I can't spell it out any clearer. Mobile phones are a prime example of a platform where content producers control the whole hardware platform -- a subproduct of the mobile carrier controling the whole network. Video signal encryption is a significant part of control on the hardware by content producers. It is therefore a negative step, taken against the interests of users. It produces zero added-value to the user. At most, it lifts a fictitious limitation imposed by the content producers themselves (refusing to play HD over unencrypted connections).
At least, I know this will play out as it always does in a healthy capitalist economy. Current content owners will get so protective that they will infuriate the people who pay them, then collapse on themselves, to be replaced by more agile companies. It's just that the time lost in this process seems, well, lost.
I would be surprised if even 0.1% of consumers would be inconvenienced by this.
Did you ever switch cellphone and lost all your Java games and applications? That's the kind of inconvenience you'll see on movies on the PC platform. It'll affect a couple of orders of magnitude more than 0.1% of users.
Google is another example; a search engine company where the two guys running the company did post-doctorate work on search engines. Is it any wonder the company does so well?
Unfortunately for Google, the guy at the helm nowadays is a manager by career with the sinking of both Sun and Novell on the resumé. Bleak times ahead.
I still cherish the memories of the Wing Commander series, namely the fa-bu-lous Wing Commander III. Great games have great stories, and great stories benefit greatly from cinematic cutscenes.
You may defend that crappy cutscenes supporting a rubbish storyline hurt games. The emphasys should be, however, on rubbish storylines killing gameplay. Cinematics merely amplify the impact of the story on the game bundle.
Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.
sergio@localhost:/home/sergio>cat/proc/`pgrep firefox-bin`/status
Name: firefox-bin
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
(...)
VmSize: 184020 kB
(...)
So, I don't know what happened to your FF. Mine is using 179MB, and this is at the end of the day. Oh, and it never crashes.
Yes, let's sack all the editors and just publish all the manuscripts (that's what they are until they are edited) on the net. That way, all the books will contain literature of the quality found on slashdot. Wonderful. Thanks, but I'd rather have the editors there working on each and every books before it is published.
That's a dreadful scenario if I ever saw one. Let everyone write anything and automatic methods pull out the relevance! That's a sure path to chaos! Just look at the web. Nothing valuable in there! Only nonsense; you can't find a piece of interesting information out there...
Please reread my post. I actually think editors are needed. It's just that we need editors like O'Reilly or Blue Note Records, not editors liks SAMS Publishing or Sony Entertainment. SAMS is threatened by Google Print. And I couldn't care less.
This is an opt-OUT program. Fundamentally, this is flawed. I mean even webpage search engines are opt-in. Your website doesn't get indexed unless you submit it, yet Google are using the webpage parallel as an example of why they should be allowed to proceed with the Print program.
This is actually not true. A site will be indexed without being submitted to google. All that's needed is for a link there to be found by Google's crawlers somewhere on the web. Webpage indexing is in fact opt-out. You opt out by using the robots.txt file.
There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.
Let's stop to think for a moment. Google indexing book contents is a major step forward in everyone's ability to find the right content. It does, however, affect the market:
1) The general public can now (more) easily find content; and thus
2) Editors' role in the publishing chain might get diminished.
While (2) might affect editors negatively, (1)'s benefits clearly outweight the problems. More important than all this, authors are not negatively affected and will probably gain from this. As long as Google does not distribute the content, having book content searchable will certainly increase sales.
Editors are going nuts because they are seeing their role as middlemen between authors and readers changed. Personally, I think they will still be needed in the future, but only *if* they adapt. Much as record labels.
In the end, this is certainly not *evil*. It's a change. It's a change I believe has great benefits. Editors must adapt. If Google is violating Copyright, then copyright laws are wrong. They exist to protect authors, not editors. The current author - editor - reader model is one that has worked for an unwired society, but laws must allow for a connected society to find its ideal publishing model.
You have it backwards- sales tax dispraportionately effects the poor. Take 2 people- one person makes 500K, one makes 20K a year, with a 10% sales tax. The person making 500K probably spends 100K a year. He will invest (which is not sales taxed) the rest. He will pay 10K a year in sales tax- 2% of his total earnings. The person making 20K will not be saving anything- he needs to spend it all to live. He will pay 2K in sales tax- 10% of his total earnings. Thus the rich end up with a lower tax rate from sales tax than the poor. Being given a choice between no sales tax or no income tax, anyone who saves significant money should pick no income, they'll save more that way.
In the end, the approach difference is in the answer to this simple question:
Should you tax people for being rich or for living rich?
I'm pretty clearly on the camp of taxing people for living rich. People who spend their money on luxury should be taxed. People who reinvest their money should never be taxed. Those should invest inside borders, not on other countries with more favourable taxes.
If you decide taxing those living their wealth, then sales tax is the way to go. It's proportional to how much luxury you buy, so it's social adjusted. Moreover, it's a very simple tax, simple to control.
