I might point out that the Constitution of the United States values a human's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness above ALL ELSE -- yet our judicial system clearly, through its actions, clearly does not. Peoples' constitutional rights are violated day in and day out, moreso than ever before because of the terrorism "threat."
Does this mean the Constitution is invalid? Of course not -- it just means we don't respect our own constitution. Similarly, just because American journalism doesn't respect its own ideals, doesn't mean those ideals are invalid.
Please stop trying to further your bizarre political agenda inside a discussion about Las Vegas, ex-strippers and competition poker. It so happens that I largely agree with your bizarre political agenda, but this isn't the place for it.
And there we have the heart of the matter. Journalism whose goal is to entertain the reader, isn't bound by the same strictures as journalism whose goal is to report the objective truth.
I'm a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson, I read Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas on a regular basis and it never stops entertaining me. Gonzo journalism is fine with me. And, in retrospect, McManus' work is very much in the same vein.
As so many people have pointed out in this thread -- very vociferously, and often with a great number of expletives -- the American media do a terrible job of reporting the objective truth. That doesn't mean the institution of journalism doesn't uphold this goal, or that we should entirely abandon detachment. It just means that the American media are a crop of Godawful journalists.
Garbage in, garbage out. During the latest Iraq war, virtually the entire American press corps has served as the Pentagon's mouthpiece because the only source of information on the situation in Iraq was the Pentagon, and "embedded" reporters.
The problem is that TV journalism makes more money than print journalism, and it makes even MORE money by losing track of objectivity and tailoring the news to please the target audience. It's no coincidence that newspaper sales plummet every year. People have taken to watching the agreeable pap that streams from their TV sets.
Detached reporting is the ideal. Because the majority of US media outlets do not live up to the ideal, should we completely abandon the ideal? Should journalism schools start teaching marketing classes? Should the goal of the journalist be to reach his target demographic and not to report the truth?
New Yorker. Harper's. NYT magazine. This is popular journalism. Along with Boy's Life, Cosmopolitan and Dr. Dobbs' Journal, these publications don't even pretend to maintain journalistic detachment. Obviously, McManus' own work is in this vein.
I'm simply pointing out that he was sent to cover this poker tournament and ended up writing a book about it, and postulating that perhaps it's because he lost track of his objectivity. I think the ex-stripper would agree.
Calm down, man. Take a deep breath. Of course the American press are full of shit -- and full of themselves. Of course none of them are detached. Frankly, any television reporting you see is not journalism and hasn't been for decades. But the more credible publications (New York Times, LA TimeS) do a pretty good job of staying objective, and they strive for detachment as well.
Deeply ingrained in US journalism is the idea of journalistic detachment. It's generally frowned upon when reporters become involved with the subject of their reporting.
It seems to me that entering into the poker tournament you were sent to cover, and then betting increasingly more, becoming increasingly more involved -- this is not a good example of journalistic detachment. McManus' failure in this regard may be one reason that most of his material was published as a book, rather than a series of articles.
In McManus' defense, I should note that US journalism is extra-particular about detachment. Much of the world follows a partisan model, where the journalists admit from the start that they have an agenda, and that they cannot be completely detached from the subject. So they emphasize objectivity instead, arguing that a journalistic work can both inform and present an agenda, as long as it's done objectively.
I wish I could make a blanket reply to all of these posts, because many of them make a good case against my argument. I've chosen to respond to yours because it has the most addressable points, the most coherency and the highest score (leading more people to read it, hopefully).
The most vocal rebuttal thus far has been If your friend is willing to forward private material, then he's no friend at all. Along the same lines is If you don't want your friend to forward private photos, then tell him as much. In a black-and-white world, both of these statements would be perfectly valid. But even my best friends have been known to suffer momentary lapses of judgement. And there are numerous other cases where I might send something to my friend, and it would be unclear to him whether he's allowed to forward it or not. I only raised the spectre of the ex-girlfriend because it seemed to be a case where I most unambiguously did not my content forwarded. And I'd rather have a way to concretely enforce that restriction with a moderate level of confidence, than rely on my friend's reading and obeying whatever written instructions I attached to the photo. If I had truly sensitive information, you wouldn't catch me sending it via such an insecure medium in the first place. Without end-to-end encryption, I'm disinclined to put any of my secrets on the wire: spoken, written or otherwise.
Also -- the truth of the matter is that I'm a homosexual. If someone sent a picture of me and my boyfriend to my ex-girlfriend I'd probably be relieved, because it might send her the message she seems so dense about receiving. But that's neither here nor there; I just felt like injecting some reality into an otherwise hypothetical discussion.
