No one in this thread has really managed to explain why ogg vorbis is necisarry yet. As people have pointed out mp3 (and aac, wma, mp3pro etc) is patented and therefore in order to write an mp3 player or encoder you must pay licencing fees, which are normally charged for each player/encoder that you distribute.
With open source software however, it is impossible to keep track of how many copies have been distributed because anyone is free to modify or redistribute the software. This pretty much makes it illegal to write an open source mp3 player/encoder, since it is impossible to meet the terms of the patent license.
There is an exception for educational and research purposes. However, if a project leader declares in his license that software is for educational purposes only, then he has covered his ass, but the legality problem has now shifted to his users - all the people that use the software for comercial or personal use are now breaking the law. Besides, the reason most of us release our software as open source isn't so people can learn from it, but so it will be usefull to people. We don't want to create a wonderfull collection of software which can only be marvelled at and not put to use. The GPL recognises this and actually prohibits people from further restricting who can use derived works (ie for non-comercial use, non-nuclear use etc).
So the first point is that if we want to follow the law, we don't have a choice but to drop mp3 and make something better. And it really is better to follow the law. One might say "But they have never sued open source developers, you are making a big deal out of nothing". To which I reply "I will trust them not to sue me when I it on paper". You are putting yourself in a bad situation to trust people to play nice. Especially when these people (proprietary software companies and music cartels) are becoming increasingly hostile to open source.
The second point is that it is better for the end user as well. The documents you create and lawfully recieve from others are your own. It is wrong for someone to restrict your access to your files, but this sort of lock-in is exacly what proprietary and patent encumbered file format create. In my opinion, proprietary file formats are a much larger problem than proprietary software.
Uhura thought those tribbles were cute and harmless, until they overran the ship and ate all the grain. What will we eat when this relentlessly pleasant grass overtakes all our crops?
The human race will not end in a dark nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, but rather in a cheerfull, neatly-kept lawn, covering the entire land mass of the planet.
Not if you don't give a damn about your peers, which is very easy to do when you have no personal relationship with any of the people driving around you. Hence the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Road rage is already a big enough problem, do we really want to aggrivate it?
If it repeats something that has been discussed ad infinitum on slashdot, then I would definitely considerate redundant. For example, all beowolf cluster comments are redundant, regardless of whether someone has made one in that particular thread or not. As are any comments advocating that slashdot cache stories, and any other comments raising concerns that have been addressed a hundred times before.
As for this comment, I don't know. I would have just ignored it or moderated it overrated if it was modded up, because it didn't add anything to the conversation. Lazy moderators were probably just browsing with "sort by highest score" turned on and didn't realize that this post came before others.
I remember when our midschool first got some Macintoshs. I was really excited. They were so much more advanced than computers I had used before. I imediatly jumped on them and started exploring and learning as much as I could about the system. And then a week later I was done. There was nothing more I could explore (shame we didn't have HyperCard). It was a black box, and the privilege of getting inside that black box cost hundreds of dollars in compilers and documentation.
So I got bored, played through some of games, and went back to my Apple IIe at home because it had a basic interpretor, hex editor and assembler and there were still things for me to explore. Latter went on to learn more free development QBasic, Java, C and Perl, which was all in DOS and then Linux. It wasn't until this last year that I used a Mac again.
The original Mac was a great machine for people who just wanted to get stuff done - draw pictures and type report. But I didn't want to that, I wanted to create. I wonder how many potential developers were lost to it like I was. I also wonder what effect good or bad that had on the quality and consistency of the programs. The Mac was always praised for how closely the applications stuck to a consistant guideline, and wonder how much of that was due to the fact that the developers had to be part of an exclusive club to participate.
That's not true. As another post pointed out, the author of PGP released his code under very simular conditions, and people did audit it, and having the code out in the open did not make it less secure.
Fun programming is not the only motivator. If that were they case, then why would security experts have exerted all the effort they have so far to investigate these machines and try to convince their legislators that they are not secure enough? That didn't allow for any technical involement at all. This is an opportunities that they have been asking for for some time, and they will take it because they are motivated to maintain our democracy.
This is not a free software project! They didn't release the code to get the benifits of the open source development methodology, or to give back to the community. They released it so that the source could be audited by anyone who cared to do so, and the framework they provided is sufficent for this. Transparency has long been deemed important in the security world and has it's own benifits that still exist even without a distributed development method.
I don't understand what your concern is, because I don't see how setting up a public CVS would improve the quality of the software. People who are interested in audititing this code do not need direct access to CVS and the lack of it will not deter them from doing so. The only way that CVS could help is if developers joined the project for fun or to scratch an itch, and happen to find bugs in the process, but I don't see any reason that this would be the case. Auditing is meticulous work. It is not the type of thing that joe-schmoe open source programmer does for fun. It is the kind of thing that security experts do, and if they are the only ones that are attracted to this code then there is nothing wrong with that.
