To be part of anonymous, you just have to call yourself anonymous. For example, I can deface a website, write "we are legion never forgive never forget blah blah" and it becomes yet another action of anonymous. The anonymous that DDOS MasterCard and the one that hunt down child porn may be completely different groups that don't even know each other.
Saying that anonymous is a powerful organization is as stupid as saying that the opensource community is a powerful organization. They are certainly powerful, have similar ideas and often work together but they are not an organization.
I don't know much about oil companies but I suspect that they do a lot of R&D. Just because what always sell the same stuff doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of innovation happening behind the scene.
I also worked with Mandriva. I also know some people who used Gentoo or CentOS. But I've never seen Arch nor Mint. I am not saying that my distros are better than your distros. What I am trying to say it that there is no real distinction between "major" and "minor" distros. #1 is maybe 5 times more popular than #10, not a big difference.
Audio is much less demanding than video and MP3 is good enough. This is why few people look elsewhere.
As for Vorbis, it is a top of the line format, with results equaling or exceeding MPEG's AAC for stereo audio. It is also used by many games internally. It is not like WebM and Theora that are visibly worse than h.264. I think that Vorbis can get more easily accepted than WebM. To get an idea. I sometimes see pirates use Vorbis, but not WebM or Theora. And pirates don't care about licenses, they want widely accepted and technically good formats.
Note : OGG is just a container, like AVI, MKV or MP4. The actual audio compression format behind most OGG files is Vorbis.
Except that the Android bits represent only a minimal part of the Linux kernel codebase, so the whole impact of this would be proportionally pretty small.
Right but if someone manages to break into android because of a bug in the kernel, it will benefit Linux even if it is not Google's code. Same thing for all other open-source components.
MOC is mostly for the part of Qt that deals with signal and slots, a form of loose coupling for objects that is very convenient for GUIs. Boost-like features of Qt are standard C++ and don't require a precompiler.
What may be unfortunate is that once you decide to use Qt there is no turning back because you will end up with Qt objects everywhere in your code. But isn't it the same with boost ?
It is not surprising that statistical analysis can distinguish between good or bad essays. Just take a bunch of human-graded essays and try to find correlations on things like the presence of some words, total length, etc... Smarter algorithms may analyze things like proper spelling and syntax. The idea here is that the robo-grader does not really grade the essay, it tries to mimic the most superficial aspect of human grading. For example, most of the time the word "wether" is a spelling mistake and the robo-grader may simply lower the score each time the word is present. The rare cases where the word is properly used is statically insignificant so it doesn't matter... 99% of the time.
This approach may work well but it is totally unfair. It is like grading using race or gender as a criterion. It will certainly improve correlation but I hope that no one think about it seriously.
I use a 12 year old CRT that was considered relatively high quality at the time (Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510). So let me answer your claims. - Ability to display perfect black color : When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs. - Ability to display more than one resolution correctly : True, great for games, especially considering that reducing the resolution increases the refresh rate (to about 150Hz) - Ultrafast response time, no input lag : True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this. - Reliable and have long life : Yes and no : Yes because my monitor is 12 years old and just refuses to die and no because there is significant degradation in the colors. I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct. - More affordable than a 24" LCD that can display 2304x1440 : It is difficult to compare prices because CRTs are now a rarity but I remember paying close to $1000 for mine. So let's say it is in the same category as current 2560x1440 LCDs. But I with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, I stayed well above LCDs for a long time. - Great image quality : It is subjective. I find LCDs better for text and CRTs better for moving pictures. At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
So your alternative is what? Buy a big car for when I have to carry a lot of people/stuff, and also buy a small car for the rest of the time? That's a huge amount of money put into declining assets. Or perhaps you think I should drive to the nearest rental agency (20 miles) every time I need to use a bigger vehicle.
These are not stupid alternatives depending on your situation. If you only need a big car once or twice a year, driving 20 miles for a rental is not a big deal. And having two cars allows one to be use as a backup for the other, you also have less problem with conflicting requirements. It means that any of the two cars will certainly be less expensive and more suited for the job than a single car that tries to do everything.
The point is that the python example the indentation is consistent and the syntax is correct, even if it is incorrect. In the C-like example, the code is correct. It may not conform to some coding style but this is easy to fix at any time.
CIA and NSA probably don't care about torrents because catching casual file sharers is very easy. The real work is about what to do with them afterwards, not CIA or NSA's job. There are many reasons for the NSA and CIA to wiretap communications, evil or not. Torrents are just not one of these.