Regarding the potential negative impact of ODRL: going from previous experience, we can be sure than the deep-pocketed acolytes of the embrace-and-extend god will use their multiply hyphenated power to turn this technology against us. They don't want to control every aspect of our lives; for the most part they're just after our money, and they want control over any aspect of our lives where money is involved.
But let's take a step back and examine the domain once again. We buy cell phones that speak to only one network provider and use trivial encryption; we have no guarantee of privacy to begin with. Those of us unfortunate enough to be living in the United States of Ashcroft know with absolute certainty that everything we say, write or do with our cell phones is recorded and scanned for keywords as a matter of course.
The scant content that is available to those of us lucky enough to have a 3G phone is either already heavily protected or it's utter tripe that isn't worth stealing in the first place. Network connectivity and a central authority are both inherent to the platform, and we can be reasonably certain that any content made available to us will take advantage of that fact, and strictly enforce the licensing terms. Our cell phones are not a free or open platform to begin with.
This point was driven home when I called my provider (Verizon) to enquire about becoming a BREW developer -- BREW is a sort of cut-rate alternative to Java for cell phones -- and was told that the entry fee into the program was US$3,000 not including development tools or software licenses, and that all software must be digitally signed by Verizon before it would run on any phone.
By standardizing DRM description language, we at least are guaranteed a few sanity checks: if I want to give my ringtone to my friend who's using Cingular because I don't want it anymore, at least both of our networks speak the same DRM language. And if I do want to download some premium content, I will find that more is available to me because producers have greater confidence in the system. And if the same DRM technology enhances my control over my own content, then it's all the better.
The introduction of cameras and multimedia SMS in the 3G market has given rise to privacy concerns, as we have seen in recent Slashdot coverage.
Consider for a moment that when people could be taking pictures of you with their cell phones at any time and at any place, some basic rights management within this very limited domain of cell phones and messaging might be extremely beneficial.
Let's say I take a quick snap of myself and my new girlfriend, and send it off to my pal across town so he can see how much fun we're having. Do I want that image to reach my parents? Do I want my ex girlfriend to see it? How about my co-workers and enemies? I'd rather not, thanks.
By giving the sender some basic control over where the content goes once it leaves his phone, we would be enhancing the sender's privacy. And, of course, all such "DRM" technologies must be taken with a grain of salt, because you and I and any other techie worth his weight in 3.5" floppies knows that any copy-protection scheme is breakable. The DRM technologies introduced to date have been far from confidence-inspiring. So DRM within this domain is more of a basic privacy tool than an Orwellian move to own your cell phone.
As for my preferred intepretation of the DRM moniker -- I've always been fond of "Digital Rights Removal Mechanism."
When you put it that way, I guess there isn't much of one. As you say, it will always be drastically cheaper to manufacturer single-purpose hardware than to equip your player with field-programmable logic and powerful DSPs.
I guess I'll slap together my own all-in-one player using one of those new Mini-ITX systems and Freevo...if the industry doesn't want to produce my miracle box, I'll just do it myself!
Java is slow and inefficient because it's a general-purpose language being compiled on the fly into a general-purpose native instruction set.
The WM9 HD codec requires an Intel of enormous power because IA32 is kinkier than a 50 year old hooker, but when support for the codec starts to appear in consumer-level DVD players next year, you'll see sub-gigahertz RISC processors doing the same job without breaking a sweat.
If you cut out the cruft -- if you design a machine language whole sole purpose is to transform digital media, include built-in SIMD operation and common mathematical building blocks for compression -- then you need fewer transistors running at a lower clock speed to accomplish the same tasks.
Recall how your MP3s used to stutter and skip when you played them on your 486. Recall how your first DVD drive required a dedicated hardware MPEG2 decoder. Compare your situation then to your situation today, where you can transparently decrypt and then software-decode MPEG2 video on the fly while SIMULTANEOUSLY decoding a six-channel AC3 audio stream.
Now jump forward three iterations of Moore's Law, ~ 5 years from now, and see what kind of load the WM9 codec puts on your CPU.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic in asking for this kind of technology now -- maybe it won't be the next generation of DVD, but the generation after that. Eventually, however, I think it'll be the way to go.
How about making the next DVD standard extensible?
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HD DVD Coming Very Soon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I see plenty of folks squawking about how red laser DVDs are untenable in the long run, regardless of the compression technology you use. The consensus among these naysayers seems to be: forget about trying to improve DVD, it's old and busted; wait for the new hotness of HD-DVD which will rock your socks.
