I've had this happen to projects I lead. Adware/spyware is almost always bundled (it's distribution is the primary motivation for Backspaceware), and this definitely causes harm. Fortunately, sites like download.com have a review process and they found my email address buried in the 'about' dialog, I guess the backspacers missed one...
Now, arguments can be made that the standard is not defined well enough to be implemented (due to things like "do it like word95 did"), but that's the sort of thing that should be resolved by all interested parties before finalizing.
Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?
With software (Linux) RAID the actual RAID set is just partitions on the physical drive, not the whole entire drive. My/boot and root partition is mirrored on all of my drives, so even if the array completely disappeared I can still boot up. To gain access to the rest of my data (RAID5), any recent kernel with RAID support will do..
Hardware RAID controllers may have made sense 10 years ago when commodity hardware was much slower (and so a dedicated CPU for RAID was a must), but unless I'm missing something they no longer make sense today.
I enjoy swearing when it's the right time, but work is not the place for it, and swearing is not a workplace communication enhancer; it's a tool of anger, frustration and an inability to express one's full feeling on a subject.
There is no right or wrong place to swear, but there IS a right or wrong time. Ever been angry or frustrated or unable to express a feeling on a subject, at work?
There is overhead involved, even with the off-loading.
Looking at my Ubuntu system, the #1 process for using up cpu is compiz (1h40m of CPU time during 7d uptime), in spite of off-loading the actual rendering to my nVidia card. I don't really notice as I have a Quad-core CPU, but it would hurt quite a bit more with only 1 or even with 2 cores.
My problem with Pidgin is with the rather plain way it looks. Kopete has a killer theming engine and many themes which are far more polished (imho) then Pidgin.
English is not standardized, so what exactly is meant by "wrong" (aside from the obvious spelling, grammar or typo)? The language grows new words and evolves old ones all the time.
There is NO commercial software that will convert a DRMed WMA file into anything
-1, Wrong.
TuneBite will. It installs 4 fake sound cards, and then lies about the sample rate so that on each of the 4 conversion channels you get 3.8x real-time performance. It works great, and doesn't rely on the DRM being broken in any way.
I have a first generation Black iPod Nano 4GB. It is an absolutely beautiful piece of hardware. It's small and thin enough to fit perfectly into the change/lipstick sub-pocket inside the right pocket on jeans, but big enough that you won't lose it. As an added bonus it has a nice backlit color LCD (mostly used for playing Frozen Bubble.. see below).
Your point about sound quality is valid, but while using my iPod I'm generally on the go and there is a lot of ambient noise anyway.. if I want more sound quality, I fall back to my trusty Archos AV500 (which may not be the best, but it sounds GREAT compared to a Nano).
Your second point about iTunes is doubly valid, but I use the Rockbox firmware which has none of the problems you mention and offers a ton of plug-ins ranging from music visualization to games.
How can there be orphaned legacy Delphi code if the current version of Delphi (Delphi 2007 aka Delphi 11) still supports everything back to Turbo Pascal?
I have several projects stuck on Delphi 7 because a lot of third-party components don't work anymore under the.NET monstrosity which is the new versions of Delphi. Not to mention we went from an environment that could generate 200-300k stand-alone executables to requiring 30mb of runtime..
Now I will admit I haven't yet tried Delphi 11, but my experiences with 8 and 9 were so painful I just gave up on even trying to port my software over.
I think you're mixing up "Random" and "Fair". Something can still be random without being fair (casino slot machines come to mind, they have to be made unfair or they wouldn't be profitable but they have to be random to be legal).
To use your example, a fair RNG would indeed be equally likely to generate all of the above strings. But with equal likelyhood, any other 12-bit sequence can also be generated. Compression works by assigning symbols to recurring sequences, where these symbols can be stored in less space then the actual sequence. All occurences of the sequence are then replaced by the symbol. Since any 12-bit sequence (continuing your example) is just as likely to occur as any other, you would need to assign symbols for all 2^12 possibilities, which gets you right back to where you started since the symbol is no shorter then the sequence.
Now, the output of an unfair or not trully random RNG (which is biased towards a particular output, lets say 1) would indeed compress. Lets say the output of this unfair RNG is a 1 90% of the time, and a 0 for 10% of the time. You can easily compress this stream by converting it into another stream which represents the number of ones in between successive zeros. This kind of compression is only possible because the RNG isn't fair (it's output can be predicted ahead of time to almost always be a 1), and doesn't work when the distribution of 0 and 1 is even.
I put two and two together. There are references to "almost a million computers world-wide" participating in the attack. Typical botnets only have on the order of 10k-100k machines, only Storm is big enough to have reached millions of zombies.
