The issue isn't the ability to play HD content, it's that the author believes Vista's DRM-centric design threaten the viability of Vista itself. The numerous interlocking DRM measures impose design restrictions on everything from device drivers to circuit board layout. Versioning requirements will prevent device manufacturers from using generic approaches to anything. Small glitches that occur routinely will set off threat flags that will abruptly cause entire devices and subsystems (including motherboards) to either stop working or switch to minimally functional modes. (That was the source of the medical imaging comments.)
I think the author's general point is that the DRM that saturates Vista will cause so many things to break, that everybody from end users to hardware and software vendors will find Vista to be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. In my opinion, some good might ultimately come from this. The general public was warned about the content industry running Congress, but it shrugged off Intellectual Property activists as "pirates" or socialists, and just sat there while the RIAA and MPAA literally wrote legislation. Tangible inconveniences, perhaps even large-scale disasters, will get people's attention where discussions of the philosophy of copyrights and patents did not.
For the full defencetalk.com article that this GoogleAds blog entry seems to be summarizing, go here . Lots more information. Found the link on Fark don'tcha know.
I've personally tried Mandrake, MEPIS, and most recently Debian. I found Debian easy to install, but as with MEPIS (though to a lesser extent) I am frustrated by things being missing or being in non-standard locations. The "command not found" message gets old fast, and so does looking for config files that aren't where all the how-to's assume they are. So one thing that I think would help a total Linux newbie is to know which distros are the most standard in terms of how they are laid out. Which ones give you the best chance of trying something from a web article and having it work as read?
The discussion might have been a lot better if the article (or rather the blog entry) weren't so sorely lacking in details. Kind of makes me miss Roland Piquepaille. You can get a lot more information by Googling "suborbital airliner."
The blogger suggests that this vehicle is basically a very fast airliner, but this is far from the case. It's a sub-orbital craft that would fly on a parabolic course, thrusting up out of the atmosphere and then coasting the rest of the way. What makes it economically feasible is that a brief, steep climb uses less energy than horizontally plowing through the atmosphere for hours. Most proposed designs use a two-stage launching system. One calls for the airliner to climb to about 50,000 feet and do a midair refueling from a tanker. In another the airliner is carried up by a larger plane and released. In either case the airliner then goes into a steep climb for about 20 minutes and then shuts off its engines, coasting until it nears its destination. It would carry only enough fuel to maintain a holding pattern in case of airport traffic.
Passengers would be strapped into their seats for the entire flight. No food or beverage service, no restrooms. People most likely will take some sort of medication to avert motion sickness, as they would be weightless for much of the flight. There is a lot of research going into the human factors such as the several Gs acceleration and dealing with weightlessness. The bit about space-shuttle views of Earth kind of mystified me, because in all the designs I've read about there would be no windows. Maybe they were talking about view-screens.
It's a pretty interesting subject, and almost certainly will be the way we will fly long distances in 20 or 30 years.
The biggest reason Windows 3.1 won was because of its backward compatability with DOS -- and Microsoft never forgot the lesson
How soon people forget history! When Vista was still Longhorn, Microsoft specifically announced that it would not be backward-compatible. They only relented after realizing what a marketing error that would be.
Actually I thought about that. The text copies that are on the web have been there for years, and were not marked "reprinted with permission..." so I figured it was probably a non-issue. The article was part of the press kit for the movie, so presumably the studio holds the copyright. If anybody's lawyers ever complain I will sadly but promptly take the page down.
Bear in mind that the article was written in the spirit of making the movie more enjoyable for people who are geeky enough to understand something about particle physics. The point was not to prove the feasibility of the oscillation overthruster, but to show that the science thread that runs through Buckaroo Banzai is a cut above standard movie technobabble. Sneider sort of addressed the mountain-collapsing issue by mentioning that the area of effect was small and short-lived, which is why the jet car had to travel 700 mph to keep up with it. It's all in fun.
As I read this article I wondered WTF? What do Microsoft patent claims have to do with Novell? Does Novell own Linux now or something? Being largely ignorant of the business aspects of the Linux world, I went to Linux.com looking for news and found this reassuring statement:
Who Owns Linux? Linux is not owned by anyone. One misconception many first-time Linux.com readers have is that this site, Linux.com, is similar to Microsoft.com, which is owned and controlled by the company that produces the Windows operating system.
Not so!
No one company or individual "owns" Linux, which was developed, and is still being improved, by thousands of corporate-supported and volunteer programmers all over the world. Not even Linus Torvalds, who started the Linux ball rolling in 1991, "owns" Linux.