It might be. However the annoyance is completely offset by the googlability of the term. It's no small deal that you can now enter "AJAX toolkits" into google, and get modern javascript toolkits, instead of stuff dated from '94.
Trying not to sound a lot like a Bible whacko, I can't stop from pointing you to the Parable of the widow's mite. It concisely demonstrates the parent poster's point.
MSIE does not publish bug info, and it should be worse than Moz, but I'd wager it's not very bad -- several windows versions use utf-8 internally, and Asia is a very very larget market to leave unsatisfied. The problem isn't on the browsers either. Heck, Big5 -> unicode is convertable with a simple dictionary -- if you support Big5, you'll surely support Big5 characters within unicode.
Furthermore, you also have to comply with Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification, which, among other things, restricts you to UTF-8 or UTF-16, which will cause you severe compatibility headaches if you need to use many non-Latin-based languages.
That's bullshit. UTF8 and UTF16 are unicode encodings. They are capable of encoding every unicode code point as well as UTF32. They are variable width encodings, optimized for the basic multilingual plane and to latin characters. You do lose some space efficiency for 'rare' characters, but even that loss is not significative. Very far from severe headaches.
I also moved to vim from emacs. In my case it was because of server administration over lines with some lag (0.5s-1s). Vim allows you to queue commands like move 25 characters right, change characters from here to '(', type something. Over lines with lag, this is a killer feature.
From then on, I grew attached to the lightweight nature of vim.
The beauty of the gimp interface needs one thing missing from most windows setups: Virtual desktops. You assign The Gimp to one or two virtual desktops, and you have all windows uncluttered, using the space as they should and without the kludge that is MDI.
MDI is a kludge, a failed attempt to copy Mac behaviour. You can prove it failed by observing how MS Office is no longer MDI (somewhat).
Add Xinerama to virtual desktops, and Gimp's interface excels. Moreover, it excels in an environment where MDI would prevent me from using the second monitor.
- INSERT is very slow (about 3x slower compared to MySQL/InnoDB) for my dataset. The "answer" is to use the COPY command or disable your indexes/FK's which is f*cking lame since you loose all your relational integrity. I was willing to trade off performance for disaster prevention (system crash, power failure, etc) by disabling WAL, but you can't actually do that.
Wrap the inserts in a transaction. Auto-commits force OS syncs, and these are slooow.
- The OSS tools available aren't as good for postgres as they are for MySQL. I've yet to find anything as nice or complete as phpmyadmin for Pg or something that supports schema's for ER Diagrams. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of designing my DB in vim.
PhpPgAdmin is way better than vim. Granted, PhpMyAdmin is better, but the difference is no showstopper.
- Having to run vacuum all the time to help the query optimizer figure things out. Why this doesn't happen automagically in the background without me having to worry about it is beyond me.
Like pg_autovacuum?
- In general, I find the documentation on mysql.com superior to on postgresql.org, but #postgresql more then makes up for it.
Will that work with any new cars? The last three cars I've owned all had keys with chips in them. Lose the key and the dealer charges between $100 and $200 to replace it.
And you don't protest? With Audi, you can get the car to learn any new key, using some strange protocol I don't remember clearly. Something along the lines of starting the car with the old key and then with the new one, with or without dancing around the vehicle in between.
You have to pay if you lose all the keys, but then you'll be paying for a new central computer. Oh, and you'll pay by the nose...
All very beautiful. But then, why the heck don't you program in Smalltalk? Smalltalk has been here for ages, is the most beautiful OO language I've ever seen, and has all the features Ruby developers rave about.
The real question is: Does Ruby present the same flaws that prevented Smalltalk from taking over the world? Take a look to the side, and you'll find C powering most applications, not Objective C -- a much much cleaner language. This is the same kind of scenario.
Probably, a language for the bottom 95% is just what is needed. Why? Because of libraries. Where is the CPAN of Ruby? How does it compare to Perl's CPAN?
Or for a broader one that incompasses the first, security.
The issues on that paper boil down to two problems:
register_globals must be turned *off*, which has been the default setting for some time
User input must not be trusted (must be validated)
The first is not a problem as of now, as the insecurity of automatically registering global variables with user input is a widely recognized problem. Any developer worth his salt will avoid register_globals (and it is off by default, I repeat).
Ruby's taint is *one* approach to the second problem, but it is not even the one I like best. I prefer design by contract, with precondition and postcondition checks in place. It clears up the 'juicy' code. After preconditions, you may trust user input, as it can't be tainted anymore. The actual processing code may be as simple as possible.
If you strip away enough you can get to the fact that every movie has one of two plots:
Introduce hero, Kill hero (or hero's dreams)
or
Introduce hero, hero succeeds.
You were right, up until Psycho, where the introduced 'Hero' dies midway through the movie.
Don't laugh. It was a real breakthrough in plot lines. Since then, many variants were invented, but movies are no longer RPG narratives.
