Free Culture is a surprising recommendation as an audiobook. I say that because some of the chapters are abysmally bad . . . A recorded performance does not have to be done in one take. Several readers flubbed lines and tried to recover as if performing live. For crying out loud, edit out the errors. I will say that I enjoyed the book, but errors like those (almost) made me want to record my own version of the offending chapters.
That's funny, I had almost exactly the same reaction, and the same impulse to record my own version! I agree, it's maddening to hear people muff their lines and just keep going, when audio editing isn't all that hard. However, I recommended it because a) it's free, b) I enjoyed it despite all the problems, and c) it occurs to me that while I've thought about recording a version, I've done nothing about it for months, while these people actually went ahead and did it -- that buys them some major props, in my book.
Besides, using the Creative Commons license to create an audiobook as a derivative work, then making that freely distributable over BitTorrent: now that's cool.
(But that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn to polish your reading! Even more off-topic than the rest of this, but actually the "Free Culture" audiobook is illustrative of something that I've often noted about amateur performing arts versus amateur technical arts like open source programming. The equivalent of flubbed lines in an open source project would be badly designed or sloppy code -- and in a good open source project, that's ruthlessly cut out, even if it means asking someone to leave the project. Whereas in "open source" culture, so far, there tends to be an attitude of "we must be supportive at all costs", which promotes a certain sloppiness, I think. I used to go to an open storytelling session where some people could have used some constructive criticism about their telling styles, but virtually never got it.)
I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on CD that is supposedly fantastic, but it's almost a spindle-worth of CDs and I can't get into it because of that--what a commitment. And I'd rather carry around a tattered copy of the book than spend the time ripping them to MP3s that I could dump to my iPod so I could have them on the go.
I listened to LOTR in audio form a few years ago, and my main thought was, "What the hell? They sing and recite poetry all the bloody time!" Turns out, I just edited all that out of the print version, so I had essentially no memory of it. In audio, it was clear that this happened constantly, and it was harder to skim over.
If anyone writes in to urge me to listen carefully to the poetry, and possibly learn Elvish, it will go hard for them.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
For certain applications, I find that they're much better. Basically, they're great for "hands free" reading, in situations where you couldn't conveniently (or safely) read a book, like while exercising, doing housework, walking around (remembering to use your eyes extra carefully to subsitute for your occupied ears when, say, crossing streets).
Also, a good performance by the narrator can do great things for a book. There are some very fine voice actors reading these books, and the best of them are fantastic. Other narrators are, well, less fantastic. It's very much a personal preference issue, though: heated arguments over the quality of the narrator regularly break out in the reviews over at Audible.com. (Like another poster, I use my iPod mainly for audiobooks, and I've been doing Audible's two-books-a-month subscription plan for years, now. Not free, but affordable enough for me.)
One free audio book I can recommend is "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig, which a bunch of people recorded into an audio book, which was permitted by Lessig's release of the book under a Creative Commons license. You can find it over at www.legaltorrents.com. The narrators are enthusiastic rather than skilled, in some cases, but the material is so interesting that it's easy to forgive the occasional lapses.
And how do we sentance a wrong do'er? Do we sentance based on each act, that every single peice of email is a seperate offense? Or do we sentance based on the whole of what he did? For example, if someone rapes one person, that is very different than if someone rapes 10 people. But what about spam?
This is a good point. The law seems to be intent on treating computer-related offences identically with "physical" crimes, although the notion of number of counts makes much less sense in the electronic context.
The same reasoning that brings us a potential 640 year verdict for a spammer (yay!) also leads to kids being subjected to $100 billion lawsuits (boo!). If you can do something online once, you can set it up to be done 1000 times -- is that a single offence, or 1000 of them?
This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever . . . The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous . ..
Ah, but you've pointed out one of the problems: Go to the gym? But it's 5am, the gym isn't open yet. Neither is anything else, unless everyone gets together and agrees to start earlier. You can do this by asking every business to change schedules, or you can do it all at once by changing the clocks.
Not so ludicrous, I think. No, for ludicrousness, wait until someone reasons that if extending it by another month is supposed to save energy, just think how much we'd save by extending it to the whole year! Wait for it.
Hey, this could be the start of something big! What if he were to also install a portable screen? Maybe it could, I dunno, fold down into the top of the machine, or something. Then you could carry the computer around and do stuff with it, wherever you went, while resting it on your knee. A sort of "knee-top" compiter, though maybe there's a better name someone can think of . ..
