Right on! It's really a pity that patent discussions on Slashdot have such a poor signal-to-noise ratio due to those "I can't believe the bastards manage to pull this off" rants... Especially a pity since it obscures the genuine prior-art revelations that the Slashdot crowd may reveal...
I believe Slashdot editors should take their responsibility (at the risk perhaps of some readers becoming bored) to actually reproduce the full first claim of the patent in the article body, and pointing out that is what really CLAIMED by the inventor!
Note that in the current case the fact that there is some kind of mechanism from the TODO list back to the source code comment is vital to the invention.
There are fundamental differences with LCD. Most importantly, this display is non-volatile; as long as the content doesn't change, it uses hardly any power which is great for reading.
An LCD needs power to maintain state (not to mention to power a backlight, although you don't always need one).
My question: How many people on/. think he is right (or even close - let's say he's off by 10 or 20 years)? Or is he full of it?"
Hey Michael, I remember a long time ago when Katz asked the readership if he was a gasbag or not, we had a little Pollbox thingy inside the article. How about using those thingies a bit more often for questions like these? Ought to be fun.
What we really want is the 2.4GHz equivalent of the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Something small and reliable that lets people be creative. Something that boots in two seconds. Something that isn't an IT nightmare, as are Windows and Linux. Something that one person could understand and master.
If you're not emulating the C64 SID chip, you'll need a fairly high-bit (just as high as for "normal" music) mp3 stream to properly reproduce the audio.
The SID chip didn't just beep at different pitches, it was a digital/analog synthesizer on a single chip.
When BYTE magazine compiled a list of the 20 most memorable microchips ever, the SID chip was in there. At the time, it was way ahead of every other sound producing silicon found in home computers. Some considered the Commodore Amiga's fully digital synthesizer chips a step back.
Penny Arcade is a good place to keep up with all things gaming. The site's updated three times a week, which each update being a news story (very well written) and a comic strip (very well drawn, and often as not damn funny).
It's not a traditional gaming magazine that covers everything new, rather they talk about which games interest them at the moment. I've a feeling that very few games of interest slip by them. The game "rez" that is mentioned in this thread as an example of a great original game is also a favorite of the PA guys.
As an example of their kind of humor, everyone on slashdot who spells Microsoft as Micro$oft should take a look at this penny-arcade comic and briefly consider if whether Gabe has a point!
It's an interesting point, this whole "get onto the emerging/disruptive technology before everyone else does".
Of course, the problem is spotting which technology is truly disruptive and going to replace the existing one, and which one is a hare-brained idea. Hindsight is everything. Remember the people who managed to warm otherwise level-headed (I suppose) venture capitalists to the idea that everybody was going to (insert famous dot.com disaster here).
My hindsight prediction is: Considering that people are already actively downloading digital music, and not because they're interested in trying out new technology but because they aren't able or willing to obtain the music in the traditional way, this is probably a real disruptive technology, not a dead dot.com end.
On the subject of how on earth anybody at all (least of all the artists) is ever going to make any money out of it, my crystal ball is silent.
It seems to be that the Slashdot-Correct way of thinking is to say that the music distributers brought these problems on themselves. But I don't think they're entirely to blame. Cheap bastards like me have something to do with it as well.
I don't mind admitting that these days I only go out to buy a CD if, after arsing around with gnutella for a day or two, I still haven't found it. If there was a "perfect" file sharing network, I'd never buy a CD again.
You might say, "you do this because CDs are overprized" (even more true here in the Netherlands than in most other parts of the world). To which my honest reply would have to be, "if CD prizes were cut by 50%, I would only cut the time I spend trying to find one on the net by 50% before giving up and buying it".
My bottom line is, if p2p networks worked perfectly, I'd never pay for music, regardless of how reasonable the price might be.
For people who are wondering about the picture of Homer Simpson with the caption "controversial advocate of dvd hacking" in the BBC article,
read this article.
Basically, the UK fox site had a DVD faq section where Homer answers the question "what is regional coding?" with "I have no idea whatsoever what regional coding means, but it is essential that you buy a multi-region player. Do it now."
