The Wheel? Levers? Arches? Steel? Medicine? A bajillion other things?
The wheel is a tool for allowing things to move without the hassle of friction. Levers are tools for applying large amounts of force over small distances (or vice versa). Arches are a design pattern for building structures that can support large amounts of strain. Steel is a material useful for building tough structures. Medicine is a family of science that helps people live longer and with less pain.
Saying that computers are more versatile than any of these things doesn't mean that computers are more important than they are. But note that computers are helpful in each and every one of the fields that the above tools are designed for use in.
you can ignore the FPGA and "internal bus"... if the CPU is so anemic they can't be any good
Dunno -- they're claiming reprogramming times for the FPGA (0.03s) that are nearly 10x faster than devices I know about. I'm not certain I'm seeing the fastest FPGAs available, but it certainly sounds impressive to me.
You've got to wonder, though, why an internal bus would be useful when the processor runs at about a tenth the speed of the external bus on an average modern PC.
Most commonly used Office apps (e.g. PhotoShop:)) will write a header in the file by which you can identify what created the file originally (or at least touched it last)
OK, so what? All images on every web site I put together are written by photoshop. That doesn't mean I've doctored them. It has excellent facilities for colour correction, scaling, cropping and rotation, all of which are typically things I need to do to a picture before putting it on a web site. And, if I'm scanning from a paper source rather than a digital camera, it has a direct interface to my scanner.
there are some slight alignment errors where the "author" was cutting and pasting bits of the image.
I'm surprised (and a bit sad about) the number of students who can't hear the 16khz tone.
I'm not. 16KHz is well above the average maximum audible frequency for humans, which is I believe 14KHz. My guess would be that ~2-5% of people are able to hear 16KHz tones even without damage.
As someone who has voted for "third parties" in every presidential election since 1988, I would welcome a system like this.
But, of course, neither of the two most powerful parties would, as it would mean a reduction in their power. And they, of course, are the people you need to persuade in order to get it implemented.
A lot of companies have used non-standard power supply cable layouts in the past. I believe the reason for this is that they added features (such as motherboard-based power management) to their PCs before there was standardized infrastructure to support them (e.g. the ATX case specification), and once they had done this they stuck with their own internal systems for a long time rather than switch to the newly emerging standards.
I also understand companies such as Dell wanting to keep customers out of thier boxes.
Are you taking the piss here? I've never owned a PC easier to work on as my Dell Optiplex GX1. You don't even need a screwdriver for most operations (you need one for the screws that hold I/O cards in place, that's about it).
The Maintenance Code is copyrighted material and protected intellectual property of StorageTek.
Yeah, OK.
The use of the event messages generated by the maintenance code by the 3rd party maintenance vendor is thus copyright infringement.
Do you have a reference to statute or a precedent that backs that statement up?
It isn't usually the case that data generated by a copyrighted program is automatically assumed to be held under the copyright of the owners of the program. For instance, Microsoft doesn't hold copyright to IP packets that are transmitted by windows machines, even though it is their code that assembles those packets.
Furthermore I believe that, in general, copyright cannot be applied to the result of an automated process. From www.copyright.gov:
Copyright protects "original works of authorship"
There is no authorship here. The article continues:
Copyrightable works include the following categories:
1. literary works;
2. musical works, including any accompanying words
3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music
4. pantomimes and choreographic works
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works
7. sound recordings
8. architectural works
These categories should be viewed broadly. For example, computer programs and most "compilations" may be registered as "literary works"; maps and architectural plans may be registered as "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works."
I don't believe the "event messages" involved fall into any of these categories, however broadly you interpret them.
That kind of thing happens from time to time. Particularly with laws that define how the government is supposed to work, like welfare benefits. I live in a "pathfinder" area of the UK, which means that the housing benefit system here currently works differently to everywhere else. Sooner or later the system will be superceded by a new version that will apply to the whole country.
You mean they're not the same chip, with various overclocking inhibitors enabled?
