You argument really only works if there is no safe place at all to pull off between where the driver is now and where they'll be when they get lost. I suppose that if you accidentally turned onto the busway or something then it might apply, but any where else, there are parking lots, gas stations, sections of the road where the visibility is good, stop lights, stop signs, and places where there is a shoulder. I mean, even if you're on the turnpike when you suddenly find out or realize that you'll have to go somewhere different, you can probably stop at a rest area before you'd need to know where to turn.
So, yeah, you're right, one could probably invent a possible scenario where there was no way to safely get to a place where you could take a brief pause from driving, but in the real world, 99% of the time, you should find someplace to pull over.
Maybe convincing children that what they need to be happy are trips to McDonalds is a form of molestation.
Further, what's the difference between Jim Jones and tobacco advertisers? They both used psychological manipulation to trick people into consuming poison. Is fast poison really worse than slow poison from an ethical standpoint?
A much better idea than putting something which insultates against heat under your laptop is to put something which conducts heat under your laptop. In my case, I use a metal cookie sheet. The result of having a conductor under your laptop is that heat it creates will disipate faster, resulting in a cooler laptop. Also, it will still provide a certain amount of insultation against heat moving downwards. With the better cooling, the amount of insulation the metal and the air between the bottom of the laptop and metal will be sufficient insulation. My laptop is too hot to use on a bare lap in warm weather, but it's never come close to being uncomfortable on the cookie sheet.
When you say "It's not always really practical to pull off to the side of the road someplace, just to tell it about a new stop you found out you need to get to along the way" what you mean is that you don't like doing it or that it's not convenient to you. It's much more practical to take steps to lower your risk of accidents than to not do so, even if doing so is inconvenient.
Keith
Re:You'll find all the stories ever told
on
Source Code & Copyright
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm really tired of hearring people claim that there aren't any new stories written. It shows a basic ignorance of literature. I don't know if the purpose of such remarks is to dismiss modern literature as redundant or just some sort of glorification of the past or perhaps even to explain why the person makingt he remark does not bother to write original stories, but regardless, it's crap.
The simple fact of the matter is that although many common human stories have been told and retold for ages, there's a great volume of significant new work which is not about the retelling of old stories. Here's a list of works which I challenge anyone to find an older story which can reasonable be classified as being in any sense the same story.
Invisible Man by Ralph Elison Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Closing Time by Joseph Heller The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Watchmen by Alan Moore V for Vendetta by Alan Moore Scud: The Disposable Assassin by Rob Schrab Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse The Time Machine by H.G. Wells The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury Nightfall by Isaac Asimov R.U.R. by Anton Capek Fooly Cooly
And that's just a quick listing of what I could come up with off of the top of my head. So, before you make that claim again, answer the list. And no dodges. You can't simply claim that a story about hunting is sufficient for The Sound of Thunder, for instance. The principle idea of the story is not "some guys go hunting". It's about how small changes in the past can affect the future in a large way. You don't need another story which matches in every detail, but it must cover the fundament of the story.
As someone who actually runs an HTPC running MythTV which records and plays back HDTV, I have to say that RAM is actually less important than I would have thought. I got 1 Gig initially, leaving a couple of slots free so that I could got to 2 Gig if needed. Well, it hasn't been. When I run top, I rarely see a significant amount of total memory utilization. Maybe 20% of my RAM is being used on average. Anything based off of MPEG is limited to dealing with two frames on either side, whether you're playing back or encoding. So what we're talking about if you want to play back one HD signal, record two at the same time, reencode another, and record two SD signals isn't that much. Essentially the one completely decompressed HD frame is 6 Meg. An SD one is 1 Meg. Add two frames on either side and we're talking about 30 Meg and 5 Meg. And since it comes already compressed, if you're recording it, you don't need to encode it. So recording it just requires a small buffer. Say 10M to be -really- generous. So the scenario I outlined above is about the maximum you'll ever need and it's only 30+20+30+10 = 90 Meg.
Now there are undoubtedly things that I have no taken into account like extra buffering, so maybe you should double that to 180 or even double it again to 360, but really, memory isn't a big issue. If it were, the set top boxes would cost a lot more. Many of the HD satellite boxes don't have but somewhere in the 8-32 Meg range for total memory.
Really if you want to worry about one thing my advice would be this: get the largest on-chip cache you can. Decoding SD in software takes my processor to about 5%. Decoding HD in software takes it to 75%. It's only 6 times as many pixels, why does it take 15 times a much processor? Simple: it overflows the cache. I don't know of any chip with the 6 Meg on-chip cache which would be needed to hold everything, but still, a large cache will likely do more to help than most anything else.
A security system is only as strong as its weakest link. The AACS is probably not the weak link. I say this because HDCP has already been proven insecure (see previous articles from like four years ago). It's more of a pain in the ass to deal with because it spits out uncompressed video, but it is not secure. So, if you want to keep it, you'll have to recompress the video yourself, but most people already do this with DVDs right now anyway to save space.
The HDCP upstream specification has actually been around for quite some time. That said, this still isn't really a case of HDCP being an end-to-end solution as much as them getting picky about what devices they are willing to give keys out to.