(However, the trademark "Linux" is owned by Linus Torvalds, so if you call something "Linux" it had better be Linux, not something else.)
I still don't understand why Novell and Microsoft are swapping millions of dollars back and forth and how it relates to Ballmer's IP claims, but as long as apt-get doesn't start asking me for license codes I'm happy.
Has anyone here used the script to make a fake boarding pass?
Why bother? A boarding pass is just a plain piece of paper with some printing on it. You can scan an old one and easily change any part of it with Photoshop, etc.
If anybody should be prosecuted over this I think it's the airlines themselves, for negligence. Forget 9/11. It would have been in their own interest to develop a better way to validate boarding passes DECADES ago, just to stop people from using such a simple trick to fly without paying.
"This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.
Anyway, it's not bullshit. ArsTechnica had this article about it in June. The idea is to grab a 12-millisecond sample of audio and transform it into a 32-bit "fingerprint" using an algorithm on the client side, then send the fingerprint to a server that compares it against a database of fingerprints from known television audio. From that they can determine what program you are listening to. If the mike picks up 12ms of you talking on the phone, the generated fingerprint simply won't match anything.
This is far from eavesdropping in the 1984 sense, but is a hell of a POC for it, and it does amount to sensing information about you that you might or might not want someone to know. The folks at Google seem to have worked hard to come up with a technique that they don't think will bother people. I see this as a classic case of very smart geeks thinking up a very clever technical solution without seeing the forest for the trees.
They've probably done more like a 127 or a 135 -- changed enough procedures and produced enough documents to enable the bureaucrats who hired them to cover their own asses, which is really all that counts.
You could give him all the money he deserves by buying a concert ticket. For thousands of years, including today, that's how musicians have made their living. Even the ones with record deals STILL make their living by performing. Standard record contracts deduct all the expenses of production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc. from the musician's small percentage royalty, before ANY actual money is paid. So in almost all cases the musician makes ZERO from record sales. The record company's reasoning is that most records released do not make a profit, so they have to recoup their expenses. In other parts of the business world that's called "investing." Record companies are essentially venture capital companies that have managed to convince the startups (bands) they invest in to sign over all their copyrights.
But anyway, what a musician gets from sales of records is exposure. The more famous they get, the more they can charge for concert tickets, which is where they make their living. They get the same exposure whether you buy a record, hear it on the radio, copy it off a friend's CD, download it from somewhere or find it lying on the sidewalk. No harm whatsoever to the musician. Legalizing file sharing, letting free distribution become the norm and letting record companies fade out of existence would materially benefit the 99.99% of musicians who are not superstars.
For someone so seemingly erudite you amaze me by missing the fundamental point that modern copyright law itself has become piracy. In the most recent copyright extension, Congress not only lengthened the terms of copyright but placed back under copyright many works which had already been in the public domain for years. Currently all audio recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This includes many works that had already been the public domain for years, even wax cylinder recordings made in the 1890s.
How can this be called a legitimate, reasonable act? Copyright isn't a one-sided thing. It's a contract. The copyright holder enjoys specific rights, and the public pays for the enforcement of those rights through taxes. The payoff for the public is that after a specific period of time the work becomes freely available. Suppose you have been making payments on your 30-year mortgage for 29 years, and Congress suddenly declares that all 30-year mortgages are now 60-year mortgages. Is it immoral or irresponsible for you to resist complying? How about someone who paid off his house several years ago and finds that under the new law it again belongs to the bank? Where's the moral high ground in defending the law here? Congress broke, and thereby voided, the contract between copyright holders and the public. The responsible thing for Congress to do would be to reinstate the public's rights that the Bono Act took away. Then you can preach to me about right and wrong.
I remember finding out about the XmlHttpRequest object in 1999 and thinking this was how Microsoft was going to take over the web. Web pages would become little client-server apps. State maintenance headaches between pages would go away. Instead of a web app being a suite of pages to navigate, a single page would just sit there and make data requests and update parts of itself. I happily started coding XmlHttpRequest in my own job and waited for the revolution to happen. But it never did. For three years Microsoft had the lead with this really cool capability, and they did absolutely nothing to hype it or encourage it. It only rated a few pages in MSDN. Right before IE6 was introduced I remember asking a manager on the IE team what kind of new features to expect. He said it wouldn't be anything much, because Netscape was pretty much dead and therefore there was not much point in putting any dev effort into IE anymore.