I think this might have something to do with that decision:
NEC is also developing a recharger for the battery that can be used at home as well as working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
It looks like right now the battery is good for high amp charge/discharge but they still need some work to safely power low amp devices.
From the discussions below, one also gets the impression that this thing needs one hell of a charger to charge it in thiry seconds which would explain why they are still working on a home charger.
But this looks really promising. Other documents mention that organic radical batteries are being researched because they are more enviromentally friendly , and because they could have a better energy density. And now this article says they have quick recharge and near capacitor like discharge capability, and are competitively priced. I don't know how many of these properties this particular battery has, but it would be pretty amazing if it had all of the above. You'd think that they would have mentioned it in the press release though, so I have to assume not.
I agree LabWindows/CVI is much nicer, and Measurement Studio (it's succesor) also looks interesting. I haven't tried it out yet but when the CVI program I was working with got to over 20 thousand lines, I really started wishing I had some of the higher level language features that C++ provides. So next time we start a large project I'll have to look into that.
On the other hand MS Visual C++ (which it is built around) disturbs me. I am one of those Unix people who is used to trusting his compiler. When I first got around windows people who always concidered the possiblity that the compiler was wrong while debugging problems, my immediate reaction was that they were idiots who couldn't code and were blaming the compiler. Then they found places where the VC++ had compiled incorrectly (and not just documented deviations from the standards - really wrong code). Biggest culture shock since I got off the indian reservation and discovered that alchohol wasn't pure evil.
The fairplay system allowed for FAIRPLAY, it is seen as the best DRM scheme online
This line of reasoning drives me crazy. For the last 20 years we have had an open, digital, non-DRM music standard which has succeded wildly. And yet now people are constantly praising FairPlay, because it is the least restrictive of the new DRM schemes. I am supposed to be happy that we have only taken one step back instead of two? To be fair it is worse than a step backwards, because it is introducing restrictions that have never existed before. FairPlay is not the best DRM - no DRM is the best DRM.
But you are right on one thing. What is the point of buying music under terms that you don't agree with? If you don't like DRM, then don't buy DRM'd music. At least now you still have the option. If consumers continue to be so eager to support these new formats, that option won't exist for very long.
I can't beleive how dense these outsourcing people are. You employ 100 people to develop software to ship thousands of jobs overseas. How does that help us?
Because employing 100 americans is better than employing 0.
I really dont understand how companies can layoff people, send their jobs overseas, and expect their profits to rise. They layoff people, their customers... WHO will buy their products? with no one having enough money to buy them.
The people who work for them are only a tiny fraction of their customers! If your reasoning were true then all the manufacturing industries that outsourced to china would have collapsed by now because they had no customers. But there were customers, and just about every dollar that was saved from outsourcing was passed onto them in the form of less expensive goods. They then had more money to spend and in doing so created more jobs (mostly in the service sector - right here in the USA).
That is the emperical facts, not my theory or how I think things would work out, but what really happened. The CEO's of the very first companies to outsource racked in some dough, because they could charge only slightly lower than the domestic companies while having vastly lower costs. But as soon as a few more got set up in China, competition drove the price down to where it should have been. The only exception to this are "fashion" companies where you are paying for a brand instead of a product, in which case the customers are just as much at fault for paying those rediculus prices as the executives are for charging it.
Outsourcing is one way of increasing efficiency and increasing efficency is the only way to improve the standard of living. Automation put people out of jobs and every cried that it would ruin the economy, but at the end of the industrial revolution, americans were better off than they were at the start. And in this case we are actually employing real live humans, not machines, so in addition to the gains in efficiency which we benifit from, there is the added benifit of creating jobs for people less fortunate then ourselves.
Outsourcing (trade really) is not the problem. It is a well understood aspect of capitalism. As a side note, monopolies, cartels, a government who is willing to prop them up, and our continous slide away from capitalism and into corpratism are problems. The outcome of that was exactly what Karl Marx described in Das Kapital.
One of us is completely misunderstanding the other.
Text mode programs don't know about terminal cut and paste. They all think they're running on DEC-compatible terminals, which is what all XTerm implementations emulate. (Actually, they assume whatever terminal you specify via $TERM, but nowadays that's almost always set to "xterm", since hardware terminals are more or less dead.)
Agreed.
They don't see mouse gestures. They just see input. They have no way of knowing whether these inputs come from a keyboard or a clipboard.