Of course, sufficiently motivated people don't need to get keys from Digital Content Protection, LLC: they can do the leg-work to generate their own. Breaking HDCP, is a pain due to all the effort involved, but cryptographically speaking, it isn't hard. So someone will do it sooner or later, if they haven't already.
Just for the record, in America, emergency rooms are not allowed to discuss payment before they treat you. They must treat you first and then discuss insurance, payment, and the like. This does not apply to other parts of the hospital and non-emergency treatment. The problem with this overall approach to things is that the very poor who cannot afford to get normal preventative medical care wind up in the emergency room, where their costs wind up being borne by others. It would be preferable if we could get them preventative medical care instead, as that would be much cheaper and hence preferable for all parties. However, there are a lot of people in this country who dislike the idea of giving anyone anything which could be seen as an entitlement.
Not seeing global climate shift as a disater waiting to happen is called living in denial. Go read the predictions of what's likely to happen. If having more droughts and more huricanes don't sound like disasters to you, then you don't know what the word disaster means. In the worst case, we may even get another ice age as a result.
Last time we had an ice age, it wiped out a significant portion of the human population. Some people believe as much as 2/3s of homo sapiens. Also, prior to the last ice age there were two species of humans. There's only one now. Neanderthals were killed off by the last ice age. Now, I don't think that we'll go from one species to zero, but it'll still certainly suck quite a bit. If nothing else, it'll likely involve killing a substantial portion of the world's poor who can't afford heating fuel.
Now, if an ice age doesn't happen, there's still no guarantee we won't see an upwards spiral in temperature. According to the ice core records we have, there has never been a time when humans existed and the temperature was significantly higher than it is now. Will we as a species survive it? Sure. But it might wind up killing off substantial percentages of the world population which can't afford air conditioning. Either way, a big climate shift is going to have a huge and disasterous effect on the world. You can pretend that humans have been here for a long time and lived through all sorts of conditions, but it's just not true. In geological terms, we've hardly been here for any time and all evidence indicates that the climate hasn't changed much at all during the time we've been here.
The world's economy runs on energy, not carbon in particular. Wind and hydroelectic power are actually already cheaper per kilowatt hour than fossil fuels. And there's promising new solar technologies which may make solar economical. If we were to put half the research money into these types of energy generation as we do into "clean coal technology" we could actually have a pretty decent shot at sharply reducing the amount of carbon we emit. It's easy to make outrageous claims about the costs of making the switch, but the large scale economic analyses which have been done don't back those up. Further, those countries which have acted in keeping with the Kyoto accord have not crippled their economies as a result. Many of them are amongst the strongest per capita economies in the world. It would cost money to switch away from using so many fossil fuels for our energy needs, but it would not cripple the world economy.
Also, 600 Watts? Most computers come with power supplies which can handle 350 at peak, and in practice seldom consume that much. The usual estimate is to assume that they consume half of their rated power.
I'm not trying to blame only Bush. I'm primarily blaming the business interests in the US and the politicians which they manage to exert influence over. Bush is one of those politicians. So was Clinton. So are quite a number of politicians. Bush is not the one pulling the strings, but he is amongst those who have unequivocally opposed any controls on carbon emissions. The only thing which makes Bush worse than some was that he specifically promised to restrict carbon dioxide emissions while he was on the campaign trail and back-pedaled the moment he got into office. But in the end, all who have promoted this course of action will bear equal culpability if it turns out disasterously.
Obviously we aren't looking at the entire history of the Earth, we don't have that information. The levels of atmospheric carbon are calculated based on air bubbles trapped in artic ice. It only goes back 160,000 years or so. We have to extrapolate from the data we have. And the data we have says that any time in the last 160,000 years, whenever the level of atmospheric carbon has risen, the temperature has risen shortly afterwards. Look at the graph in the last section of this article.
It's clear that there's been a correlation between greenhouse gasses and global temperature over the past 160,000 years. This does not absolutely prove that one causes another. They could somehow both be caused by fluctuations in sun activity or whatever. It's certainly possible. But for the moment, the wisest course of action would be to cut back on carbon emissions until we know for sure. "We don't know" is not a good reason to act recklessly.
It's as if we're in a car together going down a road and we don't know whether or not the bridge ahead is out. We have seen some signs which say it is and others which say that it may not be. Any sane person would slow down until we figure it out. That's the situation we're in. You admit that we don't know whether or not the bridge is out. So for goodness sake, let's slow down before we get to it. If it turns out that we can know that the level of carbon in the atmosphere doesn't have a big impact, we can still burn all those fossil fuels later. And if it turns out that it does matter, then we'll have averted disaster.
You talk about what you think. I don't care what you think. Until we know what the situation is, we shouldn't take unnecessary risks like filling the atmosphere with record levels of carbon simply because it's better for the bottom lines of influential companies.
If you look at graphs of global temperature and levels of atmospheric carbon over the last 100,000 years, they look almost identical. Every time atmospheric carbon rises, global temperatures rise. Right now we have more carbon in the atmosphere than we have at any time in the last 100,000 years. More than 10% more than the peak in the last 100,000 years. Does this prove that global warming is happening? No, it doesn't. But it does mean that there's enough of a possibility that we should be cautious. If we screw this up, we don't know how to fix it. That alone should make us be cautious about putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
But being cautious costs money, so the business interests in the US don't want to do it. As such, they're willing to hem and haw and throw as much FUD at things as possible. When asked about global warming, Bush says that we need more research, but he actively fights against giving the EPA more money to research global warming. Why? Because he doesn't want to know. He wants to just always be able to say "we need more research" and keep filling the atmosphere with carbon by burning fossil fuels.