It is something which could be added to Windows without breaking compatibility. It's a kernel-level change that doesn't need any user-space changes at all. Fixing this would make it possible to replace drivers and running programs just fine.
It'd break compatibility. Some programs use this behaviour as a semaphore mechanism, and would thus break.
Slashdot Mirror
At least, I know this will play out as it always does in a healthy capitalist economy. Current content owners will get so protective that they will infuriate the people who pay them, then collapse on themselves, to be replaced by more agile companies. It's just that the time lost in this process seems, well, lost.
You just need to install hal and dbus. Start their respective daemons, and you're set. No need to fiddle around with udev.rules.
You may defend that crappy cutscenes supporting a rubbish storyline hurt games. The emphasys should be, however, on rubbish storylines killing gameplay. Cinematics merely amplify the impact of the story on the game bundle.
Name: firefox-bin
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
(...)
VmSize: 184020 kB
(...)
So, I don't know what happened to your FF. Mine is using 179MB, and this is at the end of the day. Oh, and it never crashes.
Please reread my post. I actually think editors are needed. It's just that we need editors like O'Reilly or Blue Note Records, not editors liks SAMS Publishing or Sony Entertainment. SAMS is threatened by Google Print. And I couldn't care less.
1) The general public can now (more) easily find content; and thus
2) Editors' role in the publishing chain might get diminished.
While (2) might affect editors negatively, (1)'s benefits clearly outweight the problems. More important than all this, authors are not negatively affected and will probably gain from this. As long as Google does not distribute the content, having book content searchable will certainly increase sales.
Editors are going nuts because they are seeing their role as middlemen between authors and readers changed. Personally, I think they will still be needed in the future, but only *if* they adapt. Much as record labels.
In the end, this is certainly not *evil*. It's a change. It's a change I believe has great benefits. Editors must adapt. If Google is violating Copyright, then copyright laws are wrong. They exist to protect authors, not editors. The current author - editor - reader model is one that has worked for an unwired society, but laws must allow for a connected society to find its ideal publishing model.
The filesystem structure is like that for good reasons. Go read up on them.
He probably meant piece...
I'm pretty clearly on the camp of taxing people for living rich. People who spend their money on luxury should be taxed. People who reinvest their money should never be taxed. Those should invest inside borders, not on other countries with more favourable taxes.
If you decide taxing those living their wealth, then sales tax is the way to go. It's proportional to how much luxury you buy, so it's social adjusted. Moreover, it's a very simple tax, simple to control.
Trying not to sound a lot like a Bible whacko, I can't stop from pointing you to the Parable of the widow's mite. It concisely demonstrates the parent poster's point.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_for mat=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__ope n__&content=utf
MSIE does not publish bug info, and it should be worse than Moz, but I'd wager it's not very bad -- several windows versions use utf-8 internally, and Asia is a very very larget market to leave unsatisfied. The problem isn't on the browsers either. Heck, Big5 -> unicode is convertable with a simple dictionary -- if you support Big5, you'll surely support Big5 characters within unicode.
From then on, I grew attached to the lightweight nature of vim.
1) cursor: hand does not exist.
2) You can set any attribute via DOM
3) Yes you can, as standardized by DOM2
4) Please clarify
5) No. They implemented all of ECMAscript and most of DOM Level 2. Nothing was 'taken out', unless you assume MSIE as a standard.
MDI is a kludge, a failed attempt to copy Mac behaviour. You can prove it failed by observing how MS Office is no longer MDI (somewhat).
Add Xinerama to virtual desktops, and Gimp's interface excels. Moreover, it excels in an environment where MDI would prevent me from using the second monitor.
You have to pay if you lose all the keys, but then you'll be paying for a new central computer. Oh, and you'll pay by the nose...
The real question is: Does Ruby present the same flaws that prevented Smalltalk from taking over the world? Take a look to the side, and you'll find C powering most applications, not Objective C -- a much much cleaner language. This is the same kind of scenario.
Probably, a language for the bottom 95% is just what is needed. Why? Because of libraries. Where is the CPAN of Ruby? How does it compare to Perl's CPAN?
- register_globals must be turned *off*, which has been the default setting for some time
- User input must not be trusted (must be validated)
The first is not a problem as of now, as the insecurity of automatically registering global variables with user input is a widely recognized problem. Any developer worth his salt will avoid register_globals (and it is off by default, I repeat).Ruby's taint is *one* approach to the second problem, but it is not even the one I like best. I prefer design by contract, with precondition and postcondition checks in place. It clears up the 'juicy' code. After preconditions, you may trust user input, as it can't be tainted anymore. The actual processing code may be as simple as possible.
You were right, up until Psycho, where the introduced 'Hero' dies midway through the movie.
Don't laugh. It was a real breakthrough in plot lines. Since then, many variants were invented, but movies are no longer RPG narratives.