But ^C and ^V aren't mouse gestures! They are keyboard commands, and many (if not all) programs that run in the terminal use them. Suppose putty were to intercept ^C and everytime I pressed ^C it would copy the text I had highlighted, instead of passing the ^C over the SSH connection. Then how would I send the SIGINT signal to programs that had hung? How would I use the ^C command in pico (displays current line number)? How would I quit out of emacs (^X^C)? Intercepting ^V is almost as bad because it is the keyboard shortcut for "page down" in just about every terminal program I have ever used.
If putty were to start capturing keyboard input and using it for other purposes, then it would have to provide another method for you to send those key sequences.
PuTTY insists that you use default XWindows conventions for cutting and pasting.
The problem is that they can't use ^C ^V like the rest of Windows apps because the program running inside putty may use those - for example if you are using pine. Therefore any method they choose will be akward when you are habituated to the windows shortcuts. The method they chose is at least familiar to some people and is much better than the DOS terminal's solution to this problem.
Have you seen other programs that handle this better? What approach did they take?
I'm not so sure about that. I mean just look at how many people think that emacs is peverse just because it contains a personal psycologist and a copy of tetris.
I absolutely agree that batteries are not the way to go for long haul. I haven't looked at combusting H2 for that, I'll have to check it out. But for short-run, I still think electric will win out, simply because of economics. Why would you convert electricity into hydrogen, ship it across the country while keeping it cooled (and/or compressed) to liquid form and then burn it, when you can just run your transit train straight off electricity? It doesn't make any economic sense.
And since we can't produce gasoline or methonal ethanol, diesel etc from arbitrary energy sources this sounds pretty good to me. All the choices you list except biodiesel demand that we remain dependent on foreign oil or start mining more of our own.
Methanol and ethanol can both be created from biomass. So there is a (limited) renewable supply of both those fuels - not enough to replace all our oil usage, but some. Both are more efficent than hydrogen fuel cells, although again I don't know how they compare to burning hydrogen, it may be better.
Okay... So this is yet another social network. Except it open sourced. Hell, the blurb tells you how many social networks there already are. Why does this pass as news?
Because, since the source is open, we geeks can modify it work in ways the original author never dreamed. Like implementing a social network of one, or creating a network of AI friends. It would also be perfect for modeling the intricate relationships of the cast of ST:TNG. The possibilities are endless!
Could you do any of that with your proprietary invitation only network? I didn't think so.
Yet, hardware has gone down in price from where it was in the mid 80's while software has gone up.
And it will continue to do so as long as hardware is a commodity market, and software is a monopoly.
Office XP isn't worth $300, and the features added from the last version are certainly not worth as much as they charge for an upgrade. I do not know of a single feature that has been added since Office 97 that I have needed. In fact I would argue that for most institutions, they loose money on every upgrade, not only from cost of purchase, but also from deployment and temperary loss of productivity due to the changes. Why do they upgrade then? Because they would loose even more money if they were not compatible with the rest of the world.
From what I understand biodiesal is already more expensive than diesal, and will become more so when oil prices go up, because fertilizer prices will go up. Also, from back of the envelope calculations, when you look at the amount of land that we would have to use for biomass crops to match our current oil consumption, it suddenly looks much less green, as it will destroy a lot of natural habitats.
So like everything else, biomass fuels (both combustion and fuel cell) are only a partial solution. I think biodiesal will be a godsend to third world countries, who cannot upgrade their infrastructure, but don't know how much of a role it will play otherwise.
If any big media people are out there, take this as indication of a new opportunity for revenue. I too am a 18-34 year old and don't watch TV. I don't have time on weekdays to do that, and given the small amount I would watch, cable just isn't worth it. Furthermore I am not such a fan of most of these shows that I would buy the DVD. Lastly while finding episodes to download can be inconvienient, not to mention illegal, it is the best option right now (but just to clarify, I don't - I have good reason to stay clean right now).
What do I want? I want to drive down to the video store and rent these. I heard "24" was good, I wouldn't mind renting the first season over a couple weekends. I never got to see Dr Who as a kid - I would love to rent those. I have seen a few series in the rentals (like south park) but not that many. Of course blockbuster only has so much floor space, and can only have so many DVD's, so why don't they have one megawarehouse per city that is full of all sorts of hard to find movies and episodes. Advertise it in the normal outlets and work it like inter-library loan.
Of course, another solution would be a legit download service, but since there is no way to inforce the rental concept, it would be purchase only if they were willing to do it at all, and at that price point it wouldn't earn my business. So mega-rentals.
I have programmed mediums to large size systems using LabView, graphical programming language designed for non-CS engineer types to implement Test and Measurement Systems (think automating rackmounted supplies, meters for QA etc). So I thought I'd share my experience with ya'll. For perspective, most the work I had done before was in C or C++, with various toolkits.
