This patent covers the "VFAT" extensions to FAT16 then. It doesn't cover the classic 8.3-only FAT. The trick here is that a VFAT filesystem may be read by a classic FAT16 implementation without causing it to blow its proverbial cookies.
But on the other hand I will still be on windows because I need high end video editing.
Have you checked out Cinelerra? I've been eyeing it for a while but haven't gathered the gumption to try using it yet.
directX should die, it's holding lin games back
Huh? I haven't seen anything intrinsic to DirectX that would hold back third-party implementations of it; it's just yet another object-oriented (sort of) pile of graphics, sound and whatnot APIs. I think it's more likely the sheer size and complexity of the Win32 standard platform that holds up porting; who wants to go through their code rooting out all those pesky API calls and proprietary libraries when just coding for Windows is going to get them 90% of the users?
I've been working on the media player detection and control code for VegasWebcast.com, and let me tell you, dealing with browser and platform differences at the same time as trying to dance around plugin/ActiveX versioning issues, browser and media player implementation bugs, and other sources of pain is an adventure.
"Military Industrial Complex", are the ones in charge.
The Prez was two-thirds right. It's the military-industrial-energy complex. Yeah, that's right, the oil business is mixed up in it too. I suppose one could argue that energy is an industry, but when one just says "industry" it brings to mind Spaceley Sprockets, not Shalesucker Oil.
What about the stipulations on level editors included with many games *cough*Blizzard*cough* that forbids the commercialization of your own original levels?
You propose that hosting companies... just write a clause into their contract that if a customer is caught spamming they will have to pay X thousands of dollars as a penalty.
Nice thought, but it worsens the damage from this attack:
Troublemaking script kiddie launches a spam campaign advertising YOUR Web site
The anti-spam bulldogs descend on you and your hosting provider.
You get shut down by your hosting provider in response to the angry backlash.
Your reputation gets dragged through the mud because people generally hate spam.
And now you get penalized X thousands of dollars on top of it all.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the slashbots to figure out how to tack on "???" and "PROFIT!" to the list.:-)
Vonage provides a gateway between the public switched telephone network and their VoIP system, which I suspect is the justification for the telecom label.
Oh, and I'd categorize an unsecured WiFi AP under "asking for trouble".
I'm guessing you're not counting those flying deathtraps they call TIE fighters as spacecraft then. Gun batteries and ion engines strapped to solar panels, and not a whole lot else-- not even life support. Miserable, but hey, I think we could build those with today's tech -- we've got working ion engines and lasers. Those, about 100 square meters of solar panelling, maybe 200 if you cover both sides of the "wings", and the rest is titanium and steel structure plus a bit of instrumentation. Today's ion engines don't exactly have a lot of kick to them, but they work fine in space...
The poster just says that bad software design is the result of not consulting with the users. This is the truest truism that there is.
Bad software design can be caused by a lot of different things; forgetting to consult with the users is just one way things can go pear-shaped. More commonly, misunderstanding the requirements supplied by consultation with the users, failure to understand concepts like the role of well-defined interfaces and boundaries within a design, or the dreaded "scope creep" can ruin a software design.
The suggested alternative was to place a speed identification in the processor . . . Intel balked at this . . . because it didn't address their real concern.
I agree so far.
Their real concern is limiting you to a set level of performance that you pay for.
Au contraire: their real concern is crooked system builders scratching the "2 GHz" off the chip, scribbling in "2.4 GHz", slapping a big heat sink on, and pocketing the difference, leaving Joe Sixpack none the wiser. Joe Sixpack won't know to run a special utility they have to go to Intel to get just to check if their clock speed is legit.
It seems at first look that a better solution might be to have the BIOS display a warning and emit a great cacophonous PC speaker screech during startup if the input clock speed is greater than the CPU's specified speed, but big or clever crooked system builders will just patch the BIOS to remove that. A wonderful thing, flash memory...
This automatic checking thing has possibilities. I think they should also check the Vcore to make sure that's not too far out of line either, lest a misconfigured or broken motherboard fry the chip (*cough*K6-2*hack*Amptron*wheeze*)-- it would also further their anti-overclocking concerns since one way to make a balky CPU deal with overclocking is to raise the Vcore (CMOS switches faster when driven harder, but you quadratically raise the heat output... better have a truly mighty cooling system if you try it).
