There's a difference between providing service and providing content. One could think of the service provider here being the hosting company, since they are the ones actually distributing everything to website visitors. One could think of the journalists as hiring the web hosting company for their services, to put their content on.
Then it's up to the hosting company to keep whatever records they are required to, but the journalist is in the clear.
Re:The Great Slashdot Scavenger Hunt!
on
Urban Challenge
·
· Score: 1
You're not right about top-of-the-line hardware being required. They have shader code for several tiers of programmable hardware, from geforce3-equivalent cards all the way up to today's radeons.
A better bet than wifi would be just to use a GSM celphone and a PDA or something. With a bluetooth connection between the two, you wouldn't even have to hold them next to each other like IR -- just stick the phone back in your pocket and you are reading/. on the ike....or you could take the metra and avoid the traffic altogether:)
I think that the application they were talking about is remote health care with real-time video streaming, or even better a remote surgery device -- you can manufacture those by the thousands, and have the lead surgeon do everything virtually. Of course you'd need a staff on hand in case the link broke and the person had to be stitched up...
Merging into traffic is one of the exciting parts of my morning commute -- sort of a game to see how far forward I can get ahead of the traffic, and still weasel cleanly in. Same thing with changing lanes at just the right time. Even if a machine could do a better job than me, I would still rather do it myself.
What I want is a car that will automatically stay a couple of car lengths behind the guy in front, and just sit there and stay in the lane so I can read a book or something, and I believe we are at least some of the way there (intelligent cruise control).
I think that the popular video codecs would be more efficient at compressing video with a higher frame rate, because they store mostly the difference between two consecutive frames, and not the frames themselves. In a higher-fps video stream, there ought to be less difference between consecutive frames -- that's the whole point, so it seems to make sense that doubling the frame rate would increase file size by a factor slightly less than 2. One could probably test this idea really easily by encoding a regular piece of video, then taking out every other frame, and encoding it again to compare the file sizes... If someone has some time on his or her hands, please give this a shot:)
One would also hope that compression artifacts that only show up in 1 frame would fly by much more quickly, and would not be seen quite as easily.
This is totally true. I'm one of the programmers in a little side project that has decided to get a license of theirs to sort of check it out. Here are my thoughts on this:
If you like documentation, garagegames's torque engine is not for you. There are hundreds of classes with lots of features, and if you look in the code, it's ALL CODE. If I actually paid money to see the code to something, I would expect it to be completely documented with doxygen or something, so you have at least a couple lines of description for every function or method. They do have "documentation" with doxygen, but if you run it on a comment-less source tree, all you get is what the class browser shows you anyway. Oh, and there's like a several-page flow-of-control overview to get you started, but it is QUITE skimpy on details.
Not that it's impossible to work with, it's just REALLY hard to get started.
Plus, if you want whatever you are writing to actually look *good*, and not like it came from 1998, then you'll have to add all your own shader and shadow code... Just thought you'd like to know.
I think the quote they wanted in the article is the following:
"Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists."
Anyone who wants to have rotating skulls and burning fire on their script kiddie web page is still welcome to use animated gifs. I don't see a reason that all those graphics shouldn't be in Flash, because they are great for platforms that can handle it, and don't need to be shown at all (say, on a celphone or PDA) on those that can't.
Besides, mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 are certainly better at this sort of thing, and since pretty much anything that supports Flash can also display avi's or qt's or whatever, I think people should just use that instead.
IIRC, GIF really specialized in 256-color paletted images, and any extensions to that along the lines of full 32-bit color were kind of a hack, and were never very popular. PNG, on the other hand, is a great compressed lossless format that seems to cleanly support 4 channels. I've used it plenty when storing graphics for programming purposes, and have never had any kind of problems.
It seems that the only reason GIF was around in the first place is because computers were slow, and then later (instead of lossy jpegs) for displaying little images with text in them in web pages. Since PNG does that now and does it better, I think there's no reason to ever go back to GIF.
Sure, the readers and writers might now be legally free or whatever, but anyone who really wanted to use GIFs has been able to do it anyway (it's not like all along Photoshop wasn't able to export, and Explorer and Netscape weren't able to view them), and there is support for better formats pretty much everywhere now, that I don't foresee any changes in the status quo regarding GIF use.
I guess vinyl records last a bit longer than 2 days, but if you play one enough, it will wear down, especially in the old days. Then you've got to go get a new one. I'm sure back before tapes, repeat record purchases were at least a noticeable boost in a record company's profits.
