People still use them if they need to mention long URLs over phone. I occasionally see them in TV and in video blogs (because clickable YouTube-style hyperlink annotations are not part of the video standards, you know.)
Basically, there are still places where gigantic URLs are still a pain in the rear.
He needs the shuriken for his upcoming bout with Richard Stallman, who's ninja skills are well-known.
Nope, Stallman will defeat all ninjas.
Obviously, Jobs has started smuggling authentic ninja weaponry for American ninjas, who will keep attacking Stallman and keeping him busy while Jobs develops his iDiabolicalDeathmachine. Initial FSF recon suggests the doomsday weapon is 50% matte steel design, 25% BSD Unix stack, 12.5% proprietary software and 12.5% heart-wrenching evil DRM. However, they are fooled! This false information was leaked so that Stallman would think that the device was just another Apple plan! Actually, the robot is 100% evil!
If a very simple-sounding process is complex enough to be patentable, then it's probably too complex.
Unix shutdown is a simple matter: shut down all programs that have a known shutdown procedure, tell all remaining applications "we're shutting down now, so you'd better save your shit or something", then tell all remaining applications after that "we're shutting down now, I already told you to quit nicely, so blow up already", then unmount filesystems, poof, done. Application developers know that SIGTERM/SIGHUP is a good hint that the application should terminate as gracefully as possible, and the end of the world may be imminent so it'd better hurry up. Application developers should know that failure to terminate as a result of that signal may mean the user and/or the system may bring up the big guns next. There's no need for complex heuristics to see whether applications are hung or whatever: "Does this app shut down gracefully? No? Who cares, then - the user wanted a reboot, the user shall get a reboot. Off ye go." There's already a good mechanism for shutting down applications gracefully. What else would anyone need to implement shutdown procedures?
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264.
Don't know how W-CDMA works, but are ARM's fans flocking together and trying to push ARM as the One True Instruction Set for Every Microprocessor-Powered Thing Ever? Nay, demanding that all other instruction sets are technically inferior, and we should stick to a reasonable, up-to-date standard like ARM? Are they demanding that the ARM architecture should be deemed part of the open, interoperable, free-to-use sphere of commonly used computer technology (without really mentioning the patent costs at any part)?
The point is this: No one cares how H.264 licensing works, unless they're interested in creating H.264 videos. Everyone's concerned because if H.264 becomes the part of HTML5, then everyone has to care how H.264 licensing works, whether they actually want to give a damn about H.264 or not. It becomes a part of the baggage you bring with implementing HTML5 support.
Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.
But that's a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement. No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.
I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
Nah, the communist model was fine for free culture. In theory, at least, definitely not in practice (which comes as no surprise). Basically, you don't get to profit from the work - the government does. This might have worked if the artists had actually seen the fruits of that labour: Tetris, for example, definitely wasn't managed well enough to save the Soviet Union. Also, Soviet era was notorious for its censorship; for example, your only chance to create lasting works was to replace the lyrics with -1, Troll.
Actually the Wikipedia page clearly cites a geocities page as the "creditable source"... Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Yeah, I was thinking about UVB-76 a while back, and kept thinking: The GeoCities page is not exactly a credible source, but what would be a credible source?
The Russian government won't say a word (apart of possibly saying "this is a damn military facility, now get lost before I shoot you" when someone comes knocking on the door). Foreign intelligence agencies probably could qualify, but they won't say a thing, either (CIA might say "just tune to that frequency and listen for yourself if you're so damn interested, now get lost before we shoot you").
A credible source would be someone who had been documenting the station's operations over a long time, with some sort of scientific rigour, and done so without the need to keep the information confidential. But what kind of scientific publication would publish this kind of research? The second avenue would be reputable journalism - but do we really trust popular sources, when in all likelihood their "research" consists of checking the damn GeoCities page we tried to get away from?
I would be not as crass as suggesting leaked information, because even that is suspect unless the government acknowledges it's genuine.<lamehumourattempt>Dearest boredomizhkaya radio-operatorikov in very dilapidatedshkiy radio-buildingska near Moskwa: while the state-of-the-art Commodore 64 they gave to you way back in 1984 can probably load up Wikileaks just fine, Wikileaks doesn't do PETSCII yet. Don't even think about it. You'll just annoy your superiors.)</lamehumourattempt>
Now can Microsoft, Firefox and Opera finally add H.264 support to their browsers?
This basically extends the same policy that was already in place; the "license moratorium" was supposed to end in 2015, now they just made it "permanent". It only covers users, not application developers. The statement basically said "if you're a random guy with a webcam on YouTube, you have nothing to worry about. Anyone who wants to actually profit from their H.264 videos still has to pay. Anyone who develops H.264 software still has to pay."
Firefox developers already gave it a shrug and called it a bluff - with WebM around, H.264 will lose relevance and with new video standards (H.265) coming, the H.264 patent holders wouldn't have gained much if they would have started collecting royalties in 2015 anyway.
74.14E 35.74N is right in the mountains of Pakistan controlled Kashmir. [...] Naimina has several possible references, #1 on my list of likelihoods would refer to the owner of a website design company of that name targeting the Turkish language.
Yeah, it's easy to make this conclusion: Weird stuff going out in Pakistan (probably something to do with Iran's nuclear program) and there's some company in Turkey that is obviously a front for the Russian spies.
