When are the MPAA and the RIAA going to realize that while they may be losing money, is isn't close to that magnitude?
While I believe the claim of $3.0 billion is pure conjecture, I don't see the claim that it's wrong as anything but pure conjecture either.
The major cost of piracy isn't "lost" sales, but the fact that it forces them to lower their prices in order to compete with the pirate market. If they could jack up the prices of movies to the same price as CDs, maybe they would make an extra $3.0 billion - who knows?
-- this is not a.sig
Re:Imagine the impact...Lower Taxes
on
Thin, Flat LEDs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
LED's use significantly less power than sodium vapor and other light tech.
No they don't. If you want red light, then red LEDs are more efficent than creating white light and throwing away the non-red parts, but as of 2002, low pressure sodium was still the most energy efficent lighting source known to man.
I haven't checked recently, but last year the break down was something like this;
Lumens/Watt Light Source 100-190 low pressure Sodium (HID) 50-150 High pressure Sodium (HID) 60-140 Metal Halides (HID) 20-60 mercury vapor (HID) 85-95 32 watt T8 fluorescent 60-65 standard F40T12 cool white fluorescent 48-60 compact fluorescents 45-55 Super bright Red/Orange LED 35-45 Super bright Green LED 20 T3 tubular halogen 15-25 bright white LED 5-25 Halogen 17 standard 100 watt incandescent 6 incandescent night light bulb (7w) 6w incandescent flashlight bulbs
Of course, LEDs have a lot of other nice features, like toughness, long life, and a better failure mode. (They get dimmer with time, rather than suddenly burning out.)
Well, looking at their technology, it appears that it is basically a Fresnel type mirror that disperses the light from a single LED source. If I recall my undergraduate physics, this sort of thing could result in uneven light distribution and chromatic aberration in lighting surfaces making this less than ideal for displays, especially for those users where color is critically important.
Currently, the backlight on most LCDs is one or more fluorescent tubes, which are also subject to "uneven light distribution and chromatic aberration".
This technology holds the promise of paper thin backlights. Even if light distribution is bad, they could still end up with more even light than current technology at about half the thickness.
Frankley though, I have doubts about how viable it really is.
(2) Your e-mail system administrator (and mine) need to keep beefing up the servers because the sheer volume of e-mail is growing so quickly.
To a first approximations, filters solve (1) but not (2), and black hole lists solve (2).
I question the validity of the statement "black hole lists solve (2)". Block lists have been tried for many years now. The quantity of spam has steadily increased during that time, even if you only include spam comming from unblocked IPs. Based on the spam I've received in the past six months, the quantity of spam comming from listed IPs is realtively constant, all the increases have come from unlisted IP addresses.
Instead of trying to fix the patent process, I'd rather see a new law that says anything implemented on hardware built before the patent was filed does not infringe on it.
It's ignoring Moore's law that's dangerous.
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 1
Michael S. Malone says we should forget Moore's law, not because it isn't true, but mainly because it has become dangerous.
How someone can look at such a devistating example of Moore's law in action and conclude that it's the law that's the problem is beyond me.
It's ignoring Moore's law that's dangerous. If Moore's law continues (and it shows no signs of stopping, even after more than 35 years) then eventually will all have the computing power that Google has now, sitting on our desktops. The implication is obvious - in another decade, Google will fail. Not because their database is inferior, but simply because we'll all have our own copy of it.
To put it another way, most of us have fixed resource requirements. Once we can create full ray-traced 3d images at 72FPS, we're done. Most of us won't need more powerful computers. (We'll want them of course, but we won't be willing to pay for them.) If you think the dot-bomb has gone off, think again. Sales of high-end computers are already declining, and it's only going to get worse, all because of Moore's law. Forget Moore's law? Might as well take cyanide, it would be quicker.
Actually, the 2600 had enough "VRAM" to store background data for a single line on the screen.
No, it doesn't.
The graphics 20 bits of "background" which is displayed twice, optionally in reverse order the second time. If you want to display a full 40 pixels in the background, you must rewrite the display registers on the fly, every horizontal line.
There are also three missle objects, not two. And there are two 8 bit "sprite" registers.
That's it.
BTW, an unmodified 2600 has 128 bytes of "normal" ram. With the Starpath Super Charger, add a whopping 6K!
Do any spam filters work (as in NOT throwing out legit mails) other than ourselves?