Maybe there will be other things which come into play and global warming will turn out not to be a problem. Maybe global warming will disrupt the deep ocean currents and plunge the planet into another ice age. No one knows for sure. But instead of being cautious, the business interests in the US and their government have insisted that we act as if there is no possible problem and just keep pumping as much carbon into the atmosphere as we want. Whether or not global warming will be an environmental catastrophe is not clear. But what is clear is that by not taking it seriously, Bush and his fellows are taking a big risk with the fate of the entire population of this planet, because if the threat of global warming does turn out to be real, there's not any of us that won't be affected.
Because it'll suck a lot for us if we do that. Many of the big cities on Earth are along coast lines. As such, if the sea rises significantly it's gonna destroy a lot of valuable property and make a lot of people homeless. New Orleans didn't like being flooded all that much. Places like New York and Tokyo won't either. The climate change models also predict things like heavier rainfal resulting in more flooding in general, more huricanes, increased tornado activity, and more droughts. Those are not fun things.
Sure, in the end, it's not going to matter to the planet whether it's hot or cold and life in the general sense will survive, but it is in our best interests to prevent significant climate changes because of the negative effects it will have on us.
And I should also note other downsides, such as that radical climate change will also likely kill a bunch of species who can't adapt to it quickly enough. Many of these species might have contained genes and/or chemicals which would be helpful to us. With them gone, we may well never discover these useful genes and/or chemicals.
If it were a question of not disturbing the natural cylces of things, then perhaps it would be a valid argument to say that we shouldn't try to change things to be in our best interest. But it's abundantly clear that we are mucking with things. The temperature of the planet generally tracks the level of carbon in the atmosphere. The level of atmospheric carbon is higher than it has been any time in the last 100,000 years. Looking at all available sources, it's pretty clear that it's human activity which is doing this. So we are already mucking with things and changing the natural order of things. So the question becomes "what climate do we want?" And frankly, it seems like it would be significantly to our collective benefit to not have the climate change radically from what it is now. This is what we're adapted for. Make it much hotter or colder, and we're going to start to have more portions of the earth where it is infeasible to live.
If by "de facto standard" you mean "de facto pain in the ass" then yes. I mean, NAT all but kills using UDP for most applications and causes all sorts of problems for others.
Take BitTorrent, for example: two users cannot share file pieces if both of them are behind NAT. If you use BitTorrent from behind NAT, it only does so because other people in the swarm have their own IP addresses.
My VOIP box has to use a proxy service to accept incoming connections and on outgoing connections, it checks to see if it can use UDP (it can't due to NAT) every time, resulting in a delay in setting up each call.
For pretty any streaming audio or video application, I'm stuck with using TCP instead of UDP meaning that my quality suffers because it cannot maintain the same bit rate.
NAT is a bad hack. It is not a solution to the problem. It is a work around. It works but only "well enough" and "most of the time". Having enough IP addresses to go around (hint: this isn't like having enough gold to go around. They are numbers. Numbers!) is an actual solution.
If you have failed to notice the downsides to having a shortage of IP addresses in the last several years, you do not belong in a conversation about which networking protocols are better since you clearly don't operate any network protocols other than http anyway.
This is not true at all. The problem isn't in the selling at all. It's in the copying. That's what copyright law governs: copying. It doesn't say a thing about selling. Not a thing in the world.
If I make a fair-use copy of a CD I own onto an iPod and later sell that iPod to a friend, I do not have an obligation to remove the fair-use copies. If a copy is legal when it is made, it cannot later become illegal. That said, in this case, if someone is loading iPods with music in order to sell them, then the copying itself is no longer going to be defensible as a fair-use copy.
Go read William Patry's discuss of a closely related issue if you don't believe me.
Diebold is lying to the state of Alaska and they are buying it. You cannot own a file format. A file format is information. Therefore if they own it, it must be "intellectual property". So, what category of intellectual propoerty is a file format? It can't be copyrighted because it's not a form of creative expression. It cannot be patented because it is not a device or process. It cannot be trademarked because it is not a phrase or logo used to represent their business or products.
So how can they own it? Simple, they can't. Intellectual property law protects certain specific categories of information in certain circumstances. You cannot just say "we own this" and have it be so.
I'm a fan of the old one too. But that doesn't mean that there isn't room to reimagine things. As good as the old one was, the writing is so much better on this one and the themes are much more complex. I mean, I'm sorry, but a Baltar who lets the cylons into the defense grid due to a combination of lust and ego is so much more interesting than a Baltar who intentionally sells out the entire human race for personal gain. The original Baltar was a very flat, uninteresting character. The new one is one of the most interesting characters in the show. The original show was very black and white: Cylons bad, humans good. The new one is so much more complex.