Nowadays, Fox's UK Simpsons site, here, has Homer saying "I have no idea what regional coding means. But if you find out, let me know. Don't worry, I'll still be waiting here when you get back."
Tried one of the sites the guy claims is using his
blocker-blocker,
arcadeathome.com. Hit one of the links in the "latest files" box on the right, for example
this one.
If popups are disabled, the download won't start, and you'll get a fairly polite message stating you ought not to block the advertisement.
I'm not sure I'd use this blocker-blocker on my own site, since it's bound to annoy the shit out of some people. But it does kind of work.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of that hitchhiking device in HHGttG, you know, the one that was perpetually being improved by half the galaxy's engineers while the other half attempted to block it?
I love how the TODO list mentions, "fix issues with Save As dialog", as if this was all some sort of tragic accident, instead of laying out the obvious truth, "this crap application just wiped three complete pages from my document!"
A couple of weeks ago I received a SMS message that started with "Iemand vindt je leuk, en heeft ons jouw nummer achtergelaten..." ("Someone likes you and has left your number with us", original Dutch maintained for Google searches).
Oh, speaking of googling, there was a hilarious spelling mistake at the end "Wil je weten wie je geheime *aanbieder* is?" ("Do you want to know who your secret admirer is", except they put an 'e' in "aanbidder" where a 'd' should be, "aanbieder" means "provider")
I couldn't find a reference on the internet to this operation, so I figured it might be legit. I called to the number they gave: 09062001372 (couple dozen eurocents a minute). They pulled the same routine as described above. I had to enter my own phone number (as if they didn't have it) then take a guess as to who left my number in the first place (I gave a bogus number). Then I was promised they'd SMS the number of my secret provider, but of course they never did.
I suppose this scam pays off quite well. I'm a pretty suspicious person as a rule, but in this case, especially after I couldn't find any information about it on the internet, I just had to check it out. They got about 3 minutes worth of high phone rates out of me.
The statement made in the article isn't what's quoted in the summary, "10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music", but it's rather "10.1% of 12-17-year-olds who actively download music from the Internet did not purchase a single CD or cassette in the last 12 months"
The real statement allows the conclusion that 90% of downloaders still buy music media. The one in the slashdot summary, as too often is the case, is plain wrong.
Nah, this only affects displaying, it doesn't actually insert linebreaks. The text file will still look like ass if viewed with less or cat or something.
I've looked into it before, and vi(m) does not properly support wrapping by inserting newlines.
Hehe, I can just see the NASA director drafting his plea to the Bush administration:
"I feel this nation should commit itself, before the decade is out, to establishing a colony on Mars. If we don't, the terrorists will get there before us."
Don't count on MS and the MPAA fighting in the streets anytime soon. Sure, it'll probably be possible to upgrade an xbox (is it a xbox or an xbox? help!) to play divx;-) encoded movies, but don't expect MS to help you do it. Instead, expect undocumented-except-under-NDA interfaces and a default multimedia player system that is quite biased against playing local non-streaming content.
In fact, Microsoft's goal will be quite in line with the MPAA; a pay-per-view scheme using broadband internet or possibly, lacking broadband access, a return of the original Divx scheme, with local movie content that needs to be activated. The only thing MS and the MPAA might disagree on is how large a cut of the transaction goes to MS.
So, in short, based on it's heritage, an xbox is likely to be more hackable than, say, a dreamcast or playstation. But that's about it. We will see Divx on the xbox, but I'm not sure which will get there first: the rotten old circuit city scheme or the rogue codec.
Magnifying glasses say it all...
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
A moral about KDE as told by tree icons:
The konquerer webbrowser (at least in KDE 2.1.2, which I'm running now) has some magnifying glasses in the panel; with it you can quickly enlarge or shrink all fonts on the current webpage one notch, without going to the trouble of changing the font size in the browser configuration.
Given the number of hare-brained frontpagers out there that design pages that only look good if you have the exact fonts that once came with MS Office 97 beta 2 and never shipped since, this is a very useful little icon. This attention to the little things that matter is a major KDE strength.