But guess what? In ten years, HD-DVD will be old hat too. Blue lasers or no, the compression algorithms defined in the standard will pale in comparison to whatever advanced video compression is available at the time. This is an unfortunate side-effect of progress -- we're so damned clever in the last 50 years that we keep shooting ourselves in the foot technologically.
There is a sane answer: for the next generation of DVD, instead of locking ourselves into a single compression format from the beginning, why not design the standard to be extensible? The existing DVD standard already has a virtual machine instruction set for describing the interaction of menus and video segments. Why not take this idea a whole lot further and implement a domain-specific bytecode language that handles complex graphical operations, and is sufficiently powerful to code decompression algorithms?
Since the language is specific to video decompression, vendors' DVD players could efficiently compile the bytecodes to whatever internal instruction set they use. This way, when you pop a blue-laser DVD into the drive, it will come with instructions on how to decode it. The format of the file containing the video and audio streams can be specified in the standard, but their content is left up to the DVD producer.
Alternative #1: Buy a new PC (either assembled or part-by-part), spend days tweaking it and stamping out the zillions of compatibility issues and hardware glitches.
Alternative #2: Do some basic research, figure out which parts will work with each other and with your OS of choice. Put it together *exactly* the way you want it, with the case you want and everything configured as you please.
I'm not all that keen on having a Mac -- not keen enough to spend $700 on one, anyway -- but if I were in the market for a Mac desktop, I'd be railing against Apple's bow-down-to-us, one-size-fits-all, don't-look-in-the-box-boy mentality.
I know how computers work, and I want to be able to lovingly tune, tweak and alter the hell out of my machine. I can't do that with an Apple-bought Mac, because -- wait for it -- my WARRANTY will be void, oh no! Warranties are for televisions and toaster ovens; my computer is a beautiful machine,
There is, indeed, no reason why you couldn't use RPM for a source-based distro...I just think it's a bit heavyweight for that. You'd be better served with.tar.gz files and a standard for what they contain (build scripts, installed file metadata, and so forth).
As a longtime Redhat user, I've made it a habit to package even the smallest utilities. Between my personal projects, business obligations and the ties of family and friendship, I administer more than a dozen boxen. Being able to install and upgrade everything as a package keeps me sane -- once I've gotten to work on my desktop system and seen a clean upgrade (or install) work on the server in my living room, I know I can deploy the package in the field and be sure it'll work on 16 real, live production boxen. Do I ever have problems? Occasionally. But I think the mess would be much greater without such a strong binary-oriented packaging system.
I'm no Redhat evangelist -- use any damn distro that floats your boat! -- and I understand and appreciate the aesthetic that makes Gentoo appealing. But Redhat (and their package system) works for my particular situation better than anything else.
What are you talking about? Verizon uses (I believe) a WCDMA network, and it's got audio as clear as Cingular -- who uses GSM. Since WCDMA gets more signal out of a given wattage of RF, the clear audio comes through even clearer than it would with GSM.
My first phone ever was a Sprint CDMA rig -- this was back in 1998 when CDMA was very new -- and even at the time it sounded just great. I've never had problems with audio clarity with GSM or CDMA phones.
Compare to TDMA, which is half-duplex and sounds like chopped celery.
GSM is an aging standard. Code division multiplexing is the way of the future, and the engineers know this. It offers better reception, better capacity, and makes for a much better 3G infrastructure with mixed high-speed data/voice traffic.
China is rolling out a WCDMA network, folks. Qualcomm isn't necessarily the flagbearer for the technology or the platform; it's no longer a US-only phenomenon.
GSM will be phased out over the next decade, cohabitating with WCDMA, as peoples' handsets are replaced by shiny new models with ridiculous multimedia features they won't use for years. Check the market for dual-band WCDMA/GSM mobile phones and notice how many of the major manufacturers are producing them.
Regretably, none of that matters to our friend, Mr. Issa. He and his backers are interested solely in making a quick buck. It's obvious to me that Iraq would be better served by allowing a privatized Iraq Telecom corporation to arise from the ashes of the old state-run telecom. Iraq Telecom should make its own decision about what kind of cellular technology to deploy, perhaps with the help of a US bank loan. That would be a minor boon for the US and a blissful telecommunications future for Iraq.
But, honestly...what'd you expect, from a politician?
Considering that any modern browser supports some flavor HTTP compression, and that servers can be configured to support it without too much additional work...one must wonder: what's the point? Especially since a significant proportion of web traffic consists of highly-compressed images, which only grow larger (increased overhead) when you try to compress them further.
