Considering that sewage, power and medical processes could all rely on the internet...
If that's true, whomever designed those systems deserves to be punished severely. Why would you put all your eggs in a basket you don't own?
Sure, I can envision scenarios where a sewage processing plant might work BETTER if it's connected to other plants and to remote sensors via the Internet, but if the plant FAILS CATASTROPHICALLY when the 'net goes out, or even mains power, that is Very Bad Planning.
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation.
Nintendo's GameCube is also PowerPC-based, and since the Revolution has been announced as backwards-compatible with GCN titles, I'd expect that all three next-generation consoles are going to have IBM-designed chips in them.
"The reason everyone used DOS was 'cause you could just copy it and pirate the thing all the time."
Really, now, what else were they going to run all their desktop software on with their IBM PC-AT's in 1987? Minix? CP/M-86?
Thus Microsoft profited when they sold him the Xbox
Wasn't Microsoft losing money on the Xbox hardware (at least initially)? The console was a loss leader, with the real revenue opportunity coming from software sales and Xbox Live subscriptions.
Xbox2 comes out. It's a lot harder to hack, (probably close to impossible)
If by that you mean "only marginally more difficult than the most recent revision of the current Xbox hardware", then sure. It'll only take one developer failing to check for overflow in a savegame loader routine, and we'll all be installing Linux on our Xboxen all over again.
well, you're going to have to go online to play most games (and almost certainly all the Msoft games)
You either made that up or greatly misinterpreted what Microsoft has said about online play. They are encouraging developers to make online interactivity available in as many titles as possible, but that does not preclude the possibility of self-contained standalone modes of play.
so uh... yeah. You have to pay
Only if you want Xbox Live's premium features. The basic version will be free.
Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.
Where's the reciprocity?
What benefit does a musician get when his or her music is incorporated into someone else's film?
But that doesn't mean the presence of encryption tools meant he was guilty.
No one (well, no one INFORMED about the facts of this case) is arguing that it does.
The guy getting caught doing something that's against the law means he is guilty. The presence of encryption tools is to be used as an argument that he KNEW he was guilty, even before he was caught. The jury is still free to reject that argument; all the court has done is rule that the prosecution is allowed to present it in the first place.
But on the other hand, J2EE is heading towards becoming the de facto standard language for server-side web development, as is J2ME for handheld development.
If it's already working on firefox, why bother with IE?
You mean besides the fact that upwards of 80% of the audience of just about every website in the world uses IE?
If your AJAX code is based on the W3C-approved DOM, there's really not all that much you have to do to make it work properly across all four modern render engines: Gecko, Safari, Opera, and IE.
If you're still using 4.x browser hacks like "if (document.all)", well, that's another story entirely.
And municipal housing codes are municipal housing codes.
When you buy a home, you're agreeing to abide by the rules in that location that pertain to home ownership. Some such rules are just common sense, like requiring a permit to dig around underground where the utility lines are. Some of them are excessively onerous, like Homeowners' Association bylaws. The rules in this case seem to fall somewhere in between.
Most major online music "stores" out in the wild allow you to do a very cool thing called search. So if you knew even a small part of the lyrics, you should be OK.
This assumes a few things: 1. The lyrics from the music are published. 2. The online music store allows searching on the lyrics. 3. The song has lyrics to begin with (ie, tens of thousands of hours of instrumental music are left out).
Remember that publishing rights for lyrics and for phonorecordings are handled separately; that makes assumptions 1 and 2 more and more unlikely. Do you know of any music stores that actually support searching by lyrics?
"Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone."
Dear Slashdot Editor:
If I wanted your opinion, I'd read your blog. Or you could leave comments in the discussion that follows the article, and I could read it there.
Your job as an editor is not to use story submissions as a platform for your personal views. Your job is to evaluate a submission's potential interest to the community and then step aside.
(Making sure it's not a dupe and that it contains good grammar and spelling would be nice too, but we in the/. crowd aren't too picky.)
Well for one thing, anyone considering using OS X would only need to buy just the OS, not a whole bunch of expensive hardware as well.
You'd have to buy OS X and all the software you'd run under OS X.
C'mon, dude. The Mac mini is only $500. Apple has put out a product that seems to address your complaints about "a whole bunch of expensive hardware" as a barrier to checking OS X out, and yet you still complain about the barrier that's no longer there.
To keep from eliminating all old software with one fell swoop, they would need to emulate PowerPC.
The Mac product line already switched CPU architectures once, from 680x0 to PowerPC in the early 1990's. And their market was much smaller then than it is now, which means that the previous migration would seem painless in comparison, which is wasn't.