All filters have a false positive rate, even us.
There are a number of approaches that have proven extremely reliable - i.e. 0 detectable false positives. Human secretaries for example. Another low false positive approach is DCC with a trusted network. The idea here is that only email which exactly matches email sent to a known spamtrap is marked as spam.
Spam assassin can be tuned to require a higher "spammyness" count. This means you can trade higher number of false negatives for a lower number of false positives.
Challenging suspected spam is a lot better than just deleting it, but it's still not perfect. You can run afowl of important mass mailings. For example, when Network Solutions sends out domain name renewal notices, they frequently include enough crap that it looks like spam, and they don't have a valid return address. Most people want to see the message anyway.
On the other hand, your spam filter doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than you.
Unfortunately, this paper doesn't really offer any practical advice.
[...]
What are some of the best ways to learn to avoid problems?
Contrary to academically popular opinion, good programming skills are not limited to bug prevention. Finding and fixing bugs is extremely important, though virtually untaught. (Good commenting is also extremely important and rarely taught, but that's a seperate issue.)
The paper lists three techniques for spotting errors, and gives several actual examples of real errors that were found with the techniques. If you can't find any practical advice in the paper, then you should re-read it.
Why not sell CD-RWs with a song pre-recorded on them (this should work in Canada too.) I can see three advantages; 1. You beat the tax (I'm assuming they include an exemption for pre-recorded media like Canada and virtually everybody else.)
2. You become a music producer, so you can collect the tax that your competitors pay.
3. You probably have the number one song on the charts, since people will buy far more than one copy of a CD-RW- basically free advertising.
You could probably sell the title track for money too - Coke would pay to have the number one song in Australia be a commercial for their product, especially if they got to pick the name of that song.
... I don't think any one tool will succeed in eliminating spam. From a spammer's point of view, if my income depends on messages making it through filters, by damn I will bypass those filters by whatever means I can.
There are many different kinds of spammers. A professional spammer is going to get past almost anything you can dream up. But an amateur spammer can be stopped by simple techniques. Anything that raises the difficulty of spamming makes it less likely that an amateur spammer will turn pro. If spamming is limited to the serious professional, then the problem will at least stop growing.
While it's true that for many people, some of the spam they receive was inadvertantly "opted in", the vast majority is not.
I think most of the claims of "you opted in" are lies designed to minimize complaints. Of the few that are not out right lies, most of those are the results of deception. For example, joining a cooking iling list, and automattically being subscribed to a tupperware mailing list too. You haven't really given consent unless you did so knowlingly and willingly.
This type of problem definitely needs a solution, but vigilante attacks are not the solution.
One man's "vigilante" is another man's "concerned citizen".
When a store detective handcuffs a suspected shoplifter that's not the same as shooting one, but in both cases the detective is a "vigilante".
The issue isn't one of who is doing it, but what they are doing, and is that an appropriate response?
I might accept strikeback as a reasonable response to a worm attack, but only after you've tried and failed to get the owner of the attacking system to stop the worm. And even then, the strikeback would need to be limited to the minimum amount needed to prevent the worm from attacking. Formatting the attackers hard drive is unacceptable. (handcuffs, not bullets.)
It would be a lot better if there was a proper procedure for isolating an attacker, but right now there isn't.
EX-SQUEZE ME?! Yeah it's hydrogen but it's not as dangerous as the tank of gas in your car?? The article makes reference to a 10,000 PSI "tank" for this stuff. Wanna get your jollies - just knock the neck off any full compressed gas bottle and see what happens. Waddya mean the thing can't fly?
He didn't say it wasn't dangerous, he said it wasn't as dangerous as the 20+ gallons of gasoline we currently cart around.
If you sever the fule line on a standard automobile, the resulting fireball will put that puny flying gas bottle to shame.
No matter how you slice it, there's always going to be enough energy in the storage tank to move a car 300 miles. The only question is, how quickly will it spontaneously release on it's own.
This post is hogwash, and only got it's moderation because of how LOUD it was (a common problem on/.).
Any interesting point of view, but one which I notice you failed to substantiate.
While I think the original post does look at only a subset of the entire development issue, the things it does mention are dead on.
More importantly, the subset of things which it does talk about are of major importance.
Having a clearly stated goal that everyone on the team understands is far more important than which programming language you are writing in, or what tools you are using. As the original post said, there seems to have been no improvement in communicating goals effectively, nor in most of the important areas of software development.