You give him his choice of peripherals/paraphernalia, a wide price range (from cheap crank to medical-grade heroin), a variety of colors and styles to choose from...and what does he do? He picks an inferior, leafy product using obsolete THC-crystal technology that will go up in smoke as soon as you begin using it.
That's the whole point; his review was a parody of the entire genre of "prosumer reviews" that sound like they're giving you valuable information, but are really just plugging one product or another.
I don't claim it was done well...just that it's what this guy was obviously trying to do.
My flavor of choice for C/C++ is KDevelop, which offers point-and-click project management (with Makefiles and GNU autoconf underneath), integrated debugging, and project templates for KDE, GNOME, console and other types of project, including libraries.
Forte is a mature, kick-ass Java IDE released free by Sun. It works on any platform, including any Linux with a JVM.
For a lightweight option, try SciTE, the Scintilla text editor. It's a full-featured text editor based on a cross-platform C++ editor component. It has syntax highlighting, very basic build tools (makefile support, parsing of compiler errors, etc) and a nice anti-kitchen-sink aesthetic.
"It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?"
The original poster's point was clearly that someone may have shared stealth technology with the Iraqis, and that knowledge of how stealth works would render our technology worthless. I was simply pointing out that mere possession of the technology isn't a magic bullet that renders it ineffective.
The stealth will still do its job of being incredibly difficult -- but not impossible -- to detect. You can be damned sure that the engineers who designed it in the first place did the best job they could to render it as invisible as possible throughout as much of the spectrum as possible.
Even if Iraq or one of its allies has gotten ahold of an entire aircraft and had extensive opportunities to play with it in the lab, they're still going to have trouble detecting them. As other posters in this thread have pointed out, the stealth *can* be detected. The point is that it's hard to detect, and even when you do detect it, the returns you get will be sporadic and faint enough that you won't be able to target the aircraft with radar-guided missiles.
The stealth aircraft are (nearly) undetectable to radar by their very nature -- they are designed to absorb and scatter as much radar energy as possible, down to the paint used to make them black. In fact, the paint plays such an important role in the aircraft's stealth qualities, that they must be repainted whenever they've been exposed to rain.
Even if someone has given stealth technology to Iraq, that won't enable them to detect stealth aircraft. It'll just let them build stealth aircraft of their own. Which is fairly useless to them, in their current financial and strategic situation.
In early colonial America, townsfolk would often decide that their friends needed a helping hand, and they had their own helping devices. They were called stocks and pillories. The point of the punishment was not to inflict pain or leave a lasting mark (though they were quite uncomfortable and sometimes resulted in death), but to thoroughly humiliate the unlawful one in front of his community, who naturally were only interested in helping him see the error of his ways.
How precisely will it help anyone to have his friends and neighbors looking over his shoulder and monitoring the websites he visits? If he feels inclined to visit a pornographic website, why should he be chastised for doing so? Is there something inherently wrong with pornographic material?
Far from friends helping friends, the site looks to me like friends using each other to reinforce the dogmatic, injurious principles of their myopic system of belief. The religion doesn't need to expend resources on oversight of its subjects, when they are willing to police themselves so efficiently.
But, hey, that's just my opinion. Feel free to disagree as vocally as you want, and to believe anything you want. It's a free country after all, and any knots you tie in your psyche, or ulcers you burn into your stomach, whilst worrying about what's acceptable behavior in the eyes of God, are your own damned fault.
The presumption here is that porn is sinful and evil, and will send you to HELL. By watching over your shoulder and disapproving of any porn site you visit, your loved ones are making sure you don't stray from the path of righteousness.
Proxies, redirectors and other services such as anonymizer.com will surely foil this system, because a visit to www.persiankitty.com via anonymizer will simply show up as anonymizer.com in the logs.
Therefore...proxies and redirectors are tools of the devil! BURN THEM! BURN THEM ALL!!!
Have you noticed a recent drastic increase in the frequency of modship? I think I've been on a more-or-less continuous roll since mid-November, at which time I hadn't been selected for more than a year. Now I typically get mod points once a week.
Hopefully, missing my last batch won't adversely affect my chances of continuing this modding streak. Reading/. comments is always so much more fun when you're armed and dangerous..
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I might point out that the Constitution of the United States values a human's rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness above ALL ELSE -- yet our judicial system clearly, through its actions, clearly does not. Peoples' constitutional rights are violated day in and day out, moreso than ever before because of the terrorism "threat."
