You can think of some cool taglines too -- "Cesium: Just Add Water And Watch The Flames".... Or the late night BS sessions where you dream up acronyms that spell C.E.S.I.U.M. ("Cooperative Environment for Serving Information something something").
I don't know about that... Making people say "seize" ("To come to a halt") every time they mention your OS has to have some bad subconscious effects...
I'll be able to type 'apt-get update' on all my Debian systems, and 'pftp ftp.domain.com; get new-kernel.rpm; rpm -uv new-kernel.rpm' on my RH/YDL systems.
I think you mean rpm -Uv. (Sorry to be so anal, but you did take the time to type out every command in detail.)
Another popular lossless compression codec is called shorten.
Actually, there are a ton. I just like flac because it compresses very well (a bit better than shorten), is cross-platform, and is open-source.
The flac site has a feature-oriented comparison of various lossless codecs. The Monkey's Audio site has a performance-oriented comparison (they compare an older version of flac, unfortunately).
Besides, your hard drive size is going to grow exponentially, and in a few years you're going to feel pretty silly having a compressed, shittier-than-original-fidelity music collection that takes up a miniscule percentage of your hard drive.
Oh. Yeah. Right. Just like we all feel pretty silly using shittier-than-original JPEG's. Right.
If you're talking about looking at jpegs on porn sites, then sure, who cares; I agree that a lossy naked gal can get you just as horny as a lossless naked gal. But, depending on the kind of guy you are, you could also get off looking at squiggly lines on a cable porn channel you don't subscribe to; jpeg will always have applications where the users don't care that much about quality, but I hold that web browsing is a poor analogy to archival music storage.
Here's a better analogy.
If you're a graphic designer and want to archive your work, or you want to transfer a graphic to the printing house, you don't use jpeg. Jpeg, in case you haven't noticed, is noticeably shitter than lossless formats, particularly when the content is non-photographic (e.g., line art). People who care about the quality of their graphics (e.g., graphics designers) use a lossless format. When was the last time you had a task that required decent-quality graphics? If you have an answer, then you know better than to post that reply and you're trolling. If you don't have any need for decent-quality graphics, then how the hell do you feel qualified to draw this flippant analogy?
I care about the quality of my music. Listening to my music collection is my application for decent-quality music. As countless other people have commented on this story, mp3 and Ogg both sound noticeably worse than original CD-quality audio. I've spent many thousands of dollars on my music collection, so, yeah, to respond to your retort: I would feel pretty fucking silly not shelling out $200 on storage to accomodate a lossless compression of music collection, when the alternative means I have to listen to my thousands of dollars of music at noticably degraded quality. But note that my original comment that "you'd feel silly" wasn't talking about today; it was talking about a couple years from now: I'd feel a whole lot sillier in a couple years when the requisite storage cost $50. (These dollar amounts are obviously proportional to the size of your music collection. If you have an average-sized collection, divide by 4 or something like that.)
If disk space is not an issue, then why are you considering lossy compression at all?
When I decided to rip my music collection, I decided on flac, an awesome lossless codec than averages around 50% compression.
Lossless compression obviously sounds (literally) perfect now, but makes more of a difference for the long-term health of your digital music collection. If you had ripped everything to mp3 last year, and then this year decided to convert your mp3s to Ogg, then your music would have gone through two generations of lossy encoding (or you would have gone through the effort of ripping everything all over again). Not good, especially if a more desirable codec is going to come along next year... Besides, your hard drive size is going to grow exponentially, and in a few years you're going to feel pretty silly having a compressed, shittier-than-original-fidelity music collection that takes up a miniscule percentage of your hard drive.
If you want to stream your music and don't have a spare T1 to saturate, then you can always convert to mp3/Ogg/Codec-du-jour on the fly (if you're not serving tons of streams), but the important thing is that a lossless encoding of the original bits sits on your hard drive.
However, I was a little annoyed to find out last night that I couldn't set a WinAmp association for mp3s in Explorer ("Always use this program to open this type of file") because the newest version of Windows Media Player overrides whatever preference you set in Explorer; you have to go into Windows Media Player's application preferences and explicitly tell it to not associate itself with mp3s. This means that other programs cannot "reclaim" mp3 association or set it in an installer because wmplayer overrides the setting externally.
In Unix, they are just ordinary parts of the filename, and don't mean anything special unless a particular program is written to parse the filename for "stuff coming after the last period".
This is silly. Most every graphical file manager for Unix (e.g., the one that's probably displaying icons for your "desktop" files right now) uses associations based on extensions to determine what application to open a file with. This is no different from in Windows Explorer. The physical layout of filenames in the filesystem is a tremendous red herring, particularly since it hasn't applied (as others have pointed out) since LFNs were introduced almost seven years ago.