In any case, I've had enough systems get balky running at their specified speed that I really don't want to push the clock any more than necessary.
Xvnc is a virtual-framebuffer X server whose only display is a VNC listener. Tons faster than the Windoze crap, but still a pill in comparison to X remoting.
Okay, admittedly the terminal link is likely not the best place to remote a GUI application, but there are other advantages to having (gasp!) a reasonably standardized wire protocol to talk to your display.
pluggable implementations (on Linux alone, there's XFree86, MetroX, Accelerated-X,...)
better opportunity for security (though I grant it's not often taken)
cleaner interaction between applications displaying on the same desktop-- most of the "hacks" won't let applications running in different places share a desktop transparently
For that matter, most desktops released within the last 8 years are so slow and bloaty themselves they can't afford a wire protocol abstraction layer between them and the display driver! Try something truly lightweight, like twm or one of the early incarnations of fvwm with something better than those miserable default configurations, and watch your desktop scream, even with X's supposed weight.
To insinuate that people with a lot of money simply sit on their resources and don't earn more and therefore don't pay taxes just isn't true.
I'm saying that they tend to invest their resources in things like municipal bonds-- the interest income on those is non-taxable. Joe Sixpack is paying federal and state income tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax on those wages.
The double tax promotes corporate cash-hoarding and even mindless speculation in risky ventures. It's a hold-over from the Depression, when they wanted to encourage companies to hoard cash and retain a cushion against hard times.
The problem with the current plan-- to eliminate the recipient's income tax on the dividends-- is that it eliminates the wrong end of the double tax. How does eliminating the shareholder's dividend income tax discourage corporate cash hoarding? The company has to pay the tax whether it hoards or disburses the cash. If the shareholder pays the tax instead, the dividend will be proportionately larger (no tax bite removed) and subject to any state taxes and/or tax dodges affecting the shareholder. This also has the effect of eliminating multiple taxation on nested corporate shells. To be fair, dividend income from stocks held long-term should be taxed at the same rate as long-term capital gains, or be treatable as a basis adjustment rather than an income event.
Tax brackets do benefit the elite, by making it harder to become rich if you're not already. Income tax is just that: if you're just sitting on a big pile of assets, as opposed to bringing in more money, you're not incurring taxes.
Usenet has a lot of problems; Slashdot did look like a viable Usenet replacment once upon a time, but is getting to be less and less of one.
Seems to me more as though blogs as a class are the successor to Usenet. In my opinion, a few things about Usenet make it less than suitable nowadays -- the expectation of a competent admin at every site (sorry Joe Sixpack), the lack of cryptographic security measures (whee! forged cancels!), and the legal climate (spray copies of a DMCA takedown notice at every news node? What a mess!).
I also think the the moderation system should allow certain anonymous postings to be completely deleted.
Given that consignment to the -1 cellar keeps a post out of the way of everyone except those who explicitly choose to read at -1 (and should be expecting to find crapola there). The moderation system works reasonably well so long as it isn't abused in an organized fashion (inappropriate bitchslapping, karma trading, etc.)-- but then again, no system is immune to being "gamed".
Those people who have the power to command but don't know how to produce or design systems produce requirements, not designs, not even crummy pseudo-designs. Occasionally among those requirements is that some specific software, hardware, or technique of the week be used; there's no meta-requirement that all requirements be rational.:-)
Designs are important on larger projects where the majority of programmers are not skilled in design and architecture! Even if you did speak their language, do you think Ivan Sixpack could design trusses for the bridge given just outside dimensions and strength/rigidity requirements?
Programmers vary widely in ability and areas of expertise, and most have strengths and weaknesses. Some can cobble up scripts but have trouble understanding recursion; others can code quicksort from memory while trying to do graph cycle detection makes their heads hurt; still others can comprehend almost any computational problem but crap out on synchronization and distributed computing.
According to US patent 6,327,652 that is indeed correct-- unsigned code simply doesn't get any access to secured data, and may not even be allowed to run on the same desktop as signed code. If the boot sector doesn't pass the BIOS's signature check, it's not given access to the machine private key, and therefore can neither unlock locally stored encrypted content nor pose as a trusted system to other machines on the net. The only bait-and-switch here is the possibility of a concerted push by software or content producers to require a trusted runtime. One minor wrinkle is that this will require boot-selector programs like LILO to either be code-signed or be unable to properly boot signed operating systems.
