If he did 100 duels, that'd be unlikely. If you're fighting an inferior force, like a special ops team with night vision googles against a guerilla base without, killing 100 people in 8 days is far from unlikely. I'm pretty sure that in e.g. the real land war against Iraq the US forces beat them by a factor of at least 100:1.
....if one can be broken, probably the other one too. The chance that the frequency of which you connect matters is <0.001% in my opinion. Either it's secure or it isn't, and either way slashdot won't be able to answer that.
What does it matter? There is no possible way that all the uploaders or downloaders can be prosecuted in the court systems, even globally; and as the internet continues to expand, the "problem" is only going to get more complicated (worse, from the copyright holders perspectives)
Because they will try very hard to make unreasonable allegations against each person, and unreasonable damages for each alleged infringement. Giving people 100,000$ in a speeding ticket because they don't catch 99% of those speeding wouldn't be justice, it'd be law enforcement by terror. The copyright industry is dying the death of a thousand needles, and would like each needle to count as murder.
I've read Dune. I've also read Lord of the Rings. I'd much rather try to pull off Dune, I see quite clearly what parts could be heavily compressed if not cut. Of course the true fans would hate anything.
The web has never had a free video format, ever. This is an effort by the web browsers to take the market back from Adobe with the same codec used in most flash videos, minus flash. At least H.264 has many good open source implementations in ffmpeg and x264 whereas flash has none, gnash is an utter failure in my experience. So it's much better than it was but because it's not good enough we'd rather crash this project and go back to using flash.
It's really this simple, if it works with YouTube and without flash, I'm switching to it. In my case on Linux there's chromium-browser + chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree = YouTube without flash, all open source. Firefox? Opera? Freewheeling off the road, thinking their market share can't leave as suddenly as it came for something better. If Google chooses to tank Firefox by not renewing the deal and promoting Chrome as the best way to watch YouTube, the battle would be over before it started.
Has there ever really been a serious option B effort to just pick a time and do a major kernel fork and maintain it forever by any company as large as google, with their level of developers and resources/cash behind them? Any precedent there?
Not to my knowledge, but from the grandparent you'd think this would be resolved quickly one way or the other. Google could just keep a patchset and rebase from the vanilla kernel from time to time like pretty much every distro does and which will work just fine unless it's an area where the kernel devs are also rewriting a lot. Then their kernel and their drivers would have it and the vanilla kernel wouldn't.
I like it, really, I do. But seriously. When measuring distance in light years, the shortest path will always between two points(1)
Ignoring the curvature of the Earth the shortest path for the tube would be a straight line too, but most people won't have a direct route. For this tube map to make sense you have to assume a populated universe with economics of scale and space liners going where it's popular, so you'd still get hubs because it's more efficient than trying to build point-to-point connections between every star in the galaxy (some 10^22 routes needed).
If you count DivX;-) 3.11 alpha as MPEG4 ASP compliant which isn't quite true but later DivX/Xvid versions were, we've been using the same codec since 1998 only slowly phasing it out with H.264. As for VC-2, there's no wikipedia page for it, the first hit on google has nothing to do with it, the fifth hit is a blog post from 2008 where the last comment says it'll be a near lossless production/archival codec unsuitable for Internet use. So if you ignore all the evidence to the contrary, I guess you could be surprised but none of the rest will be surprised if H.264 lasts...
Mostly people will defraud themselves, there's no reason why "rich, famous and sexy person uses product X" should imply "product X will make me rich, famous and sexy". Customers are much happier to buy an overpriced item at reduced price than a full price item because they feel smart, they're as much looking to beat the "fair" price as the marketers are. And you shouid always recognize that a marketer will talk about the ideal customer, that "Teach Photoshop in 21 days" will not make you an artist, that exercise machine won't help you when you break down 5 minutes in because everything hurts and go on a MacDonald's gorge and so on. Failed reality checks vs you as a person is also not fraud.
