I was actually going to reply to "Ask Slashdot: French Government Online-Why Isn't the U.S.?," but I figured it was too late. Then I saw this story, which basically states what I was going to say about the former. The US isn't online because they can't keep something like that secure and they know it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone wipes out the French system fairly soon now that the "word is out." Of course, I may be wrong; they may have hired a building-full of 1337 French hackers to secure the system. But I doubt it.
If you've every looked at any of the OLAP technologies, it's very simple to take data in an exsiting relational structure and map it to a hierarchical structure for easier user analysis. This isn't necessarily maintaining both types of databases, but rather building one type off another type for analysis purposes. *whisper (Microsoft has some great software to let you do this on SQL Server...):)
What? Capitalism IS Slashdot's primary cause. (Re: numerous stories on defeating copyright protection in the name of saving money on CDs.) This post seems quite typical and "approprate" considering the audience.:)
But I am a pretty half-assed capitalist, and I agree with you, this is just wrong. There are probably plenty of mothers or fathers who really wanted to get something thier young children wanted for Christmas and now they can't on the budget they have because of "scalpers."
Actually, this is happening with the GameCube. Panasonic is making a hybrid GameCube system that also functions as a DVD player. I'm sure more will follow, although whether these make it to the US or not, I don't know. But this is evidence that Nintendo is open to the idea you mention.
Basically, there will be a point soon where even gaming consoles will all be "fast enough", which will mean bad news for hardware manufacturers until the "Next Big Thing" emerges to max out even cutting-edge stuff.
Nah, I don't think so. When you drop $1500 on a new PC, a lear later you're usually thinking, "Yeah, this is fast enough," and you don't upgrade. Consoles, at ~$300, are not as much of a problem. Besides, at that price you can buy 3 consoles before buying one new "cheap" PC, or 5 consoles for the price of a "average" PC. That's alot of upgrading.
I don't think that the "Next Big Thing" you mention will really change any of that. If a company figures out a way to make a cheap VR headset or something that could be sold at console prices, the same accessory will come out for the PC in successive months.
But, truthfully, consoles ALWAYS have a "next big thing" type of advantage over PCs that no PC can duplicate at this point. Group entertainment (read: party) games just don't go over well on a 17" monitor (or a 22".) You need a couch, a big TV, etc. And honestly, everything besides RPG and strategy on a PC is boring to me because of the lack of a social aspect. I think games are just more fun to play when people can watch what you're doing without getting a neck cramp or having to pull chairs over to sit next to you so they can see what's going on.
I have. I personally know 3 mothers who were camped out at ShopKo at 4:30 this morning. One of them (mine) was picking it up for my younger brothers and sisters back home as a Christmas present. If I personally know 3 people that were there before opening, I'm pretty sure that ShopKo's first-come first-serve lot of 30 units was gone 5 minutes after the store opened.
Actually there are ways to get lossy compression out of both PNG and GIF. It's not built into the format itself though. It's a fairly simple matter for an application to rearrange the pixels in your image a bit so that they compress better (for example, swapping two pixels in GIF so that like colors are next to each other.) The image loses quality; the file size gets smaller. Lossy compression doesn't need to have anything to do with the format itself, but rather that format's ability to be smaller in size given loss of quality.
Um, dude. Chill. There's a reason they have a "funny" moderation; it's because people try to make jokes occasionally on Slashdot. It "livens things up a little."
Would someone please use this man's/woman's name in a sentance for me? I've forgotten what his/her real birth name is!!!!!!! There are alot of little coding and routing numbers and letters on the ballet and I'm worried I might accidentally punch one if everyone starts going by thier initials.
OK, so you've explained that fine. Thanks. And that IS how I understand it. What my explicit and final point is is that copyright law does not exclude contract law. As part of a copyright statement, adding, "if you choose to read past this line, you explicitly agree to abide by copyright contract X," a signed contract is not required, and the creator of the content can at that point assume full control of the use of that content. Legally.
I forgot to mention: while there are limits to the exclusivity of ownership (as in fair use,) none of these exexmptions TRANSFER ownership. They only allow users of material to be exempt from normal copyright restrictions.
BUT it is not the author's place to make that decision, unless it was required prior, and as a condition of receiving, the copy of the work.
And that is EXACTLY what I am saying. It is totally up to the author what may be done with his/her intellectual property. Not to copyright law or anything else. "Copyright law" that the Slashdot crowd whines about only defines a small subset of things that can be done, by proxy on behalf of the author, without being explicitly stated... this is fair use, etc. BUT: If the author so chooses ever copy of his/her work can have stringent restrictions that restrict usage further. That is the the creator's right under the basic copyright law that is the foundation of all copyright. Look it up.