Err, no. They have different capabilities of executing multiple instructions concurrently, and additions to the instruction set (e.g. MMX, SSE) as you go through the sequence.
Luxury! I had to make do with a 386DX33, which took about twice as long to execute each instruction. And 4 megs was the best you were likely to get, 'cause the slots were all filled with 1 meg simms by the cheap computer shop, and the idea of taking a couple out to upgrade was just ludicrous...
when I had a PII, I remember having to extract all the text content just to be able to work on it, and copy-paste it back into the graphically enhanced version.
Then the software you're using for editing is badly implemented. I've used MS word and OO.o writer on a 400MHz celeron to edit documents with layouts about as complex as you'd ever expect to see, and both coped fine (although OO.o was showing signs of stress).
OTOH, using the editor in mozilla's mail client to edit anything with more than a few graphics or tables slows to a crawl.
Re:My speed benchmark for DVDs & MP3s
on
The History Of Pentium
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3 I've found this highly dependant on the input bit rate. With a 120MHz processor, I used to be able to play up to 160kb/s flawlessly, but anything over that would occasionally stutter, and 256kb/s was unplayable.
You need something running at 100Mhz to encode an MP3 in less time than it takes to play it.
What encoder are you using? I use LAME, and that seems to need ~200MHz to encode in real time.
You need something running at 1Ghz to encode video on the fly. Again: what encoder are you using? With TMPGEnc Plus encoding mpeg2 with the default setting for the motion search precision, performance on the aforementioned celeron suggests I'd need about 1.6 - 2GHz to get it up to real time (for high quality PAL DVD -- should be about the same for NTSC DVD, which has lower resolution but higher frame rate).
My first pentium (a P120MMX) is currently serving adequately as a file, print, web and e-mail server for my small office. The only upgrades since I acquired it in '97 have been RAM and hard disk space.
Of course, odds are that they do have to have the source available for the GPL libdvdcss libraries that it uses, so does that mean that they are violating trade secrets as well?
Can you point me to anywhere the MPAA/whoever has tried to prosecute CSS related developers/distributors for exposing trade secrets? I don't believe such an argument would stand up in court, because in order to be protected as a trade secret, it must be impossible to derive from publicly released material (?), which is precisely how DeCSS, and presumably libdvdcss, was developed.
Oh, I forgot. If you drag & drop a directory containing a DVD image onto the application, it starts playing the contents of the image files. But it won't let you view the DVD's menu. In order to do that, you need to open the directory by clicking on one of those buttons with an obscure icon and no tool-tip.
utility development which I feel should remain in the hands of closed source developers who bother to hire usability experts
Maybe in some cases you are right. A lot of commercial applications have better UIs than their free counterparts.
However, this story is about PowerDVD -- I downloaded the windows trial of it a few weeks ago and deleted it after about two days. It has the most obscure and hard to use user interface I've ever seen. Controls that you need to use frequently are hidden and need to be revealed by clicking on what looks like a piece of window decoration. There are buttons which change purpose depending on what the application is doing, and which use the same inexplicable icon in both modes. There doesn't seem to be any way to jump to a particular point in the file you're playing (this is a lack of a feature, but an important one for usability that exists in almost all other media player applications).
DeCSS is illegal period. This isn't a patent issue with CSS. It's industry trade secret protection.
Not in Europe it isn't. Europe (as a whole) doesn't have any general form of legal trade secret protection, other than the non-disclosure agreement -- and the limit of the use of that is that the disclosing party will have to pay damages. I don't think Johanssen was a signatory to any NDAs on CSS encryption.
The limit of protection of CSS in Europe is what they can get away with calling 'contributory copyright infringement' under the EUCD (same as it being the DMCA that's used against DeCSS in the US), and the more people using DeCSS in order to play their DVDs the better the case for a "substantial non-infringing use" we have.
I believe most EU countries are yet to make any form of decision over the legality of DeCSS. My suspicion is that a fair proportion would find it to be a legal and legitimate tool.