I know there are marketers that really defraud people, but having worked as a consultant I've come to recognize a lot of gray. For example, in our estimates we generally assume the customer is prompt, competent, coherent, authorized and in general a very good customer. Almost all of them fail on some level of dysfunctionality, but it's hopeless for us to estimate it in. Either they take forever to evaluate the pros and cons, they don't understand them, they disagree internally, no one feels authorized to decide, circumvented some internal process and have to backtrack, come into conflict with purchasing or with legal or indeed any one of a million things. Once we're out the door, they're free to blame us for every failure and cost overrun but I digress. The point is I go into many projects believing little of the estimates. Does that make me a fraudster?
In the US, you're fucked. In pretty much all European countries, large parties grow and shrink even though they rarely fall completely. For example, here in Norway in 2001 Ap acted like an ass and went from 35% to 24% in the election. In 2005 Høyre lost 7.1% and FrP gained 7.5%, shifting which was the biggest right wing party.
It may not shift the overall balance, but US politics would be way different if they had to fear the "New democrats" or "New republicans" taking their seats, not just the antichrist on the other side. Australia, seems to have some fucked up variation of the same, according to this page the Greens got 7.79% of the votes and zero seats. That is defective democracy by design.
They got one "Browsers trend" and one "Browser version trend". The former has one "IE" and one "Firefox" column and is not so very interesting. In the versions page it's whatever they feel gives something useful, nobody bothers that all Mac users are on version 10 and Linux users on version 2, they go to the detail level that matters.
How come the GPU vendors do not have a freaking portion of their hardware always work the same way, with same driver code - it just does mode setting and sets up the GPU for decent level of 2D acceleration.
Because it doesn't have a 2D engine anymore, it's all treated like a special case of 3D where z is always 0. That is just one example, there's a lot of rewiring going on inside the pipeline. Try for example reading this page on how nVidia is changing their fixed function pipeline and see if you manage not to get a headache. The drivers have to work the new way even just to achieve the old ways, it's not like CPUs where you slightly extend the x86 interface.
I really don't know where all these people come from who say "nVidia's drivers just work".
I guess people like me - that use distros with driver versions we know work, if nVidia doesn't support the latest kernel I don't upgrade. There are things I haven't been able to get working, but I've never had a crash I could trace back to the closed source drivers. Unlike Catalyst, which I had one really, really bad experience with from back before AMD bought ATI. To put it this way, if nVidia's support was bronze then ATI finished last with a broken leg. Open source is stable yes, but Intel always sucked horrible on 3D and up until now there was no accelerated driver for ATI or nVidia either.
Apologies. I should have been more clear. Why wouldn't they just suggest the latest release version for the IE browser (IE8) to begin with?
Because IE8 is still unsupported by many. For example, I know of a certain US software giant and the product I work with still doesn't officially support IE8. It supports IE6, IE7, some versions of Firefox and Safari so it's not some IE6 crapwork, but it's not official. And not everyone is jumping at the chance to try their very newest release, either. Sure, if you're replacing an IE6 application it should support everything but they'll have many others holding them at IE7.
That not bad storage per chip. Now they need to be able to pack 16 of them into a standard flash stick, for 128GB flash sticks. I'll bet they top out at 64GB per stick though.
If you're willing to pay, there's already a 256GB memory stick, I see it in stock for about 800$ + VAT here, so I guess this makes it possible to go to 512 GB. Not that I really see the sense in this product given the access speed, but I guess it's good for bragging rights.
That part is mostly fixed, I got a OCZ Vertex (Indilinx controller) and I don't notice any problems. Neither do those with Intel SSDs, as far as I know. The biggest issue is that I checked, and right now it costs more for the Vertex than I paid in April last year. If they could say halve the price, then 30-40GB SSDs would be in the "normal" price range for laptop HDDs, only being much smaller. Then you could talk to people about big vs fast, because it wouldn't add such a huge premium to the cost which is a huge turn-off. Right now you have to be willing to pay quite a lot to make your computer a little faster.