Sony products are still good. I have a lot of Sony products that I bought because they fitted my needs the most, it had nothing to do with brand names. For example while "Bravia Engine" may be a collection of crappy filters, IMHO the end result looks better than its competitors image enhancement algorithms. Sure, if you turn it off (an understandable choice) then there is no reason to pay for this feature but for some people it matters. Likewise, some people have no use for a manual focus-ring (they just want to point and shoot), so they may consider it a worthless feature. As for HDMI, the bloody wrong thing with analog HD cables is that it is a bit stupid for two digital devices to communicate in analog and lose quality in the process.
I too hate Sony DRM practices, I also hate memory sticks, the PSN, etc... I will never buy music from Sony and I don't have a PS3 but for some products, Sony still have an edge.
Steam may be a little bit evil (it is DRM after all) but at least, it is useful. By useful I mean that some features are available to steam users that pirates don't have such as a big part of online play, friend lists, automatic updates, etc... So much that I know people who actually bought a game after they played a cracked version. They wouldn't have done this it with a SecuROM game.
On the other hand, Sony's rootkit is a pure nuisance.
I never really understood how these "extra cancer deaths" are calculated. Imagine : Some guy is 40 the day of the disaster, at 75, he develops cancer and dies a year later. His death can be reliably tied to the event, thus, he is counted in the "extra deaths". But, maybe he would have died from a heart attack at age 80 otherwise. The disaster took 5 years of his life. If he had died immediately after the event, he would have lost all 40 years of remaining lifetime. Will this count as 1/8 of a death ? If we push a little further we can even say that the disaster reduced the number of deaths by heart attack.
GNU can work with online games like Diablo III is expected to be. People will pay to access the server. The fact that unofficial servers can be used is not really a problem if the official server is well maintained. There are many games where the official server is more popular than the free alternatives. Also keep in mind that GNU code doesn't mean that the graphics, sounds, levels etc... are free. Take Quake3 for example : the code is GPL but if you want to play the original game, you still need the original CD, because the data are not included in the opensource release.
Qt supports UI automation via its accessibility framework. So either it is completely broken or autoit doesn't support it. And unless someone shows me an official bug report, I think that autoit is more likely to be the problem.
I think the problem is that Qt, like most GUI toolkits, uses its own widgets instead of the windows API. There are pros and cons. And one of the cons is that programs designed only for built-in windows widgets may not work properly. It is probably the case with autoit.
It is not really unpaid work. You are "working" so that you can use the "free" recaptcha service. Remember, if a something is free, you are the product being sold.
Of course not all of you are into frivolous shopping. But advertisers don't care about pigeonholing and correlation!=causation debates. If they find that, a target group is more likely to buy their fashion accessories, they advertise for them. It can be gays, vegans, Muslims,... the reason doesn't matter as long as they register a higher score on their stats.
Folks that drive with GPS seem like some of the worst drivers on the road. Why? They are watching the screen and not the road signs. They are missing the obvious visual clues to where they are going.
People that don't know their way seem like some of the worst drivers on the road, whether they use a GPS or not. Road signs can be difficult to follow : sometimes they are hidden behind something, an intersection may be particularly complex, may reasons. As for maps they are even less effective in unexpected situations than GPSes and they don't tell you where you are. Unless your passenger does the navigation for you and does it well, you will get distracted.
The bad thing about the GPS is that you are less likely to remember your way the second time.
He was simply lucky. Giving a 20% discount on $500000 is like a gift of $100000 from the casino in case of loss, the value of just one of his bets. There is no way it can transform into millions in a single night if you are not lucky. Statistically, considering a 0.25% house edge and a $100000 flat bet, if he uses his discount less than once every 400 hands (about 7h of continuous play at 1 hand per minute), he is losing money in the long run.
The only unusual thing is that the stakes are extremely high. Coming in with $100, flat betting $10 and leaving with $1100 and a free drink is nothing extraordinary. Here, the same happened, x10000. The difference is that the law of large numbers no longer apply and the casinos start to take risks even if they have the edge.
I don't see the death penalty as a deterrent but as a way to get rid of a danger. Some criminals are a death threat to anyone around them (including other inmates if imprisoned) and there is no way to change it. The same reasoning can be applied to corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
To be part of anonymous, you just have to call yourself anonymous.
For example, I can deface a website, write "we are legion never forgive never forget blah blah" and it becomes yet another action of anonymous. The anonymous that DDOS MasterCard and the one that hunt down child porn may be completely different groups that don't even know each other.
Saying that anonymous is a powerful organization is as stupid as saying that the opensource community is a powerful organization. They are certainly powerful, have similar ideas and often work together but they are not an organization.