For example, most people agree that well commented code is very important. When's the last time you heard of a seminar on writing effective comments? Or a programming language which added extra ways to do commenting? (As of Perl 5.6, the language that brought you the phrase TIMTOWTDI there still isn't a block comment.)
Yes, there have been some improvements, but we haven't seen any major ones. I'm sorry, but OOPS isn't significantly better than assembly, CVS isn't significantly better than keeping backups, text editors haven't become significantly better than VI.
One of the major culprits for this was actually Microsoft, they had a scam going where they optimized the SETI software for Windows and then published the results to show how well their platform performed.
That attitude by SETI was my major reason for not participating in SETI@home. When they started asking on sci.crypt if there was some way they could guarantee that only their client had performed the calculations, the question that naturally arose was "why the client, and not the data?". The answer provided shows that they were not (and still aren't) interested in proving the calculations are correct.
For what it's worth, the solution to the checking problem is actually straight forward. Force the client to periodically calculate the MD5 hash of all the intermediate results (basically an image of ram) + the last MD5 sum calculated. Each block computed then returns the result (usually nothing interesting) and the MD5 sum.
All fair use is not piracy == Fair use is not piracy.
neither is all piracy fair use == Piracy is not fair use.
What's the problem?
The problem is that the clause "All fair use is not piracy" is most reasonably interpreted as
"The set of all things that are fair use contains both things that are piracy and things that are not."
and not as
"The set of all things that are fair use does not contain any elements that are piracy."
If they really wanted to convey the first idea, they should have said "No fair use is piracy, nor piracy fair use." or even better IMO, keep it a simple sound byte; "piracy is not fair use."
I think they want people to believe there are some cases when fair use is piracy, but they don't want to just say that because it it's obviously false. Then again, maybe they're just stupid.
But a lot of the code running today wasn't "written today" if you know what I mean. The problem is, in order to recompile you first need: a) the original source, and...
Why? No really, why do you need the original source to compile something? Seems to me that "assembly language" and "byte code" are languages just like p-code or Fortran.
It sounds a lot like a classic blunder, and not a new encryption at all.
But assuming for the moment that one discovers a new kind of encryption, the question becomes why is this new encryption better than the hundreds of existing algorithms.
Rijndael is libre, approved by FIPS, has reference implementations available, and has been thoroughly checked by several cryptographers. If the only difference your encryption scheme has is a (possibly flawed) proof of security, then you have a "me too" product that's competing in saturated market place. You best bet is probably to go for fame, and then try to turn that fame into a better paying job.
Slashdot Mirror
Given sovereignty?
-- this is not a
While I believe the claim of $3.0 billion is pure conjecture,
I don't see the claim that it's wrong as anything but pure conjecture either.
The major cost of piracy isn't "lost" sales, but the fact that it forces them to lower their prices in order to compete with the pirate market.
If they could jack up the prices of movies to the same price as CDs, maybe they would make an extra $3.0 billion - who knows?
-- this is not a
No they don't.
If you want red light, then red LEDs are more efficent than creating white light and throwing away the non-red parts,
but as of 2002, low pressure sodium was still the most energy efficent lighting source known to man.
I haven't checked recently, but last year the break down was something like this;
Lumens/Watt Light Source
100-190 low pressure Sodium (HID)
50-150 High pressure Sodium (HID)
60-140 Metal Halides (HID)
20-60 mercury vapor (HID)
85-95 32 watt T8 fluorescent
60-65 standard F40T12 cool white fluorescent
48-60 compact fluorescents
45-55 Super bright Red/Orange LED
35-45 Super bright Green LED
20 T3 tubular halogen
15-25 bright white LED
5-25 Halogen
17 standard 100 watt incandescent
6 incandescent night light bulb (7w)
6w incandescent flashlight bulbs
Of course, LEDs have a lot of other nice features, like toughness, long life, and a better failure mode. (They get dimmer with time, rather than suddenly burning out.)
-- this is not a
Currently, the backlight on most LCDs is one or more fluorescent tubes, which are also subject to "uneven light distribution and chromatic aberration".
This technology holds the promise of paper thin backlights. Even if light distribution is
bad, they could still end up with more even light than current technology at about half the thickness.
Frankley though, I have doubts about how viable it really is.