Plus, they ditched all the crappy parts of the older series. As much as I liked the old series, you can't argue that the show doesn't benefit from the removal of Boxey, Muffet, Count Iblis (i.e. Satan), and the Beings of Light (Angels). Frankly, I can't say that I much miss the Eastern Alliance (Space Nazis) much either. I think that you're likely comparing your memories of the old show where you've forgotten all the bad bits of it to the new show.
Someone clearly is a little behind. If nothing else, the author of the parent clearly hasn't seen the new Battlestar Galactica. Each new episode of Battlestar Galactica is so good that it compensates for six Sci-Fi channel original movies. Six. Time-wise that's a 12:1 ratio (more if you count the number of times they rerun the movies).
When considered along with Firefly and a few of the good series of old (Quantum Leap, the original Battlestar Galactica, The Twilight Zone, etc.), they're actually above zero as is. Add in the new Doctor Who and they may even make the low double digits on the cumulative qualometer.
Their overall conclusion that MS products are still vulnerable to security problems is correct, but it is not accurate to suggest that Microsoft has done nothing to address buffer overflows. Now it is clear that they have not done all they could. Specifically, they have not started writing their applications in type-safe languages, and they have only recently starting trying to apply automated static analysis to detect buffer overflows in existing code (A technical report about their efforts can be found here ). And of course, they haven't even vaguely considered requiring that drivers carry safety proofs (using the proof-carrying code stuff from Peter Lee and George Necula, for instance).
However, they have added support for computer architecture features which guard against this sort of attack, such as flagging data memory as non-executable and requiring jumps into code be word-aligned, features which is available in most new processors. They've also begun loading libraries to random addresses making it much harder for worms to know what address to jump to. Although none of these is a silver bullet which prevents all buffer overflows, they have definitely made it significantly more difficult to exploit buffer overflow errors in both operating system and application code. These features even have benefits to third-party applications.
So although the battle is certainly far from won, suggesting that Microsoft is doing nothing is ridiculous. These sort of features are not going to be visible to the user in any obvious way, but they are very good steps in the right direction. I'm certainly no Microsoft lover (I have a Mac and a Linux box and tend to avoid MS products), but if you actually keep up on Microsoft's security research and what from that is making it into the operating systems, it's obvious that they're taking buffer overflow attacks very seriously and making progress. The simple fact of the matter is that the reporter has not done his research.
He doesn't mention them and his example is clearly not about videoblogs. It's about talking heads on web pages. Look at the article. It's a guy reporting with the video embedded in a web page. That's not how video blogs work. Video blogs are like podcasts, you just download them and watch them. And if you'd watched very many, you'd see that there's not a whole lot of talking heads in them. Videobloggers, for the most part, realize that just talking to the camera is dull, so most of them avoid it and instead use their cameras to show things.
What the guy is clearly talking about is websites like CNNs or so forth. That's a completely different ball game.
Actually it's not at all clear that the largest and most important market for free operating systems is in the West. Ubuntu was not created to make money. It is funded by Mark Shuttleworth who already has tons of money. It is essentially a charitable project. As such, its most important market would actually be whereever it can do the most good. This is more likely to be the developing world than the west.
It's also not at all clear that Ubuntu is targeted at a Western audience. It's based in South Africa and includes better internationalization support than any other linux distribution I've seen. I think that the assumption that it's targetted towards Western audiences is just egocentrism.
Also, in what sense is "Windows" a helpful name for an operating system? Windows are transparent panels in walls which allow you to see what's on the other side. Why would I want Windows in my computer? I can already see what's on the other side of it. How would a novice user have any idea what "Windows" does? Without already having used a GUI-based operating system and knowing what "window" means in computer jargon (a repositionable area of the screen in which an application runs), it's no more meaningful than "Ubuntu". At least with "Ubuntu" people will know that they don't know what it means and if they're curious, go look it up.
Oh, and what the hell does "Intellisearc" mean? Sticking together existing portions of words doesn't in any way shape or form mean that the results will be meaningful. Is it supposed to be a smart search? Or a smart glacial lake or something which is not a far away glacial lake? Or is it a new MSDN feature? Or a spinoff company started by Intel and Google? All you've done is created gibberish which sounds more like a typical Western word. And if you think that that's some big improvement over using an African word, then it seems pretty clear to me that you're a marketer, not an engineer. Which is to say, you are reading the wrong web site.
Come on now. "Government regulation is always a bad thing"? Is he really advocating complete anarchy in all things? Smells like a troll to me. I guess he was just being too subtle for this crowd.
Sure. My keyboard goes on my lap or the sofa's arm when I'm not using it. The mouse atop a mouse pad on the sofa next to me or if I really need to use it a lot, I sit on the right side of the sofa and put it on the end table. It's nice and comfy.
Of course, the original poster was contrasting the relative merits of desktop computers and video game consoles, and I don't tend to use the keyboard and mouse with my video game consoles that often (except when playing Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast). But I do keep my Linux box hooked up to the TV as well. Frankly, sofas are comfy and although finding good places to put input devices can sometimes be a little trickier, it's well worth it to not have to spend hours in an uncomfortable chair. Yes, I know that comfortable desk chairs exist, but they're well outside what I can currently afford.
(or boot up my PC and get better controls and better graphics that i don't have to sit on the couch to see)
Yeah. Sitting on the couch is such a hardship. Last time I sat on a couch, I was really comfortable and had room for my friends to watch and play with me too. It was awful. I won't soon be doing that again.
