One of the oft mentioned responses to deletionism-of-trivia is that a wikia project would be a better place for it. On some level it is, there is the Wookieepedia for Star Wars trivia in such detail that only the most dedicated of fans could appreciate. So theres the solution, all the unnotable Pokemon articles should go into the Pokemon wikia.
There is, however, another level to that argument. Wikia is run by a for-profit Delaware-based corporation. Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia, is a non-profit charitable organization headed in San Francisco. Why is that relevant? When the question of hosting costs comes up for Wikipedia as they invariably do, advertisement always comes up, and has been shot down so far.
Theory goes, Jimmy Wales who founded both Wikia and Wikimedia would very much like to profit from Wikipedia, but due to the non-profit nature of Wikimedia is unable to as freely as he'd like. So how could you use Wikipedia to generate traffic for Wikia, a private hosting corporation which you own. Also keeping in mind that Wikipedia is by nature rather open about changes, "not-notable, make a Wikia project for it" does come up as a way to drive traffic, life-blood of our current internet age, and a nicely subtle one at that. Anyone looking for something more in depth about a subject than a footnote on a different page goes to the for-profit Wikia and while the text is most likely still free-as-in-speech (GFDL or CC-by-nc-sa), the ads are very much money-generating-as-in-doubleclick.net.
The Wikipedia article for Wikia does note this with cites by staff of both claiming this is inaccurate. However, this is the follow-the-money reason for the deletionism in a medium where new pages cost virtually nothing and anyone interested can get involved.
Sounds like a custom torrent tracker w/ geo-locating capabilities to keep things 'inside' would be handy. Legal issues aside I've often though it would be fun to write one. Imagine if, say, Comcast, Rogers or a large entity ran their own tracker, and only allowed IP's that were within their topology. You could probably actually hit their advertised 3 Megabit download speeds consistently.
Which isn't to say Sun and Apple couldn't come to a separate agreement wrt "jPhone", but this does serve to highlight a rather problematic licensing limitation in this day and age of greasemonkey and users wanting more control over the devices they own.
To be pedantic, while it is true that PS3-Linux does NOT run "on bare metal", it is not limited as you describe.
There is some access to the registers on the RSX chip itself, which is to say, while there isn't an X driver that takes advantages of it, there are simple demos that demonstrate that there IS access beyond a simple fb driver to the graphics chip.
The hard drive may 'virtualized' but the data iself isn't encrypted. Take the hard drive out, and skip the first 10G or so (depending on how your linux partition is setup) to where your Linux partition should be, and you have your ext3 (or whatever) partition unencrypted. (Thus avoiding known-plaintext attack on the hard drive's encryption.)
Bluetooth can be accessed via Linux and is supported by the generic hci_usb driver. pascal@pabr.org also has patches that let you use the SIXAXIS with the PS3 under Linux. (Similar to the USB patches that Sony released just prior to launch.)
WiFi can also be access via Linux, or at least Yellow Dog supports this.
There is enough access to use dd to dump the entire blue-ray disc. Any security on top of that is not covered.
They are useless for pirates, but I've heard there are torrents are out there.
Rumor has it that if the people working on the RSX X driver for Ps3-linux could do a clean room implementation on the usage of the RSX chip, then Sony would be free to actually release an X driver.
"c) and will get paid for the reuse of content on new media when the studios get paid."
Hollywood is notorious for it's bad dealings, with movies that lose money through questionable accounting practices, even after being top grossing movies for many weeks. This is more for TV than movies, but I gotta wonder what steps the contract takes to prevent the writers from getting screwed in a similar manner.
Wait a second, two out of the five people admit to having a WoW habit?
And the best new thing/. has gotten is this the dynamic "Read the rest of this comment..." (I like it). The yes-no-maybe of a beta-tags system? The new comment thresholding is cool in a tech-demo sort of way, which is to say, I login to turn it off The user preferences are this mis-mash of a lightbox page and a full page.
The music industry courted by Apple by a slice of the online pie, vs their old slice of none, agreed to try this iTunes experiment, and it was a success. Before iTunes, there was Napster and the rest to prove that people were copying songs around online. So it was obvious to the music industry there was a pie they were missing out on.
The book publishing industry has been seeming rather left out from copyright violations on the internet, save for the high profile Harry Potter book leak, which came out the weekend before the book was released from stores. A quick search on thepiratebay indicates there are ebooks out there to be found. Napster's successors being able to search for different types of media, ebooks included, aren't as obvious to the casual internet user, nor is the process of scanning it in as trivial as ripping a cd.