The only thing that would suggest otherwise would be, oh, the fact that the folks that designed this radio operation probably didn't design it so that anyone with three-minute basic Google training could figure out the messages, or at very least they were smart enough to realise that whatever was considered secure enough in 1980s probably isn't secure enough in 2010.
The folks who run the station are probably very aware that a lot of people have listened to the station, found it weird, and all thanks to the Internet, it's being constantly monitored and scrutinised. They can't fart in the broadcast room without someone posting gigantic analysis of that on some blog. The fact that they persist suggest two possibilities: 1) they know their operation hasn't been figured out yet, so they keep operating as if nothing had happened, or 2) the real purpose of the station is in the buzzing, and they're sending out these messages just to bullshit everyone.
It has been shown many times and it has been shown again: Web 1.0, with all of the glorious unreadable Perl stuff, neatly and cleanly defeats all this Ruby on Rails, gradients-and-rounded-corners, Twitter-compatible, "beta" Web 2.0 nonsense!
...or maybe Web 2.0 people should stop designing RESTful asynchronous JavaScript-compatible social-media APIs that are too easily abused. It's not that hard!
(This was supposed to be a humorous post, but it's not really working today, is it?)
And don't even get me started about all those shady companies that rebrand free and open source software and sell them as new, awesome software products.
And what's wrong with that exactly?
Selling OSS software is nice and legal as long as the customers know what they're getting. As long as people see you're selling, say, Ubuntu CDs and you just make clear that people could download and burn them themselves if they wanted, it's all nice and dandy.
But rebranding the software to something else and then charging a huge price is dishonest. There are companies that take open source software, call it something else, and then mention in very tiny print that the software you're actually buying is the same old free thing. It's technically legal as long as they follow the license, but it's still dishonest.
This is what I'm talking about. On a first glance, you might think that the page is selling "3DMagix® 3D Animation Software", written by some guy called Cody Langdon. Amazing product art. Nice examples what you can do with the software. Amazing three-day introductory offer that closes in two days, so you'd better hurry. (But don't worry, it was probably there in 2009 when the site was first spotted, too.)
Then, you read it a bit closer and notice the page mentions a few times off hand that the software is actually called "Blender", and the "3DMagix®" part refers to the bundled documentation and the tutorial videos. Off-hand mention of a "Noob to Pro" guide, which makes me wonder if the tutorial texts have been haphazadrly downloaded from the Web, again thanks to GFDL/Creative Commons content.
Now, I wouldn't mind this product if it was called "Blender Megapack" or whatever, and specifically advertised itself as a professionally formatted and edited Blender guide ("Just like Wikibooks, only in a convenient and better-formatted printed form") and training course with awesome videos. Throw in a couple of DVDs worth of freely-usable textures and models and it might be awesome. As it stands, it's barely fulfilling the legal requirements and it's 100% deliberately deceptive, and uses common scam marketing tactics.
The "Real Estate Photo Editor for Realtors" example was similar: It was an obvious attempt to niche-market an application to realtors ("you can, um, take photos of houses, and um, edit them in this software") with a mention of the GIMP buried in some far-off FAQ page.
wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?
IT is not immune to woo, and indeed, it's good that we actively point out how ridiculous IT woo would be. That link is parody, but on a far more serious note, some years ago, I heard of an actual, real software product that claimed to be able to cast spells. (I was, like, "duhhhhhhh, Perl is free, this product is obviously an attempt to take your money and run.") And don't even get me started about all those shady companies that rebrand free and open source software and sell them as new, awesome software products. (I saw one company that rebranded GIMP as "Real Estate Photo Editor for Realtors" or something silly like that. I wish I was kidding.)
But seriously...
Information technology is a tool to facilitate solving real-world problems. It's a mysterious tool in that most people have no idea how it works. As long as mysteries are involved, people can be scammed. It doesn't even have to be a particularly clever ruse, as the rebranded FOSS shows; information technology has a lot of layers, starting from hardware and going all the way to the organisatorial/societal matters, and there's always plenty of mysteries for laymen to figure out.
Things like hard AI and singularity are more in the "plausible but highly impractical - read: bloody impossible in practice, and any claims of success should be scrutinised heavily" category. On one end of the woo scale we have ridiculous crap like the famous cell phone battery-life extension stickers*, on the other end we have heavy-duty stuff like hard AI. It's like a whole spectrum of weirdnesses ranging from funky crap that promises free energy to heavy-duty stuff like cold fusion.
In short: Yes, IT woo exists. Yes, it's ridiculous.
* waiiiit... Slashdot discussion that mentions stickers fixing antenna reception issues - in 2005? This is fascinating.
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
Do we really want growing open source use in the military / intelligence sphere?
The article mentions several good points, biggest of which is that it stops people from reinventing the wheel all the time.
Where is the border between helpful and harmful, and where is the moral event horizon for the contributors?
All of the definitions of the open source and free software currently say "no discrimination of fields of endeavour" or something similar. Software shouldn't be "private use only" or "private or non-profit use only" or "only for use in field X".
What would you say if you found an awesome graphics application, but its license said "only for professional design industry use"? A license like that would annoy art students (who aren't in the industry yet), independent artists (who don't give a damn about the "industry"), or plain old normal people who happen to have a need to patch up some graphics some times (and who think "industry" = "they'll charge a lot of money from us if I want anything done").