Does this mean the Constitution is invalid? Of course not -- it just means we don't respect our own constitution. Similarly, just because American journalism doesn't respect its own ideals, doesn't mean those ideals are invalid.
Please stop trying to further your bizarre political agenda inside a discussion about Las Vegas, ex-strippers and competition poker. It so happens that I largely agree with your bizarre political agenda, but this isn't the place for it.
And there we have the heart of the matter. Journalism whose goal is to entertain the reader, isn't bound by the same strictures as journalism whose goal is to report the objective truth.
I'm a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson, I read Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas on a regular basis and it never stops entertaining me. Gonzo journalism is fine with me. And, in retrospect, McManus' work is very much in the same vein.
As so many people have pointed out in this thread -- very vociferously, and often with a great number of expletives -- the American media do a terrible job of reporting the objective truth. That doesn't mean the institution of journalism doesn't uphold this goal, or that we should entirely abandon detachment. It just means that the American media are a crop of Godawful journalists.
Garbage in, garbage out. During the latest Iraq war, virtually the entire American press corps has served as the Pentagon's mouthpiece because the only source of information on the situation in Iraq was the Pentagon, and "embedded" reporters.
The problem is that TV journalism makes more money than print journalism, and it makes even MORE money by losing track of objectivity and tailoring the news to please the target audience. It's no coincidence that newspaper sales plummet every year. People have taken to watching the agreeable pap that streams from their TV sets.
Detached reporting is the ideal. Because the majority of US media outlets do not live up to the ideal, should we completely abandon the ideal? Should journalism schools start teaching marketing classes? Should the goal of the journalist be to reach his target demographic and not to report the truth?
That's one helluva fallacy, from where I sit.
New Yorker. Harper's. NYT magazine. This is popular journalism. Along with Boy's Life, Cosmopolitan and Dr. Dobbs' Journal, these publications don't even pretend to maintain journalistic detachment. Obviously, McManus' own work is in this vein.
I'm simply pointing out that he was sent to cover this poker tournament and ended up writing a book about it, and postulating that perhaps it's because he lost track of his objectivity. I think the ex-stripper would agree.
Calm down, man. Take a deep breath. Of course the American press are full of shit -- and full of themselves. Of course none of them are detached. Frankly, any television reporting you see is not journalism and hasn't been for decades. But the more credible publications (New York Times, LA TimeS) do a pretty good job of staying objective, and they strive for detachment as well.
Deeply ingrained in US journalism is the idea of journalistic detachment. It's generally frowned upon when reporters become involved with the subject of their reporting.
It seems to me that entering into the poker tournament you were sent to cover, and then betting increasingly more, becoming increasingly more involved -- this is not a good example of journalistic detachment. McManus' failure in this regard may be one reason that most of his material was published as a book, rather than a series of articles.
In McManus' defense, I should note that US journalism is extra-particular about detachment. Much of the world follows a partisan model, where the journalists admit from the start that they have an agenda, and that they cannot be completely detached from the subject. So they emphasize objectivity instead, arguing that a journalistic work can both inform and present an agenda, as long as it's done objectively.
I think what he meant was, Linux existed before IBM had anything to do with it.
I wish I could make a blanket reply to all of these posts, because many of them make a good case against my argument. I've chosen to respond to yours because it has the most addressable points, the most coherency and the highest score (leading more people to read it, hopefully).
The most vocal rebuttal thus far has been If your friend is willing to forward private material, then he's no friend at all. Along the same lines is If you don't want your friend to forward private photos, then tell him as much. In a black-and-white world, both of these statements would be perfectly valid. But even my best friends have been known to suffer momentary lapses of judgement. And there are numerous other cases where I might send something to my friend, and it would be unclear to him whether he's allowed to forward it or not. I only raised the spectre of the ex-girlfriend because it seemed to be a case where I most unambiguously did not my content forwarded. And I'd rather have a way to concretely enforce that restriction with a moderate level of confidence, than rely on my friend's reading and obeying whatever written instructions I attached to the photo. If I had truly sensitive information, you wouldn't catch me sending it via such an insecure medium in the first place. Without end-to-end encryption, I'm disinclined to put any of my secrets on the wire: spoken, written or otherwise.
Also -- the truth of the matter is that I'm a homosexual. If someone sent a picture of me and my boyfriend to my ex-girlfriend I'd probably be relieved, because it might send her the message she seems so dense about receiving. But that's neither here nor there; I just felt like injecting some reality into an otherwise hypothetical discussion.