Slashdot Mirror
You argument really only works if there is no safe place at all to pull off between where the driver is now and where they'll be when they get lost. I suppose that if you accidentally turned onto the busway or something then it might apply, but any where else, there are parking lots, gas stations, sections of the road where the visibility is good, stop lights, stop signs, and places where there is a shoulder. I mean, even if you're on the turnpike when you suddenly find out or realize that you'll have to go somewhere different, you can probably stop at a rest area before you'd need to know where to turn.
So, yeah, you're right, one could probably invent a possible scenario where there was no way to safely get to a place where you could take a brief pause from driving, but in the real world, 99% of the time, you should find someplace to pull over.
Keith
Maybe convincing children that what they need to be happy are trips to McDonalds is a form of molestation.
Further, what's the difference between Jim Jones and tobacco advertisers? They both used psychological manipulation to trick people into consuming poison. Is fast poison really worse than slow poison from an ethical standpoint?
Keith
A much better idea than putting something which insultates against heat under your laptop is to put something which conducts heat under your laptop. In my case, I use a metal cookie sheet. The result of having a conductor under your laptop is that heat it creates will disipate faster, resulting in a cooler laptop. Also, it will still provide a certain amount of insultation against heat moving downwards. With the better cooling, the amount of insulation the metal and the air between the bottom of the laptop and metal will be sufficient insulation. My laptop is too hot to use on a bare lap in warm weather, but it's never come close to being uncomfortable on the cookie sheet.
Keith
When you say "It's not always really practical to pull off to the side of the road someplace, just to tell it about a new stop you found out you need to get to along the way" what you mean is that you don't like doing it or that it's not convenient to you. It's much more practical to take steps to lower your risk of accidents than to not do so, even if doing so is inconvenient.
Keith
I'm really tired of hearring people claim that there aren't any new stories written. It shows a basic ignorance of literature. I don't know if the purpose of such remarks is to dismiss modern literature as redundant or just some sort of glorification of the past or perhaps even to explain why the person makingt he remark does not bother to write original stories, but regardless, it's crap.
The simple fact of the matter is that although many common human stories have been told and retold for ages, there's a great volume of significant new work which is not about the retelling of old stories. Here's a list of works which I challenge anyone to find an older story which can reasonable be classified as being in any sense the same story.
Invisible Man by Ralph Elison
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Closing Time by Joseph Heller
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Watchmen by Alan Moore
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Scud: The Disposable Assassin by Rob Schrab
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
R.U.R. by Anton Capek
Fooly Cooly
And that's just a quick listing of what I could come up with off of the top of my head. So, before you make that claim again, answer the list. And no dodges. You can't simply claim that a story about hunting is sufficient for The Sound of Thunder, for instance. The principle idea of the story is not "some guys go hunting". It's about how small changes in the past can affect the future in a large way. You don't need another story which matches in every detail, but it must cover the fundament of the story.
Keith
As someone who actually runs an HTPC running MythTV which records and plays back HDTV, I have to say that RAM is actually less important than I would have thought. I got 1 Gig initially, leaving a couple of slots free so that I could got to 2 Gig if needed. Well, it hasn't been. When I run top, I rarely see a significant amount of total memory utilization. Maybe 20% of my RAM is being used on average. Anything based off of MPEG is limited to dealing with two frames on either side, whether you're playing back or encoding. So what we're talking about if you want to play back one HD signal, record two at the same time, reencode another, and record two SD signals isn't that much. Essentially the one completely decompressed HD frame is 6 Meg. An SD one is 1 Meg. Add two frames on either side and we're talking about 30 Meg and 5 Meg. And since it comes already compressed, if you're recording it, you don't need to encode it. So recording it just requires a small buffer. Say 10M to be -really- generous. So the scenario I outlined above is about the maximum you'll ever need and it's only 30+20+30+10 = 90 Meg.
Now there are undoubtedly things that I have no taken into account like extra buffering, so maybe you should double that to 180 or even double it again to 360, but really, memory isn't a big issue. If it were, the set top boxes would cost a lot more. Many of the HD satellite boxes don't have but somewhere in the 8-32 Meg range for total memory.
Really if you want to worry about one thing my advice would be this: get the largest on-chip cache you can. Decoding SD in software takes my processor to about 5%. Decoding HD in software takes it to 75%. It's only 6 times as many pixels, why does it take 15 times a much processor? Simple: it overflows the cache. I don't know of any chip with the 6 Meg on-chip cache which would be needed to hold everything, but still, a large cache will likely do more to help than most anything else.
Keith
A security system is only as strong as its weakest link. The AACS is probably not the weak link. I say this because HDCP has already been proven insecure (see previous articles from like four years ago). It's more of a pain in the ass to deal with because it spits out uncompressed video, but it is not secure. So, if you want to keep it, you'll have to recompress the video yourself, but most people already do this with DVDs right now anyway to save space.
Keith
The HDCP upstream specification has actually been around for quite some time. That said, this still isn't really a case of HDCP being an end-to-end solution as much as them getting picky about what devices they are willing to give keys out to.