I don't know much about oil companies but I suspect that they do a lot of R&D.
Just because what always sell the same stuff doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of innovation happening behind the scene.
... and Andrew Nikolic had contacted me.
I would have asked all my employees to like the satirical article in question.
I also worked with Mandriva. I also know some people who used Gentoo or CentOS. But I've never seen Arch nor Mint.
I am not saying that my distros are better than your distros. What I am trying to say it that there is no real distinction between "major" and "minor" distros. #1 is maybe 5 times more popular than #10, not a big difference.
Audio is much less demanding than video and MP3 is good enough. This is why few people look elsewhere.
As for Vorbis, it is a top of the line format, with results equaling or exceeding MPEG's AAC for stereo audio. It is also used by many games internally. It is not like WebM and Theora that are visibly worse than h.264. I think that Vorbis can get more easily accepted than WebM.
To get an idea. I sometimes see pirates use Vorbis, but not WebM or Theora. And pirates don't care about licenses, they want widely accepted and technically good formats.
Note : OGG is just a container, like AVI, MKV or MP4. The actual audio compression format behind most OGG files is Vorbis.
Except that the Android bits represent only a minimal part of the Linux kernel codebase, so the whole impact of this would be proportionally pretty small.
Right but if someone manages to break into android because of a bug in the kernel, it will benefit Linux even if it is not Google's code. Same thing for all other open-source components.
MOC is mostly for the part of Qt that deals with signal and slots, a form of loose coupling for objects that is very convenient for GUIs. Boost-like features of Qt are standard C++ and don't require a precompiler.
What may be unfortunate is that once you decide to use Qt there is no turning back because you will end up with Qt objects everywhere in your code. But isn't it the same with boost ?
It is not surprising that statistical analysis can distinguish between good or bad essays.
Just take a bunch of human-graded essays and try to find correlations on things like the presence of some words, total length, etc... Smarter algorithms may analyze things like proper spelling and syntax.
The idea here is that the robo-grader does not really grade the essay, it tries to mimic the most superficial aspect of human grading. For example, most of the time the word "wether" is a spelling mistake and the robo-grader may simply lower the score each time the word is present. The rare cases where the word is properly used is statically insignificant so it doesn't matter... 99% of the time.
This approach may work well but it is totally unfair. It is like grading using race or gender as a criterion. It will certainly improve correlation but I hope that no one think about it seriously.
I use a 12 year old CRT that was considered relatively high quality at the time (Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510). So let me answer your claims.
- Ability to display perfect black color :
When the brightness is not set too high the blacks are great (better than LCD) but not perfect. When the brightness it at 100% it is worse than the cheapest LCDs.
- Ability to display more than one resolution correctly :
True, great for games, especially considering that reducing the resolution increases the refresh rate (to about 150Hz)
- Ultrafast response time, no input lag :
True, I especially like the high refresh rate. As for the input lag, my skills are far too low to take advantage of this.
- Reliable and have long life :
Yes and no : Yes because my monitor is 12 years old and just refuses to die and no because there is significant degradation in the colors. I lost about 20% contrast in red and blue leading to a greenish tint in dark areas that is difficult to correct.
- More affordable than a 24" LCD that can display 2304x1440 :
It is difficult to compare prices because CRTs are now a rarity but I remember paying close to $1000 for mine. So let's say it is in the same category as current 2560x1440 LCDs. But I with a maximum resolution of 2048x1536, I stayed well above LCDs for a long time.
- Great image quality :
It is subjective. I find LCDs better for text and CRTs better for moving pictures. At high resolution / high refresh rate, my CRT becomes blurry.
So your alternative is what? Buy a big car for when I have to carry a lot of people/stuff, and also buy a small car for the rest of the time? That's a huge amount of money put into declining assets. Or perhaps you think I should drive to the nearest rental agency (20 miles) every time I need to use a bigger vehicle.
These are not stupid alternatives depending on your situation.
If you only need a big car once or twice a year, driving 20 miles for a rental is not a big deal.
And having two cars allows one to be use as a backup for the other, you also have less problem with conflicting requirements. It means that any of the two cars will certainly be less expensive and more suited for the job than a single car that tries to do everything.
The point is that the python example the indentation is consistent and the syntax is correct, even if it is incorrect.
In the C-like example, the code is correct. It may not conform to some coding style but this is easy to fix at any time.
CIA and NSA probably don't care about torrents because catching casual file sharers is very easy. The real work is about what to do with them afterwards, not CIA or NSA's job.
There are many reasons for the NSA and CIA to wiretap communications, evil or not. Torrents are just not one of these.
Sony products are still good.