It's kind of creepy how no one seems to remember that part of the Declaration of Independence.
The problem isn't that nobody remembers the Declaration of Independence, but rather that it has no legal standing! It was simply a suitably pompous open letter telling the British exactly what we thought they should do with their heavy-handed colonialism-- and kicking off the revolution, since they rather predictably didn't appreciate our opinion. If it were in the Constitution, that would be a different matter: the Bill of Rights is essentially a clarification and codification of what those fundamental rights are.
I thought that was 'over' to indicate end of message and 'roger' to acknowledge receipt; hence 'over and out' to close your message and the conversation in one shot, and 'roger, wilco' to indicate acceptance of instructions (IIRC 'wilco' is a contraction of 'will comply').
Not jammers but false radar stations
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 1
Both microwave ovens and active radar systems use magnetron tubes to generate their energy beams. In this case, the microwave ovens were being turned into microwave broadcasters, thus confusing our anti-radar missiles into targeting them instead of the real radars. I think they came out ahead on that one by making us waste million dollar missiles on hundred dollar microwave ovens.:-)
Or maybe just twice nay?
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 1
I think the reason the functions given are superlinear is that the small marginal improvement in value is being multiplied by the total number of nodes-- the value of the network as a whole, not the value to you of being on the network. Admittedly, this still doesn't account for that ridiculous N to the N law, let alone squaring...
In other words, if the value of a Yoyodyne Communicator to its user is proportional to the natural log of the number of people who have them, then the total value of all Yoyodyne Communicators is n ln n, which is asymptotically greater than linear. Result: each of us experiences a vanishingly small increase in value, but multiplied across the total number of users, the increase in value is greater than ever seen before.
The OSI model is often extended to take human issues into account. In the most commonly seen extension, Layer 8 is Financial and layer 9 is Political [1, 2] although there is some variability as to the stacking order, and even mention of a possible Religious layer [3]. Although these informal layers are considered something of a joke, issues at these layers are frequently encountered when trying to actually get anything done.
Slashdot Mirror
This patent covers the "VFAT" extensions to FAT16 then. It doesn't cover the classic 8.3-only FAT. The trick here is that a VFAT filesystem may be read by a classic FAT16 implementation without causing it to blow its proverbial cookies.
But on the other hand I will still be on windows because I need high end video editing.
Have you checked out Cinelerra? I've been eyeing it for a while but haven't gathered the gumption to try using it yet.
directX should die, it's holding lin games back
Huh? I haven't seen anything intrinsic to DirectX that would hold back third-party implementations of it; it's just yet another object-oriented (sort of) pile of graphics, sound and whatnot APIs. I think it's more likely the sheer size and complexity of the Win32 standard platform that holds up porting; who wants to go through their code rooting out all those pesky API calls and proprietary libraries when just coding for Windows is going to get them 90% of the users?
I've been working on the media player detection and control code for VegasWebcast.com, and let me tell you, dealing with browser and platform differences at the same time as trying to dance around plugin/ActiveX versioning issues, browser and media player implementation bugs, and other sources of pain is an adventure.
Crap! It's the Acacia Technologies lawyers! RUN!!!
More like someone needing stitches, methinks... then again, it is the month of Dismember.
"Military Industrial Complex", are the ones in charge.
The Prez was two-thirds right. It's the military-industrial-energy complex. Yeah, that's right, the oil business is mixed up in it too. I suppose one could argue that energy is an industry, but when one just says "industry" it brings to mind Spaceley Sprockets, not Shalesucker Oil.
What about the stipulations on level editors included with many games *cough*Blizzard*cough* that forbids the commercialization of your own original levels?
- Troublemaking script kiddie launches a spam campaign advertising YOUR Web site
- The anti-spam bulldogs descend on you and your hosting provider.
- You get shut down by your hosting provider in response to the angry backlash.
- Your reputation gets dragged through the mud because people generally hate spam.
- And now you get penalized X thousands of dollars on top of it all.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the slashbots to figure out how to tack on "???" and "PROFIT!" to the list.Vonage provides a gateway between the public switched telephone network and their VoIP system, which I suspect is the justification for the telecom label.
