Yes, there are all sorts of immoral and possibly illegal things hardware manufacturers can do by automatically scanning for watermarks, but the watermark itself is pretty much morally neutral.
I beg to differ. Given the purpose of electronic watermarking (locate illegal copies in the wild and be able to track it back to the specific customer who leaked it), imagine the consequences. The entertainment and software industries already calculate losses on a per-pirate-copy basis. A thousand illegal copies is a thousand lost sales and $price*1000 lost income.
If you leak a watermarked product, you're pretty much done for economically if they prosecute (which they have no reason not to, since it's the entire idea of the watermarking to start with). Try to tell their minion of lawyers that your copy was stolen, for an exercise in futility.
You'd damn better guard that watermarked product with your life, lock it in somewhere safe, never talk about it, cause you don't wanna deal with these guys if you "pirate" it by accident!
At least use a mirror!
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's not even been announced yet, so please don't take down kde.org by slashdotting it. Use a mirror, list here. I got it from the Norwegian mirror which was very fast for me (I'm in Norway, YMMV, look out your window and check). It's a cool 100 megs though.
For it is written in the great songs of Simon and Garfunkel:
And in the naked light I saw Ten thousand people, maybe more. People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening, People writing songs that voices never share And no one dared Disturb the sound of silence.
My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing.
That's a horrible standard for morals. It's quite clear that if all the world was homosexual, man would be extinct. Or that if all the world lived in your little village, or were IT proessionals or any of the things that make you you, it would likely be the end of the world. That doesn't make those things examples of bad morals!
From the article: "In [sending the spam], this unknown husband and wife team changed the Internet with one keystroke."
So he managed to write a spam and send it, with one single stroke at the keys? That's so amazing I'm sure one day we'll be able to buy a book about it - on amazon.com, with one single mouse click.
Regular expressions: J2SDK 1.4 will have this built in. It's so compatible to the Perl RE standard that SUN informally refers to it as "a hidden perl in J2SE 1.4".
The speed of Swing: I never found Swing exceptionally slow, although it does require a certain level of machinery to feel "right". SUN has addressed many of the inefficient pieces of Swing in the upcoming J2SDK 1.4. You can read about it here (PDF).
Performance in general: SUN is working hard on this, and 1.4 seems very promising.
Scalability: In my opinion, whereas both Perl and Java may be "write once, run everywhere", Perl is also "write once, read once";) While Perl excel for smaller ad-hoc tasks where you need something quick and don't care if it's dirty, I wouldn't want to be on a large development team for a huge project and write everything in Perl;)
"However, IMO this is a strange necessity. I've seen some MFC windows apps claiming to be GPL. After reading this thing about Qt though, I wonder if that is even possible. MFC is closed source. Hell, so is Windows. Does that mean that pure GPL applications on Windows are impossible? That any GPL Windows app is actually GPL-with-exception by default?"
You didn't read the GPL, it already has an explicit built-in exception that basically says that software components normally regarded as integral parts of a runtime environment, does not have to be GPL compatible by themselves. This is what makes GPL applications under Windows/MFC possible, as well as GPL apps under Java/Swing/etc.
From 3:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component
itself accompanies the executable.
The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test.
You have your mind on computers, it seems.
Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text.
Why do you say that?
ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze.
I don't understand.
The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum.
Work with KDE instead of against it - Why all the hate between these 2 groups? They both want a free DE for unix, so why do they dislike each other so much?
This perceived dislike is simply not there. I'm afraid the media has eaten into your brain with their constant scandalizing and crying scandal even if there is none. Developers across the two camps get along very well (see pictures from expos etc;). There's also a gnome-kde mailing list on which they discuss how to better interoperate. I think developers and most users have long since realized that although people's preferences differ (hence two or more alternative environments), we share the same ideology. This has brought us TWO free desktop environments (more, actually) that are both usable, mature and popular. And what's more, I personally mix applications from both environment. Were there only one DE, I wouldn't have many of the great applications I use everyday.
So if you have this pent-up need for perceiving dislike, perhaps you should go into politics, or co-hosting Jerry Springer or something instead;)
If your going to pick that nit, then the whole article falls apart -- Linux cannot be compared with Windows, Linux is just the kernel. His points talking about the difficulty of configuring X Windows become moot -- X Windows is not Linux. I could go on, but you get the point.
You're missing the point. Blaming "Linux" per se for having bad package upgrade routines is what I react to. Several Linux distros have excellent means of upgrading -- this is clearly a problem of Redhats. On the flip side, saying "Windows is unstable" because I crashed Windows 95, is unfair to Windows 2000. If he said "software upgrades in Redhat is difficult," that could be a valid point.
I can see your point, though. Writing an article on "Linux vs. Windows" is unprecise. I reckon there'd be huge differences between "Corel Linux vs. Windows" and "Slackware vs. Windows". "Redhat vs. Windows" would be precise:)
And here lies one of the biggest challenges in the Linux world. The Red Hat installation is outstanding - you basically push a button and 500 or so rpms are installed and configured correctly. But upgrading individual applications, especially for a large package like KDE, is far from pushing a button. Upgrades in Linux have a long way before they will be as easy as upgrading Windows applications.