Three years later when Mozilla started supporting off-channel requests they did it in native mode, while Microsoft was still using an ActiveX object. MS had all that time to set a new standard for dynamic web pages and they just sat on it. Finally, somebody comes along and invents a buzzword for it and somehow gets it in everybody's face. A few people write packages to make it a little easier. Now Microsoft is playing catch-up with their own version called Atlas. At least that's a cooler name, but jeez. AJAX is a case of Microsoft dropping their own ball and then showing up late to join the game.
Back in the eighties it was Turbo this, Turbo that, everywhere you looked. Then in the nineties everything was Extreme, which got old pretty fast. Most recently a lot of things have been "On Steroids," which wore out even faster. It's kind of like the evolution of credit cards from Gold to Platinum to Titanium. I'm expecting a Plutonium card someday. Anyway, if we're going to resurrect Turbo then I think it's also time to bring back "o-matic."
Those darn socialist techno-hippies at Microsoft giving away free software will undermine the whole software market, at least according to independent analysts like Steve Ballmer.
I'm not a player so maybe this is a naive question, but in these games it's legal and somewhat expected to make war on other players, right? So couldn't a gang of disgruntled players mount an in-game vendetta against real-money traders -- pillage and burn their estates, kill their characters, and just generally get medieval on their assets? If you think about it, from a game perspective the Real World is kind of like another plane of existence, and characters trafficking in the real world are sort of like evil clerics making contracts with demons. I say they must BURRRRN!
1) My loans aren't gaining interest now, the federal government is handling that for me. 2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
When I graduated from college I got a job and moved out of my parents' house in 6 months. If I understand you correctly: 1) You're borrowing money you don't need from the taxpayers so you won't have to do that, and 2) You're asking those same people to tell you how to make more money.
John Romero, like many washed-up has beens, likes to refer to John Romero in the third person.
Serutan has two gripes with this comment:
1) It's inaccurate. Bob Dole, the prototype third-person self-referencer, talked like that throughout his career, and was best known for it when he was at the height of his power. 2) Serutan dislikes when people who have done noteworthy things, but just not lately, are called failures by people who never have and never will.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue isn't the ability to play HD content, it's that the author believes Vista's DRM-centric design threaten the viability of Vista itself. The numerous interlocking DRM measures impose design restrictions on everything from device drivers to circuit board layout. Versioning requirements will prevent device manufacturers from using generic approaches to anything. Small glitches that occur routinely will set off threat flags that will abruptly cause entire devices and subsystems (including motherboards) to either stop working or switch to minimally functional modes. (That was the source of the medical imaging comments.)
I think the author's general point is that the DRM that saturates Vista will cause so many things to break, that everybody from end users to hardware and software vendors will find Vista to be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. In my opinion, some good might ultimately come from this. The general public was warned about the content industry running Congress, but it shrugged off Intellectual Property activists as "pirates" or socialists, and just sat there while the RIAA and MPAA literally wrote legislation. Tangible inconveniences, perhaps even large-scale disasters, will get people's attention where discussions of the philosophy of copyrights and patents did not.
For the full defencetalk.com article that this GoogleAds blog entry seems to be summarizing, go here . Lots more information. Found the link on Fark don'tcha know.
I've personally tried Mandrake, MEPIS, and most recently Debian. I found Debian easy to install, but as with MEPIS (though to a lesser extent) I am frustrated by things being missing or being in non-standard locations. The "command not found" message gets old fast, and so does looking for config files that aren't where all the how-to's assume they are. So one thing that I think would help a total Linux newbie is to know which distros are the most standard in terms of how they are laid out. Which ones give you the best chance of trying something from a web article and having it work as read?
The discussion might have been a lot better if the article (or rather the blog entry) weren't so sorely lacking in details. Kind of makes me miss Roland Piquepaille. You can get a lot more information by Googling "suborbital airliner."
The blogger suggests that this vehicle is basically a very fast airliner, but this is far from the case. It's a sub-orbital craft that would fly on a parabolic course, thrusting up out of the atmosphere and then coasting the rest of the way. What makes it economically feasible is that a brief, steep climb uses less energy than horizontally plowing through the atmosphere for hours. Most proposed designs use a two-stage launching system. One calls for the airliner to climb to about 50,000 feet and do a midair refueling from a tanker. In another the airliner is carried up by a larger plane and released. In either case the airliner then goes into a steep climb for about 20 minutes and then shuts off its engines, coasting until it nears its destination. It would carry only enough fuel to maintain a holding pattern in case of airport traffic.
Passengers would be strapped into their seats for the entire flight. No food or beverage service, no restrooms. People most likely will take some sort of medication to avert motion sickness, as they would be weightless for much of the flight. There is a lot of research going into the human factors such as the several Gs acceleration and dealing with weightlessness. The bit about space-shuttle views of Earth kind of mystified me, because in all the designs I've read about there would be no windows. Maybe they were talking about view-screens.