Consider use of copyrighted work to be a "loan" of that work on behalf of the creator. The creator, in the stating of the contitions of that loan, makes the choices. The user of the material has to abide by those conditions if they choose to acquire any type of copy of the property, or they are in violation of law. If the conditions are not explicitly stated, there is still a copyright. The rules are then defaulted. It is these defaults that seem to be the focus of what the Slashdot crowd (including yourself) sees copyright law as. There is much more too it than that in the base law, that give the creator ALL control of the work, if they so choose. And alot of authors do so chose.
Evidentally everyone on Slashdot makes "hard earned cash" without creating anything they value. A sad state of affairs. I love this quote, and at first I thought you were just joking... but no, you're serious.
...I have the right to do whatever the hell I want with it because IT'S MINE!!!!!!
Did you write the story in that book? Unless you did, that story is NOT yours. No matter how much hard earned cash you paid for the paper container that transports the story, you don't own the words. That's still in the direct ownership of the author. Consider your abilities of transferal of the story within the container a fair use "loan." Fair use is a set of rules added to manage these niggling things like transferal of ownership that are aggreed upon between authors and consumers. So yes, you can give the story to someone else using this container. And no, you can't copy it. And yes, if you are writing a book review, you can use excerpts. These are part of your loan. But the creators of content still own that content, don't forget. In the case of the intellectual property of others, this is NOT true:
I payed for it and I can do whatever I want with it.
That's not true at all. It's hardware *dependant.* If you have a CDROM drive that is capable of functioning as a "normal" CD player then you will have no problem extracting the audio (albeit in a non digital format.) There was a rumor recently that Macs had no problem playing copy-protected CDs but what people were really seeing is the difference between digital audio extraction and standard CD audio modes on drives. Alot of windows machines are set to digital extraction mode by default, and therefore can't play these CDs. Macs, on the other hand, evidentally default to audio. And this is hearsay, but I believe iTunes can rip audio directly from the audio subsystem rather than having to do DAE... so users with defaults set see no problems ripping CDs.
I don't think so. In the area I worked (USDA) there was computing WAY before MS. And since most people don't like change, it stayed that way even into the early 90s. Only during the past few years have they pushed for "desktop" machines... even when I worked there (97) alot of work was still done through remote X to a set of AIX servers... even with all the difficulty they had keeping them up, people continued to insist on using them. That's another story.:)
I wonder if anyone has ever considered that actually. I'm not a window manager developer or anything, and know little about the detailes, but it does seem like alot of the visual weaknesses I notice in Linux deskops (bad redraw, ugly outlining and fonts, etc.) are common througout X-based GUIs. Is there a development project to redo the system from the ground up, and perhaps port a popular windowing toolkit to it so apps could be easily ported?
I still am not sure I follow the line of arguement. Regardless of whether it's easy to catch the person who stole your credit card number (and I question how easy this would be if a random employee at a chain superstore sold your number on the internet,) the system is still fundamentally flawed. For the most part, it relies on fixed numbers that don't change. The fact that there IS a number to be stored on Passport is the problem, not the actual storing of information. And again, it's all your choice. Please explain how this is not true.
The employees who work at these companies have no binding to the good record of the company. They can take credit card numbers home and do with them as they please, just as those who would get them through holes in Passport would.
These are all good points, and it's right to be scared about giving your info away. But these points have been made over and over about credit card information and MS and they're completely invalid.
Why? Every day you use your credit card you are giving your credit card number away. Do you trust the guy at that gas station? Do you trust the person at WalMart? It's one number and many people can remember that many digits without any trouble at all. And if not that then there are always the receipts... the criminal can copy it down later after you're gone.
Ultimately we're putting our trust in a system that places a few "secret" numbers between criminals and our bank accounts. And we give these numbers away every day as part of using the system.
Don't like it? Don't use it. That is true of the Passport system AND credit cards.
Some of the points in this article may be quite true... but 10 years ago how many of us had direct access to as many photos as we do today? Sure we might have a great photo history of it but it's all in negatives down at the newspaper office, and a stingy receptionist doesn't want to get them out.
Now anyone with a camera (digital or non) can get photos up on the web where everyone can see them. It's not just the journalists who have the power to record the history. It's everyone. And the human memory network's a better place to store and propigate history anyway (you know the saying.)
... we just need to convince him somehow that he needs to open email attachments. Any of us could make an executable that would dispose of his machine and we'd collect the reward. But he wouldn't run it for us like so many Windows users would. Linux is JUST as vulnerable to 90% of the types of Windows viruses that are out there... its users just often aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually going to reply to "Ask Slashdot: French Government Online-Why Isn't the U.S.?," but I figured it was too late. Then I saw this story, which basically states what I was going to say about the former. The US isn't online because they can't keep something like that secure and they know it. I wouldn't be surprised if someone wipes out the French system fairly soon now that the "word is out." Of course, I may be wrong; they may have hired a building-full of 1337 French hackers to secure the system. But I doubt it.