Of course, sufficiently motivated people don't need to get keys from Digital Content Protection, LLC: they can do the leg-work to generate their own. Breaking HDCP, is a pain due to all the effort involved, but cryptographically speaking, it isn't hard. So someone will do it sooner or later, if they haven't already.
Keith
Just for the record, in America, emergency rooms are not allowed to discuss payment before they treat you. They must treat you first and then discuss insurance, payment, and the like. This does not apply to other parts of the hospital and non-emergency treatment. The problem with this overall approach to things is that the very poor who cannot afford to get normal preventative medical care wind up in the emergency room, where their costs wind up being borne by others. It would be preferable if we could get them preventative medical care instead, as that would be much cheaper and hence preferable for all parties. However, there are a lot of people in this country who dislike the idea of giving anyone anything which could be seen as an entitlement.
Keith
Not seeing global climate shift as a disater waiting to happen is called living in denial. Go read the predictions of what's likely to happen. If having more droughts and more huricanes don't sound like disasters to you, then you don't know what the word disaster means. In the worst case, we may even get another ice age as a result.
Last time we had an ice age, it wiped out a significant portion of the human population. Some people believe as much as 2/3s of homo sapiens. Also, prior to the last ice age there were two species of humans. There's only one now. Neanderthals were killed off by the last ice age. Now, I don't think that we'll go from one species to zero, but it'll still certainly suck quite a bit. If nothing else, it'll likely involve killing a substantial portion of the world's poor who can't afford heating fuel.
Now, if an ice age doesn't happen, there's still no guarantee we won't see an upwards spiral in temperature. According to the ice core records we have, there has never been a time when humans existed and the temperature was significantly higher than it is now. Will we as a species survive it? Sure. But it might wind up killing off substantial percentages of the world population which can't afford air conditioning. Either way, a big climate shift is going to have a huge and disasterous effect on the world. You can pretend that humans have been here for a long time and lived through all sorts of conditions, but it's just not true. In geological terms, we've hardly been here for any time and all evidence indicates that the climate hasn't changed much at all during the time we've been here.
The world's economy runs on energy, not carbon in particular. Wind and hydroelectic power are actually already cheaper per kilowatt hour than fossil fuels. And there's promising new solar technologies which may make solar economical. If we were to put half the research money into these types of energy generation as we do into "clean coal technology" we could actually have a pretty decent shot at sharply reducing the amount of carbon we emit. It's easy to make outrageous claims about the costs of making the switch, but the large scale economic analyses which have been done don't back those up. Further, those countries which have acted in keeping with the Kyoto accord have not crippled their economies as a result. Many of them are amongst the strongest per capita economies in the world. It would cost money to switch away from using so many fossil fuels for our energy needs, but it would not cripple the world economy.
Also, 600 Watts? Most computers come with power supplies which can handle 350 at peak, and in practice seldom consume that much. The usual estimate is to assume that they consume half of their rated power.
Keith
Obviously we aren't looking at the entire history of the Earth, we don't have that information. The levels of atmospheric carbon are calculated based on air bubbles trapped in artic ice. It only goes back 160,000 years or so. We have to extrapolate from the data we have. And the data we have says that any time in the last 160,000 years, whenever the level of atmospheric carbon has risen, the temperature has risen shortly afterwards. Look at the graph in the last section of this article. It's clear that there's been a correlation between greenhouse gasses and global temperature over the past 160,000 years. This does not absolutely prove that one causes another. They could somehow both be caused by fluctuations in sun activity or whatever. It's certainly possible. But for the moment, the wisest course of action would be to cut back on carbon emissions until we know for sure. "We don't know" is not a good reason to act recklessly.
It's as if we're in a car together going down a road and we don't know whether or not the bridge ahead is out. We have seen some signs which say it is and others which say that it may not be. Any sane person would slow down until we figure it out. That's the situation we're in. You admit that we don't know whether or not the bridge is out. So for goodness sake, let's slow down before we get to it. If it turns out that we can know that the level of carbon in the atmosphere doesn't have a big impact, we can still burn all those fossil fuels later. And if it turns out that it does matter, then we'll have averted disaster.
You talk about what you think. I don't care what you think. Until we know what the situation is, we shouldn't take unnecessary risks like filling the atmosphere with record levels of carbon simply because it's better for the bottom lines of influential companies.
Keith
If you look at graphs of global temperature and levels of atmospheric carbon over the last 100,000 years, they look almost identical. Every time atmospheric carbon rises, global temperatures rise. Right now we have more carbon in the atmosphere than we have at any time in the last 100,000 years. More than 10% more than the peak in the last 100,000 years. Does this prove that global warming is happening? No, it doesn't. But it does mean that there's enough of a possibility that we should be cautious. If we screw this up, we don't know how to fix it. That alone should make us be cautious about putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere.
But being cautious costs money, so the business interests in the US don't want to do it. As such, they're willing to hem and haw and throw as much FUD at things as possible. When asked about global warming, Bush says that we need more research, but he actively fights against giving the EPA more money to research global warming. Why? Because he doesn't want to know. He wants to just always be able to say "we need more research" and keep filling the atmosphere with carbon by burning fossil fuels.