From the description, it sounds like this software package would be very useful for researchers, analysts, and maybe even lawyers. Is arbitrarily limiting this software to "only for military intelligence use" really fruitful?
"Software for Analysts" sounds harmless, but could very well be their best shot at re-creating 1984.
There are more than one software packages in existence. They have widely varied forms of operation. Software vendors are capable of producing very different products that have nothing to do with each other.
Let's try this conspiracy theory in private sector: "Microsoft released Windows, which was their opening salvo for an unspeakable horror unleashed upon mankind in form of Bob." Yeah, that conspiracy worked really well and now Windows is suspicious. (Well, Windows is suspicious, but not for this reason.)
Is it really encouraging to have Echelon being empored by open source to eavesdrop on even more emails and phone calls? Or how about drones, avionics, etc? Would you feel empowered by having a killbot using your code?
Here's the thing: You could say the same thing about science. You can use science to explore the universe and improve the quality of life. But at the same time, you can use science to blow the shit out of your enemies. People discovered rockets - and now they can be used to both propel people to the moon, and to propel warheads across the world.
Like science, software solves problems. Sometimes these problems can be applied to problems that either morally sound or morally questionable.
Who says Echelon's code couldn't benefit morally acceptable uses? The details are scarce, but assuming the system exists, it must process tons of data really fast. Telephone call analysis part sounds very interesting - even the best publicly available speech analysis systems are very weak and there's certainly a legitimate, pressing need for actually working automatic speech transcription. Drones and avionics? Tons to pick apart, but even I could list a few things that come to mind - navigation systems (route finding, location awareness/reaction stuff) would be awesome. Smart weapons do a lot of image processing, too; identifying people and reacting to their movements sounds like a tough image processing challenge - and if the science behind it was more accessible to people, it could be used for all sorts of cool things.
You may say that this is backwards, but the direction doesn't really matter. If you build any publicly accessible piece of software, it can be copied and reverse-engineered by people who are up to no good, if it helps them to accomplish their goals. The military keeps an eye on the scientists and their new discoveries and wonder how this helps them to blow more people up. They get the
What happened to the concept of teaching concepts? How to produce a document using a word processor and not Microsoft Word 2007? I learned word processing with AppleWorks on an Apple//e. I can churn out a basic document in minutes with any word processor I use. How many kids 'trained' in the exclusive world of Microsoft software will ever be able to do this?
Hah. In my school, we used Teko, a word processing software that was once widely used in Finnish government institutions (and was predicted to be a hit in private sector too), but it died out in 1990s when they never made a Windows version of it. They also had WordPerfect 5.1 and Microsoft Works 1.x on the computers, which in retrospect was a good thing, because it taught that you can do the same things in many different software packages in basically the same way.
If there's two point that has to be stressed, it's that 1) things you in applications aren't exactly rocket science and you should be able to do things in just about any program if you don't panic, and 2) there's many applications and none of them look alike, even between different versions, so don't get too attached to the programs you do your work on.
The difference is that movies can show that war is hell. Games, by definition, have to make war fun.
No. There's a difference between the things depicted and how the people experience them.
Movies depict war as hell. They make the experience of watching the movie exciting (heart-pounding and poignant, usually).
In same way, nothing stops video games from depicting war as hell, while making the experience exciting (adrenaline-soaked and audio-visually interesting, usually).
For example, from the gameplay point of view, I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins - so many tactical opshuns and kicking monster ass was fun - but at the same time, I kept thinking that medieval warfare was far more gruesome than what was actually depicted in the game, and if the fact that main characters in the game always walk around with gobtons of blood spatter on them after the battle is horrifying to the point of absurdity, real medieval soldiers probably had it far worse. I mean, good grief, think about it.
Java isn't totally free. The runtime is free, but development tools require licensing...
Runtime used to be free, now it's also free software. "Development tools" is a bit of a nebulous term. The JDK (Java compiler and support tools) used to be free, now it's also free software. Various other third-party development tools used to have varying licences, but nowadays you can get full-blown IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans) under open source licences - failing that, Emacs never went anywhere. Some rather integral third-party components of Java development, like Ant and JUnit, have always come from open source world.
Microsoft learned that one the hard way when they violated their agreement with Sun.
That agreement was about Java syntax. Microsoft decided that Java wasn't good enough for them and made an incompatible dialect of Java.
If you want to make a new programming language that compiles to JVM bytecode, that's perfectly okay and everyone is already doing that. Microsoft just decided to call their distinctly non-Java language "Java".
You could use similar facts to say.NET is free....
Except the.NET folks still haven't made the tiny little doubt about patent provisions to go away.
But, in the case of digital distribution, it takes next to nothing to make after the initial eBook/PDF is created.
Uh...
I write short stories. I publish them on the Internet under CC licenses. And yet, I'd terribly appreciate if I had a publisher. (I just don't bother submitting my stuff to publishers because, frankly, I'm still learning. Maybe when I get a novel done.)
I can understand why people are peeved when music publishers are grabbing money: it's easier to see if a song sucks or is awesome, so as works of art, they're easier to market. The musicians do most of the work on their own, from composition to the finished song. But with books, there's so much more work that the author can't really do on their own - the publishers actually need to do something. Books are harder to market because they're not something you can just spend minutes listening to and deduce it's awesome. Reading a book takes a commitment of a few days. Readers need some assurance that what they're getting is not some badly spelled, barely coherent drivel.