I think you're right about the XBox flopping, but what was the logic here?
Oh, and it's pretty easy to find XBox's in Austin, so I'm guessing XBox will flop
You opened by saying that it was really easy to find a GameCube in Austin too. What does that say about the GameCube?
If you've every looked at any of the OLAP technologies, it's very simple to take data in an exsiting relational structure and map it to a hierarchical structure for easier user analysis. This isn't necessarily maintaining both types of databases, but rather building one type off another type for analysis purposes. *whisper (Microsoft has some great software to let you do this on SQL Server...) :)
What? Capitalism IS Slashdot's primary cause. (Re: numerous stories on defeating copyright protection in the name of saving money on CDs.) This post seems quite typical and "approprate" considering the audience. :)
But I am a pretty half-assed capitalist, and I agree with you, this is just wrong. There are probably plenty of mothers or fathers who really wanted to get something thier young children wanted for Christmas and now they can't on the budget they have because of "scalpers."
Actually, this is happening with the GameCube. Panasonic is making a hybrid GameCube system that also functions as a DVD player. I'm sure more will follow, although whether these make it to the US or not, I don't know. But this is evidence that Nintendo is open to the idea you mention.
Basically, there will be a point soon where even gaming consoles will all be "fast enough", which will mean bad news for hardware manufacturers until the "Next Big Thing" emerges to max out even cutting-edge stuff.
Nah, I don't think so. When you drop $1500 on a new PC, a lear later you're usually thinking, "Yeah, this is fast enough," and you don't upgrade. Consoles, at ~$300, are not as much of a problem. Besides, at that price you can buy 3 consoles before buying one new "cheap" PC, or 5 consoles for the price of a "average" PC. That's alot of upgrading.
I don't think that the "Next Big Thing" you mention will really change any of that. If a company figures out a way to make a cheap VR headset or something that could be sold at console prices, the same accessory will come out for the PC in successive months.
But, truthfully, consoles ALWAYS have a "next big thing" type of advantage over PCs that no PC can duplicate at this point. Group entertainment (read: party) games just don't go over well on a 17" monitor (or a 22".) You need a couch, a big TV, etc. And honestly, everything besides RPG and strategy on a PC is boring to me because of the lack of a social aspect. I think games are just more fun to play when people can watch what you're doing without getting a neck cramp or having to pull chairs over to sit next to you so they can see what's going on.
That's a good call. Definitely avoid spending $300 on it. Besides, like I always say, research before buying!
I have. I personally know 3 mothers who were camped out at ShopKo at 4:30 this morning. One of them (mine) was picking it up for my younger brothers and sisters back home as a Christmas present. If I personally know 3 people that were there before opening, I'm pretty sure that ShopKo's first-come first-serve lot of 30 units was gone 5 minutes after the store opened.
Actually there are ways to get lossy compression out of both PNG and GIF. It's not built into the format itself though. It's a fairly simple matter for an application to rearrange the pixels in your image a bit so that they compress better (for example, swapping two pixels in GIF so that like colors are next to each other.) The image loses quality; the file size gets smaller. Lossy compression doesn't need to have anything to do with the format itself, but rather that format's ability to be smaller in size given loss of quality.
Um, dude. Chill. There's a reason they have a "funny" moderation; it's because people try to make jokes occasionally on Slashdot. It "livens things up a little."
Would someone please use this man's/woman's name in a sentance for me? I've forgotten what his/her real birth name is!!!!!!! There are alot of little coding and routing numbers and letters on the ballet and I'm worried I might accidentally punch one if everyone starts going by thier initials.
OK, so you've explained that fine. Thanks. And that IS how I understand it. What my explicit and final point is is that copyright law does not exclude contract law. As part of a copyright statement, adding, "if you choose to read past this line, you explicitly agree to abide by copyright contract X," a signed contract is not required, and the creator of the content can at that point assume full control of the use of that content. Legally.
I forgot to mention: while there are limits to the exclusivity of ownership (as in fair use,) none of these exexmptions TRANSFER ownership. They only allow users of material to be exempt from normal copyright restrictions.
BUT it is not the author's place to make that decision, unless it was required prior, and as a condition of receiving, the copy of the work.
And that is EXACTLY what I am saying. It is totally up to the author what may be done with his/her intellectual property. Not to copyright law or anything else. "Copyright law" that the Slashdot crowd whines about only defines a small subset of things that can be done, by proxy on behalf of the author, without being explicitly stated... this is fair use, etc. BUT: If the author so chooses ever copy of his/her work can have stringent restrictions that restrict usage further. That is the the creator's right under the basic copyright law that is the foundation of all copyright. Look it up.