I HATE the previews on DVD's that can not be skipped over. I preffer previews to be on a DVD in a "bonus" section. If the preview is forced on me, I get very frustrated, I have zero interest in what I am watching.
I hear ya!
I recently had an odd experience: my wife bought a DVD for our daughter (Mulan 2) from a second-hand bookstore. It was cheap, and after viewing it, I thought it must be a copy rather than an official version. Analyzing why I thought so, I realized that it was because it didn't have much crap at the beginning, and what there was, you were allowed to skip over. Can't possibly be an official studio release, if you're that free to choose what you watch . . . Gave me a bit of chill to realize that this was the way to tell the difference -- but if starts making enough of a difference to people's purchasing decisions, it should give the studios a chill, too.
No way! You mean that our elected officials are being paid off by corporations so that state citizens get the shaft? Who would have thought?!
Nothing will really improve until we require the following quote to be tattooed onto the forearm of every elected official:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute nor common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
I've recently been involved in preparing a grant application to the Gates Foundation, and came away with a very positive impression of the institution. These people are serious, they're well-funded, and they're doing their damnedest to make good decisions about how best to address health challenges in the poorest nations in the world. They're placing a lot of emphasis on addressing diseases that don't always get a lot of funding in the West, like tuberculosis and malaria.
(Full disclosure: we didn't get the grant, so I don't like them out of some sense of gratitude. But it did seem clear that they were going through a good peer review process, and they were gratifyingly willing to consider proposals from non-traditional sources - we were a bunch of physical chemists, for example.)
So say what you like about Gate and his operating system, but he's doing a good thing with this Foundation, and shame on anyone who says he's not doing "enough".
I ask you, why do you use Linux when there's so many more games/applications/etc available for Windows? Or does your pearticular personality fit with Linux better than it does with Windows? Well, mine fits with the AmigaOS user interface better than it does with Windows OR Linux. And so I use it instead. Thank you for respecting my right to choose what I prefer.
OK, I have to step in here. The two sides of this debate (amigabill and, well, everybody else) are completely missing one another.
He's asserting that he likes AmigaOS for personal reasons, and does not care whether you use it or not!
Everyone else is assuming that there's some sort of implicit message that everyone should convert to AmigaOS, or that AmigaOS should supplant their existing OS. No such claims seems to be being made, so the two sides are debating different questions.
And I have now completely exhausted the extent to which I care . . . (Loved AmigaOS at the time, but you'll have to pry my Mac from my cold, dead hands.)
The article says: ". . . [an] A&R director at EMI believes that HSS as a hit predictor merely reinforces decisions taken by A&Rs, those record company employees given the job of discovering new songs and artists. "A good A&R has a very accurate instinct for what the market needs," he says - and the fact that 95% of hit songs in the past 50 years are high scorers seems to back him up."
Um, HSS is using past hit songs to define high scores, so the fact that past hits have high scores is not some sort of vindication of the job these mysterious A&R guys have been doing. The real question is why that figure isn't 100% - I'm guessing this is probably because the clusters are fairly wide, so some songs manage to be far enough from the algorithm's definition of the cluster to be classed as non-hits, despite being part of the training set?
"I used to own a used video game store, but recently we went out of business because we sold all of our good games."
Hmm, that would make sense. I love this comment in his auction listing: "... game systems aren't my specialty..."
Aren't his specialty?! Sweet tap-dancing Buddha, this is supposed to be just a minor sideline? What's his real interest? Does he have four hundred thousand RC cars out back, or what?
I don't neccesarily mean that there will have to be some sort of global catastrophe, just that there will be no real exploration until a group of humans blasts off from Earth with no prospects to return. Ideally, they would be volunteers . . .
. . . but if you relax that constraint, think of the possibilities! Example: isn't it an election year in the U.S.? I can think of several candidates (so to speak) for a one-way trip into space.
MIT isn't promoting the fact that she is the first woman, the press is.
Right - the article somehow makes it sound like this is a result of quota hiring, but there's nothing to suggest that.
Further note, grandparent post, that the "other recent programs' efforts" mentioned in the article involve getting girls in high school to participate in activities (and classes) related to computer science, electrical engineering, and math. This is far from some sort of quota program, and it seems to me to be a very sensible approach: if the problem is that too many girls are either shooed away from these fields or have never thought that they were an option, then give them a chance to see what it's all about, then decide for themselves.