And here's a KDE weakness. Right smack next to the 'font enlarge/shrink' icons is another magnifying glass, but this one is for searching in the webpage! Anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about this realizes it's a bad idea to have very similar icons with completely different functions next to each other, but somehow these sort of glitches appear in KDE.
But give me GUI design glitches over all-round crap [iyour own least favorite OS/WM here] any day of the week.
Incidently, another proof that people tend to only complain about rights (in this case, fair use) that are lost, and not about rights that they were never granted or able to use.
What am I talking about? The use of copy protection that goes back to the early eighties: on video games. Remember those C64 games on tape and disk? The media had al sorts of non-standard stuff to stop tape-to-tapers and disk copiers. And making a backup of those crappy tapes really wasn't a luxury. I wonder how many of them still work nowadays, even if kept in safe storage.
So why not complain about backing up PS2 and dreamcast games?
Better do rigorous bug testing before releasing such a "benevolent worm". I hear Morris originally planned something else for his worm, too:-)
Seriously, it won't be a proper solution anyway because any future mutations are bound to be disk-resident (and thus immune to reboots). They might even rely on a reboot to do serious damage, given Window's unwillingness to write to files (like, say, MSVCRT.DLL) while they're in use.
I had an idea for a simple little program that can help sort out this Code red mess. I'm not aware of any existing program that does this and unfortunately lack the time to write it myself -- even though it's probably not beyond my rudimentary bash skills, it's that simple -- so I'll just present the idea here in the hope that someone will pick it up (or shoot it down in flames if it sucks:-).
What I propose is a GPL'd shell/python/perl script that "grep"s the apache/thttpd/whatever access log for "default.ida" requests, and logs the requesting site name/ip to a file. Sort | uniq this file for good measure, then send a friendly message to the webmaster at this site, stating at
least the following points:
an apology in case this is the 50th mail of this nature that the admin receives (possible, because I recall that an infected host contacts about 100 semi-random targets), and point out that there's no way for the sender of knowing that in advance.
that their host has probably been infected by the Code Red worm, or a mutation thereof (you should grep for "default.ida" only and not "www.worm.com" as well, as mutations are not likely to use that string). Also quote the access log line, to be complete.
briefly point out that this is not a hoax, as can be seen from these mainstream press articles (link, link, link).
point to the microsoft patch.
warn them to look into the problem in case it's a new strain of Code Red (for example, a disk-resident one that can't be flushed by a reboot).
put in a plug for free software:-). Make it a friendly and useful kind of microsoft bashing for a change...
link to the author and source of the program that was used to generate this mail, for review and troubleshooting of the program.
Running this a few times a day, and keeping track of the sites that we've mailed already to avoid duplicates, should give semi-awake (i.e. reading mail, but not patching their system regularly) IIS admins some friendly help.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe Slashdot editors should take their responsibility (at the risk perhaps of some readers becoming bored) to actually reproduce the full first claim of the patent in the article body, and pointing out that is what really CLAIMED by the inventor!
Note that in the current case the fact that there is some kind of mechanism from the TODO list back to the source code comment is vital to the invention.
There are fundamental differences with LCD. Most importantly, this display is non-volatile; as long as the content doesn't change, it uses hardly any power which is great for reading.
An LCD needs power to maintain state (not to mention to power a backlight, although you don't always need one).
You typo of Media Payer gave me an idea. In the spirit of M$, may I coin "MediaP(l)ayer"?
Hey Michael, I remember a long time ago when Katz asked the readership if he was a gasbag or not, we had a little Pollbox thingy inside the article. How about using those thingies a bit more often for questions like these? Ought to be fun.
That's not Soviet Russia, that's the Microsoft utopia!
For one ghastly moment I thought Jon Katz was posting again!
You're talking about game consoles, no?
If you're not emulating the C64 SID chip, you'll need a fairly high-bit (just as high as for "normal" music) mp3 stream to properly reproduce the audio.