Publishers do far more than just physically distribute the books. They need to make sure the book is in proper physical format (or in an appropriate file format). They need to make sure it's got correct catalogue data (yeah, right, as if I'm going to waste my money on ISBNs).
The publishers edit the books. I find it's freaking impossible for me to edit my work properly - it'd be easier if I just could hit a reset button in my head and see the text from a completely different person's perspective. I can never spot all of the silly little mistakes I make. People whine endlessly when they spot typos, and I can't blame them. I do, especially if I find typos in stuff I've already sent out.
The publishers market the book. This is rather crucial. I do absolutely no marketing, and according to Google Analytics I've had hundreds of page hits over the last year! Some even stayed on the site for more than a few minutes! I'm overjoyed! I don't have a foggiest idea of how to market my stories, and I don't actually want to learn. (Ummm.... here's my boring fantasy stories!...I fail this marketing stuff forever.)
Marketing and editing are the two things that the publishers are needed for. From a reader's point of view, the publisher acts as a quality control figure: They won't try to sell books unless they think they can make money out of them, and toward that end, they only select books that actually may be marketable and fix them up so people won't gouge their eyes out when they try to read the books. From author's point of view, publishers simplify things: they're doing the boring gruntwork and the author can focus on stuff they're supposed to be good at - that is to say, writing. The authors write, and the publishers hand out an advance based on how well they expect the book will sell and royalties in case the expectations are exceeded. Pure and simple.
Other schools may be different, but at mine, on any test that we took in math class, our teacher would reset our calculators to its factory defaults.
When I was in the school, the teachers wanted the calculator memory wiped before tests, too. What actually happened was they went rounds in the class making sure every TI-85 screen said "memory cleared"; you know, a little bit of cooperation from the students saves time, right? Incidentally, there was a BASIC program available that basically just spoofed that message on screen. The temptation was great all around. Luckily, for the national graduation exams, the calculators had to be turned in before the exam and the evil masterminds in the capital demanded that the teachers get the proverbial dirt under their fingernails and check the calculators beforehand. =)
My point is the same that the security folks keep saying: You can't trust technology if your process is flawed. And there's always problems with the process if you look hard enough.
numerous ports to other systems, including most recently ports to the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3
Wow! And Microsoft is truly a master of portable software - after all, once you write the software, it runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7! Maybe even on the server editions! No complaints there whatsoever!
It's not a condition of copyright, patent or trademark law that you have to make your work available on all platforms past, present and future.
No, but it's a crappy business move: On short term, it displeases the potential customers who'd like to buy the game on platforms they own, and on longer term, it annoys retrogamers and game culture researchers who not only have to find the game, but also get the platform to run it on. If the game would have a market, no matter how small, decades after the release, and you fail to provide it to the market, you're basically wasting the opportunity: from business standpoint, you're not making any money, and from altruistic standpoint, no one's having any fun.
The intended purpose of patent and copyright systems is indeed to provide incentive to produce, and therefore advance the state of the art, or enrich culture. However, Lemmings on the Amiga did that. Job done.
Then why the hell the researchers wet their pants when they find out that someone has discovered some ancient philosopher's or author's lost works? As in actual text of the writings, not just second-hand facts that the writings may or may not have existed at some point of time? By your logic, surely it would have been enough that we would have, at one point, known that the works did in fact exist for certain?
My point is that if any product of the culture is just pushed out of the door and forgotten - "job done" - it's failing to work as part of our cultural output. One of the reasons copyrights expire is that it allows people to preserve the works and keep them alive. The only reason copyrights exist is that it encourages people to create the works and profit from them before everyone's entitled to make derivatives and preserve the work for posterity. The "preservation" is a natural state of people who don't create works themselves: Hoard copies of artwork, and enjoy them at their leisure.
The fact that the current producers of the culture are actively campaigning for throw-away culture and works that can't be preserved is very harmful. People who keep the works available for future generations to enjoy are doing a service to everyone, whether the media producers approve of it or not.
It is? And here I was thinking "damn, why haven't the folks ported Lemmings to Wii yet? I mean, Wiimote would work so much better than the pads in the old console ports."
What does "relying on heavy reuse from the existing H.264 codebase" actually mean?
It means exactly what it says: The developers added a VP8 decoder to FFmpeg, and only had to write very little of completely new code, while making extensive use of the code that already exists in FFmpeg. This way, VP8 decoder will improve when the rest of FFmpeg improves, and all codecs that share the same bits of code benefit from those improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
People still use them if they need to mention long URLs over phone. I occasionally see them in TV and in video blogs (because clickable YouTube-style hyperlink annotations are not part of the video standards, you know.)
Basically, there are still places where gigantic URLs are still a pain in the rear.
He needs the shuriken for his upcoming bout with Richard Stallman, who's ninja skills are well-known.
Nope, Stallman will defeat all ninjas.
Obviously, Jobs has started smuggling authentic ninja weaponry for American ninjas, who will keep attacking Stallman and keeping him busy while Jobs develops his iDiabolicalDeathmachine. Initial FSF recon suggests the doomsday weapon is 50% matte steel design, 25% BSD Unix stack, 12.5% proprietary software and 12.5% heart-wrenching evil DRM. However, they are fooled! This false information was leaked so that Stallman would think that the device was just another Apple plan! Actually, the robot is 100% evil!