I love the following quote from Robert A. Heinlein, which I think should be repeated whenever this sort of thing comes up:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit.
[It's from circa 1938, in a short story where someone has invented a method of foretelling the exact time of a person's death, and the insurance companies go to the courts seeking to have it banned. I forget the name of the story but I'm sure six other Slashdotters can fill that in for me.]
I'm still wondering why the governments don't require free and "open source" text for public schools. In college, the professors used to change the text every semester so that the students couldn't sell the books back at the end of the semester (likely getting kick-backs from the text manufacturers, no doubt).
And later that same thread . ..
You're exactly right about getting kick-backs . . .
Oh, yeah! I'm a professor, and you should see the stuff we get from the textbook people: hot and cold running Porsches, massages from scantily-clad young women (or men, if you prefer), big envelopes stuffed with cash . ..
No, wait, that was all a dream. I must be teaching at the wrong place, because the very most I've ever gotten is the occasional free book and an even more occasional phone call asking if I've considered using book X.
But you're right that textbooks are hideoulsy overpriced, and it's maddening that the publishers keep changing editions in an effort to force students to buy new rather than used. But it's an awfully big brush you're painting with, when you say that we're all getting kickbacks -- and you're getting paint all over me!
Laugh if you will, but I for one applaud this new era of open source viruses . . . Wait . . . Oops, my "open source = good" reflex was triggered before my brain had a chance to think about it.
We [Canadians] are all presumed guilty anyway, as we are charged a tax on blank CD's for money to go to the "poor starving" artists.
Something I've never understood is how this can possibly be true. You're right, there's supposed to be a levy of 21 cents per CD-R -- but I can easily buy 100 CD-Rs for C$29.99 at any computer discount store. Do CD-Rs really cost so little that they can be sold for 30 cents each, 21 cents of which is collected by the government? Seems implausible. Or is this levy not yet being seriously collected, in fact?
But I agree that it's an insane procedure, effectively putting the government in charge of collecting money for businesses that *might* be hurt by *potential* copying. Foolishness. I've had a word with Sheila Copps (Heritage Minister, under whose jurisdiction the Copyright Board apparently falls) about this, yet the practice continues. I told her it was a bad idea, but apparently she remains unconvinced.
I was gonna say. The comment that this is a "giant leap backward for mankind" is just not fair. How can you expect everything to stay compatible while trying to lock down parts of the OS against attack? You wouldn't be saying something like that if it was Linux we were talking about.
Y'know, this Slashdot Microsoft-bashing has gone beyond mildly amusing, and gotten into the range where it completely negates virtually everything that's said. If you always object to everything, then your legitimate complaints will be seen as just more whining, people.
Seriously, if you're bored, try to construct a Slashdot story that would not be spun in an anti-Microsoft way.
CNN: "Microsoft announced today that they have ended world hunger."
Slashdot: "linux_boy reports: Microsoft claims to have ended world hunger. Just what we need, more overpopulation!"
They didn't actually test these passwords they just said "I'll give you a bar of chocolate if you give me your password".
So people can just make it up.
I really, really hope you're right about this! I just love the thought of hundreds of people saying, "Sure, my password is, uh, rutabaga. Now gimme the chocolate."
Unfortunately, I suspect this is probably not what happened in most cases. But as you say, who knows: they have no way to check.
While it is impressive to write something like this in such a small binary, the "Application" as a whole is MUCH larger. The obvious dependancy on DirectX alone makes the entire app > 20MB.
Right! It reminds me of the business of creating N-ingredient recipes (3-ingredient or 4-ingredient, typically): the trick is to define as many things as possible as "staples" (salt, flour, butter, sugar), so that the ingredients can be "salmon, oregano, and bread crumbs" or something.
But just like the N-ingredient case, it's not really cheating. People really are likely to have those things already in their kitchen, and people really are likely to have the supporting libraries around their hard drive. And any attempt to optimize for size has a certain appeal in these days of increasingly bloated code.
Slashdot Mirror
Free Culture is a surprising recommendation as an audiobook. I say that because some of the chapters are abysmally bad . . . A recorded performance does not have to be done in one take. Several readers flubbed lines and tried to recover as if performing live. For crying out loud, edit out the errors. I will say that I enjoyed the book, but errors like those (almost) made me want to record my own version of the offending chapters.