The basic unit of code in LabView is called a VI (Virtual Instrament - think function). When creating a VI you have two parts - the Front Panel (interface) and the Block Diagram (implementation). On the front panel you create a bunch of widgets which serve as the input and output to the VI. Each control has it's own data type for example numeric controls, and sliders are int or float, buttons, swithes and LED's are binary, text feilds are string, pulldowns are enum, etc. You have an array controls and cluster (think struct) controls which can contain other controls. You also have a few highlevel controls like a graph for the waveform type, and some abstract types for standard error handling, and references for open instrement objects, ActiveX objects etc. You should also draw an icon for the VI, which will be it's representation when being called from other VIs. So basically every function you write automatically has a user interface, which doubles as it's signature declaration. This comes in handy when doing black box testing.
Now in the Block Diagram these controls show up as input and output terminals, which you wire to other things. For example you can call other VIs, by wiring data to the inputs on the left of the VI icon and the outputs on the right hand side. The types on both ends of the wires must match and the wires are drawn with different colors to indicate their type (derived from whatever their input is - you don't have to explicitly specify wire type).There are no variables (well there are globals, but you don't use them much) data just flows from the input terminals to the output terminals, with the runtime system executing whatever happens to be in the way and taking care of memory management.
You have all the standard flow control constructs. A switch statement is a box with a special terminal that you wire for the conditional, and then a pull down box at the top, that lets you enumerate and switch between all the different cases. You can wire just about any type into the conditional terminal. The simplest example would have a boolean input wire and only one case - true - ie an if statement. You have foreach loops which iterate through all the elements of an array you wire in, and while loops (technically a do-while) which is another box with an internal terminal for the conditional. And so on.
One of the intersting things about this language is that because execution order is determined by data flow, not program text, it is inherently parallel. If you draw two loops on the same diagram, and one isn't dependent on the other for data, then they will operate concurrently.
Okay enough explaining the interesting parts of the language, onto the thrashing. Do not believe what NI (the makers of LabView) tell you about increased productivity. It is true that you save some time due to the fact that this is a high level language, and comes with a nice set of libararies. However, this is offset by the fact that it takes so much longer to draw code then it does to type it. A picture may be worth a thousand words but an icon is worth exactly one. It only takes slighly to wire up a function, or draw a loop than it does to type it. But where the really killer comes in is you now have the added complexity of having to think about how to layout all these elements, and predict how much space you will need for them. If you predict wrong you will be constantly resizing boxes and rerouting wires. As you can imagine refactoring is a huge pain, so you better have a perfect design when you start, and we all know that we never have bugs in the design, right? And we never want to modify our program to do things in the
Re:What the hell?
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PC In An XP Box
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· Score: 3, Informative
You know, that cardboard box that windows comes in when you buy it from a retail store.
The point of the Hydrogen Economy is to provide a generic and highly portable form of energy storage which can be generated from any other energy source.
And it completely fails on that point. Hydrogen is a horrible intermediate form. As a gas or liquid it is extremely light and seeps through everything. As a metal oxide, it's energy density is extremely low compared to oils and even less than batteries. And lastly converting energy into hydrogen form is also extremely inefficient.
And at this point a purely electric car is more effiecent than fuel cell. It already is easily and efficiently distributable, and can be generated by any source. Hydrogen will never reach the efficeincy that electric grids/batteries have.
Of course batteries have diminishing returns for long-haul applications, but even for that hydrogen is not the best solution. What we will likely see is mostly electric for urban transportation while long haul will use fossil fuel, biodiesel, or ethanol/methonal fuel cell, whichever turns out to be most cost efficient in the future.
Does anyone have a free-market solution to this? Yes, simply make the US companies (and government departments) truely responsible (ie their ass is on the line) for protecting this information. If the cost of failure is higher than other savings, then they themselves will implement strict requirements, and will only want to contract out to groups who have proven themselves to be trustworthy.
You are missing his point. He didn't say that the mouse felt slower than a CLI. In fact the entire desire for having a one handed keyboard is driven by the fact that you know the mouse is faster and you don't want to keep taking your hand off of it.
I used to do a lot of CAD work when I was younger. Like most any graphics programs you constantly alternate between choosing your tool and providing direct input with the mouse. The two methods of doing this were either to type the command, or click the correct tool on the tool pallet. Both of these were annoying. In the first you were constantly moving your hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back, while in the second you were constantly moving the mouse out of the drawing area and back. I finally got lazy and learned how to type all of the common commands with one hand. Now I don't know which of the original two was faster but the one handed typing was much better than both of them.