There's two very fundamental decisions in the US, the Sony vs Betamax decision and the MGM vs Grokster decision. The essence is that the Betamax decision says infringements are not sufficient in itself as long as there is substantial non-infringing use, but the Grokster decision (9-0 vote) says it's not a general shield against how you design, apply, market, sell and support it. That goes for how you plan it internally, how you market it externally and how you handle support from users. They could go as far as consider things implicit in its domain or construction, for example if I set up an indexer that only indexed warez groups or had search filters only relevant to warez releases that would be used against me as intent.
In short, you have to keep a thick veil between you and infringing users and pretend the 800lb elephant in the room isn't there. You are making a general tool for a general market, once you start straying from that you are very likely to break the law. And it's an extremely good reason why there's normally a zero tolerance policy on warez talk in support forums. You can not legally allow yourself to know.
Basically, I think it is because they'll only do cases where they think they'll win something. For example, quite early on Usenet servers scored some pretty fundamental victories against copyright so they're attacking indexers instead which could put a cramp in Usenet's style. I think the biggest danger is that by attacking Rapidshare and Megaupload, is that they'll kill off files without password because those could be scanned and filtered. I suspect shortly after a victory against them, a new set of file hosts would show up where having a passworded archive is mandatory and you must get info/pass from another service. People will still pay for the bandwidth and it'll be a win-win for everyone but the *AAs.
It's time to see IE6 go. Unfortunately, Microsoft will support IE6 until support for XP runs out - this model needs to change, badly.
SP3 for XP should've made IE7 mandatory. Unfortunately, the right decisions are not always good for business.
Yeah, because forced upgrades also go over so well with this crowd. Should a RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu LTS release of Linux force upgrades to Firefox? Is it okay to do that just because the next major version is free? There's a lot you can blame Microsoft for, but it's the companies that don't want to upgrade which is the problem here. Or would you rather Microsoft moves more in the direction of Apple too, making decisions for you than to leave it to the users?
As a result his guess for L was around 10000, a few orders of magnitude off it would seem.
Assuming they didn't do digital before radio, or don't significantly use huge broadcasters at all (fiber optics + local wireless anyone?) or any one of the other million assumptions to make L > 0 in the first place. But instead instead assume that soon we'll start finding Earth-size exoplanets and when we do I'm sure we'll leave a satellite dish in that direction listening for any signals of any sort. I would think that any other species that discover a planet similar to their own would do the same. That could easily last 10000 years before we'd give up.
All it takes then is for one of us to send a ping, I'm assuming with a directed beam we could make it orders of magnitudes stronger than a random TV broadcast, something simple yet clearly artificial. And I don't think we should be that concerned about alien invasion, if they can see our planet - which seems easier than picking up a radio signal, then they can analyze the orbit and the atmospheric composition. They could be more likely to want to colonize an planet apparently uninhabited by intelligent life like settlers than trying to take over one, I think even here on Earth we'd jump more at the chance of "Earth 2" than starting an all out war - and losing the planet really is all out.
And ultimately, this doesn't really influence the number of civilizations in the galaxy, only if we can find them or not. If anything, it says that there could be a lot more hiding out there that we don't hear from.
They don't need it "through and tested", the 1.92M$ verdict went around the world and they got all the FUD they could possibly want. The idea that you can be fined millions of dollars for file sharing will stay in the public mind regardless, until there's a decision that says you definitely can't. So the RIAA got very little to gain and everything to lose here.
Same as every other software that infringes on a patent or two? Some patent troll gets richer but hopefully some politician cares enough about the library of congress to do something about it. At least the odds are better than going after companies or individual contributors.
That should read: "I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government isn't changing the market by measuring office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does."
Slashdot Mirror
If he did 100 duels, that'd be unlikely. If you're fighting an inferior force, like a special ops team with night vision googles against a guerilla base without, killing 100 people in 8 days is far from unlikely. I'm pretty sure that in e.g. the real land war against Iraq the US forces beat them by a factor of at least 100:1.