Consider use of copyrighted work to be a "loan" of that work on behalf of the creator. The creator, in the stating of the contitions of that loan, makes the choices. The user of the material has to abide by those conditions if they choose to acquire any type of copy of the property, or they are in violation of law. If the conditions are not explicitly stated, there is still a copyright. The rules are then defaulted. It is these defaults that seem to be the focus of what the Slashdot crowd (including yourself) sees copyright law as. There is much more too it than that in the base law, that give the creator ALL control of the work, if they so choose. And alot of authors do so chose.
*Sigh*
...I have the right to do whatever the hell I want with it because IT'S MINE!!!!!!
Evidentally everyone on Slashdot makes "hard earned cash" without creating anything they value. A sad state of affairs. I love this quote, and at first I thought you were just joking... but no, you're serious.
Did you write the story in that book? Unless you did, that story is NOT yours. No matter how much hard earned cash you paid for the paper container that transports the story, you don't own the words. That's still in the direct ownership of the author. Consider your abilities of transferal of the story within the container a fair use "loan." Fair use is a set of rules added to manage these niggling things like transferal of ownership that are aggreed upon between authors and consumers. So yes, you can give the story to someone else using this container. And no, you can't copy it. And yes, if you are writing a book review, you can use excerpts. These are part of your loan. But the creators of content still own that content, don't forget. In the case of the intellectual property of others, this is NOT true:
I payed for it and I can do whatever I want with it.
so it's OS-independent.
That's not true at all. It's hardware *dependant.* If you have a CDROM drive that is capable of functioning as a "normal" CD player then you will have no problem extracting the audio (albeit in a non digital format.) There was a rumor recently that Macs had no problem playing copy-protected CDs but what people were really seeing is the difference between digital audio extraction and standard CD audio modes on drives. Alot of windows machines are set to digital extraction mode by default, and therefore can't play these CDs. Macs, on the other hand, evidentally default to audio. And this is hearsay, but I believe iTunes can rip audio directly from the audio subsystem rather than having to do DAE... so users with defaults set see no problems ripping CDs.
I don't think so. In the area I worked (USDA) there was computing WAY before MS. And since most people don't like change, it stayed that way even into the early 90s. Only during the past few years have they pushed for "desktop" machines... even when I worked there (97) alot of work was still done through remote X to a set of AIX servers... even with all the difficulty they had keeping them up, people continued to insist on using them. That's another story. :)
Maybe he did send a message in but as "Richard Stallman." No one saw a message from "RMS" so they just assumed he had decided to duck out.
I wonder if anyone has ever considered that actually. I'm not a window manager developer or anything, and know little about the detailes, but it does seem like alot of the visual weaknesses I notice in Linux deskops (bad redraw, ugly outlining and fonts, etc.) are common througout X-based GUIs. Is there a development project to redo the system from the ground up, and perhaps port a popular windowing toolkit to it so apps could be easily ported?
The key is to set your client to use port 21. You may find that most normal FTP sites use that port.
I still am not sure I follow the line of arguement. Regardless of whether it's easy to catch the person who stole your credit card number (and I question how easy this would be if a random employee at a chain superstore sold your number on the internet,) the system is still fundamentally flawed. For the most part, it relies on fixed numbers that don't change. The fact that there IS a number to be stored on Passport is the problem, not the actual storing of information. And again, it's all your choice. Please explain how this is not true.
No.
The employees who work at these companies have no binding to the good record of the company. They can take credit card numbers home and do with them as they please, just as those who would get them through holes in Passport would.
These are all good points, and it's right to be scared about giving your info away. But these points have been made over and over about credit card information and MS and they're completely invalid.
Why? Every day you use your credit card you are giving your credit card number away. Do you trust the guy at that gas station? Do you trust the person at WalMart? It's one number and many people can remember that many digits without any trouble at all. And if not that then there are always the receipts... the criminal can copy it down later after you're gone.
Ultimately we're putting our trust in a system that places a few "secret" numbers between criminals and our bank accounts. And we give these numbers away every day as part of using the system.
Don't like it? Don't use it. That is true of the Passport system AND credit cards.
Some of the points in this article may be quite true... but 10 years ago how many of us had direct access to as many photos as we do today? Sure we might have a great photo history of it but it's all in negatives down at the newspaper office, and a stingy receptionist doesn't want to get them out.
Now anyone with a camera (digital or non) can get photos up on the web where everyone can see them. It's not just the journalists who have the power to record the history. It's everyone. And the human memory network's a better place to store and propigate history anyway (you know the saying.)
... we just need to convince him somehow that he needs to open email attachments. Any of us could make an executable that would dispose of his machine and we'd collect the reward. But he wouldn't run it for us like so many Windows users would. Linux is JUST as vulnerable to 90% of the types of Windows viruses that are out there... its users just often aren't.