Oh, and I'd categorize an unsecured WiFi AP under "asking for trouble".
So did the TI-99/4a, but the relevant pins on the TMS9918A weren't run out of the case, so they had to be modded to do it ...
I'm guessing you're not counting those flying deathtraps they call TIE fighters as spacecraft then. Gun batteries and ion engines strapped to solar panels, and not a whole lot else-- not even life support. Miserable, but hey, I think we could build those with today's tech -- we've got working ion engines and lasers. Those, about 100 square meters of solar panelling, maybe 200 if you cover both sides of the "wings", and the rest is titanium and steel structure plus a bit of instrumentation. Today's ion engines don't exactly have a lot of kick to them, but they work fine in space...
The poster just says that bad software design is the result of not consulting with the users. This is the truest truism that there is.
Bad software design can be caused by a lot of different things; forgetting to consult with the users is just one way things can go pear-shaped. More commonly, misunderstanding the requirements supplied by consultation with the users, failure to understand concepts like the role of well-defined interfaces and boundaries within a design, or the dreaded "scope creep" can ruin a software design.
The suggested alternative was to place a speed identification in the processor . . . Intel balked at this . . . because it didn't address their real concern.
I agree so far.
Their real concern is limiting you to a set level of performance that you pay for.
Au contraire: their real concern is crooked system builders scratching the "2 GHz" off the chip, scribbling in "2.4 GHz", slapping a big heat sink on, and pocketing the difference, leaving Joe Sixpack none the wiser. Joe Sixpack won't know to run a special utility they have to go to Intel to get just to check if their clock speed is legit.
It seems at first look that a better solution might be to have the BIOS display a warning and emit a great cacophonous PC speaker screech during startup if the input clock speed is greater than the CPU's specified speed, but big or clever crooked system builders will just patch the BIOS to remove that. A wonderful thing, flash memory...
This automatic checking thing has possibilities. I think they should also check the Vcore to make sure that's not too far out of line either, lest a misconfigured or broken motherboard fry the chip (*cough*K6-2*hack*Amptron*wheeze*)-- it would also further their anti-overclocking concerns since one way to make a balky CPU deal with overclocking is to raise the Vcore (CMOS switches faster when driven harder, but you quadratically raise the heat output... better have a truly mighty cooling system if you try it).
In any case, I've had enough systems get balky running at their specified speed that I really don't want to push the clock any more than necessary.
Xvnc is a virtual-framebuffer X server whose only display is a VNC listener. Tons faster than the Windoze crap, but still a pill in comparison to X remoting.
- pluggable implementations (on Linux alone, there's XFree86, MetroX, Accelerated-X,
...)
- better opportunity for security (though I grant it's not often taken)
- cleaner interaction between applications displaying on the same desktop-- most of the "hacks" won't let applications running in different places share a desktop transparently
For that matter, most desktops released within the last 8 years are so slow and bloaty themselves they can't afford a wire protocol abstraction layer between them and the display driver! Try something truly lightweight, like twm or one of the early incarnations of fvwm with something better than those miserable default configurations, and watch your desktop scream, even with X's supposed weight.To insinuate that people with a lot of money simply sit on their resources and don't earn more and therefore don't pay taxes just isn't true.
I'm saying that they tend to invest their resources in things like municipal bonds-- the interest income on those is non-taxable. Joe Sixpack is paying federal and state income tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax on those wages.
The double tax promotes corporate cash-hoarding and even mindless speculation in risky ventures. It's a hold-over from the Depression, when they wanted to encourage companies to hoard cash and retain a cushion against hard times.
The problem with the current plan-- to eliminate the recipient's income tax on the dividends-- is that it eliminates the wrong end of the double tax. How does eliminating the shareholder's dividend income tax discourage corporate cash hoarding? The company has to pay the tax whether it hoards or disburses the cash. If the shareholder pays the tax instead, the dividend will be proportionately larger (no tax bite removed) and subject to any state taxes and/or tax dodges affecting the shareholder. This also has the effect of eliminating multiple taxation on nested corporate shells. To be fair, dividend income from stocks held long-term should be taxed at the same rate as long-term capital gains, or be treatable as a basis adjustment rather than an income event.
Oh well, just my two cents plus applicable tax...