Slashdot Mirror
No one in this thread has really managed to explain why ogg vorbis is necisarry yet. As people have pointed out mp3 (and aac, wma, mp3pro etc) is patented and therefore in order to write an mp3 player or encoder you must pay licencing fees, which are normally charged for each player/encoder that you distribute.
With open source software however, it is impossible to keep track of how many copies have been distributed because anyone is free to modify or redistribute the software. This pretty much makes it illegal to write an open source mp3 player/encoder, since it is impossible to meet the terms of the patent license.
There is an exception for educational and research purposes. However, if a project leader declares in his license that software is for educational purposes only, then he has covered his ass, but the legality problem has now shifted to his users - all the people that use the software for comercial or personal use are now breaking the law. Besides, the reason most of us release our software as open source isn't so people can learn from it, but so it will be usefull to people. We don't want to create a wonderfull collection of software which can only be marvelled at and not put to use. The GPL recognises this and actually prohibits people from further restricting who can use derived works (ie for non-comercial use, non-nuclear use etc).
So the first point is that if we want to follow the law, we don't have a choice but to drop mp3 and make something better. And it really is better to follow the law. One might say "But they have never sued open source developers, you are making a big deal out of nothing". To which I reply "I will trust them not to sue me when I it on paper". You are putting yourself in a bad situation to trust people to play nice. Especially when these people (proprietary software companies and music cartels) are becoming increasingly hostile to open source.
The second point is that it is better for the end user as well. The documents you create and lawfully recieve from others are your own. It is wrong for someone to restrict your access to your files, but this sort of lock-in is exacly what proprietary and patent encumbered file format create. In my opinion, proprietary file formats are a much larger problem than proprietary software.
Uhura thought those tribbles were cute and harmless, until they overran the ship and ate all the grain. What will we eat when this relentlessly pleasant grass overtakes all our crops?
The human race will not end in a dark nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, but rather in a cheerfull, neatly-kept lawn, covering the entire land mass of the planet.
But isn't peer pressure a good motivator?
Not if you don't give a damn about your peers, which is very easy to do when you have no personal relationship with any of the people driving around you. Hence the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Road rage is already a big enough problem, do we really want to aggrivate it?
If it repeats something that has been discussed ad infinitum on slashdot, then I would definitely considerate redundant. For example, all beowolf cluster comments are redundant, regardless of whether someone has made one in that particular thread or not. As are any comments advocating that slashdot cache stories, and any other comments raising concerns that have been addressed a hundred times before.
As for this comment, I don't know. I would have just ignored it or moderated it overrated if it was modded up, because it didn't add anything to the conversation. Lazy moderators were probably just browsing with "sort by highest score" turned on and didn't realize that this post came before others.
I remember when our midschool first got some Macintoshs. I was really excited. They were so much more advanced than computers I had used before. I imediatly jumped on them and started exploring and learning as much as I could about the system. And then a week later I was done. There was nothing more I could explore (shame we didn't have HyperCard). It was a black box, and the privilege of getting inside that black box cost hundreds of dollars in compilers and documentation.
So I got bored, played through some of games, and went back to my Apple IIe at home because it had a basic interpretor, hex editor and assembler and there were still things for me to explore. Latter went on to learn more free development QBasic, Java, C and Perl, which was all in DOS and then Linux. It wasn't until this last year that I used a Mac again.
The original Mac was a great machine for people who just wanted to get stuff done - draw pictures and type report. But I didn't want to that, I wanted to create. I wonder how many potential developers were lost to it like I was. I also wonder what effect good or bad that had on the quality and consistency of the programs. The Mac was always praised for how closely the applications stuck to a consistant guideline, and wonder how much of that was due to the fact that the developers had to be part of an exclusive club to participate.
That's not true. As another post pointed out, the author of PGP released his code under very simular conditions, and people did audit it, and having the code out in the open did not make it less secure.
Fun programming is not the only motivator. If that were they case, then why would security experts have exerted all the effort they have so far to investigate these machines and try to convince their legislators that they are not secure enough? That didn't allow for any technical involement at all. This is an opportunities that they have been asking for for some time, and they will take it because they are motivated to maintain our democracy.
This is not a free software project! They didn't release the code to get the benifits of the open source development methodology, or to give back to the community. They released it so that the source could be audited by anyone who cared to do so, and the framework they provided is sufficent for this. Transparency has long been deemed important in the security world and has it's own benifits that still exist even without a distributed development method.