The PowerPC architecture is actually growing in popularity these days -- besides Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo both use PPC's, and their big brothers in IBM's POWER line are nothing to scoff at either. I don't see any reason why Apple would WANT to switch to x86.
Maybe a dual-processor system: one PowerPC and one Intel? Not likely, I grant you.
Didn't the Amiga have an add-on daughterboard with a 386 on it, to allegedly allow you to run 386 software? That didn't work out all that well for Commodore.
"What do you mean we don't have them archived??? You just cost us 1.45 billion dollars!"
Knowing the financial industry as well as I do, I wouldn't be at all surprised to heat that the executives that failed to create a defensible email retention policy really will end up hanging all of the blame on some poor system-administrating underling who had just done exactly what he had been told to do.
The notion of academic freedom is central to a university
Sure, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want on university grounds, and when it comes time to face consequences you get off scot-free by claiming a defense of "academic freedom".
If someone can't figure out whether to run a report for their boss or send on a chain letter, I don't think a new version of Office is going to fix the problem.
The new version of Office will AUTOMATICALLY send on any chain letters you receive, leaving you free to focus your attentions on running reports!
That didn't stop me from frying a 20MHz 486SX by changing the mobo jumper settings to run it as 25MHz. No restarts, no fatal OS errors, it just stopped booting up one day.
Sorry OC'ers, I'm going to side with the chip manufacturers on this one. I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more profit on no more work.
At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD's RFID tag.
Playing antique games is a novelty, NOT a major selling point!
And yet you're HAPPY with the PSP and all the PSX title rehashes in its software lineup?
Obviously Nintendo isn't going to release a new console that JUST plays older games. Having a 20-year library of classic games available is of course A selling point for the Revolution, bu it's foolish to assume that it will be a PRIMARY selling point. Like you said, why not if it's cheap and gives the user another reason to love their product.
They expect me to pay 20-25 bucks for the same exact game from 15 years ago without any new graphics or sound.
You need to shop at better stores. I've never seen the NES Classics series selling for much more than $15, and frankly I think the manufacturing and distribution costs are the only reason why the retail price wasn't even lower.
Also... NESticle? Did it revert to 1998 when I wasn't looking? There are much better NES emu's available now.
Handhelds were the last area they had a commanding lead over the opposition, and the PSP has blown that to hell. I have four friends, two of whom have never owned any dedicated video-gaming system, who bought the PSP within a week of release.
I wouldn't base the entire state of the handheld console market on anecdotal evidence from four of your friends.
As another reply mentioned, the DS is outselling the PSP in Japan by a factor of three to one. Add in Nintendo's three version of the GBA hardware, and it's tough to argue against Nintendo still having the dominant marketshare.
Sure, the PSP has staked a claim at the high-end corner of the market, but it's still several years premature to predict that their commanding lead in the market is diminishing.
If the server used HT, it would be possible for one of those other users to run an exploit on the server to crack my e-commerce site's private key.
It may be possible, yes. But plausible?
this is an issue that effects me and my customers
It MAY affect you and your customers at some later time, but right now it doesn't.
If you're THAT concerned about this issue, I assume you're going to call up your ISP and transition your site onto dedicated machines? Isn't it worth the extra cost to be assured that some other customer of the shared server environment can't compromise your crypto key?
The page says that it can show up to five layers of content, dynamically changed if you want, with a soundtrack. It can show video, images, and even Macromedia Flash files.
You don't think the Xbox, or any low-end x86 machine, is capable of that?
Anyway, the "mod an Xbox" comment was in response to the submitter's suggestion that you could hack this $2000 commercial-grade device to serve as a $200 consumer-grade set-top box, which obviously would be a poor financial decision to make.
Wouldn't it be great if every article published in the NY Times for the past 150 years were indexed in Google?
It'd be great for Google. It'd be great for us users too, at least as long as Google Inc. continues to Not Be Evil.
It'd be bad for Lexis-Nexis, who is currently the market leader in that kind of comprehensive long-term media archival. And THEY charge for access.
I'd expect the Times to continue poking a hole to let Google in for spidering purposes. They did it when it was free registration, and I see no reason for them not to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that sewage, power and medical processes could all rely on the internet...
If that's true, whomever designed those systems deserves to be punished severely. Why would you put all your eggs in a basket you don't own?
Sure, I can envision scenarios where a sewage processing plant might work BETTER if it's connected to other plants and to remote sensors via the Internet, but if the plant FAILS CATASTROPHICALLY when the 'net goes out, or even mains power, that is Very Bad Planning.
They are making the PowerPC for the Xbox and the Cell for the new Playstation.