That's funny, I had almost exactly the same reaction, and the same impulse to record my own version! I agree, it's maddening to hear people muff their lines and just keep going, when audio editing isn't all that hard. However, I recommended it because a) it's free, b) I enjoyed it despite all the problems, and c) it occurs to me that while I've thought about recording a version, I've done nothing about it for months, while these people actually went ahead and did it -- that buys them some major props, in my book.
Besides, using the Creative Commons license to create an audiobook as a derivative work, then making that freely distributable over BitTorrent: now that's cool.
(But that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn to polish your reading! Even more off-topic than the rest of this, but actually the "Free Culture" audiobook is illustrative of something that I've often noted about amateur performing arts versus amateur technical arts like open source programming. The equivalent of flubbed lines in an open source project would be badly designed or sloppy code -- and in a good open source project, that's ruthlessly cut out, even if it means asking someone to leave the project. Whereas in "open source" culture, so far, there tends to be an attitude of "we must be supportive at all costs", which promotes a certain sloppiness, I think. I used to go to an open storytelling session where some people could have used some constructive criticism about their telling styles, but virtually never got it.)
I have a copy of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on CD that is supposedly fantastic, but it's almost a spindle-worth of CDs and I can't get into it because of that--what a commitment. And I'd rather carry around a tattered copy of the book than spend the time ripping them to MP3s that I could dump to my iPod so I could have them on the go.
I listened to LOTR in audio form a few years ago, and my main thought was, "What the hell? They sing and recite poetry all the bloody time!" Turns out, I just edited all that out of the print version, so I had essentially no memory of it. In audio, it was clear that this happened constantly, and it was harder to skim over.
If anyone writes in to urge me to listen carefully to the poetry, and possibly learn Elvish, it will go hard for them.
I would be interested in knowing if anyone actually prefers the audio format to traditional page flipping.
For certain applications, I find that they're much better. Basically, they're great for "hands free" reading, in situations where you couldn't conveniently (or safely) read a book, like while exercising, doing housework, walking around (remembering to use your eyes extra carefully to subsitute for your occupied ears when, say, crossing streets).
Also, a good performance by the narrator can do great things for a book. There are some very fine voice actors reading these books, and the best of them are fantastic. Other narrators are, well, less fantastic. It's very much a personal preference issue, though: heated arguments over the quality of the narrator regularly break out in the reviews over at Audible.com. (Like another poster, I use my iPod mainly for audiobooks, and I've been doing Audible's two-books-a-month subscription plan for years, now. Not free, but affordable enough for me.)
One free audio book I can recommend is "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig, which a bunch of people recorded into an audio book, which was permitted by Lessig's release of the book under a Creative Commons license. You can find it over at www.legaltorrents.com. The narrators are enthusiastic rather than skilled, in some cases, but the material is so interesting that it's easy to forgive the occasional lapses.
And how do we sentance a wrong do'er? Do we sentance based on each act, that every single peice of email is a seperate offense? Or do we sentance based on the whole of what he did? For example, if someone rapes one person, that is very different than if someone rapes 10 people. But what about spam?
This is a good point. The law seems to be intent on treating computer-related offences identically with "physical" crimes, although the notion of number of counts makes much less sense in the electronic context.
The same reasoning that brings us a potential 640 year verdict for a spammer (yay!) also leads to kids being subjected to $100 billion lawsuits (boo!). If you can do something online once, you can set it up to be done 1000 times -- is that a single offence, or 1000 of them?
This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever . . . The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous . . .
Ah, but you've pointed out one of the problems: Go to the gym? But it's 5am, the gym isn't open yet. Neither is anything else, unless everyone gets together and agrees to start earlier. You can do this by asking every business to change schedules, or you can do it all at once by changing the clocks.
Not so ludicrous, I think. No, for ludicrousness, wait until someone reasons that if extending it by another month is supposed to save energy, just think how much we'd save by extending it to the whole year! Wait for it.
. . . were meant to be a response to those who criticise KDE as being overbloated.
I think the word "overbloated" is bloated, by four letters.
Also a pretty cool, official NASA Quicktime movie from the impactor's camera - kind of wobbly and jerky, but nifty nevertheless.
Well, I think we can be a bit tolerant, here -- everyone's camera work suffers when they're about to splat into a comet.
Hey, this could be the start of something big! What if he were to also install a portable screen? Maybe it could, I dunno, fold down into the top of the machine, or something. Then you could carry the computer around and do stuff with it, wherever you went, while resting it on your knee. A sort of "knee-top" compiter, though maybe there's a better name someone can think of . . .