This guy re-installed Redhat because he couldn't manage to install new KDE 2.2 packages. And he takes it out on "Linux," when he should of course take it out on Redhat. I know I updated KDE with a few commands involving urpmi on my Mandrake install, and it should be even simpler to do on Debian -- certainly much simpler than upgrading something equivalent on MS Windows.
I have from #coverage on irc.slashnet.org that Mayor Guiliani stated the buildings will in fact be rebuilt, in some form. Which is not at all surprising, I guess. I do hope they will reserve some of the area for some kind of a memorial monument so that we will never forget September 11 2001, and never take our sense of security for granted.
Now you can be a hacker too
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Just read this l33t article on "How To Become a Hacker", and you'll be hacking into people's mail before you know it!
As has been mentioned, Mandrakesofts donations page came about after numerous requests from the users. I for one am glad to see it -- I've used Mandrake since years ago, and until now I've never paid a cent for it. I love the distro and I would like some way to show it monetarily:-) But I wouldn't go out and by a boxed set because I wouldn't read the manual, I'd throw the box away, I wouldn't need support (if that's even included) and I know retailers probably make more than Mandrakesoft from these sales anyway.
Now the great thing about Mandrakesoft is that they hire lots of developers from many free software projects, like KDE, GNOME, PHP-Nuke, Plex86, Apache and many others. When you make a donation, you can mark those money for, say, KDE development. This way KDE will get better, KDE developers will eat, Mandrakesoft will save some dough and I can sleep at night.
In my opinion Mandrakesoft is heading in the right direction -- their way of income is a lot better than that of SuSE, which seeks to sell more boxes by making it extremely difficult to download their distro. And it's better than that of Red Hat, which charges for services such as automated software updates (which is included free with Mandrake).
Indeed, I think Mandrakesoft is discovering the future ideal way of making free software and still eat three meals a day. Their method is in many ways compliant with The Street Performer Protocol, in that users will pay up if and only if they actually like what they get. --
Slashdot Mirror
Careful, your audience is naive and with no sense of sarcasm ;-)
Yes, there are all sorts of immoral and possibly illegal things hardware manufacturers can do by automatically scanning for watermarks, but the watermark itself is pretty much morally neutral.
I beg to differ. Given the purpose of electronic watermarking (locate illegal copies in the wild and be able to track it back to the specific customer who leaked it), imagine the consequences. The entertainment and software industries already calculate losses on a per-pirate-copy basis. A thousand illegal copies is a thousand lost sales and $price*1000 lost income.
If you leak a watermarked product, you're pretty much done for economically if they prosecute (which they have no reason not to, since it's the entire idea of the watermarking to start with). Try to tell their minion of lawyers that your copy was stolen, for an exercise in futility.
You'd damn better guard that watermarked product with your life, lock it in somewhere safe, never talk about it, cause you don't wanna deal with these guys if you "pirate" it by accident!
It's not even been announced yet, so please don't take down kde.org by slashdotting it. Use a mirror, list here. I got it from the Norwegian mirror which was very fast for me (I'm in Norway, YMMV, look out your window and check). It's a cool 100 megs though.
Says here:
Posted by CmdrTaco on 0:06 Tuesday 02 April 2002
:)
For it is written in the great songs of Simon and Garfunkel:
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing.
That's a horrible standard for morals. It's quite clear that if all the world was homosexual, man would be extinct. Or that if all the world lived in your little village, or were IT proessionals or any of the things that make you you, it would likely be the end of the world. That doesn't make those things examples of bad morals!
From the article: "In [sending the spam], this unknown husband and wife team changed the Internet with one keystroke."
So he managed to write a spam and send it, with one single stroke at the keys? That's so amazing I'm sure one day we'll be able to buy a book about it - on amazon.com, with one single mouse click.
http://all.your.base.are.belong.to.us
http://toys.are.us
Any other funny URL predictions?
You're assuming for some reason that detection is implemented like this:
if (checkKnownSignatures() == INFECTED || checkHeuristics() == MAYBE_INFECTED) {
alertUser();
}
That would indeed call for a weakening of heuristics. I reckon you could avoid this "stupid" situation by a slight change to your logic:
if (checkHeuristics() == MAYBE_INFECTED) {
if (checkKnownSignatures() != INFECTED_BY_MAGIC_LANTERN) {
alertUser();
}
} else if (checkKnownSignatures() == INFECTED) {
alertUser();
}
KDE on CygWin -- there you go! It's only KDE 1.1.2 though. But it beats Windows ;)
That's GNU/Speak thank you very much.
You didn't read the GPL, it already has an explicit built-in exception that basically says that software components normally regarded as integral parts of a runtime environment, does not have to be GPL compatible by themselves. This is what makes GPL applications under Windows/MFC possible, as well as GPL apps under Java/Swing/etc.