Maybe there will be other things which come into play and global warming will turn out not to be a problem. Maybe global warming will disrupt the deep ocean currents and plunge the planet into another ice age. No one knows for sure. But instead of being cautious, the business interests in the US and their government have insisted that we act as if there is no possible problem and just keep pumping as much carbon into the atmosphere as we want. Whether or not global warming will be an environmental catastrophe is not clear. But what is clear is that by not taking it seriously, Bush and his fellows are taking a big risk with the fate of the entire population of this planet, because if the threat of global warming does turn out to be real, there's not any of us that won't be affected.
Keith
Because it'll suck a lot for us if we do that. Many of the big cities on Earth are along coast lines. As such, if the sea rises significantly it's gonna destroy a lot of valuable property and make a lot of people homeless. New Orleans didn't like being flooded all that much. Places like New York and Tokyo won't either. The climate change models also predict things like heavier rainfal resulting in more flooding in general, more huricanes, increased tornado activity, and more droughts. Those are not fun things.
Sure, in the end, it's not going to matter to the planet whether it's hot or cold and life in the general sense will survive, but it is in our best interests to prevent significant climate changes because of the negative effects it will have on us.
And I should also note other downsides, such as that radical climate change will also likely kill a bunch of species who can't adapt to it quickly enough. Many of these species might have contained genes and/or chemicals which would be helpful to us. With them gone, we may well never discover these useful genes and/or chemicals.
If it were a question of not disturbing the natural cylces of things, then perhaps it would be a valid argument to say that we shouldn't try to change things to be in our best interest. But it's abundantly clear that we are mucking with things. The temperature of the planet generally tracks the level of carbon in the atmosphere. The level of atmospheric carbon is higher than it has been any time in the last 100,000 years. Looking at all available sources, it's pretty clear that it's human activity which is doing this. So we are already mucking with things and changing the natural order of things. So the question becomes "what climate do we want?" And frankly, it seems like it would be significantly to our collective benefit to not have the climate change radically from what it is now. This is what we're adapted for. Make it much hotter or colder, and we're going to start to have more portions of the earth where it is infeasible to live.
Keith
If by "de facto standard" you mean "de facto pain in the ass" then yes. I mean, NAT all but kills using UDP for most applications and causes all sorts of problems for others.
Take BitTorrent, for example: two users cannot share file pieces if both of them are behind NAT. If you use BitTorrent from behind NAT, it only does so because other people in the swarm have their own IP addresses.
My VOIP box has to use a proxy service to accept incoming connections and on outgoing connections, it checks to see if it can use UDP (it can't due to NAT) every time, resulting in a delay in setting up each call.
For pretty any streaming audio or video application, I'm stuck with using TCP instead of UDP meaning that my quality suffers because it cannot maintain the same bit rate.
NAT is a bad hack. It is not a solution to the problem. It is a work around. It works but only "well enough" and "most of the time". Having enough IP addresses to go around (hint: this isn't like having enough gold to go around. They are numbers. Numbers!) is an actual solution.
If you have failed to notice the downsides to having a shortage of IP addresses in the last several years, you do not belong in a conversation about which networking protocols are better since you clearly don't operate any network protocols other than http anyway.
Keith
This is not true at all. The problem isn't in the selling at all. It's in the copying. That's what copyright law governs: copying. It doesn't say a thing about selling. Not a thing in the world.
If I make a fair-use copy of a CD I own onto an iPod and later sell that iPod to a friend, I do not have an obligation to remove the fair-use copies. If a copy is legal when it is made, it cannot later become illegal. That said, in this case, if someone is loading iPods with music in order to sell them, then the copying itself is no longer going to be defensible as a fair-use copy.
Go read
William Patry's discuss of a closely related issue if you don't believe me.
Keith
Diebold is lying to the state of Alaska and they are buying it. You cannot own a file format. A file format is information. Therefore if they own it, it must be "intellectual property". So, what category of intellectual propoerty is a file format? It can't be copyrighted because it's not a form of creative expression. It cannot be patented because it is not a device or process. It cannot be trademarked because it is not a phrase or logo used to represent their business or products.
So how can they own it? Simple, they can't. Intellectual property law protects certain specific categories of information in certain circumstances. You cannot just say "we own this" and have it be so.
I'm a fan of the old one too. But that doesn't mean that there isn't room to reimagine things. As good as the old one was, the writing is so much better on this one and the themes are much more complex. I mean, I'm sorry, but a Baltar who lets the cylons into the defense grid due to a combination of lust and ego is so much more interesting than a Baltar who intentionally sells out the entire human race for personal gain. The original Baltar was a very flat, uninteresting character. The new one is one of the most interesting characters in the show. The original show was very black and white: Cylons bad, humans good. The new one is so much more complex.
Plus, they ditched all the crappy parts of the older series. As much as I liked the old series, you can't argue that the show doesn't benefit from the removal of Boxey, Muffet, Count Iblis (i.e. Satan), and the Beings of Light (Angels). Frankly, I can't say that I much miss the Eastern Alliance (Space Nazis) much either. I think that you're likely comparing your memories of the old show where you've forgotten all the bad bits of it to the new show.
Keith
1) Get a college degree by outsourcing all your programming assignments
2) Get a job as a computer programmer
3) Outsource all your work
4) Profit
(And all without a ????)