I think that even usenet is prior art in this case. For example, you've got comp.sys.*, each of which could be viewed as a discussion about a specific product...
I bet Amazon has a whole department that's targeted specifically at trying to formulate every little part of their process into a patent, and trying to push it though. I suppose there is nothing to stop them from trying, but I sure hope there is something to stop them from actually getting patents on things like "Talking about stuff over a network" and "Clicking to buy things".
From the programming side (and I mean C), the only really fundamental difference between a 32-bit and a 64-bit address space is the size of a pointer. Right now on most platforms, a pointer is 4 bytes, same as an int, so if you want to do dirty pointer math tricks, you don't have to even think about truncation or anything. Under a 64-bit system, the pointers are 8 bytes, but the regular default int type might be 4 still, so you have to be careful about how you treat those numbers. If you are never screwing around with the way you store and dereference pointers, then (given that all the other libraries already exist under the target 64-bit platform) compiling for 64-bit is just as easy as anything else. In fact, you can develop under 32-bit, and then once you get access to 64-bit, you just recompile and hope that you haven't forgotten anything. Then there are cross-compilers and emulation too...
It certainly seems that an electric car ought to be able to achieve bursts of very high power output using some really large capacitors. Has this been done in any projects? I think it would be neat for the next electric civic or whatever to have a "turbo boost" button, that lets it peel off for 30 seconds or so.
I think one of the reasons people feel this way is that the redhat installer, instead of having a progress bar and some text flashing by about what package just got installed, tells little stories about redhat's origins and how great it is and all the crap you can do with it. That is just a very windows-esque thing, and I have never enjoyed it. I wish there were a way to turn it off -- cuz I really don't care what kind of beat-up hat the guy wore.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between providing service and providing content. One could think of the service provider here being the hosting company, since they are the ones actually distributing everything to website visitors. One could think of the journalists as hiring the web hosting company for their services, to put their content on.
Then it's up to the hosting company to keep whatever records they are required to, but the journalist is in the clear.
12. ?
13. Profit!
You're not right about top-of-the-line hardware being required. They have shader code for several tiers of programmable hardware, from geforce3-equivalent cards all the way up to today's radeons.
You actually forgot two:
8. ???
9. Profit!
A better bet than wifi would be just to use a GSM celphone and a PDA or something. With a bluetooth connection between the two, you wouldn't even have to hold them next to each other like IR -- just stick the phone back in your pocket and you are reading /. on the ike. ...or you could take the metra and avoid the traffic altogether :)
The only reason verisign won that was because of all the wildcards that they added.
The reason I invested in a new windshield infact was due to this ... sign
It wasn't an ad for new windshields, was it?
tee hee
I think that the application they were talking about is remote health care with real-time video streaming, or even better a remote surgery device -- you can manufacture those by the thousands, and have the lead surgeon do everything virtually. Of course you'd need a staff on hand in case the link broke and the person had to be stitched up...
Actually I'd prefer it the other way.
Merging into traffic is one of the exciting parts of my morning commute -- sort of a game to see how far forward I can get ahead of the traffic, and still weasel cleanly in. Same thing with changing lanes at just the right time. Even if a machine could do a better job than me, I would still rather do it myself.
What I want is a car that will automatically stay a couple of car lengths behind the guy in front, and just sit there and stay in the lane so I can read a book or something, and I believe we are at least some of the way there (intelligent cruise control).
I think that the popular video codecs would be more efficient at compressing video with a higher frame rate, because they store mostly the difference between two consecutive frames, and not the frames themselves. In a higher-fps video stream, there ought to be less difference between consecutive frames -- that's the whole point, so it seems to make sense that doubling the frame rate would increase file size by a factor slightly less than 2. One could probably test this idea really easily by encoding a regular piece of video, then taking out every other frame, and encoding it again to compare the file sizes... If someone has some time on his or her hands, please give this a shot :)
One would also hope that compression artifacts that only show up in 1 frame would fly by much more quickly, and would not be seen quite as easily.
