I would love to read this article about how my privacy is being taken away. But first I'll need to tell the NY Times my gender, age, zip code, income, and occupation. So what's worse, giving up privacy in the name of security, or giving up privacy to read about giving up privacy in the name of security?
You know, it's funny that Apple did this, but it's been done before. Install aalib and mplayer, then try "mplayer -vo aa" sometime. It would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of the two to see which one produces more convincing ASCII art.
Verilog and VHDL are both excellent hardware description languages. The syntax may seem obtuse at first because you are expecting them to be like programming languages. In a programming language, you describe a set of mostly sequential operations. In a hardware description language, you describe several blocks of hardware all operating in parallel. Obviously the syntax of an HDL is going to need to be a little different from your average programming language.
If you use either VHDL or Verilog, you will have plenty of choices for compilers, simulators, and synthesis tools. There are many books available that will help you learn these two languages. You will have access to excellent usenet communities at comp.lang.verilog and comp.lang.vhdl. If you only learn JHDL, you simply won't have so many choices.
I recommend learning one of the big two first. I think you will find that both Verilog and VHDL will meet your needs. I can't tell you which to choose, since I don't want to start a VHDL vs Verilog flame war here. I recommend checking out some of the VHDL and Verilog models at http://www.opencores.org and deciding for yourself which syntax you prefer.
I've got an even better one. I was the TA for an embedded systems course and someone turned in a program that I had written, except with the comments changed. Normally I was careful about where I kept my solutions, but I guess I left that one in a public directory. It's one thing to cheat off of another student and hope the instructor doesn't notice. But cheating off the instructor! I wonder how they made it all the way to a third year course with no common sense.
While clockless digital circuit design is not new, it's not as well analyzed as conventional synchronous circuit design. There are still many improvements to be made to this design technique. It will also take time before it will be generally accepted by the industry.
I saw a presentation about Null Convention Logic (NCL) just last week. It seems that there are companies out there already manufacturing chips using this particular asynchronous design technique. Overall, the advantages don't seem to be great enough to make a big impact on the computer industry, but with active research in this area we might see something within the next few years.
There is some French jerk who copyrighted the smiley face several years ago. His copyright has been ignored in the US, so Wal-Mart and others continue to use smiley faces in advertising and on merchandise. But I understand that it's hard to find the ubiquitous smiley face in Europe, since he demands royalties to any European company that want to use "his" logo.
I work for a college radio station that also broadcasts on the Internet, so I've been watching this area closely. Radio stations already pay royalties to the songwriters, mostly through the two organizations ASCAP and BMI. But they do not have to pay royalties to the performers of the music, whose copyright is usually held by a record label. Live broadcast is considered a performance itself, so the people who performed on the recording don't get paid for our live "performance" of their music.
Now, with Internet broadcast we are still required to pay fees to the songwriters through ASCAP and BMI. But what is at dispute here is whether we now have to pay fees to the record labels as well. Of course, the RIAA says we should pay. They are trying desparately to convince Congress that Internet broadcast is not the same as airwave broadcast, since it is essentially "copying" digital data from one computer to another. NAB, the national association of broadcasters, is the most outspoken group against this legislation, unsurprisingly. Their stance is that Internet radio should fall under the same laws as broadcast radio.
The issue is not as black and white as both sides claim. What if I set up a server on the Internet to stream my favorite mp3's to all my friends, where they can save them on their computers. If I claim I am just an "Internet radio" station, then I have used a loophole to get around my blatant copyright infringement. I don't have a good answer for what should be done in cases like that. Comments?
I have to disagree. I have never used Gnome much, but I have used KDE and Windows enough to see that KDE has made progress on their own, without the help of Windows.
They did start out by borrowing the most intelligent UI elements from various existing GUIs (devices on the desktop ala MacOS desktop, heirarchical program selection ala Windows Start menu). But they added many of their own UI improvements.
KDE had total web browser integration back in 1.0. The file manager WAS the web browser. Wanna download that file to a particular directory? Just drag the hyperlink into the appropriate folder. I have heard that IE is finally doing this sort of thing, but KDE certainly preceded it.