....if one can be broken, probably the other one too. The chance that the frequency of which you connect matters is <0.001% in my opinion. Either it's secure or it isn't, and either way slashdot won't be able to answer that.
What does it matter? There is no possible way that all the uploaders or downloaders can be prosecuted in the court systems, even globally; and as the internet continues to expand, the "problem" is only going to get more complicated (worse, from the copyright holders perspectives)
Because they will try very hard to make unreasonable allegations against each person, and unreasonable damages for each alleged infringement. Giving people 100,000$ in a speeding ticket because they don't catch 99% of those speeding wouldn't be justice, it'd be law enforcement by terror. The copyright industry is dying the death of a thousand needles, and would like each needle to count as murder.
I've read Dune. I've also read Lord of the Rings. I'd much rather try to pull off Dune, I see quite clearly what parts could be heavily compressed if not cut. Of course the true fans would hate anything.
The web has never had a free video format, ever. This is an effort by the web browsers to take the market back from Adobe with the same codec used in most flash videos, minus flash. At least H.264 has many good open source implementations in ffmpeg and x264 whereas flash has none, gnash is an utter failure in my experience. So it's much better than it was but because it's not good enough we'd rather crash this project and go back to using flash.
It's really this simple, if it works with YouTube and without flash, I'm switching to it. In my case on Linux there's chromium-browser + chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree = YouTube without flash, all open source. Firefox? Opera? Freewheeling off the road, thinking their market share can't leave as suddenly as it came for something better. If Google chooses to tank Firefox by not renewing the deal and promoting Chrome as the best way to watch YouTube, the battle would be over before it started.
Has there ever really been a serious option B effort to just pick a time and do a major kernel fork and maintain it forever by any company as large as google, with their level of developers and resources/cash behind them? Any precedent there?
Not to my knowledge, but from the grandparent you'd think this would be resolved quickly one way or the other. Google could just keep a patchset and rebase from the vanilla kernel from time to time like pretty much every distro does and which will work just fine unless it's an area where the kernel devs are also rewriting a lot. Then their kernel and their drivers would have it and the vanilla kernel wouldn't.
I like it, really, I do. But seriously. When measuring distance in light years, the shortest path will always between two points(1)
Ignoring the curvature of the Earth the shortest path for the tube would be a straight line too, but most people won't have a direct route. For this tube map to make sense you have to assume a populated universe with economics of scale and space liners going where it's popular, so you'd still get hubs because it's more efficient than trying to build point-to-point connections between every star in the galaxy (some 10^22 routes needed).
Remember the CODECs we were using six years ago?
If you count DivX ;-) 3.11 alpha as MPEG4 ASP compliant which isn't quite true but later DivX/Xvid versions were, we've been using the same codec since 1998 only slowly phasing it out with H.264. As for VC-2, there's no wikipedia page for it, the first hit on google has nothing to do with it, the fifth hit is a blog post from 2008 where the last comment says it'll be a near lossless production/archival codec unsuitable for Internet use. So if you ignore all the evidence to the contrary, I guess you could be surprised but none of the rest will be surprised if H.264 lasts...
Mostly people will defraud themselves, there's no reason why "rich, famous and sexy person uses product X" should imply "product X will make me rich, famous and sexy". Customers are much happier to buy an overpriced item at reduced price than a full price item because they feel smart, they're as much looking to beat the "fair" price as the marketers are. And you shouid always recognize that a marketer will talk about the ideal customer, that "Teach Photoshop in 21 days" will not make you an artist, that exercise machine won't help you when you break down 5 minutes in because everything hurts and go on a MacDonald's gorge and so on. Failed reality checks vs you as a person is also not fraud.