This is totally true. I'm one of the programmers in a little side project that has decided to get a license of theirs to sort of check it out. Here are my thoughts on this:
If you like documentation, garagegames's torque engine is not for you. There are hundreds of classes with lots of features, and if you look in the code, it's ALL CODE. If I actually paid money to see the code to something, I would expect it to be completely documented with doxygen or something, so you have at least a couple lines of description for every function or method. They do have "documentation" with doxygen, but if you run it on a comment-less source tree, all you get is what the class browser shows you anyway. Oh, and there's like a several-page flow-of-control overview to get you started, but it is QUITE skimpy on details.
Not that it's impossible to work with, it's just REALLY hard to get started.
Plus, if you want whatever you are writing to actually look *good*, and not like it came from 1998, then you'll have to add all your own shader and shadow code... Just thought you'd like to know.
And someone was Ravaged!!
I think the quote they wanted in the article is the following:
"Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends. These people, they are terrorists."
Anyone who wants to have rotating skulls and burning fire on their script kiddie web page is still welcome to use animated gifs. I don't see a reason that all those graphics shouldn't be in Flash, because they are great for platforms that can handle it, and don't need to be shown at all (say, on a celphone or PDA) on those that can't.
Besides, mpeg-2 and mpeg-4 are certainly better at this sort of thing, and since pretty much anything that supports Flash can also display avi's or qt's or whatever, I think people should just use that instead.
IIRC, GIF really specialized in 256-color paletted images, and any extensions to that along the lines of full 32-bit color were kind of a hack, and were never very popular. PNG, on the other hand, is a great compressed lossless format that seems to cleanly support 4 channels. I've used it plenty when storing graphics for programming purposes, and have never had any kind of problems.
It seems that the only reason GIF was around in the first place is because computers were slow, and then later (instead of lossy jpegs) for displaying little images with text in them in web pages. Since PNG does that now and does it better, I think there's no reason to ever go back to GIF.
Sure, the readers and writers might now be legally free or whatever, but anyone who really wanted to use GIFs has been able to do it anyway (it's not like all along Photoshop wasn't able to export, and Explorer and Netscape weren't able to view them), and there is support for better formats pretty much everywhere now, that I don't foresee any changes in the status quo regarding GIF use.
The grapes watch YOU with wireless technology.
And then stomp on you to make rokeg blood pie.
I guess vinyl records last a bit longer than 2 days, but if you play one enough, it will wear down, especially in the old days. Then you've got to go get a new one. I'm sure back before tapes, repeat record purchases were at least a noticeable boost in a record company's profits.
I think that even usenet is prior art in this case. For example, you've got comp.sys.*, each of which could be viewed as a discussion about a specific product...
I bet Amazon has a whole department that's targeted specifically at trying to formulate every little part of their process into a patent, and trying to push it though. I suppose there is nothing to stop them from trying, but I sure hope there is something to stop them from actually getting patents on things like "Talking about stuff over a network" and "Clicking to buy things".
From the programming side (and I mean C), the only really fundamental difference between a 32-bit and a 64-bit address space is the size of a pointer. Right now on most platforms, a pointer is 4 bytes, same as an int, so if you want to do dirty pointer math tricks, you don't have to even think about truncation or anything. Under a 64-bit system, the pointers are 8 bytes, but the regular default int type might be 4 still, so you have to be careful about how you treat those numbers.
If you are never screwing around with the way you store and dereference pointers, then (given that all the other libraries already exist under the target 64-bit platform) compiling for 64-bit is just as easy as anything else. In fact, you can develop under 32-bit, and then once you get access to 64-bit, you just recompile and hope that you haven't forgotten anything.
Then there are cross-compilers and emulation too...
People are activly researching exactly what you are talking about -- making programmable hardware perform ray-tracing operations.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rtongfx/
Another option is harnessing years of aerodynamics research and firing golf balls.
For added fun, take your cannon to the course!
It sucks that LCDs are taking over the monitor market, because it leaves less room for stereoscopic viewing with shutter glasses.
news.com gets sued for deep-linking straight to DeCSS.exe.
It certainly seems that an electric car ought to be able to achieve bursts of very high power output using some really large capacitors. Has this been done in any projects? I think it would be neat for the next electric civic or whatever to have a "turbo boost" button, that lets it peel off for 30 seconds or so.
I love pokey
I think one of the reasons people feel this way is that the redhat installer, instead of having a progress bar and some text flashing by about what package just got installed, tells little stories about redhat's origins and how great it is and all the crap you can do with it. That is just a very windows-esque thing, and I have never enjoyed it. I wish there were a way to turn it off -- cuz I really don't care what kind of beat-up hat the guy wore.