I would expect nothing less from Microsoft. A secure program never gets released because you might never need to upgrade, and you won't need patches. In fact, I wonder if they maybe don't actually make sure that stuff isn't totally secure and bug free.
I would have dismissed this as a troll, but it's been modded up, so now I feel compelled to reply.
How is it advantageous to Microsoft to get people to download free patches? Why would they willfully leave security holes in their software to force people to download free patches? They like incurring extra development expense, extra load on their servers, and paying for extra bandwidth?
In this article we'll do something that so far we're not aware anyone has done yet - discuss building a small 18-unit... rack cabinet for as little as $50.
Just buy it. Raxxess, Middle Atlantic, and other companies make budget racks for home use.
I've got a 20-space Raxxess elite rack, and it looks and works great. The Raxxess economy rack series is probably closer to what you would get if you built it yourself. Zzounds (a leading online music store) has the best prices I've seen on Raxxess gear. Their website is down right now for some reason, but the cache of their rack section shows that the Raxxess 20-space economy rack is $84.95 (+$5.00 shipping).
A professional 20-space rack for $84.95 sounds better to me that a "do it yourself" 18-space rack for "as little as $50," particularly when you consider the cost of your time and labor.
Token ring is not ancient technology, it is a mature technology that has a lot of advantages over ethernet for wide area networking
I was always taught that the main advantage was that it can offer guarantees on maximum times between transmits, which ethernet obviously cannot, and is therefore preferable in realtime applications (e.g., factory floor automation where there needs to be tight timing synchronization; isn't there some ISO standard for factory floor networking based on token ring?).
This, of course, is more of a LAN than a WAN point.
Further, many newer high-end phones (e.g., the Nokia 8290) have infrared capability. I just have to put my 8290 near my computer's infrared port, put the phone in infrared mode, and my computer instantly recognizes it. Nokia's PC Suite software (and many third party programs) lets you copy entries to and from your phone's address book.
Ah, my mistake. After further research, I agree you are not required to carry an ID (though, from what I see online, it seems in Italy and France you are?).
A few years ago the cops knocked on the door of my apartment (I wasn't there at the time). My roommate Aaron was playing his stereo loudly, and the cops wanted to cite him for a noise violation. (In Santa Barbara, California, a noise violation is an infracation, so you can't be put in jail for it.)
The cops asked for ID, and Aaron, being the leftist cop-hating fellow he is, tore a square off from a piece of paper, drew a picture of himself on it, wrote his name underneath, and handed it to the cops. The cops arrested him (in his own home), and were within their rights. This is what erroneously led me to believe that you had to carry ID and present it upon an officer's request.
In actuality, he was arrested and thrown in jail because he was being charged with an infraction and failed to supply ID. This is legal; the only reference I can find is in the second incident (towards the bottom) on this page from Copswatch. This means that if you litter or jaywalk and are unable to provide legal ID, you can be thrown in jail.
I'd be interested to have someone confirm or gainsay that ID is required in Italy, France, or other countries.
Also, it's worth mentioning that many/most college campuses require students to carry ID at all times and furnish it upon request (this I'm sure of; a google search corroborates).
The potential for abuse is astronomical. Pervasive automatic face recognition could be used to track individuals wherever they go.
If the government wanted to secretly track me wherever I went, they could easily do so today by deploying a team of operatives to follow me everywhere. As long as the surveilance takes place in public, my understanding is that there is nothing illegal about this.
If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using facial recognition, they would have to buy a lot of powerful computers. If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using physical surveilance, they would have to hire a lot of operatives. Ultimately, the former avenue will turn out to be more fiscally and logistically prudent, but we can't fault the government for frugality.
The technology is hardly foolproof. Among the potential downsides are false positives, for example that so-and-so was "seen" on a street frequented by drug dealers. Such a report will create "facts" that the individual must explain away.
This point is ridiculous. The same issue exists will all current forms of identification: there is a probability of misidentification associated with the identification method. If a fingerprint says you were at a crime scene, your defense attorney will call a scientist as an expert witness to state that the technology is XX.XXX% inaccurate. Same with DNA, witness identifications, etc. The process of "explaining away" digital face recognitions identifications is no different, and the possibility of misidentification no more alarming.
It is very hard to provide effective notice of the presence and capabilities of cameras in most public places, much less obtain meaningful consent.
BS. All over Britain, for instance, you'll find signs that say, "This area monitored by CCTV." That's effective notice as far as I'm concerned. The average citizen there knows what a CCTV camera does and is capable of, just as the average citizen will become familiar with facial recognition technology if it becomes pervasive. (I think it's reasonable to demand that the capabilities of the system be publicly available.)