(OK, I suck at celebrity fan fiction.)
If a very simple-sounding process is complex enough to be patentable, then it's probably too complex.
Unix shutdown is a simple matter: shut down all programs that have a known shutdown procedure, tell all remaining applications "we're shutting down now, so you'd better save your shit or something", then tell all remaining applications after that "we're shutting down now, I already told you to quit nicely, so blow up already", then unmount filesystems, poof, done. Application developers know that SIGTERM/SIGHUP is a good hint that the application should terminate as gracefully as possible, and the end of the world may be imminent so it'd better hurry up. Application developers should know that failure to terminate as a result of that signal may mean the user and/or the system may bring up the big guns next. There's no need for complex heuristics to see whether applications are hung or whatever: "Does this app shut down gracefully? No? Who cares, then - the user wanted a reboot, the user shall get a reboot. Off ye go." There's already a good mechanism for shutting down applications gracefully. What else would anyone need to implement shutdown procedures?
ARM and W-CDMA work in similar ways. ARM happens to own the patents and licenses them to whomever for a reasonable fee. W-CDMA works in much the same way as H.264.
Don't know how W-CDMA works, but are ARM's fans flocking together and trying to push ARM as the One True Instruction Set for Every Microprocessor-Powered Thing Ever? Nay, demanding that all other instruction sets are technically inferior, and we should stick to a reasonable, up-to-date standard like ARM? Are they demanding that the ARM architecture should be deemed part of the open, interoperable, free-to-use sphere of commonly used computer technology (without really mentioning the patent costs at any part)?
The point is this: No one cares how H.264 licensing works, unless they're interested in creating H.264 videos. Everyone's concerned because if H.264 becomes the part of HTML5, then everyone has to care how H.264 licensing works, whether they actually want to give a damn about H.264 or not. It becomes a part of the baggage you bring with implementing HTML5 support.
Try writing an opensource point-of-sale or e-commerce program that can directly process credit cards. You can't without spending around $20,000 for PA-DSS auditing.
But that's a legal requirement, not a licensing requirement. No one's forcing you to use H.264 from legal perspective.
I mean, when it was Czechoslovakia and under the Soviets, I think free culture took a worse beating.
Nah, the communist model was fine for free culture. In theory, at least, definitely not in practice (which comes as no surprise). Basically, you don't get to profit from the work - the government does. This might have worked if the artists had actually seen the fruits of that labour: Tetris, for example, definitely wasn't managed well enough to save the Soviet Union. Also, Soviet era was notorious for its censorship; for example, your only chance to create lasting works was to replace the lyrics with -1, Troll.
Actually the Wikipedia page clearly cites a geocities page as the "creditable source"... Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Yeah, I was thinking about UVB-76 a while back, and kept thinking: The GeoCities page is not exactly a credible source, but what would be a credible source?
The Russian government won't say a word (apart of possibly saying "this is a damn military facility, now get lost before I shoot you" when someone comes knocking on the door). Foreign intelligence agencies probably could qualify, but they won't say a thing, either (CIA might say "just tune to that frequency and listen for yourself if you're so damn interested, now get lost before we shoot you").
A credible source would be someone who had been documenting the station's operations over a long time, with some sort of scientific rigour, and done so without the need to keep the information confidential. But what kind of scientific publication would publish this kind of research? The second avenue would be reputable journalism - but do we really trust popular sources, when in all likelihood their "research" consists of checking the damn GeoCities page we tried to get away from?
I would be not as crass as suggesting leaked information, because even that is suspect unless the government acknowledges it's genuine.<lamehumourattempt>Dearest boredomizhkaya radio-operatorikov in very dilapidatedshkiy radio-buildingska near Moskwa: while the state-of-the-art Commodore 64 they gave to you way back in 1984 can probably load up Wikileaks just fine, Wikileaks doesn't do PETSCII yet. Don't even think about it. You'll just annoy your superiors.)</lamehumourattempt>
Now can Microsoft, Firefox and Opera finally add H.264 support to their browsers?
This basically extends the same policy that was already in place; the "license moratorium" was supposed to end in 2015, now they just made it "permanent". It only covers users, not application developers. The statement basically said "if you're a random guy with a webcam on YouTube, you have nothing to worry about. Anyone who wants to actually profit from their H.264 videos still has to pay. Anyone who develops H.264 software still has to pay."
Firefox developers already gave it a shrug and called it a bluff - with WebM around, H.264 will lose relevance and with new video standards (H.265) coming, the H.264 patent holders wouldn't have gained much if they would have started collecting royalties in 2015 anyway.
74.14E 35.74N is right in the mountains of Pakistan controlled Kashmir. [...] Naimina has several possible references, #1 on my list of likelihoods would refer to the owner of a website design company of that name targeting the Turkish language.
Yeah, it's easy to make this conclusion: Weird stuff going out in Pakistan (probably something to do with Iran's nuclear program) and there's some company in Turkey that is obviously a front for the Russian spies.
The only thing that would suggest otherwise would be, oh, the fact that the folks that designed this radio operation probably didn't design it so that anyone with three-minute basic Google training could figure out the messages, or at very least they were smart enough to realise that whatever was considered secure enough in 1980s probably isn't secure enough in 2010.