I HATE the previews on DVD's that can not be skipped over. I preffer previews to be on a DVD in a "bonus" section. If the preview is forced on me, I get very frustrated, I have zero interest in what I am watching.
I hear ya!
I recently had an odd experience: my wife bought a DVD for our daughter (Mulan 2) from a second-hand bookstore. It was cheap, and after viewing it, I thought it must be a copy rather than an official version. Analyzing why I thought so, I realized that it was because it didn't have much crap at the beginning, and what there was, you were allowed to skip over. Can't possibly be an official studio release, if you're that free to choose what you watch . . . Gave me a bit of chill to realize that this was the way to tell the difference -- but if starts making enough of a difference to people's purchasing decisions, it should give the studios a chill, too.
No way! You mean that our elected officials are being paid off by corporations so that state citizens get the shaft? Who would have thought?!
Nothing will really improve until we require the following quote to be tattooed onto the forearm of every elected official:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute nor common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
-Robert Heinlein, "Life Line", 1939
I've recently been involved in preparing a grant application to the Gates Foundation, and came away with a very positive impression of the institution. These people are serious, they're well-funded, and they're doing their damnedest to make good decisions about how best to address health challenges in the poorest nations in the world. They're placing a lot of emphasis on addressing diseases that don't always get a lot of funding in the West, like tuberculosis and malaria.
(Full disclosure: we didn't get the grant, so I don't like them out of some sense of gratitude. But it did seem clear that they were going through a good peer review process, and they were gratifyingly willing to consider proposals from non-traditional sources - we were a bunch of physical chemists, for example.)
So say what you like about Gate and his operating system, but he's doing a good thing with this Foundation, and shame on anyone who says he's not doing "enough".
I ask you, why do you use Linux when there's so many more games/applications/etc available for Windows? Or does your pearticular personality fit with Linux better than it does with Windows? Well, mine fits with the AmigaOS user interface better than it does with Windows OR Linux. And so I use it instead. Thank you for respecting my right to choose what I prefer.
OK, I have to step in here. The two sides of this debate (amigabill and, well, everybody else) are completely missing one another.
He's asserting that he likes AmigaOS for personal reasons, and does not care whether you use it or not!
Everyone else is assuming that there's some sort of implicit message that everyone should convert to AmigaOS, or that AmigaOS should supplant their existing OS. No such claims seems to be being made, so the two sides are debating different questions.
And I have now completely exhausted the extent to which I care . . . (Loved AmigaOS at the time, but you'll have to pry my Mac from my cold, dead hands.)
The article says: ". . . [an] A&R director at EMI believes that HSS as a hit predictor merely reinforces decisions taken by A&Rs, those record company employees given the job of discovering new songs and artists. "A good A&R has a very accurate instinct for what the market needs," he says - and the fact that 95% of hit songs in the past 50 years are high scorers seems to back him up."
Um, HSS is using past hit songs to define high scores, so the fact that past hits have high scores is not some sort of vindication of the job these mysterious A&R guys have been doing. The real question is why that figure isn't 100% - I'm guessing this is probably because the clusters are fairly wide, so some songs manage to be far enough from the algorithm's definition of the cluster to be classed as non-hits, despite being part of the training set?
"I used to own a used video game store, but recently we went out of business because we sold all of our good games."
Hmm, that would make sense. I love this comment in his auction listing: "... game systems aren't my specialty..."
Aren't his specialty?! Sweet tap-dancing Buddha, this is supposed to be just a minor sideline? What's his real interest? Does he have four hundred thousand RC cars out back, or what?
I think I'd rather be a chronic internet addict than sat in front of the box watching crap reality TV shows all the time.
Oh, you're just saying that because you feel confident, secure, and empowered.
I don't neccesarily mean that there will have to be some sort of global catastrophe, just that there will be no real exploration until a group of humans blasts off from Earth with no prospects to return. Ideally, they would be volunteers . . .
. . . but if you relax that constraint, think of the possibilities! Example: isn't it an election year in the U.S.? I can think of several candidates (so to speak) for a one-way trip into space.
MIT isn't promoting the fact that she is the first woman, the press is.
Right - the article somehow makes it sound like this is a result of quota hiring, but there's nothing to suggest that.