There is an excellent article in Wired from several weeks ago from when Storm was used to DDoS the entire country of Estonia for 2 weeks. A fantastic read, but here's a particularly scary excerpt: Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe
If that is the case -- if Azizov isn't trying to cloud the issue -- the implication is perhaps more troubling. It suggests that there is a group of Russian hackers who, on their own, can disrupt the routine functioning of commerce, media, and government any time they want. If so, these hackers represent a stateless power -- a sort of private militia.
While the article does contain a lot of speculation and sketchy sources (like the above quoted Azizov) the evidence does seem to be pointing in a particular direction:
I ask him why anyone would trust him. After all, he seems to have a suspiciously intimate knowledge of the Estonian attacks. "Russian IT specialists are knowledgeable and experienced enough to destroy the key servers of whole states," he says. "They're the best in the world."
The implication: Clearly you want them on your side, so why not hire them? Maybe Estonia was simply an advertising campaign.
It's starting to look an awful lot like another Cold War is coming, except this time it will be a Cyber war waged by turning your enemy's (and the rest of the world's) poorly secured computers against their critical infrastructure while the actual government absolves itself of blame. Nice.
iTunes is a direct port of the Mac iTunes. It uses the same idioms as other Mac applications.
I am a Windows user at home and a Linux (both KDE and Gnome) user at work. iTunes was the first piece of Apple software I ever tried to use, and my experience was a disaster.
The key is not to assume the usual Windows idioms apply.
Why not? I'm still using Windows, aren't I? iTunes looks and acts like no other program I've ever seen on any platform (except Apple's own). Should the user interface idioms of a foreign platform really be shoved down my throat, just so I can copy files to an MP3 player?
Don't even get me started on giving all my songs 6-character filenames and putting them in a hidden folder on the target file system...
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. I believe this to be the main reason why myself and others like me (I see a few in this thread) loathe it. I want to be able to organize my music myself in a way that makes sense to me (and often, only me).
I don't consider this to be a waste of time at all, as I enjoy the occasional walk through my library to add new music or re-discover old favorites.
In the end, I think to each his own. iTunes is simply not for everyone and neither is any other piece of software, be it made by Apple or not.
I absolutely abhor the iTunes interface. It is 2nd last on my list of good music management programs, one small notch above Music Match Jukebox. Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists. I gave up after half an hour and just installed RockBox on my Nano so I could be free from it's horrors.
I would imagine that iTunes is great for the casual user that doesn't need nor want much MANUAL control over their music library, but for more advanced users the non-standard UI (on Windows) and strange "simplified" ways of doing simple things make it near useless.
This is the first believable explanation I've seen for why this behavior doesn't occur on XP (brushing it off as 'XP doesn't have MMCSS' is stupid, as it doesn't have any audio glitches in periods of heavy network I/O either).
The new Windows Vista audio architecture is a massive beast compared to the simple architecture of XP. See this thread on Creative's forums for comparisons to XP, pretty pictures and explanations, or skip straight to the blog of the developer responsible for an overview of how the new audio sub-system works.
While I don't see any encryption layers, the XP diagram ends in "hardware" but the Vista diagram ends with "Audio Driver".. anyone know what happens after that? What does does the Audio Driver have to do get the samples into the sound card's memory space?
A fantastic post, kudos to you.. you've earned yourself a Fan. If I wasn't the GP, I'd mod you up:)
Could you give some sources for the 20x difference in royalty rates between the USA (SoundExchange?) and Russia (ROMS)? It would make excellent cannon fodder for future arguments on this subject, but a quick search turned up nothing.
As an interesting side, and more relevant to this article, what are the royalty rates of Europe (IFPI)?
This information seems fairly hard to come by, as searching for any of the above organizations with the added term 'royalty' gives little information except royalty rates for webcasters and not online stores. Or are the two considered the same under law (since technically a store can be considered as streaming the song to the purchaser)?
They have offered to pay royalties, but were turned down:
Major record labels once again refused to accept royalty payments from Russian on-line music stores.
IFPI refused to receive money from the Russian royalty collecting entity ROMS (Russian Organization on Collective Management of Rights of Authors and Other Rightholders in Multimedia, Digital Networks & Visual Arts). Although ROMS operates within the law, IFPI insists that the only entity which could act on behalf of the labels and other rightholders and collect royalties is the Russian branch of IFPI (RPA - Russian Phonographic Association) and refuses to accept anything from ROMS.
What would you like them to do, start mailing cheques directly to the artists?
Sources: allofmp3 blog, which links to russian papers.