The folks who run the station are probably very aware that a lot of people have listened to the station, found it weird, and all thanks to the Internet, it's being constantly monitored and scrutinised. They can't fart in the broadcast room without someone posting gigantic analysis of that on some blog. The fact that they persist suggest two possibilities: 1) they know their operation hasn't been figured out yet, so they keep operating as if nothing had happened, or 2) the real purpose of the station is in the buzzing, and they're sending out these messages just to bullshit everyone.
It has been shown many times and it has been shown again: Web 1.0, with all of the glorious unreadable Perl stuff, neatly and cleanly defeats all this Ruby on Rails, gradients-and-rounded-corners, Twitter-compatible, "beta" Web 2.0 nonsense!
...or maybe Web 2.0 people should stop designing RESTful asynchronous JavaScript-compatible social-media APIs that are too easily abused. It's not that hard!
(This was supposed to be a humorous post, but it's not really working today, is it?)
And what's wrong with that exactly?
Selling OSS software is nice and legal as long as the customers know what they're getting. As long as people see you're selling, say, Ubuntu CDs and you just make clear that people could download and burn them themselves if they wanted, it's all nice and dandy.
But rebranding the software to something else and then charging a huge price is dishonest. There are companies that take open source software, call it something else, and then mention in very tiny print that the software you're actually buying is the same old free thing. It's technically legal as long as they follow the license, but it's still dishonest.
This is what I'm talking about. On a first glance, you might think that the page is selling "3DMagix® 3D Animation Software", written by some guy called Cody Langdon. Amazing product art. Nice examples what you can do with the software. Amazing three-day introductory offer that closes in two days, so you'd better hurry. (But don't worry, it was probably there in 2009 when the site was first spotted, too.)
Then, you read it a bit closer and notice the page mentions a few times off hand that the software is actually called "Blender", and the "3DMagix®" part refers to the bundled documentation and the tutorial videos. Off-hand mention of a "Noob to Pro" guide, which makes me wonder if the tutorial texts have been haphazadrly downloaded from the Web, again thanks to GFDL/Creative Commons content.
Now, I wouldn't mind this product if it was called "Blender Megapack" or whatever, and specifically advertised itself as a professionally formatted and edited Blender guide ("Just like Wikibooks, only in a convenient and better-formatted printed form") and training course with awesome videos. Throw in a couple of DVDs worth of freely-usable textures and models and it might be awesome. As it stands, it's barely fulfilling the legal requirements and it's 100% deliberately deceptive, and uses common scam marketing tactics.
The "Real Estate Photo Editor for Realtors" example was similar: It was an obvious attempt to niche-market an application to realtors ("you can, um, take photos of houses, and um, edit them in this software") with a mention of the GIMP buried in some far-off FAQ page.
wouldn't stupid and silly ideas like hard AI and the singularity count as "IT woo"?
IT is not immune to woo, and indeed, it's good that we actively point out how ridiculous IT woo would be. That link is parody, but on a far more serious note, some years ago, I heard of an actual, real software product that claimed to be able to cast spells. (I was, like, "duhhhhhhh, Perl is free, this product is obviously an attempt to take your money and run.") And don't even get me started about all those shady companies that rebrand free and open source software and sell them as new, awesome software products. (I saw one company that rebranded GIMP as "Real Estate Photo Editor for Realtors" or something silly like that. I wish I was kidding.)
But seriously...
Information technology is a tool to facilitate solving real-world problems. It's a mysterious tool in that most people have no idea how it works. As long as mysteries are involved, people can be scammed. It doesn't even have to be a particularly clever ruse, as the rebranded FOSS shows; information technology has a lot of layers, starting from hardware and going all the way to the organisatorial/societal matters, and there's always plenty of mysteries for laymen to figure out.
Things like hard AI and singularity are more in the "plausible but highly impractical - read: bloody impossible in practice, and any claims of success should be scrutinised heavily" category. On one end of the woo scale we have ridiculous crap like the famous cell phone battery-life extension stickers*, on the other end we have heavy-duty stuff like hard AI. It's like a whole spectrum of weirdnesses ranging from funky crap that promises free energy to heavy-duty stuff like cold fusion.
In short: Yes, IT woo exists. Yes, it's ridiculous.
* waiiiit... Slashdot discussion that mentions stickers fixing antenna reception issues - in 2005? This is fascinating.
...the real smoking gun would have been a TOS episode titled "I, Padd".
(This is bogus. Why did I bother posting this?)
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
The Xbox option was attractive, but I was not going to sully my first Doom experience with a video game controller.
There's nothing wrong with the Xbox 360 port (or any other console port, for that matter), even if you swear by mouse/keyboard on FPSes. Doom was perfectly playable on keyboard alone, because up/down aiming was automatic. Works perfectly well on one digital directional pad and a few buttons, and the Xbox 360 port translates it pretty naturally to the dualstick layout.
It was only in Quake when people started craving for mouselook, when four buttons wasn't quite enough to move and aim.
That said, it's slightly annoying that Xbox 360 version runs in software mode and doesn't have any of the hardware-accelerated niceties in later source ports, but it doesn't make the game much worse. =)
Do we really want growing open source use in the military / intelligence sphere?
The article mentions several good points, biggest of which is that it stops people from reinventing the wheel all the time.
Where is the border between helpful and harmful, and where is the moral event horizon for the contributors?
All of the definitions of the open source and free software currently say "no discrimination of fields of endeavour" or something similar. Software shouldn't be "private use only" or "private or non-profit use only" or "only for use in field X".