Regarding the potential negative impact of ODRL: going from previous experience, we can be sure than the deep-pocketed acolytes of the embrace-and-extend god will use their multiply hyphenated power to turn this technology against us. They don't want to control every aspect of our lives; for the most part they're just after our money, and they want control over any aspect of our lives where money is involved.
But let's take a step back and examine the domain once again. We buy cell phones that speak to only one network provider and use trivial encryption; we have no guarantee of privacy to begin with. Those of us unfortunate enough to be living in the United States of Ashcroft know with absolute certainty that everything we say, write or do with our cell phones is recorded and scanned for keywords as a matter of course.
The scant content that is available to those of us lucky enough to have a 3G phone is either already heavily protected or it's utter tripe that isn't worth stealing in the first place. Network connectivity and a central authority are both inherent to the platform, and we can be reasonably certain that any content made available to us will take advantage of that fact, and strictly enforce the licensing terms. Our cell phones are not a free or open platform to begin with.
This point was driven home when I called my provider (Verizon) to enquire about becoming a BREW developer -- BREW is a sort of cut-rate alternative to Java for cell phones -- and was told that the entry fee into the program was US$3,000 not including development tools or software licenses, and that all software must be digitally signed by Verizon before it would run on any phone.
By standardizing DRM description language, we at least are guaranteed a few sanity checks: if I want to give my ringtone to my friend who's using Cingular because I don't want it anymore, at least both of our networks speak the same DRM language. And if I do want to download some premium content, I will find that more is available to me because producers have greater confidence in the system. And if the same DRM technology enhances my control over my own content, then it's all the better.
The introduction of cameras and multimedia SMS in the 3G market has given rise to privacy concerns, as we have seen in recent Slashdot coverage.
Consider for a moment that when people could be taking pictures of you with their cell phones at any time and at any place, some basic rights management within this very limited domain of cell phones and messaging might be extremely beneficial.
Let's say I take a quick snap of myself and my new girlfriend, and send it off to my pal across town so he can see how much fun we're having. Do I want that image to reach my parents? Do I want my ex girlfriend to see it? How about my co-workers and enemies? I'd rather not, thanks.
By giving the sender some basic control over where the content goes once it leaves his phone, we would be enhancing the sender's privacy. And, of course, all such "DRM" technologies must be taken with a grain of salt, because you and I and any other techie worth his weight in 3.5" floppies knows that any copy-protection scheme is breakable. The DRM technologies introduced to date have been far from confidence-inspiring. So DRM within this domain is more of a basic privacy tool than an Orwellian move to own your cell phone.
As for my preferred intepretation of the DRM moniker -- I've always been fond of "Digital Rights Removal Mechanism."
When you put it that way, I guess there isn't much of one. As you say, it will always be drastically cheaper to manufacturer single-purpose hardware than to equip your player with field-programmable logic and powerful DSPs.
I guess I'll slap together my own all-in-one player using one of those new Mini-ITX systems and Freevo...if the industry doesn't want to produce my miracle box, I'll just do it myself!
Java is slow and inefficient because it's a general-purpose language being compiled on the fly into a general-purpose native instruction set.
The WM9 HD codec requires an Intel of enormous power because IA32 is kinkier than a 50 year old hooker, but when support for the codec starts to appear in consumer-level DVD players next year, you'll see sub-gigahertz RISC processors doing the same job without breaking a sweat.
If you cut out the cruft -- if you design a machine language whole sole purpose is to transform digital media, include built-in SIMD operation and common mathematical building blocks for compression -- then you need fewer transistors running at a lower clock speed to accomplish the same tasks.
Recall how your MP3s used to stutter and skip when you played them on your 486. Recall how your first DVD drive required a dedicated hardware MPEG2 decoder. Compare your situation then to your situation today, where you can transparently decrypt and then software-decode MPEG2 video on the fly while SIMULTANEOUSLY decoding a six-channel AC3 audio stream.
Now jump forward three iterations of Moore's Law, ~ 5 years from now, and see what kind of load the WM9 codec puts on your CPU.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic in asking for this kind of technology now -- maybe it won't be the next generation of DVD, but the generation after that. Eventually, however, I think it'll be the way to go.
I see plenty of folks squawking about how red laser DVDs are untenable in the long run, regardless of the compression technology you use. The consensus among these naysayers seems to be: forget about trying to improve DVD, it's old and busted; wait for the new hotness of HD-DVD which will rock your socks.