It's a pretty interesting subject, and almost certainly will be the way we will fly long distances in 20 or 30 years.
Let the reality of Vista sink in.
The biggest reason Windows 3.1 won was because of its backward compatability with DOS -- and Microsoft never forgot the lesson
How soon people forget history! When Vista was still Longhorn, Microsoft specifically announced that it would not be backward-compatible. They only relented after realizing what a marketing error that would be.
What is a truck?
Actually I thought about that. The text copies that are on the web have been there for years, and were not marked "reprinted with permission..." so I figured it was probably a non-issue. The article was part of the press kit for the movie, so presumably the studio holds the copyright. If anybody's lawyers ever complain I will sadly but promptly take the page down.
Bear in mind that the article was written in the spirit of making the movie more enjoyable for people who are geeky enough to understand something about particle physics. The point was not to prove the feasibility of the oscillation overthruster, but to show that the science thread that runs through Buckaroo Banzai is a cut above standard movie technobabble. Sneider sort of addressed the mountain-collapsing issue by mentioning that the area of effect was small and short-lived, which is why the jet car had to travel 700 mph to keep up with it. It's all in fun.
Throw the researchers in jail for showing the weakness in the system. Problem solved!
You can make the cover of Time Magazine just by downloading lots of pr0n!
Sweet!
This wouldn't even fool my 3rd level Magic User.
And he'll pretty much believe anything I tell him.
As I read this article I wondered WTF? What do Microsoft patent claims have to do with Novell? Does Novell own Linux now or something? Being largely ignorant of the business aspects of the Linux world, I went to Linux.com looking for news and found this reassuring statement:
Who Owns Linux?
Linux is not owned by anyone. One misconception many first-time Linux.com readers have is that this site, Linux.com, is similar to Microsoft.com, which is owned and controlled by the company that produces the Windows operating system.
Not so!
No one company or individual "owns" Linux, which was developed, and is still being improved, by thousands of corporate-supported and volunteer programmers all over the world. Not even Linus Torvalds, who started the Linux ball rolling in 1991, "owns" Linux.
(However, the trademark "Linux" is owned by Linus Torvalds, so if you call something "Linux" it had better be Linux, not something else.)
I still don't understand why Novell and Microsoft are swapping millions of dollars back and forth and how it relates to Ballmer's IP claims, but as long as apt-get doesn't start asking me for license codes I'm happy.
Has anyone here used the script to make a fake boarding pass?
Why bother? A boarding pass is just a plain piece of paper with some printing on it. You can scan an old one and easily change any part of it with Photoshop, etc.
If anybody should be prosecuted over this I think it's the airlines themselves, for negligence. Forget 9/11. It would have been in their own interest to develop a better way to validate boarding passes DECADES ago, just to stop people from using such a simple trick to fly without paying.
Buy a man some copyrights and he'll have material for a day. Buy him some congressmen for $100 million and he'll have material for a lifetime.
"This sounds like bullshit to me" gets rated INSIGHTFUL??? Man, Slashdot has gone down the tubes.
Anyway, it's not bullshit. ArsTechnica had this article about it in June. The idea is to grab a 12-millisecond sample of audio and transform it into a 32-bit "fingerprint" using an algorithm on the client side, then send the fingerprint to a server that compares it against a database of fingerprints from known television audio. From that they can determine what program you are listening to. If the mike picks up 12ms of you talking on the phone, the generated fingerprint simply won't match anything.
This is far from eavesdropping in the 1984 sense, but is a hell of a POC for it, and it does amount to sensing information about you that you might or might not want someone to know. The folks at Google seem to have worked hard to come up with a technique that they don't think will bother people. I see this as a classic case of very smart geeks thinking up a very clever technical solution without seeing the forest for the trees.
They've probably done more like a 127 or a 135 -- changed enough procedures and produced enough documents to enable the bureaucrats who hired them to cover their own asses, which is really all that counts.
You could give him all the money he deserves by buying a concert ticket. For thousands of years, including today, that's how musicians have made their living. Even the ones with record deals STILL make their living by performing. Standard record contracts deduct all the expenses of production, manufacturing, distribution, advertising, etc. from the musician's small percentage royalty, before ANY actual money is paid. So in almost all cases the musician makes ZERO from record sales. The record company's reasoning is that most records released do not make a profit, so they have to recoup their expenses. In other parts of the business world that's called "investing." Record companies are essentially venture capital companies that have managed to convince the startups (bands) they invest in to sign over all their copyrights.