Nintendo's GameCube is also PowerPC-based, and since the Revolution has been announced as backwards-compatible with GCN titles, I'd expect that all three next-generation consoles are going to have IBM-designed chips in them.
"The reason everyone used DOS was 'cause you could just copy it and pirate the thing all the time."
Really, now, what else were they going to run all their desktop software on with their IBM PC-AT's in 1987? Minix? CP/M-86?
Thus Microsoft profited when they sold him the Xbox
Wasn't Microsoft losing money on the Xbox hardware (at least initially)? The console was a loss leader, with the real revenue opportunity coming from software sales and Xbox Live subscriptions.
Xbox2 comes out. It's a lot harder to hack, (probably close to impossible)
If by that you mean "only marginally more difficult than the most recent revision of the current Xbox hardware", then sure. It'll only take one developer failing to check for overflow in a savegame loader routine, and we'll all be installing Linux on our Xboxen all over again.
well, you're going to have to go online to play most games (and almost certainly all the Msoft games)
You either made that up or greatly misinterpreted what Microsoft has said about online play. They are encouraging developers to make online interactivity available in as many titles as possible, but that does not preclude the possibility of self-contained standalone modes of play.
so uh... yeah. You have to pay
Only if you want Xbox Live's premium features. The basic version will be free.
Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.
Where's the reciprocity?
What benefit does a musician get when his or her music is incorporated into someone else's film?
But that doesn't mean the presence of encryption tools meant he was guilty.
No one (well, no one INFORMED about the facts of this case) is arguing that it does.
The guy getting caught doing something that's against the law means he is guilty. The presence of encryption tools is to be used as an argument that he KNEW he was guilty, even before he was caught. The jury is still free to reject that argument; all the court has done is rule that the prosecution is allowed to present it in the first place.
So quit calling Java dead :)
Okay, fine.
Java applets embedded in webpages are dead.
But on the other hand, J2EE is heading towards becoming the de facto standard language for server-side web development, as is J2ME for handheld development.
On the whole, Java is alive and well.
If it's already working on firefox, why bother with IE?
You mean besides the fact that upwards of 80% of the audience of just about every website in the world uses IE?
If your AJAX code is based on the W3C-approved DOM, there's really not all that much you have to do to make it work properly across all four modern render engines: Gecko, Safari, Opera, and IE.
If you're still using 4.x browser hacks like "if (document.all)", well, that's another story entirely.
Private property is private property.
And municipal housing codes are municipal housing codes.
When you buy a home, you're agreeing to abide by the rules in that location that pertain to home ownership. Some such rules are just common sense, like requiring a permit to dig around underground where the utility lines are. Some of them are excessively onerous, like Homeowners' Association bylaws. The rules in this case seem to fall somewhere in between.
Most major online music "stores" out in the wild allow you to do a very cool thing called search. So if you knew even a small part of the lyrics, you should be OK.
This assumes a few things:
1. The lyrics from the music are published.
2. The online music store allows searching on the lyrics.
3. The song has lyrics to begin with (ie, tens of thousands of hours of instrumental music are left out).
Remember that publishing rights for lyrics and for phonorecordings are handled separately; that makes assumptions 1 and 2 more and more unlikely. Do you know of any music stores that actually support searching by lyrics?
"Yeah, Steve's kinda right on this - podcasting is neat & all, but the breathy overstatement of how it will change our lives is a wee bit overdone."
/. crowd aren't too picky.)
Dear Slashdot Editor:
If I wanted your opinion, I'd read your blog. Or you could leave comments in the discussion that follows the article, and I could read it there.
Your job as an editor is not to use story submissions as a platform for your personal views. Your job is to evaluate a submission's potential interest to the community and then step aside.
(Making sure it's not a dupe and that it contains good grammar and spelling would be nice too, but we in the
Well for one thing, anyone considering using OS X would only need to buy just the OS, not a whole bunch of expensive hardware as well.
You'd have to buy OS X and all the software you'd run under OS X.
C'mon, dude. The Mac mini is only $500. Apple has put out a product that seems to address your complaints about "a whole bunch of expensive hardware" as a barrier to checking OS X out, and yet you still complain about the barrier that's no longer there.
To keep from eliminating all old software with one fell swoop, they would need to emulate PowerPC.
The Mac product line already switched CPU architectures once, from 680x0 to PowerPC in the early 1990's. And their market was much smaller then than it is now, which means that the previous migration would seem painless in comparison, which is wasn't.
The PowerPC architecture is actually growing in popularity these days -- besides Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo both use PPC's, and their big brothers in IBM's POWER line are nothing to scoff at either. I don't see any reason why Apple would WANT to switch to x86.