The internet, rife with music copying, does not have as much copying of books online, so why would book publishers agree to let Apple sell books online? Baen aside, book publishers, like the record companies, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the future. Amazon has the leverage to get licensing for ebook versions, especially on long-tail books not widely carried in retail stores. Which means Amazon will have lower prices if given competition, which will make them that much more palatable to customers.
I would welcome Apple selling ebooks online, and while the iPhone is far from perfect for reading books, it is a step in the right direction compared to a desktop, portability. Of course, I doubt Apple will, simply because reading isn't glamorous unless the librarian is a slim brunette with glasses, and then it still isn't reading that is glamorous.
And the power, not to mention oil needed to make the larger case is of course free.
Similarly, the Exxon Valdez spill was great for the environment, because of all the diesel saved because it crashed. If it hadn't crashed, it probably would still be running today, burning diesel, which is bad for the environment.
Power consumption definitely has a part in being environmentally conscious, but a needlessly larger case doesn't help it.
This isn't a slightly bigger case in case you wanted a 2nd hard drive. This is a drastically bigger case for if you wanted 7 more.
These computers are in cases that would fit a full-size ATX motherboard. Supposedly Wallmart did a survey, and found that most of their customers believe "Bigger is Better", even when it isn't. It is not a terrible deal given that it's a mini-ATX motherboard, but using that big a case for it is just wasting space.
Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.
Maybe they'd make a loss, but think of the PR! Already it's hard to bash Bill Gates, even on/., due to the philanthropy the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation does.
Bringing computers to children of the world? It'd be hard to spin that as pure evil, especially if the BMGFoundation picks up the tab. Oh sure, you could point out how they now run windows instead of linux, but who is really going to care?
(Sony's PSP clocks in at 130, the Neo 1973 is supposed to have a 280 PPI screen)
Now Apple's products both look very slick, and the screens are pretty okay. But put an N800 next to them, and compare the screen. You can really see where Nokia screen shines, and thats with reading text on the screen.
Goto your preferences page, goto Homepage Check Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, and No Icons
Not as good as before the site redesign, but still better than the default.
Unfortunately, D2 just doesn't really work for me. Even if they make D2 the default, I hope I can continue using D1 as my default with a settable preference.
This is why real net neutrality is so important (and I am talking about real net neutrality, not the fake one that some are advocating that still allows packet shaping).
Except that packet shaping makes sense when voip is added into the mix. And gaming. And anything else thats highly latency sensitive, but not as much bandwidth sensitive. Net Neutrality is really about shaping based on origin/destination, not type. As in, voip traffic that goes through my cable modem via Comcast, and goes to Vonage should be treated the same by Comcast as if that same traffic was being sent directly to Comcast.
Now packet shaping can also be used to cause bit torrent, and only bit torrent traffic to be unusably slow, but the core of net neutrality's conflict is voip, because of the money involved on both sides. Comcast sells 'digital phone service' which is voip done inside their box. Vonage sells voip, and you can also get a Linksys router that will give you a normal telephone jack if you give it internet. The whole conflict arises and becomes such a big deal when Comcast's Voip service works fine, and Vonage's doesn't, and the only reason for that is because Comcast is deprioritizing the Vonage traffic simply because its Vonage. And its business competitor.
Real net neutrality needs to allow packet shaping _somewhere_ because of limitations in technology, but that packet shaping rests on the end user, on the Linksys box that does Qos for you, on the... Comcast box that does Voip. And thats where it gets muddy. You can't legislate Comcast, the company, cannot packet shape, because it is required. You need legislation to specifically Comcast's servers cannot packet shape. How do you get legislature to understand that very specific nuance when the next line on a net-neutrality bill is 'oh yeah, $50 million to company $FOO for pork-barrel'
Point is, allowance of packet shaping is needed, but there is nuance to what should be allowed.