Tax brackets do benefit the elite, by making it harder to become rich if you're not already. Income tax is just that: if you're just sitting on a big pile of assets, as opposed to bringing in more money, you're not incurring taxes.
Usenet has a lot of problems; Slashdot did look like a viable Usenet replacment once upon a time, but is getting to be less and less of one.
Seems to me more as though blogs as a class are the successor to Usenet. In my opinion, a few things about Usenet make it less than suitable nowadays -- the expectation of a competent admin at every site (sorry Joe Sixpack), the lack of cryptographic security measures (whee! forged cancels!), and the legal climate (spray copies of a DMCA takedown notice at every news node? What a mess!).
I also think the the moderation system should allow certain anonymous postings to be completely deleted.
Given that consignment to the -1 cellar keeps a post out of the way of everyone except those who explicitly choose to read at -1 (and should be expecting to find crapola there). The moderation system works reasonably well so long as it isn't abused in an organized fashion (inappropriate bitchslapping, karma trading, etc.)-- but then again, no system is immune to being "gamed".
Latitude : 42.5460
Longitude : 83.4284
Also colloquially known as ICBM address, in case anyone feels like pulling this stunt.
Those people who have the power to command but don't know how to produce or design systems produce requirements, not designs, not even crummy pseudo-designs. Occasionally among those requirements is that some specific software, hardware, or technique of the week be used; there's no meta-requirement that all requirements be rational. :-)
Designs are important on larger projects where the majority of programmers are not skilled in design and architecture! Even if you did speak their language, do you think Ivan Sixpack could design trusses for the bridge given just outside dimensions and strength/rigidity requirements?
Programmers vary widely in ability and areas of expertise, and most have strengths and weaknesses. Some can cobble up scripts but have trouble understanding recursion; others can code quicksort from memory while trying to do graph cycle detection makes their heads hurt; still others can comprehend almost any computational problem but crap out on synchronization and distributed computing.
According to US patent 6,327,652 that is indeed correct-- unsigned code simply doesn't get any access to secured data, and may not even be allowed to run on the same desktop as signed code. If the boot sector doesn't pass the BIOS's signature check, it's not given access to the machine private key, and therefore can neither unlock locally stored encrypted content nor pose as a trusted system to other machines on the net. The only bait-and-switch here is the possibility of a concerted push by software or content producers to require a trusted runtime. One minor wrinkle is that this will require boot-selector programs like LILO to either be code-signed or be unable to properly boot signed operating systems.
It's kind of creepy how no one seems to remember that part of the Declaration of Independence.
The problem isn't that nobody remembers the Declaration of Independence, but rather that it has no legal standing! It was simply a suitably pompous open letter telling the British exactly what we thought they should do with their heavy-handed colonialism-- and kicking off the revolution, since they rather predictably didn't appreciate our opinion. If it were in the Constitution, that would be a different matter: the Bill of Rights is essentially a clarification and codification of what those fundamental rights are.
I thought that was 'over' to indicate end of message and 'roger' to acknowledge receipt; hence 'over and out' to close your message and the conversation in one shot, and 'roger, wilco' to indicate acceptance of instructions (IIRC 'wilco' is a contraction of 'will comply').
Both microwave ovens and active radar systems use magnetron tubes to generate their energy beams. In this case, the microwave ovens were being turned into microwave broadcasters, thus confusing our anti-radar missiles into targeting them instead of the real radars. I think they came out ahead on that one by making us waste million dollar missiles on hundred dollar microwave ovens. :-)
I think the reason the functions given are superlinear is that the small marginal improvement in value is being multiplied by the total number of nodes-- the value of the network as a whole, not the value to you of being on the network. Admittedly, this still doesn't account for that ridiculous N to the N law, let alone squaring...
In other words, if the value of a Yoyodyne Communicator to its user is proportional to the natural log of the number of people who have them, then the total value of all Yoyodyne Communicators is n ln n, which is asymptotically greater than linear. Result: each of us experiences a vanishingly small increase in value, but multiplied across the total number of users, the increase in value is greater than ever seen before.
The OSI model is often extended to take human issues into account. In the most commonly seen extension, Layer 8 is Financial and layer 9 is Political [1, 2] although there is some variability as to the stacking order, and even mention of a possible Religious layer [3]. Although these informal layers are considered something of a joke, issues at these layers are frequently encountered when trying to actually get anything done.