The previously mentioned thumbnail previews of image files was in KDE before any Microsoft product.
Drag-and-drop is implemented intelligently in KDE. Drag something to a folder or to the desktop, and you are presented with a Move/Copy/Link option EVERY TIME. That's so beautiful I could cry. I hate guessing when Windows wants to move, copy, or make a shortcut to a file.
Right click on a file and you are presented with an "open with" option BY DEFAULT. You can get this in Windows, but only with an annoying shift-right click.
Click on a program or document in the taskbar to minimize/restore it. Yep, KDE had it before Windows.
KDiskNavigator showed up around 1.1 or 1.2. This offered a Start Menu-style approach to browsing your filesystem. Very quick way to find something if you dislike the command line. Windows doesn't have this.
KDE can use smart window placement to keep your windows from getting too cluttered on your screen. As far as I know, Windows doesn't have this.
Add to this all the traditional advantages of using any X-Windows window manager (more configurability, multiple desktops) and you can see that KDE hasn't been playing catch-up to Microsoft for a long time.
When my girlfriend first saw KDE 1.2, she was so excited, she wanted to know how she could get it onto her Windows laptop.:)
It doesn't matter whether it's emulation or not. It still doesn't seem very innovative to me. Many companies use emulation to port their programs to other OSes. Corel Office 2000 for Linux is an example that many Slashdot readers will be familiar with. Other software I use on Solaris is ported a similar way from a certain Microsoft OS. Is it supposed to be innovative that they applied this concept to games?
> The best part is that utf-8 requires no change. All ascii programs can read utf-8 and all utf-8 programs can read ascii.
I'm confused. ASCII is 7 bit, right? If UTF-8 is eight bit then I don't see how the two are always interchangeable, unless UTF-8 always zeroes the high bit. If that's the case, why not UTF-7?
Does anyone else find it ironic that you have to register your email address, country, zip code, age, sex, and household income before you can read an article about privacy abuses?
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to read this article about how my privacy is being taken away. But first I'll need to tell the NY Times my gender, age, zip code, income, and occupation. So what's worse, giving up privacy in the name of security, or giving up privacy to read about giving up privacy in the name of security?
You know, it's funny that Apple did this, but it's been done before. Install aalib and mplayer, then try "mplayer -vo aa" sometime. It would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of the two to see which one produces more convincing ASCII art.
Verilog and VHDL are both excellent hardware description languages. The syntax may seem obtuse at first because you are expecting them to be like programming languages. In a programming language, you describe a set of mostly sequential operations. In a hardware description language, you describe several blocks of hardware all operating in parallel. Obviously the syntax of an HDL is going to need to be a little different from your average programming language.
If you use either VHDL or Verilog, you will have plenty of choices for compilers, simulators, and synthesis tools. There are many books available that will help you learn these two languages. You will have access to excellent usenet communities at comp.lang.verilog and comp.lang.vhdl. If you only learn JHDL, you simply won't have so many choices.
I recommend learning one of the big two first. I think you will find that both Verilog and VHDL will meet your needs. I can't tell you which to choose, since I don't want to start a VHDL vs Verilog flame war here. I recommend checking out some of the VHDL and Verilog models at http://www.opencores.org and deciding for yourself which syntax you prefer.
I've got an even better one. I was the TA for an embedded systems course and someone turned in a program that I had written, except with the comments changed. Normally I was careful about where I kept my solutions, but I guess I left that one in a public directory. It's one thing to cheat off of another student and hope the instructor doesn't notice. But cheating off the instructor! I wonder how they made it all the way to a third year course with no common sense.
While clockless digital circuit design is not new, it's not as well analyzed as conventional synchronous circuit design. There are still many improvements to be made to this design technique. It will also take time before it will be generally accepted by the industry.
I saw a presentation about Null Convention Logic (NCL) just last week. It seems that there are companies out there already manufacturing chips using this particular asynchronous design technique. Overall, the advantages don't seem to be great enough to make a big impact on the computer industry, but with active research in this area we might see something within the next few years.