-- this is not a
I question the validity of the statement "black hole lists solve (2)".
Block lists have been tried for many years now.
The quantity of spam has steadily increased during that time, even if you only include spam comming from unblocked IPs.
Based on the spam I've received in the past six months,
the quantity of spam comming from listed IPs is realtively constant,
all the increases have come from unlisted IP addresses.
-- this is not a
Instead of trying to fix the patent process,
I'd rather see a new law that says anything implemented on hardware built before the patent was filed does not infringe on it.
How someone can look at such a devistating example of Moore's law in action and conclude that it's the law that's the problem is beyond me.
It's ignoring Moore's law that's dangerous.
If Moore's law continues (and it shows no signs of stopping, even after more than 35 years) then eventually will all have the computing power that Google has now, sitting on our desktops. The implication is obvious - in another decade, Google will fail. Not because their database is inferior, but simply because we'll all have our own copy of it.
To put it another way, most of us have fixed resource requirements. Once we can create full ray-traced 3d images at 72FPS, we're done. Most of us won't need more powerful computers. (We'll want them of course, but we won't be willing to pay for them.) If you think the dot-bomb has gone off, think again. Sales of high-end computers are already declining, and it's only going to get worse, all because of Moore's law. Forget Moore's law? Might as well take cyanide, it would be quicker.
-- this is not a
Yes, spamwolf is mine, that's why I'm so familar with it.
.sig
There are probably many others like it.
-- this is not a
No, it doesn't.
The graphics 20 bits of "background" which is displayed twice,
optionally in reverse order the second time.
If you want to display a full 40 pixels in the background,
you must rewrite the display registers on the fly, every horizontal line.
There are also three missle objects, not two.
And there are two 8 bit "sprite" registers.
That's it.
BTW, an unmodified 2600 has 128 bytes of "normal" ram.
With the Starpath Super Charger, add a whopping 6K!
-- this is not a
All filters have a false positive rate, even us.
There are a number of approaches that have proven extremely reliable - i.e. 0 detectable false positives.
Human secretaries for example.
Another low false positive approach is DCC with a trusted network. The idea here is that only email which exactly matches email sent to a known spamtrap is marked as spam.
Spam assassin can be tuned to require a higher "spammyness" count. This means you can trade higher number of false negatives for a lower number of false positives.
Whitelisting and challenging rather than discarding also reduce false positives.
-- this is not a
Basically the same approach is used by spamwolf
.sig
Challenging suspected spam is a lot better than just deleting it, but it's still not perfect.
You can run afowl of important mass mailings.
For example, when Network Solutions sends out domain name renewal notices,
they frequently include enough crap that it looks like spam, and they don't have a valid return address.
Most people want to see the message anyway.
On the other hand, your spam filter doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than you.
-- this is not a
Contrary to academically popular opinion, good programming skills are not limited to bug prevention.
Finding and fixing bugs is extremely important, though virtually untaught.
(Good commenting is also extremely important and rarely taught, but that's a seperate issue.)
The paper lists three techniques for spotting errors,
and gives several actual examples of real errors that were found with the techniques.
If you can't find any practical advice in the paper, then you should re-read it.
-- this is not a
Why not sell CD-RWs with a song pre-recorded on them (this should work in Canada too.)
.sig
I can see three advantages;
1. You beat the tax (I'm assuming they include an exemption for pre-recorded media like Canada and virtually everybody else.)
2. You become a music producer, so you can collect the tax that your competitors pay.
3. You probably have the number one song on the charts, since people will buy far more than
one copy of a CD-RW- basically free advertising.
You could probably sell the title track for money too -
Coke would pay to have the number one song in Australia be a commercial for their product,
especially if they got to pick the name of that song.
-- this is not a
There are many different kinds of spammers.
A professional spammer is going to get past almost anything you can dream up.
But an amateur spammer can be stopped by simple techniques.
Anything that raises the difficulty of spamming makes it less likely that an amateur spammer will turn pro.
If spamming is limited to the serious professional, then the problem will at least stop growing.
Spamwolf now in beta!
I think most of the claims of "you opted in" are lies designed to minimize complaints.
Of the few that are not out right lies, most of those are the results of deception.
For example, joining a cooking iling list, and automattically being subscribed to a tupperware mailing list too.
You haven't really given consent unless you did so knowlingly and willingly.