I don't know, maybe the situation's better over here in the UK -- see how this sounds for a reading list; this is what I read for my GCSE english lit:
* 2 Shakespeare plays (1 serious, Julius Caesar, and one comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream) * 1 relatively modern set work (Lord of the Flies, William Golding; another group in my school did Orwell's Animal Farm) * 2 books of the student's choice (subject to acceptance by the teacher) for a comparative essay (I chose a couple of classic SF titles, this was considered perfectly acceptable)
I'm sure there must have been something else, 'cause I had to write 5 essays, and there's only 4 listed, but I can't remember what it was. Oh, well. Thinking about it, I suspect it was poetry of some kind, although I don't know what it would have been.
But the point is this: everything on that list was a good, interesting story, the kind that holds your attention. And that's the kind of story that's needed. It doesn't matter when it was written, it has to be engaging.
So if I'm reading Slashdot, I'm not really reading
You're not reading something which is "art". Do you really expect the "National Endowment for the Arts" to care about anything else? RTFA: this is not a literacy study, it is an appreciation-of-arts study.
Blame it on the marketing department. From what I understand, all the references to Asimov in the film are based on a directive they issued, and weren't part of the original script but rather added in afterward.
As hundreds of other people have already pointed out, the bug filed 2 years ago, while it would have helped if it were fixed _would not have solved this problem_. Read it. It would have just stopped the use of and tags to open shell: URIs, not tags or form submissions, and probably not javascript either.
Also, the reported wasn't aware of this specific problem. One poster was aware of another protocol scheme that could be used to cause problems, which was subsuquently blocked -- i.e. they fixed the reason the problem reported was dangerous without fixing the "bug" itself. And, as fixing this "bug" would have damaged Mozilla's functionality, this is probably a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wheel? Levers? Arches? Steel? Medicine? A bajillion other things?
The wheel is a tool for allowing things to move without the hassle of friction. Levers are tools for applying large amounts of force over small distances (or vice versa). Arches are a design pattern for building structures that can support large amounts of strain. Steel is a material useful for building tough structures. Medicine is a family of science that helps people live longer and with less pain.
Saying that computers are more versatile than any of these things doesn't mean that computers are more important than they are. But note that computers are helpful in each and every one of the fields that the above tools are designed for use in.
*Sigh*. Yes, we remember The Core, renowned as having the worst physics in a movie, ever.
They did ...
That should have been linked to the "insultingly stupid movie physics" review.
you can ignore the FPGA and "internal bus"... if the CPU is so anemic they can't be any good
Dunno -- they're claiming reprogramming times for the FPGA (0.03s) that are nearly 10x faster than devices I know about. I'm not certain I'm seeing the fastest FPGAs available, but it certainly sounds impressive to me.
You've got to wonder, though, why an internal bus would be useful when the processor runs at about a tenth the speed of the external bus on an average modern PC.
Most commonly used Office apps (e.g. PhotoShop :)) will write a header in the file by which you can identify what created the file originally (or at least touched it last)
OK, so what? All images on every web site I put together are written by photoshop. That doesn't mean I've doctored them. It has excellent facilities for colour correction, scaling, cropping and rotation, all of which are typically things I need to do to a picture before putting it on a web site. And, if I'm scanning from a paper source rather than a digital camera, it has a direct interface to my scanner.
there are some slight alignment errors where the "author" was cutting and pasting bits of the image.
That's evidence. The use of photoshop isn't.
I'm surprised (and a bit sad about) the number of students who can't hear the 16khz tone.
I'm not. 16KHz is well above the average maximum audible frequency for humans, which is I believe 14KHz. My guess would be that ~2-5% of people are able to hear 16KHz tones even without damage.
As someone who has voted for "third parties" in every presidential election since 1988, I would welcome a system like this.
But, of course, neither of the two most powerful parties would, as it would mean a reduction in their power. And they, of course, are the people you need to persuade in order to get it implemented.