From 3:
The Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (ALICE) has won the bronze and the top marks at the Loebner AI Challenge, a competition based on the Turing test.
You have your mind on computers, it seems.
Silver and gold remain unawarded as silver requires convincing half the judges the AI program is a human, and the gold requires speech interaction rather than text.
Why do you say that?
ALICE repeated as this year's bronze by scoring best among all the entries. She failed to convince half the judges she was human, so she has to stick to bronze.
I don't understand.
The event took place last Saturday at the London Science Museum.
Maybe your plans have something to do with this.
Work with KDE instead of against it - Why all the hate between these 2 groups? They both want a free DE for unix, so why do they dislike each other so much?
;). There's also a gnome-kde mailing list on which they discuss how to better interoperate. I think developers and most users have long since realized that although people's preferences differ (hence two or more alternative environments), we share the same ideology. This has brought us TWO free desktop environments (more, actually) that are both usable, mature and popular. And what's more, I personally mix applications from both environment. Were there only one DE, I wouldn't have many of the great applications I use everyday.
;)
This perceived dislike is simply not there. I'm afraid the media has eaten into your brain with their constant scandalizing and crying scandal even if there is none. Developers across the two camps get along very well (see pictures from expos etc
So if you have this pent-up need for perceiving dislike, perhaps you should go into politics, or co-hosting Jerry Springer or something instead
Well considering KDE 2.2.1 is a *bugfix* release existing solely to fix bugs that were in 2.2.0, it seems better to release it with 2.2.1 than 2.2.0 :)
If your going to pick that nit, then the whole article falls apart -- Linux cannot be compared with Windows, Linux is just the kernel. His points talking about the difficulty of configuring X Windows become moot -- X Windows is not Linux. I could go on, but you get the point.
:)
You're missing the point. Blaming "Linux" per se for having bad package upgrade routines is what I react to. Several Linux distros have excellent means of upgrading -- this is clearly a problem of Redhats. On the flip side, saying "Windows is unstable" because I crashed Windows 95, is unfair to Windows 2000. If he said "software upgrades in Redhat is difficult," that could be a valid point.
I can see your point, though. Writing an article on "Linux vs. Windows" is unprecise. I reckon there'd be huge differences between "Corel Linux vs. Windows" and "Slackware vs. Windows". "Redhat vs. Windows" would be precise
From the article:
And here lies one of the biggest challenges in the Linux world. The Red Hat installation is outstanding - you basically push a button and 500 or so rpms are installed and configured correctly. But upgrading individual applications, especially for a large package like KDE, is far from pushing a button. Upgrades in Linux have a long way before they will be as easy as upgrading Windows applications.
This guy re-installed Redhat because he couldn't manage to install new KDE 2.2 packages. And he takes it out on "Linux," when he should of course take it out on Redhat. I know I updated KDE with a few commands involving urpmi on my Mandrake install, and it should be even simpler to do on Debian -- certainly much simpler than upgrading something equivalent on MS Windows.
I have from #coverage on irc.slashnet.org that Mayor Guiliani stated the buildings will in fact be rebuilt, in some form. Which is not at all surprising, I guess. I do hope they will reserve some of the area for some kind of a memorial monument so that we will never forget September 11 2001, and never take our sense of security for granted.
Just read this l33t article on "How To Become a Hacker", and you'll be hacking into people's mail before you know it!
Andamooka has a nice amount of books freely available online, and they're annotatable too. Worth checking out.
--
"Besides Jon Orwant (who will continue as Senior Contributing Editor) nobody is happier to see TPJ return then me!"
Really, you've got some extreme self confidence there taco, if you think people are so happy to see TPJ return, and then see you.
--
Details here.
--
As has been mentioned, Mandrakesofts donations page came about after numerous requests from the users. I for one am glad to see it -- I've used Mandrake since years ago, and until now I've never paid a cent for it. I love the distro and I would like some way to show it monetarily :-) But I wouldn't go out and by a boxed set because I wouldn't read the manual, I'd throw the box away, I wouldn't need support (if that's even included) and I know retailers probably make more than Mandrakesoft from these sales anyway.
Now the great thing about Mandrakesoft is that they hire lots of developers from many free software projects, like KDE, GNOME, PHP-Nuke, Plex86, Apache and many others. When you make a donation, you can mark those money for, say, KDE development. This way KDE will get better, KDE developers will eat, Mandrakesoft will save some dough and I can sleep at night.
In my opinion Mandrakesoft is heading in the right direction -- their way of income is a lot better than that of SuSE, which seeks to sell more boxes by making it extremely difficult to download their distro. And it's better than that of Red Hat, which charges for services such as automated software updates (which is included free with Mandrake).
Indeed, I think Mandrakesoft is discovering the future ideal way of making free software and still eat three meals a day. Their method is in many ways compliant with The Street Performer Protocol, in that users will pay up if and only if they actually like what they get.
--
Seeing as Slash 2.0 is codenamed Bender, does it have an all-new "In Your Face" Interface?
--