I have a lot of Sony products that I bought because they fitted my needs the most, it had nothing to do with brand names.
For example while "Bravia Engine" may be a collection of crappy filters, IMHO the end result looks better than its competitors image enhancement algorithms. Sure, if you turn it off (an understandable choice) then there is no reason to pay for this feature but for some people it matters. Likewise, some people have no use for a manual focus-ring (they just want to point and shoot), so they may consider it a worthless feature.
As for HDMI, the bloody wrong thing with analog HD cables is that it is a bit stupid for two digital devices to communicate in analog and lose quality in the process.
I too hate Sony DRM practices, I also hate memory sticks, the PSN, etc... I will never buy music from Sony and I don't have a PS3 but for some products, Sony still have an edge.
Steam may be a little bit evil (it is DRM after all) but at least, it is useful.
By useful I mean that some features are available to steam users that pirates don't have such as a big part of online play, friend lists, automatic updates, etc... So much that I know people who actually bought a game after they played a cracked version. They wouldn't have done this it with a SecuROM game.
On the other hand, Sony's rootkit is a pure nuisance.
I never really understood how these "extra cancer deaths" are calculated.
Imagine :
Some guy is 40 the day of the disaster, at 75, he develops cancer and dies a year later. His death can be reliably tied to the event, thus, he is counted in the "extra deaths". But, maybe he would have died from a heart attack at age 80 otherwise. The disaster took 5 years of his life. If he had died immediately after the event, he would have lost all 40 years of remaining lifetime. Will this count as 1/8 of a death ? If we push a little further we can even say that the disaster reduced the number of deaths by heart attack.
GNU can work with online games like Diablo III is expected to be.
People will pay to access the server. The fact that unofficial servers can be used is not really a problem if the official server is well maintained. There are many games where the official server is more popular than the free alternatives.
Also keep in mind that GNU code doesn't mean that the graphics, sounds, levels etc... are free. Take Quake3 for example : the code is GPL but if you want to play the original game, you still need the original CD, because the data are not included in the opensource release.
Qt supports UI automation via its accessibility framework.
So either it is completely broken or autoit doesn't support it.
And unless someone shows me an official bug report, I think that autoit is more likely to be the problem.
I think the problem is that Qt, like most GUI toolkits, uses its own widgets instead of the windows API. There are pros and cons. And one of the cons is that programs designed only for built-in windows widgets may not work properly. It is probably the case with autoit.
It is not really unpaid work. You are "working" so that you can use the "free" recaptcha service.
Remember, if a something is free, you are the product being sold.
I heard that older hard drives were huge and spun fast enough to cause significant damage in case they shatter.
CRTs could implode too.
Of course not all of you are into frivolous shopping.
But advertisers don't care about pigeonholing and correlation!=causation debates. If they find that, a target group is more likely to buy their fashion accessories, they advertise for them. It can be gays, vegans, Muslims,... the reason doesn't matter as long as they register a higher score on their stats.
Folks that drive with GPS seem like some of the worst drivers on the road. Why? They are watching the screen and not the road signs. They are missing the obvious visual clues to where they are going.
People that don't know their way seem like some of the worst drivers on the road, whether they use a GPS or not.
Road signs can be difficult to follow : sometimes they are hidden behind something, an intersection may be particularly complex, may reasons. As for maps they are even less effective in unexpected situations than GPSes and they don't tell you where you are. Unless your passenger does the navigation for you and does it well, you will get distracted.
The bad thing about the GPS is that you are less likely to remember your way the second time.
Some of them aren't. Some others don't care. The others already hate Sarko's internet policy.
He was simply lucky.
Giving a 20% discount on $500000 is like a gift of $100000 from the casino in case of loss, the value of just one of his bets. There is no way it can transform into millions in a single night if you are not lucky.
Statistically, considering a 0.25% house edge and a $100000 flat bet, if he uses his discount less than once every 400 hands (about 7h of continuous play at 1 hand per minute), he is losing money in the long run.
The only unusual thing is that the stakes are extremely high. Coming in with $100, flat betting $10 and leaving with $1100 and a free drink is nothing extraordinary. Here, the same happened, x10000.
The difference is that the law of large numbers no longer apply and the casinos start to take risks even if they have the edge.
I think you got it backwards. What you are describing is the point of view of the consumer (the client).
Are you implying that musicians that perform live are like prostitutes, and the others are like porn actors ?
I don't see the death penalty as a deterrent but as a way to get rid of a danger. Some criminals are a death threat to anyone around them (including other inmates if imprisoned) and there is no way to change it.
The same reasoning can be applied to corporations.