The SID chip didn't just beep at different pitches, it was a digital/analog synthesizer on a single chip.
When BYTE magazine compiled a list of the 20 most memorable microchips ever, the SID chip was in there. At the time, it was way ahead of every other sound producing silicon found in home computers. Some considered the Commodore Amiga's fully digital synthesizer chips a step back.
It's not a traditional gaming magazine that covers everything new, rather they talk about which games interest them at the moment. I've a feeling that very few games of interest slip by them. The game "rez" that is mentioned in this thread as an example of a great original game is also a favorite of the PA guys.
As an example of their kind of humor, everyone on slashdot who spells Microsoft as Micro$oft should take a look at this penny-arcade comic and briefly consider if whether Gabe has a point!
It's an interesting point, this whole "get onto the emerging/disruptive technology before everyone else does".
Of course, the problem is spotting which technology is truly disruptive and going to replace the existing one, and which one is a hare-brained idea. Hindsight is everything. Remember the people who managed to warm otherwise level-headed (I suppose) venture capitalists to the idea that everybody was going to (insert famous dot.com disaster here).
My hindsight prediction is: Considering that people are already actively downloading digital music, and not because they're interested in trying out new technology but because they aren't able or willing to obtain the music in the traditional way, this is probably a real disruptive technology, not a dead dot.com end.
On the subject of how on earth anybody at all (least of all the artists) is ever going to make any money out of it, my crystal ball is silent.
It seems to be that the Slashdot-Correct way of thinking is to say that the music distributers brought these problems on themselves. But I don't think they're entirely to blame. Cheap bastards like me have something to do with it as well.
I don't mind admitting that these days I only go out to buy a CD if, after arsing around with gnutella for a day or two, I still haven't found it. If there was a "perfect" file sharing network, I'd never buy a CD again.
You might say, "you do this because CDs are overprized" (even more true here in the Netherlands than in most other parts of the world). To which my honest reply would have to be, "if CD prizes were cut by 50%, I would only cut the time I spend trying to find one on the net by 50% before giving up and buying it".
My bottom line is, if p2p networks worked perfectly, I'd never pay for music, regardless of how reasonable the price might be.
Basically, the UK fox site had a DVD faq section where Homer answers the question "what is regional coding?" with "I have no idea whatsoever what regional coding means, but it is essential that you buy a multi-region player. Do it now."
Nowadays, Fox's UK Simpsons site, here, has Homer saying "I have no idea what regional coding means. But if you find out, let me know. Don't worry, I'll still be waiting here when you get back."
If popups are disabled, the download won't start, and you'll get a fairly polite message stating you ought not to block the advertisement.
I'm not sure I'd use this blocker-blocker on my own site, since it's bound to annoy the shit out of some people. But it does kind of work.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of that hitchhiking device in HHGttG, you know, the one that was perpetually being improved by half the galaxy's engineers while the other half attempted to block it?
I love how the TODO list mentions, "fix issues with Save As dialog", as if this was all some sort of tragic accident, instead of laying out the obvious truth, "this crap application just wiped three complete pages from my document!"
A couple of weeks ago I received a SMS message that started with "Iemand vindt je leuk, en heeft ons jouw nummer achtergelaten..." ("Someone likes you and has left your number with us", original Dutch maintained for Google searches).
Oh, speaking of googling, there was a hilarious spelling mistake at the end "Wil je weten wie je geheime *aanbieder* is?" ("Do you want to know who your secret admirer is", except they put an 'e' in "aanbidder" where a 'd' should be, "aanbieder" means "provider")
I couldn't find a reference on the internet to this operation, so I figured it might be legit. I called to the number they gave: 09062001372 (couple dozen eurocents a minute). They pulled the same routine as described above. I had to enter my own phone number (as if they didn't have it) then take a guess as to who left my number in the first place (I gave a bogus number). Then I was promised they'd SMS the number of my secret provider, but of course they never did.
I suppose this scam pays off quite well. I'm a pretty suspicious person as a rule, but in this case, especially after I couldn't find any information about it on the internet, I just had to check it out. They got about 3 minutes worth of high phone rates out of me.