A lot of companies have used non-standard power supply cable layouts in the past. I believe the reason for this is that they added features (such as motherboard-based power management) to their PCs before there was standardized infrastructure to support them (e.g. the ATX case specification), and once they had done this they stuck with their own internal systems for a long time rather than switch to the newly emerging standards.
I also understand companies such as Dell wanting to keep customers out of thier boxes.
Are you taking the piss here? I've never owned a PC easier to work on as my Dell Optiplex GX1. You don't even need a screwdriver for most operations (you need one for the screws that hold I/O cards in place, that's about it).
The Maintenance Code is copyrighted material and protected intellectual property of StorageTek.
Yeah, OK.
The use of the event messages generated by the maintenance code by the 3rd party maintenance vendor is thus copyright infringement.
Do you have a reference to statute or a precedent that backs that statement up?
It isn't usually the case that data generated by a copyrighted program is automatically assumed to be held under the copyright of the owners of the program. For instance, Microsoft doesn't hold copyright to IP packets that are transmitted by windows machines, even though it is their code that assembles those packets.
Furthermore I believe that, in general, copyright cannot be applied to the result of an automated process. From www.copyright.gov:
Copyright protects "original works of authorship"
There is no authorship here. The article continues:
Copyrightable works include the following categories:
1. literary works;
2. musical works, including any accompanying words
3. dramatic works, including any accompanying music
4. pantomimes and choreographic works
5. pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
6. motion pictures and other audiovisual works
7. sound recordings
8. architectural works
These categories should be viewed broadly. For example, computer programs and most "compilations" may be registered as "literary works"; maps and architectural plans may be registered as "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works."
I don't believe the "event messages" involved fall into any of these categories, however broadly you interpret them.
That kind of thing happens from time to time. Particularly with laws that define how the government is supposed to work, like welfare benefits. I live in a "pathfinder" area of the UK, which means that the housing benefit system here currently works differently to everywhere else. Sooner or later the system will be superceded by a new version that will apply to the whole country.
You mean they're not the same chip, with various overclocking inhibitors enabled?
Err, no. They have different capabilities of executing multiple instructions concurrently, and additions to the instruction set (e.g. MMX, SSE) as you go through the sequence.
My first PC used to tick while checking ram
:)
Heh! My 286 used to do that.
I really believe in getting value for money out of old hardware...
So, what're you doing with the speccy?
Luxury! I had to make do with a 386DX33, which took about twice as long to execute each instruction. And 4 megs was the best you were likely to get, 'cause the slots were all filled with 1 meg simms by the cheap computer shop, and the idea of taking a couple out to upgrade was just ludicrous...
when I had a PII, I remember having to extract all the text content just to be able to work on it, and copy-paste it back into the graphically enhanced version.
Then the software you're using for editing is badly implemented. I've used MS word and OO.o writer on a 400MHz celeron to edit documents with layouts about as complex as you'd ever expect to see, and both coped fine (although OO.o was showing signs of stress).
OTOH, using the editor in mozilla's mail client to edit anything with more than a few graphics or tables slows to a crawl.
You need something running at 75Mhz to play an MP3
I've found this highly dependant on the input bit rate. With a 120MHz processor, I used to be able to play up to 160kb/s flawlessly, but anything over that would occasionally stutter, and 256kb/s was unplayable.
You need something running at 100Mhz to encode an MP3 in less time than it takes to play it.
What encoder are you using? I use LAME, and that seems to need ~200MHz to encode in real time.
You need something running at 1Ghz to encode video on the fly.
Again: what encoder are you using? With TMPGEnc Plus encoding mpeg2 with the default setting for the motion search precision, performance on the aforementioned celeron suggests I'd need about 1.6 - 2GHz to get it up to real time (for high quality PAL DVD -- should be about the same for NTSC DVD, which has lower resolution but higher frame rate).
My first pentium (a P120MMX) is currently serving adequately as a file, print, web and e-mail server for my small office. The only upgrades since I acquired it in '97 have been RAM and hard disk space.