I don't understand what your concern is, because I don't see how setting up a public CVS would improve the quality of the software. People who are interested in audititing this code do not need direct access to CVS and the lack of it will not deter them from doing so. The only way that CVS could help is if developers joined the project for fun or to scratch an itch, and happen to find bugs in the process, but I don't see any reason that this would be the case. Auditing is meticulous work. It is not the type of thing that joe-schmoe open source programmer does for fun. It is the kind of thing that security experts do, and if they are the only ones that are attracted to this code then there is nothing wrong with that.
I think this might have something to do with that decision:
NEC is also developing a recharger for the battery that can be used at home as well as working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
It looks like right now the battery is good for high amp charge/discharge but they still need some work to safely power low amp devices.
From the discussions below, one also gets the impression that this thing needs one hell of a charger to charge it in thiry seconds which would explain why they are still working on a home charger.
But this looks really promising. Other documents mention that organic radical batteries are being researched because they are more enviromentally friendly , and because they could have a better energy density. And now this article says they have quick recharge and near capacitor like discharge capability, and are competitively priced. I don't know how many of these properties this particular battery has, but it would be pretty amazing if it had all of the above. You'd think that they would have mentioned it in the press release though, so I have to assume not.
I agree LabWindows/CVI is much nicer, and Measurement Studio (it's succesor) also looks interesting. I haven't tried it out yet but when the CVI program I was working with got to over 20 thousand lines, I really started wishing I had some of the higher level language features that C++ provides. So next time we start a large project I'll have to look into that.
On the other hand MS Visual C++ (which it is built around) disturbs me. I am one of those Unix people who is used to trusting his compiler. When I first got around windows people who always concidered the possiblity that the compiler was wrong while debugging problems, my immediate reaction was that they were idiots who couldn't code and were blaming the compiler. Then they found places where the VC++ had compiled incorrectly (and not just documented deviations from the standards - really wrong code). Biggest culture shock since I got off the indian reservation and discovered that alchohol wasn't pure evil.
The fairplay system allowed for FAIRPLAY, it is seen as the best DRM scheme online
This line of reasoning drives me crazy. For the last 20 years we have had an open, digital, non-DRM music standard which has succeded wildly. And yet now people are constantly praising FairPlay, because it is the least restrictive of the new DRM schemes. I am supposed to be happy that we have only taken one step back instead of two? To be fair it is worse than a step backwards, because it is introducing restrictions that have never existed before. FairPlay is not the best DRM - no DRM is the best DRM.
But you are right on one thing. What is the point of buying music under terms that you don't agree with? If you don't like DRM, then don't buy DRM'd music. At least now you still have the option. If consumers continue to be so eager to support these new formats, that option won't exist for very long.
I can't beleive how dense these outsourcing people are. You employ 100 people to develop software to ship thousands of jobs overseas. How does that help us?
Because employing 100 americans is better than employing 0.
I really dont understand how companies can layoff people, send their jobs overseas, and expect their profits to rise. They layoff people, their customers... WHO will buy their products? with no one having enough money to buy them.
The people who work for them are only a tiny fraction of their customers! If your reasoning were true then all the manufacturing industries that outsourced to china would have collapsed by now because they had no customers. But there were customers, and just about every dollar that was saved from outsourcing was passed onto them in the form of less expensive goods. They then had more money to spend and in doing so created more jobs (mostly in the service sector - right here in the USA).
That is the emperical facts, not my theory or how I think things would work out, but what really happened. The CEO's of the very first companies to outsource racked in some dough, because they could charge only slightly lower than the domestic companies while having vastly lower costs. But as soon as a few more got set up in China, competition drove the price down to where it should have been. The only exception to this are "fashion" companies where you are paying for a brand instead of a product, in which case the customers are just as much at fault for paying those rediculus prices as the executives are for charging it.
Outsourcing is one way of increasing efficiency and increasing efficency is the only way to improve the standard of living. Automation put people out of jobs and every cried that it would ruin the economy, but at the end of the industrial revolution, americans were better off than they were at the start. And in this case we are actually employing real live humans, not machines, so in addition to the gains in efficiency which we benifit from, there is the added benifit of creating jobs for people less fortunate then ourselves.
Outsourcing (trade really) is not the problem. It is a well understood aspect of capitalism. As a side note, monopolies, cartels, a government who is willing to prop them up, and our continous slide away from capitalism and into corpratism are problems. The outcome of that was exactly what Karl Marx described in Das Kapital.
One of us is completely misunderstanding the other.
Text mode programs don't know about terminal cut and paste. They all think they're running on DEC-compatible terminals, which is what all XTerm implementations emulate. (Actually, they assume whatever terminal you specify via $TERM, but nowadays that's almost always set to "xterm", since hardware terminals are more or less dead.)
Agreed.
They don't see mouse gestures. They just see input. They have no way of knowing whether these inputs come from a keyboard or a clipboard.