The statement made in the article isn't what's quoted in the summary,
"10.1% of 12-17s are actively downloading/not purchasing music",
but it's rather
"10.1% of 12-17-year-olds who actively download music from the Internet did not purchase a single CD or cassette in the last 12 months"
The real statement allows the conclusion that 90% of downloaders still buy music media. The one in the slashdot summary, as too often is the case, is plain wrong.
It's a fun comic at any rate... check out the not-so-subtle point about the xbox controllers!
Nah, this only affects displaying, it doesn't actually insert linebreaks. The text file will still look like ass if viewed with less or cat or something.
I've looked into it before, and vi(m) does not properly support wrapping by inserting newlines.
Hehe, I can just see the NASA director drafting his plea to the Bush administration:
"I feel this nation should commit itself, before the decade is out, to establishing a colony on Mars.
If we don't, the terrorists will get there before us."
Don't count on MS and the MPAA fighting in the streets anytime soon. Sure, it'll probably be possible to upgrade an xbox (is it a xbox or an xbox? help!) to play divx ;-) encoded movies, but don't expect MS to help you do it. Instead, expect undocumented-except-under-NDA interfaces and a default multimedia player system that is quite biased against playing local non-streaming content.
In fact, Microsoft's goal will be quite in line with the MPAA; a pay-per-view scheme using broadband internet or possibly, lacking broadband access, a return of the original Divx scheme, with local movie content that needs to be activated. The only thing MS and the MPAA might disagree on is how large a cut of the transaction goes to MS.
So, in short, based on it's heritage, an xbox is likely to be more hackable than, say, a dreamcast or playstation. But that's about it. We will see Divx on the xbox, but I'm not sure which will get there first: the rotten old circuit city scheme or the rogue codec.
A moral about KDE as told by tree icons:
The konquerer webbrowser (at least in KDE 2.1.2, which I'm running now) has some magnifying glasses in the panel; with it you can quickly enlarge or shrink all fonts on the current webpage one notch, without going to the trouble of changing the font size in the browser configuration.
Given the number of hare-brained frontpagers out there that design pages that only look good if you have the exact fonts that once came with MS Office 97 beta 2 and never shipped since, this is a very useful little icon. This attention to the little things that matter is a major KDE strength.
And here's a KDE weakness. Right smack next to the 'font enlarge/shrink' icons is another magnifying glass, but this one is for searching in the webpage! Anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about this realizes it's a bad idea to have very similar icons with completely different functions next to each other, but somehow these sort of glitches appear in KDE.
But give me GUI design glitches over all-round crap [iyour own least favorite OS/WM here] any day of the week.
Incidently, another proof that people tend to only complain about rights (in this case, fair use) that are lost, and not about rights that they were never granted or able to use.
What am I talking about? The use of copy protection that goes back to the early eighties: on video games. Remember those C64 games on tape and disk? The media had al sorts of non-standard stuff to stop tape-to-tapers and disk copiers. And making a backup of those crappy tapes really wasn't a luxury. I wonder how many of them still work nowadays, even if kept in safe storage.
So why not complain about backing up PS2 and dreamcast games?
Better do rigorous bug testing before releasing such a "benevolent worm". I hear Morris originally planned something else for his worm, too :-)
Seriously, it won't be a proper solution anyway because any future mutations are bound to be disk-resident (and thus immune to reboots). They might even rely on a reboot to do serious damage, given Window's unwillingness to write to files (like, say, MSVCRT.DLL) while they're in use.
What I propose is a GPL'd shell/python/perl script that "grep"s the apache/thttpd/whatever access log for "default.ida" requests, and logs the requesting site name/ip to a file. Sort | uniq this file for good measure, then send a friendly message to the webmaster at this site, stating at least the following points:
Running this a few times a day, and keeping track of the sites that we've mailed already to avoid duplicates, should give semi-awake (i.e. reading mail, but not patching their system regularly) IIS admins some friendly help.
What do you think?
Thanks.
(damn 20 sec rule)