Maybe a dual-processor system: one PowerPC and one Intel? Not likely, I grant you.
Didn't the Amiga have an add-on daughterboard with a 386 on it, to allegedly allow you to run 386 software? That didn't work out all that well for Commodore.
"What do you mean we don't have them archived??? You just cost us 1.45 billion dollars!"
Knowing the financial industry as well as I do, I wouldn't be at all surprised to heat that the executives that failed to create a defensible email retention policy really will end up hanging all of the blame on some poor system-administrating underling who had just done exactly what he had been told to do.
The notion of academic freedom is central to a university
Sure, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want on university grounds, and when it comes time to face consequences you get off scot-free by claiming a defense of "academic freedom".
If someone can't figure out whether to run a report for their boss or send on a chain letter, I don't think a new version of Office is going to fix the problem.
The new version of Office will AUTOMATICALLY send on any chain letters you receive, leaving you free to focus your attentions on running reports!
The likelyhood of frying parts is not very high.
That didn't stop me from frying a 20MHz 486SX by changing the mobo jumper settings to run it as 25MHz. No restarts, no fatal OS errors, it just stopped booting up one day.
Sorry OC'ers, I'm going to side with the chip manufacturers on this one. I think they know better than you what clock speeds their chips optimally run at. If your 1.8GHz Athlon wasn't likely to fail at 2.2GHz under normal conditions, they would have sold it as a 2.2GHz and made more profit on no more work.
At the store, someone buying a new DVD would have to provide a password or some kind of biometric data, like a fingerprint or iris scan, which would be added to the DVD's RFID tag.
People still buy DVD's at STORES?
MSNing for something just seems wrong.
Mmmm, sinning for something...
Playing antique games is a novelty, NOT a major selling point!
And yet you're HAPPY with the PSP and all the PSX title rehashes in its software lineup?
Obviously Nintendo isn't going to release a new console that JUST plays older games. Having a 20-year library of classic games available is of course A selling point for the Revolution, bu it's foolish to assume that it will be a PRIMARY selling point. Like you said, why not if it's cheap and gives the user another reason to love their product.
They expect me to pay 20-25 bucks for the same exact game from 15 years ago without any new graphics or sound.
You need to shop at better stores. I've never seen the NES Classics series selling for much more than $15, and frankly I think the manufacturing and distribution costs are the only reason why the retail price wasn't even lower.
Also... NESticle? Did it revert to 1998 when I wasn't looking? There are much better NES emu's available now.
Handhelds were the last area they had a commanding lead over the opposition, and the PSP has blown that to hell. I have four friends, two of whom have never owned any dedicated video-gaming system, who bought the PSP within a week of release.
I wouldn't base the entire state of the handheld console market on anecdotal evidence from four of your friends.
As another reply mentioned, the DS is outselling the PSP in Japan by a factor of three to one. Add in Nintendo's three version of the GBA hardware, and it's tough to argue against Nintendo still having the dominant marketshare.
Sure, the PSP has staked a claim at the high-end corner of the market, but it's still several years premature to predict that their commanding lead in the market is diminishing.
If the server used HT, it would be possible for one of those other users to run an exploit on the server to crack my e-commerce site's private key.
It may be possible, yes. But plausible?
this is an issue that effects me and my customers
It MAY affect you and your customers at some later time, but right now it doesn't.
If you're THAT concerned about this issue, I assume you're going to call up your ISP and transition your site onto dedicated machines? Isn't it worth the extra cost to be assured that some other customer of the shared server environment can't compromise your crypto key?
"the MoD said the spoof was 'brilliant.'"
Which can not be said about the person who put a 50Mb attachment in his email.
Or the mail admin who allowed 50MB attachments.
The page says that it can show up to five layers of content, dynamically changed if you want, with a soundtrack. It can show video, images, and even Macromedia Flash files.
You don't think the Xbox, or any low-end x86 machine, is capable of that?
Anyway, the "mod an Xbox" comment was in response to the submitter's suggestion that you could hack this $2000 commercial-grade device to serve as a $200 consumer-grade set-top box, which obviously would be a poor financial decision to make.
Wouldn't it be great if every article published in the NY Times for the past 150 years were indexed in Google?
It'd be great for Google. It'd be great for us users too, at least as long as Google Inc. continues to Not Be Evil.
It'd be bad for Lexis-Nexis, who is currently the market leader in that kind of comprehensive long-term media archival. And THEY charge for access.
I'd expect the Times to continue poking a hole to let Google in for spidering purposes. They did it when it was free registration, and I see no reason for them not to continue.