Why didn't a comment saying that Comcast, the cable co, is actually paying Tivo to port their front end to their provided set-top box? Its older news, and they're certainly taking their time rolling it out, but it does rather negate the article's main argument
I used their service until I moved away, and it was good. When I was signing up, they asked me what os I ran, and I said Linux, and the guy signing me up printed up an abbreviated setup page. It skipped the 'click the start button...' windows steps, and jumped straight to the info I needed (Static IP & netmask). Or maybe those were always on a separate page and I threw out the Windows setup instructions. They also didn't ask for my SSN, which is probably a good thing, except I had to setup a 'secret question' that I then promptly forgot and had to fax a copy of my drivers license to cancel service. Their downtown office had wifi and was two doors down from one of the local bars. And now I find out their lead tech posts on/. ? Man, I miss Santa Cruz, it gets cold here in Boston sometimes.:p
Its in the article, but perhaps it should be (re)noted that games are not actually playable. The article is light on details, but the hack originates from the debug firmware included with the dev-kits. Sony is well within their rights to pursue the leak of that firmware, as the developers signed NDA's with Sony.
Safari is the gateway to OS X, the same way Firefox is to Ubuntu. I don't know about you, but switching to Ubuntu was that much easier since Firefox runs on both. I'm betting Apple is hoping the same will happen with users and switching to OS X. The default font smoothing in Safari looks 'better' than the default on IE, and I'm betting others feel the same way (Fired up VMWare to test out Safari). I'll bet Apple spent a good amount of time tweaking that so its was 'just right'.
I could see a user after installing Safari going "Hey, this is pretty; Maybe I should get a Mac?" Theres an earlier comment about Safari being bundled with iTunes. I think that is also spot on. Install iTunes after buying a shiny new iPod means you're already buying Apple products, whats upgrading to a iMac instead of a Dell(and OS X) when you're already familiar with iTunes and Safari? (Buying things at a price premium was previously demonstrated with iPod purchase)
Slashdot Mirror
One of the oft mentioned responses to deletionism-of-trivia is that a wikia project would be a better place for it. On some level it is, there is the Wookieepedia for Star Wars trivia in such detail that only the most dedicated of fans could appreciate. So theres the solution, all the unnotable Pokemon articles should go into the Pokemon wikia.
There is, however, another level to that argument. Wikia is run by a for-profit Delaware-based corporation. Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia, is a non-profit charitable organization headed in San Francisco. Why is that relevant? When the question of hosting costs comes up for Wikipedia as they invariably do, advertisement always comes up, and has been shot down so far.
Theory goes, Jimmy Wales who founded both Wikia and Wikimedia would very much like to profit from Wikipedia, but due to the non-profit nature of Wikimedia is unable to as freely as he'd like. So how could you use Wikipedia to generate traffic for Wikia, a private hosting corporation which you own. Also keeping in mind that Wikipedia is by nature rather open about changes, "not-notable, make a Wikia project for it" does come up as a way to drive traffic, life-blood of our current internet age, and a nicely subtle one at that. Anyone looking for something more in depth about a subject than a footnote on a different page goes to the for-profit Wikia and while the text is most likely still free-as-in-speech (GFDL or CC-by-nc-sa), the ads are very much money-generating-as-in-doubleclick.net.
The Wikipedia article for Wikia does note this with cites by staff of both claiming this is inaccurate. However, this is the follow-the-money reason for the deletionism in a medium where new pages cost virtually nothing and anyone interested can get involved.
Sounds like a custom torrent tracker w/ geo-locating capabilities to keep things 'inside' would be handy. Legal issues aside I've often though it would be fun to write one. Imagine if, say, Comcast, Rogers or a large entity ran their own tracker, and only allowed IP's that were within their topology. You could probably actually hit their advertised 3 Megabit download speeds consistently.
This might hit them closer to home:
Tibet is as much a part of China, as Nanjing is a part of Japan.
Tag the story !bricked if you agree.
Which isn't to say Sun and Apple couldn't come to a separate agreement wrt "jPhone", but this does serve to highlight a rather problematic licensing limitation in this day and age of greasemonkey and users wanting more control over the devices they own.
Anyone else immediately think of Flylogic when they saw this?
They etch away the plastic surrounding the die on an IC to expose the die itself, and can then read back the contents of the rom manually. "You can literally take these two pictures above and create a schematic from them if you understand NMOS circuits."
(their blog)
...How does whats described in the article affect those with the power to create a schematic from an inert chip?
To be pedantic, while it is true that PS3-Linux does NOT run "on bare metal", it is not limited as you describe.
There is some access to the registers on the RSX chip itself, which is to say, while there isn't an X driver that takes advantages of it, there are simple demos that demonstrate that there IS access beyond a simple fb driver to the graphics chip.