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I've had this happen to projects I lead. Adware/spyware is almost always bundled (it's distribution is the primary motivation for Backspaceware), and this definitely causes harm. Fortunately, sites like download.com have a review process and they found my email address buried in the 'about' dialog, I guess the backspacers missed one...
How you can possibly compare the two on equal terms when one isn't available for you to look at?
Huh? The OOXML standard is available for all to see at Standard ECMA-376: Office Open XML File Formats
Now, arguments can be made that the standard is not defined well enough to be implemented (due to things like "do it like word95 did"), but that's the sort of thing that should be resolved by all interested parties before finalizing.
Why add the additional point of failure? Or was I supposed to buy 2 identical RAID cards for when one failed and it turned out the array it built isn't compatible with anything except the exact same device with the exact same firmware revision?
/boot and root partition is mirrored on all of my drives, so even if the array completely disappeared I can still boot up. To gain access to the rest of my data (RAID5), any recent kernel with RAID support will do..
With software (Linux) RAID the actual RAID set is just partitions on the physical drive, not the whole entire drive. My
Hardware RAID controllers may have made sense 10 years ago when commodity hardware was much slower (and so a dedicated CPU for RAID was a must), but unless I'm missing something they no longer make sense today.
How can you patent a coefficient matrix? That's all color space converters are.. matrices mapping one vector (color) space to another.
I enjoy swearing when it's the right time, but work is not the place for it, and swearing is not a workplace communication enhancer; it's a tool of anger, frustration and an inability to express one's full feeling on a subject.
There is no right or wrong place to swear, but there IS a right or wrong time. Ever been angry or frustrated or unable to express a feeling on a subject, at work?
Voting with your wallet is a highly effective tactic.
I see this point come up a lot in these types of discussions. What is this assertion based on?
There is overhead involved, even with the off-loading.
Looking at my Ubuntu system, the #1 process for using up cpu is compiz (1h40m of CPU time during 7d uptime), in spite of off-loading the actual rendering to my nVidia card. I don't really notice as I have a Quad-core CPU, but it would hurt quite a bit more with only 1 or even with 2 cores.
My problem with Pidgin is with the rather plain way it looks. Kopete has a killer theming engine and many themes which are far more polished (imho) then Pidgin.
Blame the firehose...
Now now, the editors have been doing a poor job of verifying their facts long before the introduction of the firehouse.
*ducks*
English is not standardized, so what exactly is meant by "wrong" (aside from the obvious spelling, grammar or typo)? The language grows new words and evolves old ones all the time.
They want to be able to buy whatever media they want and then use it whatever way they want, even if it means breaking the law.
I'm sorry, this is wrong why exactly?
If the laws are good in theory but stupid in practice (and they are), they will in practice be broken.
There is NO commercial software that will convert a DRMed WMA file into anything
-1, Wrong.
TuneBite will. It installs 4 fake sound cards, and then lies about the sample rate so that on each of the 4 conversion channels you get 3.8x real-time performance. It works great, and doesn't rely on the DRM being broken in any way.
I have a first generation Black iPod Nano 4GB. It is an absolutely beautiful piece of hardware. It's small and thin enough to fit perfectly into the change/lipstick sub-pocket inside the right pocket on jeans, but big enough that you won't lose it. As an added bonus it has a nice backlit color LCD (mostly used for playing Frozen Bubble .. see below).
Your point about sound quality is valid, but while using my iPod I'm generally on the go and there is a lot of ambient noise anyway.. if I want more sound quality, I fall back to my trusty Archos AV500 (which may not be the best, but it sounds GREAT compared to a Nano).
Your second point about iTunes is doubly valid, but I use the Rockbox firmware which has none of the problems you mention and offers a ton of plug-ins ranging from music visualization to games.
How can there be orphaned legacy Delphi code if the current version of Delphi (Delphi 2007 aka Delphi 11) still supports everything back to Turbo Pascal?
.NET monstrosity which is the new versions of Delphi. Not to mention we went from an environment that could generate 200-300k stand-alone executables to requiring 30mb of runtime..
I have several projects stuck on Delphi 7 because a lot of third-party components don't work anymore under the
Now I will admit I haven't yet tried Delphi 11, but my experiences with 8 and 9 were so painful I just gave up on even trying to port my software over.
I think you're mixing up "Random" and "Fair". Something can still be random without being fair (casino slot machines come to mind, they have to be made unfair or they wouldn't be profitable but they have to be random to be legal).
To use your example, a fair RNG would indeed be equally likely to generate all of the above strings. But with equal likelyhood, any other 12-bit sequence can also be generated. Compression works by assigning symbols to recurring sequences, where these symbols can be stored in less space then the actual sequence. All occurences of the sequence are then replaced by the symbol. Since any 12-bit sequence (continuing your example) is just as likely to occur as any other, you would need to assign symbols for all 2^12 possibilities, which gets you right back to where you started since the symbol is no shorter then the sequence.