Further note, grandparent post, that the "other recent programs' efforts" mentioned in the article involve getting girls in high school to participate in activities (and classes) related to computer science, electrical engineering, and math. This is far from some sort of quota program, and it seems to me to be a very sensible approach: if the problem is that too many girls are either shooed away from these fields or have never thought that they were an option, then give them a chance to see what it's all about, then decide for themselves.
I love the following quote from Robert A. Heinlein, which I think should be repeated whenever this sort of thing comes up:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped or turned back, for their private benefit.
[It's from circa 1938, in a short story where someone has invented a method of foretelling the exact time of a person's death, and the insurance companies go to the courts seeking to have it banned. I forget the name of the story but I'm sure six other Slashdotters can fill that in for me.]
There's obviously a typo in the headline. It should read "Virgin Accuses Microsoft of Abusing Monopoly". This is Slashdot, people, get it right!
I'm still wondering why the governments don't require free and "open source" text for public schools. In college, the professors used to change the text every semester so that the students couldn't sell the books back at the end of the semester (likely getting kick-backs from the text manufacturers, no doubt).
.
.
And later that same thread . .
You're exactly right about getting kick-backs . . .
Oh, yeah! I'm a professor, and you should see the stuff we get from the textbook people: hot and cold running Porsches, massages from scantily-clad young women (or men, if you prefer), big envelopes stuffed with cash . .
No, wait, that was all a dream. I must be teaching at the wrong place, because the very most I've ever gotten is the occasional free book and an even more occasional phone call asking if I've considered using book X.
But you're right that textbooks are hideoulsy overpriced, and it's maddening that the publishers keep changing editions in an effort to force students to buy new rather than used. But it's an awfully big brush you're painting with, when you say that we're all getting kickbacks -- and you're getting paint all over me!
Laugh if you will, but I for one applaud this new era of open source viruses . . . Wait . . . Oops, my "open source = good" reflex was triggered before my brain had a chance to think about it.
We [Canadians] are all presumed guilty anyway, as we are charged a tax on blank CD's for money to go to the "poor starving" artists.
Something I've never understood is how this can possibly be true. You're right, there's supposed to be a levy of 21 cents per CD-R -- but I can easily buy 100 CD-Rs for C$29.99 at any computer discount store. Do CD-Rs really cost so little that they can be sold for 30 cents each, 21 cents of which is collected by the government? Seems implausible. Or is this levy not yet being seriously collected, in fact?
But I agree that it's an insane procedure, effectively putting the government in charge of collecting money for businesses that *might* be hurt by *potential* copying. Foolishness. I've had a word with Sheila Copps (Heritage Minister, under whose jurisdiction the Copyright Board apparently falls) about this, yet the practice continues. I told her it was a bad idea, but apparently she remains unconvinced.
I was gonna say. The comment that this is a "giant leap backward for mankind" is just not fair. How can you expect everything to stay compatible while trying to lock down parts of the OS against attack? You wouldn't be saying something like that if it was Linux we were talking about.
Y'know, this Slashdot Microsoft-bashing has gone beyond mildly amusing, and gotten into the range where it completely negates virtually everything that's said. If you always object to everything, then your legitimate complaints will be seen as just more whining, people.
Seriously, if you're bored, try to construct a Slashdot story that would not be spun in an anti-Microsoft way.
CNN: "Microsoft announced today that they have ended world hunger."
Slashdot: "linux_boy reports: Microsoft claims to have ended world hunger. Just what we need, more overpopulation!"
They didn't actually test these passwords they just said "I'll give you a bar of chocolate if you give me your password".
So people can just make it up.
I really, really hope you're right about this! I just love the thought of hundreds of people saying, "Sure, my password is, uh, rutabaga. Now gimme the chocolate."
Unfortunately, I suspect this is probably not what happened in most cases. But as you say, who knows: they have no way to check.
While it is impressive to write something like this in such a small binary, the "Application" as a whole is MUCH larger. The obvious dependancy on DirectX alone makes the entire app > 20MB.
Right! It reminds me of the business of creating N-ingredient recipes (3-ingredient or 4-ingredient, typically): the trick is to define as many things as possible as "staples" (salt, flour, butter, sugar), so that the ingredients can be "salmon, oregano, and bread crumbs" or something.
But just like the N-ingredient case, it's not really cheating. People really are likely to have those things already in their kitchen, and people really are likely to have the supporting libraries around their hard drive. And any attempt to optimize for size has a certain appeal in these days of increasingly bloated code.