But ^C and ^V aren't mouse gestures! They are keyboard commands, and many (if not all) programs that run in the terminal use them. Suppose putty were to intercept ^C and everytime I pressed ^C it would copy the text I had highlighted, instead of passing the ^C over the SSH connection. Then how would I send the SIGINT signal to programs that had hung? How would I use the ^C command in pico (displays current line number)? How would I quit out of emacs (^X^C)? Intercepting ^V is almost as bad because it is the keyboard shortcut for "page down" in just about every terminal program I have ever used.
If putty were to start capturing keyboard input and using it for other purposes, then it would have to provide another method for you to send those key sequences.
PuTTY insists that you use default XWindows conventions for cutting and pasting.
The problem is that they can't use ^C ^V like the rest of Windows apps because the program running inside putty may use those - for example if you are using pine. Therefore any method they choose will be akward when you are habituated to the windows shortcuts. The method they chose is at least familiar to some people and is much better than the DOS terminal's solution to this problem.
Have you seen other programs that handle this better? What approach did they take?
I'm not so sure about that. I mean just look at how many people think that emacs is peverse just because it contains a personal psycologist and a copy of tetris.
I absolutely agree that batteries are not the way to go for long haul. I haven't looked at combusting H2 for that, I'll have to check it out. But for short-run, I still think electric will win out, simply because of economics. Why would you convert electricity into hydrogen, ship it across the country while keeping it cooled (and/or compressed) to liquid form and then burn it, when you can just run your transit train straight off electricity? It doesn't make any economic sense.
And since we can't produce gasoline or methonal ethanol, diesel etc from arbitrary energy sources this sounds pretty good to me. All the choices you list except biodiesel demand that we remain dependent on foreign oil or start mining more of our own.
Methanol and ethanol can both be created from biomass. So there is a (limited) renewable supply of both those fuels - not enough to replace all our oil usage, but some. Both are more efficent than hydrogen fuel cells, although again I don't know how they compare to burning hydrogen, it may be better.
Okay... So this is yet another social network. Except it open sourced. Hell, the blurb tells you how many social networks there already are. Why does this pass as news?
Because, since the source is open, we geeks can modify it work in ways the original author never dreamed. Like implementing a social network of one, or creating a network of AI friends. It would also be perfect for modeling the intricate relationships of the cast of ST:TNG. The possibilities are endless!
Could you do any of that with your proprietary invitation only network? I didn't think so.
Yet, hardware has gone down in price from where it was in the mid 80's while software has gone up.
And it will continue to do so as long as hardware is a commodity market, and software is a monopoly.
Office XP isn't worth $300, and the features added from the last version are certainly not worth as much as they charge for an upgrade. I do not know of a single feature that has been added since Office 97 that I have needed. In fact I would argue that for most institutions, they loose money on every upgrade, not only from cost of purchase, but also from deployment and temperary loss of productivity due to the changes. Why do they upgrade then? Because they would loose even more money if they were not compatible with the rest of the world.
From what I understand biodiesal is already more expensive than diesal, and will become more so when oil prices go up, because fertilizer prices will go up. Also, from back of the envelope calculations, when you look at the amount of land that we would have to use for biomass crops to match our current oil consumption, it suddenly looks much less green, as it will destroy a lot of natural habitats.
So like everything else, biomass fuels (both combustion and fuel cell) are only a partial solution. I think biodiesal will be a godsend to third world countries, who cannot upgrade their infrastructure, but don't know how much of a role it will play otherwise.
If any big media people are out there, take this as indication of a new opportunity for revenue. I too am a 18-34 year old and don't watch TV. I don't have time on weekdays to do that, and given the small amount I would watch, cable just isn't worth it. Furthermore I am not such a fan of most of these shows that I would buy the DVD. Lastly while finding episodes to download can be inconvienient, not to mention illegal, it is the best option right now (but just to clarify, I don't - I have good reason to stay clean right now).
What do I want? I want to drive down to the video store and rent these. I heard "24" was good, I wouldn't mind renting the first season over a couple weekends. I never got to see Dr Who as a kid - I would love to rent those. I have seen a few series in the rentals (like south park) but not that many. Of course blockbuster only has so much floor space, and can only have so many DVD's, so why don't they have one megawarehouse per city that is full of all sorts of hard to find movies and episodes. Advertise it in the normal outlets and work it like inter-library loan.
Of course, another solution would be a legit download service, but since there is no way to inforce the rental concept, it would be purchase only if they were willing to do it at all, and at that price point it wouldn't earn my business. So mega-rentals.
I have programmed mediums to large size systems using LabView, graphical programming language designed for non-CS engineer types to implement Test and Measurement Systems (think automating rackmounted supplies, meters for QA etc). So I thought I'd share my experience with ya'll. For perspective, most the work I had done before was in C or C++, with various toolkits.