The hard drive may 'virtualized' but the data iself isn't encrypted. Take the hard drive out, and skip the first 10G or so (depending on how your linux partition is setup) to where your Linux partition should be, and you have your ext3 (or whatever) partition unencrypted. (Thus avoiding known-plaintext attack on the hard drive's encryption.)
Bluetooth can be accessed via Linux and is supported by the generic hci_usb driver. pascal@pabr.org also has patches that let you use the SIXAXIS with the PS3 under Linux. (Similar to the USB patches that Sony released just prior to launch.)
WiFi can also be access via Linux, or at least Yellow Dog supports this.
There is enough access to use dd to dump the entire blue-ray disc. Any security on top of that is not covered. They are useless for pirates, but I've heard there are torrents are out there.
Rumor has it that if the people working on the RSX X driver for Ps3-linux could do a clean room implementation on the usage of the RSX chip, then Sony would be free to actually release an X driver.
"c) and will get paid for the reuse of content on new media when the studios get paid."
Hollywood is notorious for it's bad dealings, with movies that lose money through questionable accounting practices, even after being top grossing movies for many weeks. This is more for TV than movies, but I gotta wonder what steps the contract takes to prevent the writers from getting screwed in a similar manner.
Thats not long enough, so change it: How to let the Record activity to record than 45 seconds of audio.
Wait a second, two out of the five people admit to having a WoW habit?
/. has gotten is this the dynamic "Read the rest of this comment..." (I like it). The yes-no-maybe of a beta-tags system?
/. from work.
And the best new thing
The new comment thresholding is cool in a tech-demo sort of way, which is to say, I login to turn it off
The user preferences are this mis-mash of a lightbox page and a full page.
I think the two might be related.
Then again, I'm the one posting to
xkcd 356 - nerd sniping
The music industry courted by Apple by a slice of the online pie, vs their old slice of none, agreed to try this iTunes experiment, and it was a success. Before iTunes, there was Napster and the rest to prove that people were copying songs around online. So it was obvious to the music industry there was a pie they were missing out on.
The book publishing industry has been seeming rather left out from copyright violations on the internet, save for the high profile Harry Potter book leak, which came out the weekend before the book was released from stores. A quick search on thepiratebay indicates there are ebooks out there to be found. Napster's successors being able to search for different types of media, ebooks included, aren't as obvious to the casual internet user, nor is the process of scanning it in as trivial as ripping a cd.
The internet, rife with music copying, does not have as much copying of books online, so why would book publishers agree to let Apple sell books online? Baen aside, book publishers, like the record companies, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the future. Amazon has the leverage to get licensing for ebook versions, especially on long-tail books not widely carried in retail stores. Which means Amazon will have lower prices if given competition, which will make them that much more palatable to customers.
I would welcome Apple selling ebooks online, and while the iPhone is far from perfect for reading books, it is a step in the right direction compared to a desktop, portability. Of course, I doubt Apple will, simply because reading isn't glamorous unless the librarian is a slim brunette with glasses, and then it still isn't reading that is glamorous.
And the power, not to mention oil needed to make the larger case is of course free.
Similarly, the Exxon Valdez spill was great for the environment, because of all the diesel saved because it crashed. If it hadn't crashed, it probably would still be running today, burning diesel, which is bad for the environment.
Power consumption definitely has a part in being environmentally conscious, but a needlessly larger case doesn't help it.
This isn't a slightly bigger case in case you wanted a 2nd hard drive. This is a drastically bigger case for if you wanted 7 more.
Whoops, mini-ITX not mini-ATX
These computers are in cases that would fit a full-size ATX motherboard. Supposedly Wallmart did a survey, and found that most of their customers believe "Bigger is Better", even when it isn't. It is not a terrible deal given that it's a mini-ATX motherboard, but using that big a case for it is just wasting space.
Even better than that, the computers being sold as 'green PC' meaning thats the mfr's product name, and has nothing to do with being enviromentally conscious.
Maybe they'd make a loss, but think of the PR! /., due to the philanthropy the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation does.
Already it's hard to bash Bill Gates, even on
Bringing computers to children of the world? It'd be hard to spin that as pure evil, especially if the BMGFoundation picks up the tab.
Oh sure, you could point out how they now run windows instead of linux, but who is really going to care?
Ignore the resolution, look a the Pixels Per Inch (PPI).