I know there are marketers that really defraud people, but having worked as a consultant I've come to recognize a lot of gray. For example, in our estimates we generally assume the customer is prompt, competent, coherent, authorized and in general a very good customer. Almost all of them fail on some level of dysfunctionality, but it's hopeless for us to estimate it in. Either they take forever to evaluate the pros and cons, they don't understand them, they disagree internally, no one feels authorized to decide, circumvented some internal process and have to backtrack, come into conflict with purchasing or with legal or indeed any one of a million things. Once we're out the door, they're free to blame us for every failure and cost overrun but I digress. The point is I go into many projects believing little of the estimates. Does that make me a fraudster?
In the US, you're fucked. In pretty much all European countries, large parties grow and shrink even though they rarely fall completely. For example, here in Norway in 2001 Ap acted like an ass and went from 35% to 24% in the election. In 2005 Høyre lost 7.1% and FrP gained 7.5%, shifting which was the biggest right wing party.
It may not shift the overall balance, but US politics would be way different if they had to fear the "New democrats" or "New republicans" taking their seats, not just the antichrist on the other side. Australia, seems to have some fucked up variation of the same, according to this page the Greens got 7.79% of the votes and zero seats. That is defective democracy by design.
They got one "Browsers trend" and one "Browser version trend". The former has one "IE" and one "Firefox" column and is not so very interesting. In the versions page it's whatever they feel gives something useful, nobody bothers that all Mac users are on version 10 and Linux users on version 2, they go to the detail level that matters.
How come the GPU vendors do not have a freaking portion of their hardware always work the same way, with same driver code - it just does mode setting and sets up the GPU for decent level of 2D acceleration.
Because it doesn't have a 2D engine anymore, it's all treated like a special case of 3D where z is always 0. That is just one example, there's a lot of rewiring going on inside the pipeline. Try for example reading this page on how nVidia is changing their fixed function pipeline and see if you manage not to get a headache. The drivers have to work the new way even just to achieve the old ways, it's not like CPUs where you slightly extend the x86 interface.
I really don't know where all these people come from who say "nVidia's drivers just work".
I guess people like me - that use distros with driver versions we know work, if nVidia doesn't support the latest kernel I don't upgrade. There are things I haven't been able to get working, but I've never had a crash I could trace back to the closed source drivers. Unlike Catalyst, which I had one really, really bad experience with from back before AMD bought ATI. To put it this way, if nVidia's support was bronze then ATI finished last with a broken leg. Open source is stable yes, but Intel always sucked horrible on 3D and up until now there was no accelerated driver for ATI or nVidia either.
Apologies. I should have been more clear. Why wouldn't they just suggest the latest release version for the IE browser (IE8) to begin with?
Because IE8 is still unsupported by many. For example, I know of a certain US software giant and the product I work with still doesn't officially support IE8. It supports IE6, IE7, some versions of Firefox and Safari so it's not some IE6 crapwork, but it's not official. And not everyone is jumping at the chance to try their very newest release, either. Sure, if you're replacing an IE6 application it should support everything but they'll have many others holding them at IE7.
That not bad storage per chip. Now they need to be able to pack 16 of them into a standard flash stick, for 128GB flash sticks. I'll bet they top out at 64GB per stick though.
If you're willing to pay, there's already a 256GB memory stick, I see it in stock for about 800$ + VAT here, so I guess this makes it possible to go to 512 GB. Not that I really see the sense in this product given the access speed, but I guess it's good for bragging rights.
That part is mostly fixed, I got a OCZ Vertex (Indilinx controller) and I don't notice any problems. Neither do those with Intel SSDs, as far as I know. The biggest issue is that I checked, and right now it costs more for the Vertex than I paid in April last year. If they could say halve the price, then 30-40GB SSDs would be in the "normal" price range for laptop HDDs, only being much smaller. Then you could talk to people about big vs fast, because it wouldn't add such a huge premium to the cost which is a huge turn-off. Right now you have to be willing to pay quite a lot to make your computer a little faster.
