable hardware. So either you're predicting something that's not very spectacular, indeed has pretty much already happened and wouldn't reduce the potential market anyway, or you're predicting the death of the "desktop" as such and people migrating to PS3s, iPhones and other devices which I find that very hard to believe. The laptop is very much alive and kicking, even if the desktop is relegated to a niche - yet a much bigger niche still than say "Macs" is, just for comparison.
Intelligence is widely assumed to be normally distributed, making the mean the same as the median.
No, it's a statistical measure of what percentile you're in and they renormalize the scale constantly to keep it that way. The only thing you can tell about two people with 90 and 110 in IQ is that there's just as many people between 90 and 100 as it is between 100 and 110, but there's absolutely no measure of how far apart they are in intelligence.
(2) Optical media will not be dead if ISPs keep putting 150 GB (i.e. three-to-six hd movies) limitations on their internet lines.
So it'll be a US thing like the imperial system, I guess. /speaking from a 60/60 Mbps fiber connection @ $100/mo, no caps. So I am slightly ahead of the curve but almost all large, new buildings now have fiber. They'll deliver me 800/800 Mbps here if I wanted to pay $1100/month, the last mile is no longer the limit.
Well that noise are the massive fans that keep the temperature of the equipment fairly close to ambient. If you quiet down the fans, the room temperature won't change much but power-hungry components will suddenly be way, way above room temperature. I had a really crappy cabinet crammed with back-to-back disks, didn't think much of it until they started dying... checked the SMART data, oh 75C for the top drive... that's 50C or so above the ambient temperature in the room. Better cabinet with more space, more and bigger fans, now it's down to 40-45C. It's not to "pamper" that hardware they do it, it's to do it quietly. If you don't care that your gaming machine sounds like a jet engine taking off, there's no problem.
Hitachi:
"Capacity - One GB is equal to one billion bytes and one TB equals 1,000GB (one trillion bytes) when referring to hard drive capacity."
Western Digital:
"As used for storage capacity, one megabyte (MB) = one million bytes, one gigabyte (GB) = one billion bytes, and one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes."
Seagate (PDF product sheets):
"When referring to hard drive capacity, one gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes."
So no, no and more no. Sometimes there really should be a "-1, Wrong" moderation...
Pr0n stars? Because we all know what it's really full of...
It's too common and too cheap. Napoleon used to serve his most distinguished guests on aluminium platters, the lesser guests on gold. Granite counter tops are nice, but they're more for the aesthetics and bling than because people actually need granite.
Statistically, they are buying things. In fact, more than the average person.
But it doesn't say that they pirate less as a fraction of their total media consumption. A person that watches 10 movies a year and pays for 80% buys less than a person that watches 100 movies a year and pays for 20%, but the last guy is much closer to being a "freeloading, non-contributing jerk".
I think the reason it's pulled is that it shows that people use it as their own price gouge. By pirating some things and buying others you can make the cost be whatever you feel is "right". Or whatever you can justify from your current income. They're not in control anymore, no matter what...
Which is rather like a 100m dash runner saying "I'm not running against the competition, but against the clock." It doesn't make you any less of a competitor, it actually makes you more dangerous since you're not just a bleak copy and you won't respond to distractions or diversions. Many, many project leaders would have started to respond to Microsoft's FUD campaigns and be taunted away from working on the project. Microsoft has been trying to trip Linux up and while they might have succeeded in adoption, the project just keeps going because Linus ignores them. Which is probably the smartest thing he could possibly do.
Yes, because nobody's seen a fake rolex since it's manufactured in Switzerland. Sure, manufacturing makes it easier to get blueprints, machinery, parts, make extra production runs and so on but China will continue to imitate, even if you bring the production home. You'll never be able to sell to China as long as they continue to ignore IP law. They might give it lip service from time to time but on the whole they know ignoring it is good for their economy.
I mean you now need power but really the battery on most desktop replacements is more like a small ups then for one the go use.
Sometimes it just doesn't matter. I had a laptop with defective battery, it lasted just long enough for it to resume and show the "battery critical" warning so you could dive for the outlet. I was only lugging it office to office though so it stayed in service a long time.