If face recognition technologies are pioneered in countries where civil liberties are relatively strong, it becomes more likely that they will also be deployed in countries where civil liberties hardly exist. In twenty years, at current rates of progress, it will be feasible for the Chinese government to use face recognition to track the public movements of everyone in the country.
We can only debate the propriety and legality of the technology in countries that protect privacy. The technology will advance and cheapen to the point where it avails the government of Evil Country X regardless of American civil liberty law. I really don't think the Chinese government bases its surveillance decisions around what happens at the Superbowl.
Of course, if the US chose to oppose widespread deployment of facial recognition technology, then it would have a moral high ground from which to decry Chinese human rights abuses. This works in China because the US holds a carrot of cash and commerce that allows it to exert influence on Beijing. In North Korea, Iran, and a whole lotta other countries that couldn't care less above American notions of morality, the opposition would gain nothing.
.............
I'll close by mentioning that in the country I live in (the United States of America), my identity is not private when I'm in public. I am required by law to carry legal identification with me at all times when in public, and am required to present it to any police officer who asks to see it. If a cop asks to see my ID 50 times an hour, I would consider it harrassment and grounds for a civil suit. But (again, IANAL) I consider the harrassment to be a result of the repeated interaction between me and the cop; if the cop were to establish my identification once and then tell all his cop and robot buddies, "Hey, this is Steven, he looks like this, keep an eye on him," I wouldn't have grounds for complaint. (This obviously links back to the operative surveilance scenario mentioned at the beginning.)
Gee, that's a whole new twist on "2010: A Space Odyssey."
Not to be a mega nerd nitpicker, but Arthur Clarke titled the sequel "2010: Odyssey Two." The cinematic adaptation was "2010: The Year We Make Contact."
As you stated in your own reply, the government can collect income taxes on foreign income. They can't collect property taxes on foreign property owned by US citizens.
Property taxes are generally justified as payment for public services provided to residents (police, trash collection, public schools, etc.). The government obviously has no business collecting property taxes, then, on property I own in Norway.
Similarly, what the hell kind of services does the County of Los Angeles provide in outer space? There sure ain't no curb-side (satellite-side?) recycling...
The first release of X windows was on June 19 1984
I was looking at this document, which exists many places on the Internet. Yes, X had been in development for several years before '86 and had enjoyed several "non-external" releases.
Similarly, MS Windows, which debuted in 1985, had been under development since 1981.
The same could be said that removing a letter does not a trademark make either, and yet neither Microsoft nor the appropriate company (lazy me, not doing research) have sued over Windows/X-Windows.
The X Consortium holds the trademark on the X Window System.
The first commercial release of MS Windows, 1.0, came out in November 1985. The first commercial release of X Windows was in 1986.
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...lawyers are lawyers, and what they don't know about technology issues (like enough to know that a program that cannot run on the same platform as another is clearly not a rival...) they make up in determination and legal maneuvering.
Well, obviously I don't know much about technology issues either then, because I don't see how the platform disparity magically makes KIllustrator a non-competitor.
If I'm a graphic designer, then I want to avail myself of a set of tools that helps me get my job done. If someone tells me there are programs called KIllustrator and the GIMP that work as well as their Adobe equivalents and cost considerably less, then I will no doubt be strongly tempted to quit shelling out hundreds of dollars to Adobe. Sounds to me like KIllustrator constitutes competition, and threatening competition at that.
The argument that the platform difference allays the competition is particularly weak in the instance of graphic design software. Some people have the preconception that graphic designers and artists are "Mac people," but in my experience they are more interested in the tools that best help them get the job done. In modern graphic design, file format compatability makes platforms largely irrelevant (aside from OS learning curves). There are many other business spaces and user types in which platform differences are much more significant (e.g., software engineering; Microsoft wouldn't perceive some Unix IDE as a competitor to Visual Studio).
...unless he can prove that he wrote the optimal code possible for each language
Uh, how is this possible? Even if the semantics of all these languages were formally specified (which, of course, they're not) and even if the semantics included execution time information (which I've never ever seen before), the task of proving optimality seems impossible. No, I take that back, it is impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
The flac site has a feature-oriented comparison of various lossless codecs. The Monkey's Audio site has a performance-oriented comparison (they compare an older version of flac, unfortunately).