There's two very fundamental decisions in the US, the Sony vs Betamax decision and the MGM vs Grokster decision. The essence is that the Betamax decision says infringements are not sufficient in itself as long as there is substantial non-infringing use, but the Grokster decision (9-0 vote) says it's not a general shield against how you design, apply, market, sell and support it. That goes for how you plan it internally, how you market it externally and how you handle support from users. They could go as far as consider things implicit in its domain or construction, for example if I set up an indexer that only indexed warez groups or had search filters only relevant to warez releases that would be used against me as intent.
In short, you have to keep a thick veil between you and infringing users and pretend the 800lb elephant in the room isn't there. You are making a general tool for a general market, once you start straying from that you are very likely to break the law. And it's an extremely good reason why there's normally a zero tolerance policy on warez talk in support forums. You can not legally allow yourself to know.
Basically, I think it is because they'll only do cases where they think they'll win something. For example, quite early on Usenet servers scored some pretty fundamental victories against copyright so they're attacking indexers instead which could put a cramp in Usenet's style. I think the biggest danger is that by attacking Rapidshare and Megaupload, is that they'll kill off files without password because those could be scanned and filtered. I suspect shortly after a victory against them, a new set of file hosts would show up where having a passworded archive is mandatory and you must get info/pass from another service. People will still pay for the bandwidth and it'll be a win-win for everyone but the *AAs.
It's time to see IE6 go. Unfortunately, Microsoft will support IE6 until support for XP runs out - this model needs to change, badly.
SP3 for XP should've made IE7 mandatory. Unfortunately, the right decisions are not always good for business.
Yeah, because forced upgrades also go over so well with this crowd. Should a RHEL/SLES/Ubuntu LTS release of Linux force upgrades to Firefox? Is it okay to do that just because the next major version is free? There's a lot you can blame Microsoft for, but it's the companies that don't want to upgrade which is the problem here. Or would you rather Microsoft moves more in the direction of Apple too, making decisions for you than to leave it to the users?
As a result his guess for L was around 10000, a few orders of magnitude off it would seem.
Assuming they didn't do digital before radio, or don't significantly use huge broadcasters at all (fiber optics + local wireless anyone?) or any one of the other million assumptions to make L > 0 in the first place. But instead instead assume that soon we'll start finding Earth-size exoplanets and when we do I'm sure we'll leave a satellite dish in that direction listening for any signals of any sort. I would think that any other species that discover a planet similar to their own would do the same. That could easily last 10000 years before we'd give up.
All it takes then is for one of us to send a ping, I'm assuming with a directed beam we could make it orders of magnitudes stronger than a random TV broadcast, something simple yet clearly artificial. And I don't think we should be that concerned about alien invasion, if they can see our planet - which seems easier than picking up a radio signal, then they can analyze the orbit and the atmospheric composition. They could be more likely to want to colonize an planet apparently uninhabited by intelligent life like settlers than trying to take over one, I think even here on Earth we'd jump more at the chance of "Earth 2" than starting an all out war - and losing the planet really is all out.
And ultimately, this doesn't really influence the number of civilizations in the galaxy, only if we can find them or not. If anything, it says that there could be a lot more hiding out there that we don't hear from.
Yes, I hear they've got her locked up tight in a sanctuary.
You got that wrong, she's the one who is locking them up. Clearly she's a dom, not a sub.
They don't need it "through and tested", the 1.92M$ verdict went around the world and they got all the FUD they could possibly want. The idea that you can be fined millions of dollars for file sharing will stay in the public mind regardless, until there's a decision that says you definitely can't. So the RIAA got very little to gain and everything to lose here.
Yes, but 4/23 =17.3% of the EU, from a nation-state perspective.
Uh, try 3/27...
Same as every other software that infringes on a patent or two? Some patent troll gets richer but hopefully some politician cares enough about the library of congress to do something about it. At least the odds are better than going after companies or individual contributors.
That should read: "I just find it ridiculous to claim that the government isn't changing the market by measuring office suites by completely different metrics than the free market does."