-- this is not a
One man's "vigilante" is another man's "concerned citizen".
When a store detective handcuffs a suspected shoplifter that's not the same as shooting one,
but in both cases the detective is a "vigilante".
The issue isn't one of who is doing it, but what they are doing, and is that an appropriate response?
I might accept strikeback as a reasonable response to a worm attack, but only after you've tried and failed to get the owner of the attacking system to stop the worm. And even then, the strikeback would need to be limited to the minimum amount needed to prevent the worm from attacking. Formatting the attackers hard drive is unacceptable. (handcuffs, not bullets.)
It would be a lot better if there was a proper procedure for isolating an attacker, but right now there isn't.
-- this is not a
He didn't say it wasn't dangerous, he said it wasn't as dangerous as the 20+ gallons of gasoline we currently cart around.
If you sever the fule line on a standard automobile, the resulting fireball will put that puny flying gas bottle to shame.
No matter how you slice it, there's always going to be enough energy in the storage tank to move a car 300 miles. The only question is, how quickly will it spontaneously release on it's own.
-- this is not a
Aggregation? You mean like instead of paying for one porn site,
.sig
I pay a single fee to adult check and that let's me view porn on several sites?
-- this is not a
Instead of soundproofing the box,
why not just use a network server, and put the drive(s) in another room.
Cheap taps, (could have one per tv), no drive noise or fan noise.
Any interesting point of view, but one which I notice you failed to substantiate.
While I think the original post does look at only a subset of the entire development issue, the things it does mention are dead on.
More importantly, the subset of things which it does talk about are of major importance.
Having a clearly stated goal that everyone on the team understands is far more important than which programming language you are writing in, or what tools you are using.
As the original post said, there seems to have been no improvement in communicating goals effectively, nor in most of the important areas of software development.
For example, most people agree that well commented code is very important.
When's the last time you heard of a seminar on writing effective comments?
Or a programming language which added extra ways to do commenting?
(As of Perl 5.6, the language that brought you the phrase TIMTOWTDI there still isn't a block comment.)
Yes, there have been some improvements, but we haven't seen any major ones.
I'm sorry, but OOPS isn't significantly better than assembly, CVS isn't significantly better than keeping backups, text editors haven't become significantly better than VI.
-- this is not a
That attitude by SETI was my major reason for not participating in SETI@home.
When they started asking on sci.crypt if there was some way they could guarantee that only their client had performed the calculations,
the question that naturally arose was "why the client, and not the data?".
The answer provided shows that they were not (and still aren't) interested in proving the calculations are correct.
For what it's worth, the solution to the checking problem is actually straight forward.
Force the client to periodically calculate the MD5 hash of all the intermediate results (basically an image of ram) + the last MD5 sum calculated.
Each block computed then returns the result (usually nothing interesting) and the MD5 sum.
-- this is not a
The problem is that the clause "All fair use is not piracy" is most reasonably interpreted as
"The set of all things that are fair use contains both things that are piracy and things that are not."
and not as
"The set of all things that are fair use does not contain any elements that are piracy."
If they really wanted to convey the first idea, they should have said
"No fair use is piracy, nor piracy fair use."
or even better IMO, keep it a simple sound byte;
"piracy is not fair use."
I think they want people to believe there are some cases when fair use is piracy,
but they don't want to just say that because it it's obviously false.
Then again, maybe they're just stupid.
-- this is not a
Two children were walking down the street when they both spotted a cake on the sidewalk.
.sig
The first child said "I saw it first, I should get the whole cake."
The second child said "No, we found it together, we should split it 50/50".
Then an adult happened by and suggested a compromise.
The first child should get 3/4 of the cake, and the second 1/4.
-- this is not a
Why?
No really, why do you need the original source to compile something?
Seems to me that "assembly language" and "byte code" are languages just like p-code or Fortran.
-- this is not a
It sounds a lot like a classic blunder, and not a new encryption at all.
.sig
But assuming for the moment that one discovers a new kind of encryption,
the question becomes why is this new encryption better than the hundreds of existing algorithms.
Rijndael is libre, approved by FIPS, has reference implementations available,
and has been thoroughly checked by several cryptographers.
If the only difference your encryption scheme has is a (possibly flawed) proof of security,
then you have a "me too" product that's competing in saturated market place.
You best bet is probably to go for fame, and then try to turn that fame into a better paying job.
-- this is not a