Here's a better analogy. If you're a graphic designer and want to archive your work, or you want to transfer a graphic to the printing house, you don't use jpeg. Jpeg, in case you haven't noticed, is noticeably shitter than lossless formats, particularly when the content is non-photographic (e.g., line art). People who care about the quality of their graphics (e.g., graphics designers) use a lossless format. When was the last time you had a task that required decent-quality graphics? If you have an answer, then you know better than to post that reply and you're trolling. If you don't have any need for decent-quality graphics, then how the hell do you feel qualified to draw this flippant analogy?
I care about the quality of my music. Listening to my music collection is my application for decent-quality music. As countless other people have commented on this story, mp3 and Ogg both sound noticeably worse than original CD-quality audio. I've spent many thousands of dollars on my music collection, so, yeah, to respond to your retort: I would feel pretty fucking silly not shelling out $200 on storage to accomodate a lossless compression of music collection, when the alternative means I have to listen to my thousands of dollars of music at noticably degraded quality. But note that my original comment that "you'd feel silly" wasn't talking about today; it was talking about a couple years from now: I'd feel a whole lot sillier in a couple years when the requisite storage cost $50. (These dollar amounts are obviously proportional to the size of your music collection. If you have an average-sized collection, divide by 4 or something like that.)
When I decided to rip my music collection, I decided on flac, an awesome lossless codec than averages around 50% compression.
Lossless compression obviously sounds (literally) perfect now, but makes more of a difference for the long-term health of your digital music collection. If you had ripped everything to mp3 last year, and then this year decided to convert your mp3s to Ogg, then your music would have gone through two generations of lossy encoding (or you would have gone through the effort of ripping everything all over again). Not good, especially if a more desirable codec is going to come along next year... Besides, your hard drive size is going to grow exponentially, and in a few years you're going to feel pretty silly having a compressed, shittier-than-original-fidelity music collection that takes up a miniscule percentage of your hard drive.
If you want to stream your music and don't have a spare T1 to saturate, then you can always convert to mp3/Ogg/Codec-du-jour on the fly (if you're not serving tons of streams), but the important thing is that a lossless encoding of the original bits sits on your hard drive.
However, I was a little annoyed to find out last night that I couldn't set a WinAmp association for mp3s in Explorer ("Always use this program to open this type of file") because the newest version of Windows Media Player overrides whatever preference you set in Explorer; you have to go into Windows Media Player's application preferences and explicitly tell it to not associate itself with mp3s. This means that other programs cannot "reclaim" mp3 association or set it in an installer because wmplayer overrides the setting externally.
Okay, zZounds is back up. Here's the link to the 20-space Raxxess economy rack.
How is it advantageous to Microsoft to get people to download free patches? Why would they willfully leave security holes in their software to force people to download free patches? They like incurring extra development expense, extra load on their servers, and paying for extra bandwidth?
I've got a 20-space Raxxess elite rack, and it looks and works great. The Raxxess economy rack series is probably closer to what you would get if you built it yourself. Zzounds (a leading online music store) has the best prices I've seen on Raxxess gear. Their website is down right now for some reason, but the cache of their rack section shows that the Raxxess 20-space economy rack is $84.95 (+$5.00 shipping).
A professional 20-space rack for $84.95 sounds better to me that a "do it yourself" 18-space rack for "as little as $50," particularly when you consider the cost of your time and labor.
Don Knuth weighs in on this at the bottom of this page.
This, of course, is more of a LAN than a WAN point.
Further, many newer high-end phones (e.g., the Nokia 8290) have infrared capability. I just have to put my 8290 near my computer's infrared port, put the phone in infrared mode, and my computer instantly recognizes it. Nokia's PC Suite software (and many third party programs) lets you copy entries to and from your phone's address book.
A few years ago the cops knocked on the door of my apartment (I wasn't there at the time). My roommate Aaron was playing his stereo loudly, and the cops wanted to cite him for a noise violation. (In Santa Barbara, California, a noise violation is an infracation, so you can't be put in jail for it.)
The cops asked for ID, and Aaron, being the leftist cop-hating fellow he is, tore a square off from a piece of paper, drew a picture of himself on it, wrote his name underneath, and handed it to the cops. The cops arrested him (in his own home), and were within their rights. This is what erroneously led me to believe that you had to carry ID and present it upon an officer's request.
In actuality, he was arrested and thrown in jail because he was being charged with an infraction and failed to supply ID. This is legal; the only reference I can find is in the second incident (towards the bottom) on this page from Copswatch. This means that if you litter or jaywalk and are unable to provide legal ID, you can be thrown in jail.
I'd be interested to have someone confirm or gainsay that ID is required in Italy, France, or other countries.
Also, it's worth mentioning that many/most college campuses require students to carry ID at all times and furnish it upon request (this I'm sure of; a google search corroborates).