What would you say if you found an awesome graphics application, but its license said "only for professional design industry use"? A license like that would annoy art students (who aren't in the industry yet), independent artists (who don't give a damn about the "industry"), or plain old normal people who happen to have a need to patch up some graphics some times (and who think "industry" = "they'll charge a lot of money from us if I want anything done").
From the description, it sounds like this software package would be very useful for researchers, analysts, and maybe even lawyers. Is arbitrarily limiting this software to "only for military intelligence use" really fruitful?
"Software for Analysts" sounds harmless, but could very well be their best shot at re-creating 1984.
There are more than one software packages in existence. They have widely varied forms of operation. Software vendors are capable of producing very different products that have nothing to do with each other.
Let's try this conspiracy theory in private sector: "Microsoft released Windows, which was their opening salvo for an unspeakable horror unleashed upon mankind in form of Bob." Yeah, that conspiracy worked really well and now Windows is suspicious. (Well, Windows is suspicious, but not for this reason.)
Is it really encouraging to have Echelon being empored by open source to eavesdrop on even more emails and phone calls? Or how about drones, avionics, etc? Would you feel empowered by having a killbot using your code?
Here's the thing: You could say the same thing about science. You can use science to explore the universe and improve the quality of life. But at the same time, you can use science to blow the shit out of your enemies. People discovered rockets - and now they can be used to both propel people to the moon, and to propel warheads across the world.
Like science, software solves problems. Sometimes these problems can be applied to problems that either morally sound or morally questionable.
Who says Echelon's code couldn't benefit morally acceptable uses? The details are scarce, but assuming the system exists, it must process tons of data really fast. Telephone call analysis part sounds very interesting - even the best publicly available speech analysis systems are very weak and there's certainly a legitimate, pressing need for actually working automatic speech transcription. Drones and avionics? Tons to pick apart, but even I could list a few things that come to mind - navigation systems (route finding, location awareness/reaction stuff) would be awesome. Smart weapons do a lot of image processing, too; identifying people and reacting to their movements sounds like a tough image processing challenge - and if the science behind it was more accessible to people, it could be used for all sorts of cool things.
You may say that this is backwards, but the direction doesn't really matter. If you build any publicly accessible piece of software, it can be copied and reverse-engineered by people who are up to no good, if it helps them to accomplish their goals. The military keeps an eye on the scientists and their new discoveries and wonder how this helps them to blow more people up. They get the
What happened to the concept of teaching concepts? How to produce a document using a word processor and not Microsoft Word 2007? I learned word processing with AppleWorks on an Apple //e. I can churn out a basic document in minutes with any word processor I use. How many kids 'trained' in the exclusive world of Microsoft software will ever be able to do this?
Hah. In my school, we used Teko, a word processing software that was once widely used in Finnish government institutions (and was predicted to be a hit in private sector too), but it died out in 1990s when they never made a Windows version of it. They also had WordPerfect 5.1 and Microsoft Works 1.x on the computers, which in retrospect was a good thing, because it taught that you can do the same things in many different software packages in basically the same way.
If there's two point that has to be stressed, it's that 1) things you in applications aren't exactly rocket science and you should be able to do things in just about any program if you don't panic, and 2) there's many applications and none of them look alike, even between different versions, so don't get too attached to the programs you do your work on.
The difference is that movies can show that war is hell. Games, by definition, have to make war fun.
No. There's a difference between the things depicted and how the people experience them.
Movies depict war as hell. They make the experience of watching the movie exciting (heart-pounding and poignant, usually).
In same way, nothing stops video games from depicting war as hell, while making the experience exciting (adrenaline-soaked and audio-visually interesting, usually).
For example, from the gameplay point of view, I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins - so many tactical opshuns and kicking monster ass was fun - but at the same time, I kept thinking that medieval warfare was far more gruesome than what was actually depicted in the game, and if the fact that main characters in the game always walk around with gobtons of blood spatter on them after the battle is horrifying to the point of absurdity, real medieval soldiers probably had it far worse. I mean, good grief, think about it.
They once claimed that their database was unbreakable. It broke:
Once? Heck, that doesn't even begin to describe the problems Oracle has had with their frequent claims of superior security...
Java isn't totally free. The runtime is free, but development tools require licensing...
Runtime used to be free, now it's also free software. "Development tools" is a bit of a nebulous term. The JDK (Java compiler and support tools) used to be free, now it's also free software. Various other third-party development tools used to have varying licences, but nowadays you can get full-blown IDEs (Eclipse and NetBeans) under open source licences - failing that, Emacs never went anywhere. Some rather integral third-party components of Java development, like Ant and JUnit, have always come from open source world.
Microsoft learned that one the hard way when they violated their agreement with Sun.
That agreement was about Java syntax. Microsoft decided that Java wasn't good enough for them and made an incompatible dialect of Java.
If you want to make a new programming language that compiles to JVM bytecode, that's perfectly okay and everyone is already doing that. Microsoft just decided to call their distinctly non-Java language "Java".
You could use similar facts to say .NET is free....
Except the .NET folks still haven't made the tiny little doubt about patent provisions to go away.
But, in the case of digital distribution, it takes next to nothing to make after the initial eBook/PDF is created.
Uh...