(from http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html)
# 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen multi-touch display
# 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi
http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/17/nokia-n810-gets-official/
4.13-nch WVGA (800 x 480)
Which math + Google calculator: sqrt((800 * 800) + (480 * 480)) / 4.13 = 225.896441
225 PPI
(Sony's PSP clocks in at 130, the Neo 1973 is supposed to have a 280 PPI screen)
Now Apple's products both look very slick, and the screens are pretty okay. But put an N800 next to them, and compare the screen. You can really see where Nokia screen shines, and thats with reading text on the screen.
Create an account + Log in
Goto your preferences page, goto Homepage
Check Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, and No Icons
Not as good as before the site redesign, but still better than the default.
Unfortunately, D2 just doesn't really work for me. Even if they make D2 the default, I hope I can continue using D1 as my default with a settable preference.
More like:
/more/ units in same factory, same tools.
Company _designs_ product.
Company sends product to China for manufacture, orders 100k units.
China makes 100k units.
China makes 100k
???.
(IP Black Market) Profit!
Except that packet shaping makes sense when voip is added into the mix. And gaming. And anything else thats highly latency sensitive, but not as much bandwidth sensitive. Net Neutrality is really about shaping based on origin/destination, not type. As in, voip traffic that goes through my cable modem via Comcast, and goes to Vonage should be treated the same by Comcast as if that same traffic was being sent directly to Comcast.
Now packet shaping can also be used to cause bit torrent, and only bit torrent traffic to be unusably slow, but the core of net neutrality's conflict is voip, because of the money involved on both sides. Comcast sells 'digital phone service' which is voip done inside their box. Vonage sells voip, and you can also get a Linksys router that will give you a normal telephone jack if you give it internet. The whole conflict arises and becomes such a big deal when Comcast's Voip service works fine, and Vonage's doesn't, and the only reason for that is because Comcast is deprioritizing the Vonage traffic simply because its Vonage. And its business competitor.
Real net neutrality needs to allow packet shaping _somewhere_ because of limitations in technology, but that packet shaping rests on the end user, on the Linksys box that does Qos for you, on the... Comcast box that does Voip. And thats where it gets muddy. You can't legislate Comcast, the company, cannot packet shape, because it is required. You need legislation to specifically Comcast's servers cannot packet shape. How do you get legislature to understand that very specific nuance when the next line on a net-neutrality bill is 'oh yeah, $50 million to company $FOO for pork-barrel'
Point is, allowance of packet shaping is needed, but there is nuance to what should be allowed.
Why didn't a comment saying that Comcast, the cable co, is actually paying Tivo to port their front end to their provided set-top box?
- usat_x.htm
Its older news, and they're certainly taking their time rolling it out, but it does rather negate the article's main argument
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-03-14-tivo
Office in downtown Santa Cruz? Go Cruzio!
/. ? Man, I miss Santa Cruz, it gets cold here in Boston sometimes. :p
;)
I used their service until I moved away, and it was good. When I was signing up, they asked me what os I ran, and I said Linux, and the guy signing me up printed up an abbreviated setup page. It skipped the 'click the start button...' windows steps, and jumped straight to the info I needed (Static IP & netmask). Or maybe those were always on a separate page and I threw out the Windows setup instructions. They also didn't ask for my SSN, which is probably a good thing, except I had to setup a 'secret question' that I then promptly forgot and had to fax a copy of my drivers license to cancel service. Their downtown office had wifi and was two doors down from one of the local bars. And now I find out their lead tech posts on
A+++, would buy again
I've always just called it GIM (pronounced Jim) Paint.
Its in the article, but perhaps it should be (re)noted that games are not actually playable. The article is light on details, but the hack originates from the debug firmware included with the dev-kits. Sony is well within their rights to pursue the leak of that firmware, as the developers signed NDA's with Sony.
Safari is the gateway to OS X, the same way Firefox is to Ubuntu. I don't know about you, but switching to Ubuntu was that much easier since Firefox runs on both. I'm betting Apple is hoping the same will happen with users and switching to OS X. The default font smoothing in Safari looks 'better' than the default on IE, and I'm betting others feel the same way (Fired up VMWare to test out Safari). I'll bet Apple spent a good amount of time tweaking that so its was 'just right'.
I could see a user after installing Safari going "Hey, this is pretty; Maybe I should get a Mac?" Theres an earlier comment about Safari being bundled with iTunes. I think that is also spot on. Install iTunes after buying a shiny new iPod means you're already buying Apple products, whats upgrading to a iMac instead of a Dell(and OS X) when you're already familiar with iTunes and Safari? (Buying things at a price premium was previously demonstrated with iPod purchase)