If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using facial recognition, they would have to buy a lot of powerful computers. If the government wanted to track everyone in the country using physical surveilance, they would have to hire a lot of operatives. Ultimately, the former avenue will turn out to be more fiscally and logistically prudent, but we can't fault the government for frugality.
This point is ridiculous. The same issue exists will all current forms of identification: there is a probability of misidentification associated with the identification method. If a fingerprint says you were at a crime scene, your defense attorney will call a scientist as an expert witness to state that the technology is XX.XXX% inaccurate. Same with DNA, witness identifications, etc. The process of "explaining away" digital face recognitions identifications is no different, and the possibility of misidentification no more alarming. BS. All over Britain, for instance, you'll find signs that say, "This area monitored by CCTV." That's effective notice as far as I'm concerned. The average citizen there knows what a CCTV camera does and is capable of, just as the average citizen will become familiar with facial recognition technology if it becomes pervasive. (I think it's reasonable to demand that the capabilities of the system be publicly available.) We can only debate the propriety and legality of the technology in countries that protect privacy. The technology will advance and cheapen to the point where it avails the government of Evil Country X regardless of American civil liberty law. I really don't think the Chinese government bases its surveillance decisions around what happens at the Superbowl.Of course, if the US chose to oppose widespread deployment of facial recognition technology, then it would have a moral high ground from which to decry Chinese human rights abuses. This works in China because the US holds a carrot of cash and commerce that allows it to exert influence on Beijing. In North Korea, Iran, and a whole lotta other countries that couldn't care less above American notions of morality, the opposition would gain nothing.
I'll close by mentioning that in the country I live in (the United States of America), my identity is not private when I'm in public. I am required by law to carry legal identification with me at all times when in public, and am required to present it to any police officer who asks to see it. If a cop asks to see my ID 50 times an hour, I would consider it harrassment and grounds for a civil suit. But (again, IANAL) I consider the harrassment to be a result of the repeated interaction between me and the cop; if the cop were to establish my identification once and then tell all his cop and robot buddies, "Hey, this is Steven, he looks like this, keep an eye on him," I wouldn't have grounds for complaint. (This obviously links back to the operative surveilance scenario mentioned at the beginning.)
Most of the windshield in my car is out of arm's reach. This is the situtation in many cars.
Property taxes are generally justified as payment for public services provided to residents (police, trash collection, public schools, etc.). The government obviously has no business collecting property taxes, then, on property I own in Norway.
Similarly, what the hell kind of services does the County of Los Angeles provide in outer space? There sure ain't no curb-side (satellite-side?) recycling...
I was looking at this document, which exists many places on the Internet. Yes, X had been in development for several years before '86 and had enjoyed several "non-external" releases.
Similarly, MS Windows, which debuted in 1985, had been under development since 1981.
Uh, isn't that exactly what I said? To wit: "The first commercial release of MS Windows, 1.0, came out in November 1985."
The X Consortium holds the trademark on the X Window System.
The first commercial release of MS Windows, 1.0, came out in November 1985. The first commercial release of X Windows was in 1986.
- ATTENTION READERS -
The deal of a lifetime!!! Pay a mere $9.95 upfront to Money Makers International, and we will pay you $5 cash at the beginning of every month for the rest of your life!
But wait, there's more! On the first day of the 36th month, we will give you a brand new Ferrari!
What are you waiting for!? Sign up now!
(Offer subject to change at any time, but most likely right after we get your ten bucks.)
Well, obviously I don't know much about technology issues either then, because I don't see how the platform disparity magically makes KIllustrator a non-competitor.
If I'm a graphic designer, then I want to avail myself of a set of tools that helps me get my job done. If someone tells me there are programs called KIllustrator and the GIMP that work as well as their Adobe equivalents and cost considerably less, then I will no doubt be strongly tempted to quit shelling out hundreds of dollars to Adobe. Sounds to me like KIllustrator constitutes competition, and threatening competition at that.
The argument that the platform difference allays the competition is particularly weak in the instance of graphic design software. Some people have the preconception that graphic designers and artists are "Mac people," but in my experience they are more interested in the tools that best help them get the job done. In modern graphic design, file format compatability makes platforms largely irrelevant (aside from OS learning curves). There are many other business spaces and user types in which platform differences are much more significant (e.g., software engineering; Microsoft wouldn't perceive some Unix IDE as a competitor to Visual Studio).
Uh, how is this possible? Even if the semantics of all these languages were formally specified (which, of course, they're not) and even if the semantics included execution time information (which I've never ever seen before), the task of proving optimality seems impossible. No, I take that back, it is impossible.