There is some French jerk who copyrighted the smiley face several years ago. His copyright has been ignored in the US, so Wal-Mart and others continue to use smiley faces in advertising and on merchandise. But I understand that it's hard to find the ubiquitous smiley face in Europe, since he demands royalties to any European company that want to use "his" logo.
I work for a college radio station that also broadcasts on the Internet, so I've been watching this area closely. Radio stations already pay royalties to the songwriters, mostly through the two organizations ASCAP and BMI. But they do not have to pay royalties to the performers of the music, whose copyright is usually held by a record label. Live broadcast is considered a performance itself, so the people who performed on the recording don't get paid for our live "performance" of their music.
Now, with Internet broadcast we are still required to pay fees to the songwriters through ASCAP and BMI. But what is at dispute here is whether we now have to pay fees to the record labels as well. Of course, the RIAA says we should pay. They are trying desparately to convince Congress that Internet broadcast is not the same as airwave broadcast, since it is essentially "copying" digital data from one computer to another. NAB, the national association of broadcasters, is the most outspoken group against this legislation, unsurprisingly. Their stance is that Internet radio should fall under the same laws as broadcast radio.
The issue is not as black and white as both sides claim. What if I set up a server on the Internet to stream my favorite mp3's to all my friends, where they can save them on their computers. If I claim I am just an "Internet radio" station, then I have used a loophole to get around my blatant copyright infringement. I don't have a good answer for what should be done in cases like that. Comments?
I have to disagree. I have never used Gnome much, but I have used KDE and Windows enough to see that KDE has made progress on their own, without the help of Windows.
:)
They did start out by borrowing the most intelligent UI elements from various existing GUIs (devices on the desktop ala MacOS desktop, heirarchical program selection ala Windows Start menu). But they added many of their own UI improvements.
KDE had total web browser integration back in 1.0. The file manager WAS the web browser. Wanna download that file to a particular directory? Just drag the hyperlink into the appropriate folder. I have heard that IE is finally doing this sort of thing, but KDE certainly preceded it.
The previously mentioned thumbnail previews of image files was in KDE before any Microsoft product.
Drag-and-drop is implemented intelligently in KDE. Drag something to a folder or to the desktop, and you are presented with a Move/Copy/Link option EVERY TIME. That's so beautiful I could cry. I hate guessing when Windows wants to move, copy, or make a shortcut to a file.
Right click on a file and you are presented with an "open with" option BY DEFAULT. You can get this in Windows, but only with an annoying shift-right click.
Click on a program or document in the taskbar to minimize/restore it. Yep, KDE had it before Windows.
KDiskNavigator showed up around 1.1 or 1.2. This offered a Start Menu-style approach to browsing your filesystem. Very quick way to find something if you dislike the command line. Windows doesn't have this.
KDE can use smart window placement to keep your windows from getting too cluttered on your screen. As far as I know, Windows doesn't have this.
Add to this all the traditional advantages of using any X-Windows window manager (more configurability, multiple desktops) and you can see that KDE hasn't been playing catch-up to Microsoft for a long time.
When my girlfriend first saw KDE 1.2, she was so excited, she wanted to know how she could get it onto her Windows laptop.
It doesn't matter whether it's emulation or not. It still doesn't seem very innovative to me. Many companies use emulation to port their programs to other OSes. Corel Office 2000 for Linux is an example that many Slashdot readers will be familiar with. Other software I use on Solaris is ported a similar way from a certain Microsoft OS. Is it supposed to be innovative that they applied this concept to games?
> The best part is that utf-8 requires no change. All ascii programs can read utf-8 and all utf-8 programs can read ascii.
I'm confused. ASCII is 7 bit, right? If UTF-8 is eight bit then I don't see how the two are always interchangeable, unless UTF-8 always zeroes the high bit. If that's the case, why not UTF-7?
Does anyone else find it ironic that you have to register your email address, country, zip code, age, sex, and household income before you can read an article about privacy abuses?