But anyway, what a musician gets from sales of records is exposure. The more famous they get, the more they can charge for concert tickets, which is where they make their living. They get the same exposure whether you buy a record, hear it on the radio, copy it off a friend's CD, download it from somewhere or find it lying on the sidewalk. No harm whatsoever to the musician. Legalizing file sharing, letting free distribution become the norm and letting record companies fade out of existence would materially benefit the 99.99% of musicians who are not superstars.
For someone so seemingly erudite you amaze me by missing the fundamental point that modern copyright law itself has become piracy. In the most recent copyright extension, Congress not only lengthened the terms of copyright but placed back under copyright many works which had already been in the public domain for years. Currently all audio recordings made before 1972 are now copyrighted until 2067. This includes many works that had already been the public domain for years, even wax cylinder recordings made in the 1890s.
How can this be called a legitimate, reasonable act? Copyright isn't a one-sided thing. It's a contract. The copyright holder enjoys specific rights, and the public pays for the enforcement of those rights through taxes. The payoff for the public is that after a specific period of time the work becomes freely available. Suppose you have been making payments on your 30-year mortgage for 29 years, and Congress suddenly declares that all 30-year mortgages are now 60-year mortgages. Is it immoral or irresponsible for you to resist complying? How about someone who paid off his house several years ago and finds that under the new law it again belongs to the bank? Where's the moral high ground in defending the law here? Congress broke, and thereby voided, the contract between copyright holders and the public. The responsible thing for Congress to do would be to reinstate the public's rights that the Bono Act took away. Then you can preach to me about right and wrong.
I remember finding out about the XmlHttpRequest object in 1999 and thinking this was how Microsoft was going to take over the web. Web pages would become little client-server apps. State maintenance headaches between pages would go away. Instead of a web app being a suite of pages to navigate, a single page would just sit there and make data requests and update parts of itself. I happily started coding XmlHttpRequest in my own job and waited for the revolution to happen. But it never did. For three years Microsoft had the lead with this really cool capability, and they did absolutely nothing to hype it or encourage it. It only rated a few pages in MSDN. Right before IE6 was introduced I remember asking a manager on the IE team what kind of new features to expect. He said it wouldn't be anything much, because Netscape was pretty much dead and therefore there was not much point in putting any dev effort into IE anymore.
Three years later when Mozilla started supporting off-channel requests they did it in native mode, while Microsoft was still using an ActiveX object. MS had all that time to set a new standard for dynamic web pages and they just sat on it. Finally, somebody comes along and invents a buzzword for it and somehow gets it in everybody's face. A few people write packages to make it a little easier. Now Microsoft is playing catch-up with their own version called Atlas. At least that's a cooler name, but jeez. AJAX is a case of Microsoft dropping their own ball and then showing up late to join the game.
Back in the eighties it was Turbo this, Turbo that, everywhere you looked. Then in the nineties everything was Extreme, which got old pretty fast. Most recently a lot of things have been "On Steroids," which wore out even faster. It's kind of like the evolution of credit cards from Gold to Platinum to Titanium. I'm expecting a Plutonium card someday. Anyway, if we're going to resurrect Turbo then I think it's also time to bring back "o-matic."
Those darn socialist techno-hippies at Microsoft giving away free software will undermine the whole software market, at least according to independent analysts like Steve Ballmer.
I'm not a player so maybe this is a naive question, but in these games it's legal and somewhat expected to make war on other players, right? So couldn't a gang of disgruntled players mount an in-game vendetta against real-money traders -- pillage and burn their estates, kill their characters, and just generally get medieval on their assets? If you think about it, from a game perspective the Real World is kind of like another plane of existence, and characters trafficking in the real world are sort of like evil clerics making contracts with demons. I say they must BURRRRN!
1) My loans aren't gaining interest now, the federal government is handling that for me.
2) I want options when I graduate to move to where I need to or whatever. I don't want to live in my parents' basement till I am 35.
When I graduated from college I got a job and moved out of my parents' house in 6 months. If I understand you correctly:
1) You're borrowing money you don't need from the taxpayers so you won't have to do that, and
2) You're asking those same people to tell you how to make more money.
Suck it.
John Romero, like many washed-up has beens, likes to refer to John Romero in the third person.
Serutan has two gripes with this comment:
1) It's inaccurate. Bob Dole, the prototype third-person self-referencer, talked like that throughout his career, and was best known for it when he was at the height of his power.
2) Serutan dislikes when people who have done noteworthy things, but just not lately, are called failures by people who never have and never will.