The basic unit of code in LabView is called a VI (Virtual Instrament - think function). When creating a VI you have two parts - the Front Panel (interface) and the Block Diagram (implementation). On the front panel you create a bunch of widgets which serve as the input and output to the VI. Each control has it's own data type for example numeric controls, and sliders are int or float, buttons, swithes and LED's are binary, text feilds are string, pulldowns are enum, etc. You have an array controls and cluster (think struct) controls which can contain other controls. You also have a few highlevel controls like a graph for the waveform type, and some abstract types for standard error handling, and references for open instrement objects, ActiveX objects etc. You should also draw an icon for the VI, which will be it's representation when being called from other VIs. So basically every function you write automatically has a user interface, which doubles as it's signature declaration. This comes in handy when doing black box testing.
Now in the Block Diagram these controls show up as input and output terminals, which you wire to other things. For example you can call other VIs, by wiring data to the inputs on the left of the VI icon and the outputs on the right hand side. The types on both ends of the wires must match and the wires are drawn with different colors to indicate their type (derived from whatever their input is - you don't have to explicitly specify wire type).There are no variables (well there are globals, but you don't use them much) data just flows from the input terminals to the output terminals, with the runtime system executing whatever happens to be in the way and taking care of memory management.
You have all the standard flow control constructs. A switch statement is a box with a special terminal that you wire for the conditional, and then a pull down box at the top, that lets you enumerate and switch between all the different cases. You can wire just about any type into the conditional terminal. The simplest example would have a boolean input wire and only one case - true - ie an if statement. You have foreach loops which iterate through all the elements of an array you wire in, and while loops (technically a do-while) which is another box with an internal terminal for the conditional. And so on.
One of the intersting things about this language is that because execution order is determined by data flow, not program text, it is inherently parallel. If you draw two loops on the same diagram, and one isn't dependent on the other for data, then they will operate concurrently.
Okay enough explaining the interesting parts of the language, onto the thrashing. Do not believe what NI (the makers of LabView) tell you about increased productivity. It is true that you save some time due to the fact that this is a high level language, and comes with a nice set of libararies. However, this is offset by the fact that it takes so much longer to draw code then it does to type it. A picture may be worth a thousand words but an icon is worth exactly one. It only takes slighly to wire up a function, or draw a loop than it does to type it. But where the really killer comes in is you now have the added complexity of having to think about how to layout all these elements, and predict how much space you will need for them. If you predict wrong you will be constantly resizing boxes and rerouting wires. As you can imagine refactoring is a huge pain, so you better have a perfect design when you start, and we all know that we never have bugs in the design, right? And we never want to modify our program to do things in the
You know, that cardboard box that windows comes in when you buy it from a retail store.
The point of the Hydrogen Economy is to provide a generic and highly portable form of energy storage which can be generated from any other energy source.
And it completely fails on that point. Hydrogen is a horrible intermediate form. As a gas or liquid it is extremely light and seeps through everything. As a metal oxide, it's energy density is extremely low compared to oils and even less than batteries. And lastly converting energy into hydrogen form is also extremely inefficient.
And at this point a purely electric car is more effiecent than fuel cell. It already is easily and efficiently distributable, and can be generated by any source. Hydrogen will never reach the efficeincy that electric grids/batteries have.
Of course batteries have diminishing returns for long-haul applications, but even for that hydrogen is not the best solution. What we will likely see is mostly electric for urban transportation while long haul will use fossil fuel, biodiesel, or ethanol/methonal fuel cell, whichever turns out to be most cost efficient in the future.
Does anyone have a free-market solution to this?
Yes, simply make the US companies (and government departments) truely responsible (ie their ass is on the line) for protecting this information. If the cost of failure is higher than other savings, then they themselves will implement strict requirements, and will only want to contract out to groups who have proven themselves to be trustworthy.
You are missing his point. He didn't say that the mouse felt slower than a CLI. In fact the entire desire for having a one handed keyboard is driven by the fact that you know the mouse is faster and you don't want to keep taking your hand off of it.
I used to do a lot of CAD work when I was younger. Like most any graphics programs you constantly alternate between choosing your tool and providing direct input with the mouse. The two methods of doing this were either to type the command, or click the correct tool on the tool pallet. Both of these were annoying. In the first you were constantly moving your hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back, while in the second you were constantly moving the mouse out of the drawing area and back. I finally got lazy and learned how to type all of the common commands with one hand. Now I don't know which of the original two was faster but the one handed typing was much better than both of them.
So we can learn how the universe really works, and make an improved model?