Keith
Someone clearly is a little behind. If nothing else, the author of the parent clearly hasn't seen the new Battlestar Galactica. Each new episode of Battlestar Galactica is so good that it compensates for six Sci-Fi channel original movies. Six. Time-wise that's a 12:1 ratio (more if you count the number of times they rerun the movies).
When considered along with Firefly and a few of the good series of old (Quantum Leap, the original Battlestar Galactica, The Twilight Zone, etc.), they're actually above zero as is. Add in the new Doctor Who and they may even make the low double digits on the cumulative qualometer.
Keith
Their overall conclusion that MS products are still vulnerable to security problems is correct, but it is not accurate to suggest that Microsoft has done nothing to address buffer overflows. Now it is clear that they have not done all they could. Specifically, they have not started writing their applications in type-safe languages, and they have only recently starting trying to apply automated static analysis to detect buffer overflows in existing code (A technical report about their efforts can be found
here ). And of course, they haven't even vaguely considered requiring that drivers carry safety proofs (using the proof-carrying code stuff from Peter Lee and George Necula, for instance).
However, they have added support for computer architecture features which guard against this sort of attack, such as flagging data memory as non-executable and requiring jumps into code be word-aligned, features which is available in most new processors. They've also begun loading libraries to random addresses making it much harder for worms to know what address to jump to. Although none of these is a silver bullet which prevents all buffer overflows, they have definitely made it significantly more difficult to exploit buffer overflow errors in both operating system and application code. These features even have benefits to third-party applications.
So although the battle is certainly far from won, suggesting that Microsoft is doing nothing is ridiculous. These sort of features are not going to be visible to the user in any obvious way, but they are very good steps in the right direction. I'm certainly no Microsoft lover (I have a Mac and a Linux box and tend to avoid MS products), but if you actually keep up on Microsoft's security research and what from that is making it into the operating systems, it's obvious that they're taking buffer overflow attacks very seriously and making progress. The simple fact of the matter is that the reporter has not done his research.
Keith
This article should clearly get a -1 Irrelevant.
He doesn't mention them and his example is clearly not about videoblogs. It's about talking heads on web pages. Look at the article. It's a guy reporting with the video embedded in a web page. That's not how video blogs work. Video blogs are like podcasts, you just download them and watch them. And if you'd watched very many, you'd see that there's not a whole lot of talking heads in them. Videobloggers, for the most part, realize that just talking to the camera is dull, so most of them avoid it and instead use their cameras to show things.
What the guy is clearly talking about is websites like CNNs or so forth. That's a completely different ball game.
Keith
Actually it's not at all clear that the largest and most important market for free operating systems is in the West. Ubuntu was not created to make money. It is funded by Mark Shuttleworth who already has tons of money. It is essentially a charitable project. As such, its most important market would actually be whereever it can do the most good. This is more likely to be the developing world than the west.
It's also not at all clear that Ubuntu is targeted at a Western audience. It's based in South Africa and includes better internationalization support than any other linux distribution I've seen. I think that the assumption that it's targetted towards Western audiences is just egocentrism.
Also, in what sense is "Windows" a helpful name for an operating system? Windows are transparent panels in walls which allow you to see what's on the other side. Why would I want Windows in my computer? I can already see what's on the other side of it. How would a novice user have any idea what "Windows" does? Without already having used a GUI-based operating system and knowing what "window" means in computer jargon (a repositionable area of the screen in which an application runs), it's no more meaningful than "Ubuntu". At least with "Ubuntu" people will know that they don't know what it means and if they're curious, go look it up.
Oh, and what the hell does "Intellisearc" mean? Sticking together existing portions of words doesn't in any way shape or form mean that the results will be meaningful. Is it supposed to be a smart search? Or a smart glacial lake or something which is not a far away glacial lake? Or is it a new MSDN feature? Or a spinoff company started by Intel and Google? All you've done is created gibberish which sounds more like a typical Western word. And if you think that that's some big improvement over using an African word, then it seems pretty clear to me that you're a marketer, not an engineer. Which is to say, you are reading the wrong web site.
Keith
Come on now. "Government regulation is always a bad thing"? Is he really advocating complete anarchy in all things? Smells like a troll to me. I guess he was just being too subtle for this crowd.
Keith
Sure. My keyboard goes on my lap or the sofa's arm when I'm not using it. The mouse atop a mouse pad on the sofa next to me or if I really need to use it a lot, I sit on the right side of the sofa and put it on the end table. It's nice and comfy.
Of course, the original poster was contrasting the relative merits of desktop computers and video game consoles, and I don't tend to use the keyboard and mouse with my video game consoles that often (except when playing Typing of the Dead on Dreamcast). But I do keep my Linux box hooked up to the TV as well. Frankly, sofas are comfy and although finding good places to put input devices can sometimes be a little trickier, it's well worth it to not have to spend hours in an uncomfortable chair. Yes, I know that comfortable desk chairs exist, but they're well outside what I can currently afford.
Keith
(or boot up my PC and get better controls and better graphics that i don't have to sit on the couch to see)
Yeah. Sitting on the couch is such a hardship. Last time I sat on a couch, I was really comfortable and had room for my friends to watch and play with me too. It was awful. I won't soon be doing that again.
Keith