Of course, odds are that they do have to have the source available for the GPL libdvdcss libraries that it uses, so does that mean that they are violating trade secrets as well?
Can you point me to anywhere the MPAA/whoever has tried to prosecute CSS related developers/distributors for exposing trade secrets? I don't believe such an argument would stand up in court, because in order to be protected as a trade secret, it must be impossible to derive from publicly released material (?), which is precisely how DeCSS, and presumably libdvdcss, was developed.
Oh, I forgot. If you drag & drop a directory containing a DVD image onto the application, it starts playing the contents of the image files. But it won't let you view the DVD's menu. In order to do that, you need to open the directory by clicking on one of those buttons with an obscure icon and no tool-tip.
utility development which I feel should remain in the hands of closed source developers who bother to hire usability experts
Maybe in some cases you are right. A lot of commercial applications have better UIs than their free counterparts.
However, this story is about PowerDVD -- I downloaded the windows trial of it a few weeks ago and deleted it after about two days. It has the most obscure and hard to use user interface I've ever seen. Controls that you need to use frequently are hidden and need to be revealed by clicking on what looks like a piece of window decoration. There are buttons which change purpose depending on what the application is doing, and which use the same inexplicable icon in both modes. There doesn't seem to be any way to jump to a particular point in the file you're playing (this is a lack of a feature, but an important one for usability that exists in almost all other media player applications).
DeCSS is illegal period. This isn't a patent issue with CSS. It's industry trade secret protection.
Not in Europe it isn't. Europe (as a whole) doesn't have any general form of legal trade secret protection, other than the non-disclosure agreement -- and the limit of the use of that is that the disclosing party will have to pay damages. I don't think Johanssen was a signatory to any NDAs on CSS encryption.
The limit of protection of CSS in Europe is what they can get away with calling 'contributory copyright infringement' under the EUCD (same as it being the DMCA that's used against DeCSS in the US), and the more people using DeCSS in order to play their DVDs the better the case for a "substantial non-infringing use" we have.
I believe most EU countries are yet to make any form of decision over the legality of DeCSS. My suspicion is that a fair proportion would find it to be a legal and legitimate tool.
I don't know, maybe the situation's better over here in the UK -- see how this sounds for a reading list; this is what I read for my GCSE english lit:
* 2 Shakespeare plays (1 serious, Julius Caesar, and one comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
* 1 relatively modern set work (Lord of the Flies, William Golding; another group in my school did Orwell's Animal Farm)
* 2 books of the student's choice (subject to acceptance by the teacher) for a comparative essay (I chose a couple of classic SF titles, this was considered perfectly acceptable)
I'm sure there must have been something else, 'cause I had to write 5 essays, and there's only 4 listed, but I can't remember what it was. Oh, well. Thinking about it, I suspect it was poetry of some kind, although I don't know what it would have been.
But the point is this: everything on that list was a good, interesting story, the kind that holds your attention. And that's the kind of story that's needed. It doesn't matter when it was written, it has to be engaging.
So if I'm reading Slashdot, I'm not really reading
You're not reading something which is "art". Do you really expect the "National Endowment for the Arts" to care about anything else? RTFA: this is not a literacy study, it is an appreciation-of-arts study.
Blame it on the marketing department. From what I understand, all the references to Asimov in the film are based on a directive they issued, and weren't part of the original script but rather added in afterward.
As hundreds of other people have already pointed out, the bug filed 2 years ago, while it would have helped if it were fixed _would not have solved this problem_. Read it. It would have just stopped the use of and tags to open shell: URIs, not tags or form submissions, and probably not javascript either.
Also, the reported wasn't aware of this specific problem. One poster was aware of another protocol scheme that could be used to cause problems, which was subsuquently blocked -- i.e. they fixed the reason the problem reported was dangerous without fixing the "bug" itself. And, as fixing this "bug" would have damaged Mozilla's functionality, this is probably a good thing.