A company system might be a grey are (you control it but they own it, and also control to some degree) but the installer doesn't check and no-one really cares.
Since you'd be prohibited from doing work (commercial use) after installing it, I doubt the company would approve. Unless you plan to argue that you don't actually work, you just surf slashdot so it's okay...
If you go hiking, carrying 4.5 kg for hours is absolutely nothing. Most "road warriors" only cover a tiny bit on foot, mostly it's by car, bus, tram, subway or train - they very rarely actually carry their laptop all day. I've asked for the biggest, baddest laptop they issued because I essentially needed a "server in a laptop format" to lug around, GPU wasn't important but CPU, memory and HDD performance was. I'm guessing it weighed 3-4 kg, and the main reason I didn't go for one more extreme is because I'd have to go outside the normal procurement process. I'd typically be at one to three clients a day - anything more is too inefficient, so moving it two-four times a day, typically 5-10 minutes at each end of the move. That's 20-80 minutes total, I could easily have carried 10 or 20 kg as long as setting it up and packing it down is just as easy. It's more about how many actually have the need than the downside of the weight IMO. My impression is that designers mostly work out of their office, they don't go offsite to design. Then again, many want their laptop handy when they get inspired so I guess it's possible...
You don't come across a broken printer driver and say "Hey, I want to fix this. Where's the source code for it?" without being something of a geek. He wrote a Lisp interpreter, if that's not geeky then I don't know what is. I don't know how much of the GNU project he wrote himself, but I doubt he said "Everyone else you write the code, I'll lead." to get it started. And a life dedicated to software and source code, that sure sounds like a fanatic geek to me. Of course he's no Linus kind of geek, but then again most geeks couldn't fill his shoes if they tried. I mean I see a lot of ways RMS could have been the random irrelevant weirdo geek. He's still a weirdo, but the license he made and the relentless advocacy he did for it is pretty damn important. You can argue that he's not exactly talking well to corporations or the average joe, but apparently he convinced enough other geeks - like Linus - to use his license. And without code you don't have users at all, simple as that. He got the snowball rolling, even though he can hardly take credit for the whole avalanche.
I think he's said many stupid things, like his criticism of the Creative Commons licenses. His world is just extremely black and white. But on some things I think the critics are a bit unfair, like with DRM. It was obvious, however implied, that the idea of getting source code was to fix your device - in his original case, his printer. Not that someone else could make a different printer with that code, because the original printer wouldn't run any modified unsigned code. If he had been a little more precise when he wrote the GPLv2, it would have been covered as for him it's always about the user's freedom, not just the developer's freedom to use it for his own projects. That has been clear since he wrote about the "four freedoms" in 1986, long before the GPL. As such maybe he was a little lucky, because it doesn't seem Linus sees it that way and if he'd made that clear maybe Linus would have rejected his license. It wouldn't take much of a butterfly effect for it to all end differently...
XP may be officially "unsupported" in 2014, but China, and corporate users in other countries will keep it going for decades to come. Too bad Ubuntu/Gnome didn't "get the hint" and create a usable interface like XP instead of Unity/Gnome-Shell or they could of got some of the market share. IE6/XP is this centuries' COBOL.
Those who subscribe to the "it works, don't change it" mantra won't ever change unless they absolutely have to. And if they do have to change, they choose the smallest possible change which would be a Windows upgrade. The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.
In short, I don't think the "alternative browser" revolution ever happened in China. About 86% still use IE, the Chinese web is built for IE. They're really in a class of their own here, compare it to say India which is another country that is big and will be ridiculously huge as everybody gets online (July estimates):
IE: 33.48%
FF: 32.86%
Chrome: 29.78%
It's pretty much the same with search engines, everywhere but China Google has about 90%. In China it's 65% Baidu, 31% Google. They are on the Internet in the sense that they have an IP address but most Chinese are practically on their own net using their own tools and don't know or care what goes on in the "outside" world. Even if you call the US navel gazing, at least there's a helluva lot of foreigners that speak English and surf English-language sites that'll give you the international opinion. There's not a lot of non-Chinese that browse Chinese sites and the expat Chinese would like to visit or go back and still be on good terms with the government. Not saying it's perfect everywhere else either but it's still a fairly closed society, Internet or not.