But guess what? In ten years, HD-DVD will be old hat too. Blue lasers or no, the compression algorithms defined in the standard will pale in comparison to whatever advanced video compression is available at the time. This is an unfortunate side-effect of progress -- we're so damned clever in the last 50 years that we keep shooting ourselves in the foot technologically.
There is a sane answer: for the next generation of DVD, instead of locking ourselves into a single compression format from the beginning, why not design the standard to be extensible? The existing DVD standard already has a virtual machine instruction set for describing the interaction of menus and video segments. Why not take this idea a whole lot further and implement a domain-specific bytecode language that handles complex graphical operations, and is sufficiently powerful to code decompression algorithms?
Since the language is specific to video decompression, vendors' DVD players could efficiently compile the bytecodes to whatever internal instruction set they use. This way, when you pop a blue-laser DVD into the drive, it will come with instructions on how to decode it. The format of the file containing the video and audio streams can be specified in the standard, but their content is left up to the DVD producer.
Alternative #1: Buy a new PC (either assembled or part-by-part), spend days tweaking it and stamping out the zillions of compatibility issues and hardware glitches.
Alternative #2: Do some basic research, figure out which parts will work with each other and with your OS of choice. Put it together *exactly* the way you want it, with the case you want and everything configured as you please.
I'm not all that keen on having a Mac -- not keen enough to spend $700 on one, anyway -- but if I were in the market for a Mac desktop, I'd be railing against Apple's bow-down-to-us, one-size-fits-all, don't-look-in-the-box-boy mentality.
I know how computers work, and I want to be able to lovingly tune, tweak and alter the hell out of my machine. I can't do that with an Apple-bought Mac, because -- wait for it -- my WARRANTY will be void, oh no! Warranties are for televisions and toaster ovens; my computer is a beautiful machine,
There is, indeed, no reason why you couldn't use RPM for a source-based distro...I just think it's a bit heavyweight for that. You'd be better served with .tar.gz files and a standard for what they contain (build scripts, installed file metadata, and so forth).
As a longtime Redhat user, I've made it a habit to package even the smallest utilities. Between my personal projects, business obligations and the ties of family and friendship, I administer more than a dozen boxen. Being able to install and upgrade everything as a package keeps me sane -- once I've gotten to work on my desktop system and seen a clean upgrade (or install) work on the server in my living room, I know I can deploy the package in the field and be sure it'll work on 16 real, live production boxen. Do I ever have problems? Occasionally. But I think the mess would be much greater without such a strong binary-oriented packaging system.
I'm no Redhat evangelist -- use any damn distro that floats your boat! -- and I understand and appreciate the aesthetic that makes Gentoo appealing. But Redhat (and their package system) works for my particular situation better than anything else.
My only wish is that there were moderation choices for "Gullible" and "Funny As All Hell."
What are you talking about? Verizon uses (I believe) a WCDMA network, and it's got audio as clear as Cingular -- who uses GSM. Since WCDMA gets more signal out of a given wattage of RF, the clear audio comes through even clearer than it would with GSM.
My first phone ever was a Sprint CDMA rig -- this was back in 1998 when CDMA was very new -- and even at the time it sounded just great. I've never had problems with audio clarity with GSM or CDMA phones.
Compare to TDMA, which is half-duplex and sounds like chopped celery.
GSM is an aging standard. Code division multiplexing is the way of the future, and the engineers know this. It offers better reception, better capacity, and makes for a much better 3G infrastructure with mixed high-speed data/voice traffic.
China is rolling out a WCDMA network, folks. Qualcomm isn't necessarily the flagbearer for the technology or the platform; it's no longer a US-only phenomenon.
GSM will be phased out over the next decade, cohabitating with WCDMA, as peoples' handsets are replaced by shiny new models with ridiculous multimedia features they won't use for years. Check the market for dual-band WCDMA/GSM mobile phones and notice how many of the major manufacturers are producing them.
Regretably, none of that matters to our friend, Mr. Issa. He and his backers are interested solely in making a quick buck. It's obvious to me that Iraq would be better served by allowing a privatized Iraq Telecom corporation to arise from the ashes of the old state-run telecom. Iraq Telecom should make its own decision about what kind of cellular technology to deploy, perhaps with the help of a US bank loan. That would be a minor boon for the US and a blissful telecommunications future for Iraq.
But, honestly...what'd you expect, from a politician?
Considering that any modern browser supports some flavor HTTP compression, and that servers can be configured to support it without too much additional work...one must wonder: what's the point? Especially since a significant proportion of web traffic consists of highly-compressed images, which only grow larger (increased overhead) when you try to compress them further.