Now, the output of an unfair or not trully random RNG (which is biased towards a particular output, lets say 1) would indeed compress. Lets say the output of this unfair RNG is a 1 90% of the time, and a 0 for 10% of the time. You can easily compress this stream by converting it into another stream which represents the number of ones in between successive zeros. This kind of compression is only possible because the RNG isn't fair (it's output can be predicted ahead of time to almost always be a 1), and doesn't work when the distribution of 0 and 1 is even.
I put two and two together. There are references to "almost a million computers world-wide" participating in the attack. Typical botnets only have on the order of 10k-100k machines, only Storm is big enough to have reached millions of zombies.
While the article does contain a lot of speculation and sketchy sources (like the above quoted Azizov) the evidence does seem to be pointing in a particular direction:
It's starting to look an awful lot like another Cold War is coming, except this time it will be a Cyber war waged by turning your enemy's (and the rest of the world's) poorly secured computers against their critical infrastructure while the actual government absolves itself of blame. Nice.
And what makes sense to you today might make you cringe next year. It's important for both/all of those visions to be possible.
I agree whole-heartedly.
P.S. That link gives me a "no music found" error.
Fixed, try again now. It appears Soundclick changed their site, and broke old-style links.
iTunes is a direct port of the Mac iTunes. It uses the same idioms as other Mac applications.
...
I am a Windows user at home and a Linux (both KDE and Gnome) user at work. iTunes was the first piece of Apple software I ever tried to use, and my experience was a disaster.
The key is not to assume the usual Windows idioms apply.
Why not? I'm still using Windows, aren't I? iTunes looks and acts like no other program I've ever seen on any platform (except Apple's own). Should the user interface idioms of a foreign platform really be shoved down my throat, just so I can copy files to an MP3 player?
Don't even get me started on giving all my songs 6-character filenames and putting them in a hidden folder on the target file system
Organization happens automatically, with iTunes.
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. I believe this to be the main reason why myself and others like me (I see a few in this thread) loathe it. I want to be able to organize my music myself in a way that makes sense to me (and often, only me).
I don't consider this to be a waste of time at all, as I enjoy the occasional walk through my library to add new music or re-discover old favorites.
In the end, I think to each his own. iTunes is simply not for everyone and neither is any other piece of software, be it made by Apple or not.
I must respectfully disagree.
I absolutely abhor the iTunes interface. It is 2nd last on my list of good music management programs, one small notch above Music Match Jukebox. Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists. I gave up after half an hour and just installed RockBox on my Nano so I could be free from it's horrors.
I would imagine that iTunes is great for the casual user that doesn't need nor want much MANUAL control over their music library, but for more advanced users the non-standard UI (on Windows) and strange "simplified" ways of doing simple things make it near useless.
How do you manage to get on a 'file sharing' network without understanding that if you put something in the 'shared' folder, it'll be shared?
Trivially easy, I see it all the time. It goes something like this:
User: Where can I download new music?
Local geek: P2P
User: Huh?
* Local geek installs P2P on User's machine
User: Thanks!
This is the first believable explanation I've seen for why this behavior doesn't occur on XP (brushing it off as 'XP doesn't have MMCSS' is stupid, as it doesn't have any audio glitches in periods of heavy network I/O either).
.. anyone know what happens after that? What does does the Audio Driver have to do get the samples into the sound card's memory space?
The new Windows Vista audio architecture is a massive beast compared to the simple architecture of XP. See this thread on Creative's forums for comparisons to XP, pretty pictures and explanations, or skip straight to the blog of the developer responsible for an overview of how the new audio sub-system works.
While I don't see any encryption layers, the XP diagram ends in "hardware" but the Vista diagram ends with "Audio Driver"
A fantastic post, kudos to you.. you've earned yourself a Fan. If I wasn't the GP, I'd mod you up :)
Could you give some sources for the 20x difference in royalty rates between the USA (SoundExchange?) and Russia (ROMS)? It would make excellent cannon fodder for future arguments on this subject, but a quick search turned up nothing.
As an interesting side, and more relevant to this article, what are the royalty rates of Europe (IFPI)?
This information seems fairly hard to come by, as searching for any of the above organizations with the added term 'royalty' gives little information except royalty rates for webcasters and not online stores. Or are the two considered the same under law (since technically a store can be considered as streaming the song to the purchaser)?
What would you like them to do, start mailing cheques directly to the artists?
Sources: allofmp3 blog, which links to russian papers.