I write short stories. I publish them on the Internet under CC licenses. And yet, I'd terribly appreciate if I had a publisher. (I just don't bother submitting my stuff to publishers because, frankly, I'm still learning. Maybe when I get a novel done.)
I can understand why people are peeved when music publishers are grabbing money: it's easier to see if a song sucks or is awesome, so as works of art, they're easier to market. The musicians do most of the work on their own, from composition to the finished song. But with books, there's so much more work that the author can't really do on their own - the publishers actually need to do something. Books are harder to market because they're not something you can just spend minutes listening to and deduce it's awesome. Reading a book takes a commitment of a few days. Readers need some assurance that what they're getting is not some badly spelled, barely coherent drivel.
Publishers do far more than just physically distribute the books. They need to make sure the book is in proper physical format (or in an appropriate file format). They need to make sure it's got correct catalogue data (yeah, right, as if I'm going to waste my money on ISBNs).
The publishers edit the books. I find it's freaking impossible for me to edit my work properly - it'd be easier if I just could hit a reset button in my head and see the text from a completely different person's perspective. I can never spot all of the silly little mistakes I make. People whine endlessly when they spot typos, and I can't blame them. I do, especially if I find typos in stuff I've already sent out.
The publishers market the book. This is rather crucial. I do absolutely no marketing, and according to Google Analytics I've had hundreds of page hits over the last year! Some even stayed on the site for more than a few minutes! I'm overjoyed! I don't have a foggiest idea of how to market my stories, and I don't actually want to learn. (Ummm.... here's my boring fantasy stories! ...I fail this marketing stuff forever.)
Marketing and editing are the two things that the publishers are needed for. From a reader's point of view, the publisher acts as a quality control figure: They won't try to sell books unless they think they can make money out of them, and toward that end, they only select books that actually may be marketable and fix them up so people won't gouge their eyes out when they try to read the books. From author's point of view, publishers simplify things: they're doing the boring gruntwork and the author can focus on stuff they're supposed to be good at - that is to say, writing. The authors write, and the publishers hand out an advance based on how well they expect the book will sell and royalties in case the expectations are exceeded. Pure and simple.
These potatos will be served.... by Master Chef.
Yeah! Right after they were first harvested in Harvest!
(Some headlines are just confusing in so many senses.)
Other schools may be different, but at mine, on any test that we took in math class, our teacher would reset our calculators to its factory defaults.
When I was in the school, the teachers wanted the calculator memory wiped before tests, too. What actually happened was they went rounds in the class making sure every TI-85 screen said "memory cleared"; you know, a little bit of cooperation from the students saves time, right? Incidentally, there was a BASIC program available that basically just spoofed that message on screen. The temptation was great all around. Luckily, for the national graduation exams, the calculators had to be turned in before the exam and the evil masterminds in the capital demanded that the teachers get the proverbial dirt under their fingernails and check the calculators beforehand. =)
My point is the same that the security folks keep saying: You can't trust technology if your process is flawed. And there's always problems with the process if you look hard enough.
numerous ports to other systems, including most recently ports to the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, and PlayStation 3
Wow! And Microsoft is truly a master of portable software - after all, once you write the software, it runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7! Maybe even on the server editions! No complaints there whatsoever!
It's not a condition of copyright, patent or trademark law that you have to make your work available on all platforms past, present and future.
No, but it's a crappy business move: On short term, it displeases the potential customers who'd like to buy the game on platforms they own, and on longer term, it annoys retrogamers and game culture researchers who not only have to find the game, but also get the platform to run it on. If the game would have a market, no matter how small, decades after the release, and you fail to provide it to the market, you're basically wasting the opportunity: from business standpoint, you're not making any money, and from altruistic standpoint, no one's having any fun.
The intended purpose of patent and copyright systems is indeed to provide incentive to produce, and therefore advance the state of the art, or enrich culture. However, Lemmings on the Amiga did that. Job done.
Then why the hell the researchers wet their pants when they find out that someone has discovered some ancient philosopher's or author's lost works? As in actual text of the writings, not just second-hand facts that the writings may or may not have existed at some point of time? By your logic, surely it would have been enough that we would have, at one point, known that the works did in fact exist for certain?
My point is that if any product of the culture is just pushed out of the door and forgotten - "job done" - it's failing to work as part of our cultural output. One of the reasons copyrights expire is that it allows people to preserve the works and keep them alive. The only reason copyrights exist is that it encourages people to create the works and profit from them before everyone's entitled to make derivatives and preserve the work for posterity. The "preservation" is a natural state of people who don't create works themselves: Hoard copies of artwork, and enjoy them at their leisure.
The fact that the current producers of the culture are actively campaigning for throw-away culture and works that can't be preserved is very harmful. People who keep the works available for future generations to enjoy are doing a service to everyone, whether the media producers approve of it or not.
Psygnosis is now Sony Studio Liverpool.
It is? And here I was thinking "damn, why haven't the folks ported Lemmings to Wii yet? I mean, Wiimote would work so much better than the pads in the old console ports."
Now I know.
DAMN.
What does "relying on heavy reuse from the existing H.264 codebase" actually mean?
It means exactly what it says: The developers added a VP8 decoder to FFmpeg, and only had to write very little of completely new code, while making extensive use of the code that already exists in FFmpeg. This way, VP8 decoder will improve when the rest of FFmpeg improves, and all codecs that share the same bits of code benefit from those improvements.