Typical nonconformist Mac user.
You give him his choice of peripherals/paraphernalia, a wide price range (from cheap crank to medical-grade heroin), a variety of colors and styles to choose from...and what does he do? He picks an inferior, leafy product using obsolete THC-crystal technology that will go up in smoke as soon as you begin using it.
That's the whole point; his review was a parody of the entire genre of "prosumer reviews" that sound like they're giving you valuable information, but are really just plugging one product or another.
I don't claim it was done well...just that it's what this guy was obviously trying to do.
We have several excellent IDEs available to us.
My flavor of choice for C/C++ is KDevelop, which offers point-and-click project management (with Makefiles and GNU autoconf underneath), integrated debugging, and project templates for KDE, GNOME, console and other types of project, including libraries.
Forte is a mature, kick-ass Java IDE released free by Sun. It works on any platform, including any Linux with a JVM.
For a lightweight option, try SciTE, the Scintilla text editor. It's a full-featured text editor based on a cross-platform C++ editor component. It has syntax highlighting, very basic build tools (makefile support, parsing of compiler errors, etc) and a nice anti-kitchen-sink aesthetic.
"It begs the question: did one of the countries that opposes the war pass this advanced technology, obviously developed since the 1991 Gulf War, to Iraq as an underhanded way of flipping the bird to the US and Bush?"
The original poster's point was clearly that someone may have shared stealth technology with the Iraqis, and that knowledge of how stealth works would render our technology worthless. I was simply pointing out that mere possession of the technology isn't a magic bullet that renders it ineffective.
The stealth will still do its job of being incredibly difficult -- but not impossible -- to detect. You can be damned sure that the engineers who designed it in the first place did the best job they could to render it as invisible as possible throughout as much of the spectrum as possible.
Even if Iraq or one of its allies has gotten ahold of an entire aircraft and had extensive opportunities to play with it in the lab, they're still going to have trouble detecting them. As other posters in this thread have pointed out, the stealth *can* be detected. The point is that it's hard to detect, and even when you do detect it, the returns you get will be sporadic and faint enough that you won't be able to target the aircraft with radar-guided missiles.
The stealth aircraft are (nearly) undetectable to radar by their very nature -- they are designed to absorb and scatter as much radar energy as possible, down to the paint used to make them black. In fact, the paint plays such an important role in the aircraft's stealth qualities, that they must be repainted whenever they've been exposed to rain.
Even if someone has given stealth technology to Iraq, that won't enable them to detect stealth aircraft. It'll just let them build stealth aircraft of their own. Which is fairly useless to them, in their current financial and strategic situation.
In early colonial America, townsfolk would often decide that their friends needed a helping hand, and they had their own helping devices. They were called stocks and pillories. The point of the punishment was not to inflict pain or leave a lasting mark (though they were quite uncomfortable and sometimes resulted in death), but to thoroughly humiliate the unlawful one in front of his community, who naturally were only interested in helping him see the error of his ways.
How precisely will it help anyone to have his friends and neighbors looking over his shoulder and monitoring the websites he visits? If he feels inclined to visit a pornographic website, why should he be chastised for doing so? Is there something inherently wrong with pornographic material?
Far from friends helping friends, the site looks to me like friends using each other to reinforce the dogmatic, injurious principles of their myopic system of belief. The religion doesn't need to expend resources on oversight of its subjects, when they are willing to police themselves so efficiently.
But, hey, that's just my opinion. Feel free to disagree as vocally as you want, and to believe anything you want. It's a free country after all, and any knots you tie in your psyche, or ulcers you burn into your stomach, whilst worrying about what's acceptable behavior in the eyes of God, are your own damned fault.
The presumption here is that porn is sinful and evil, and will send you to HELL. By watching over your shoulder and disapproving of any porn site you visit, your loved ones are making sure you don't stray from the path of righteousness.
Proxies, redirectors and other services such as anonymizer.com will surely foil this system, because a visit to www.persiankitty.com via anonymizer will simply show up as anonymizer.com in the logs.
Therefore...proxies and redirectors are tools of the devil! BURN THEM! BURN THEM ALL!!!
Have you noticed a recent drastic increase in the frequency of modship? I think I've been on a more-or-less continuous roll since mid-November, at which time I hadn't been selected for more than a year. Now I typically get mod points once a week.
/. comments is always so much more fun when you're armed and dangerous..
Hopefully, missing my last batch won't adversely affect my chances of continuing this modding streak. Reading