What is utterly mind boggling about this announcement is that it is being applied uniformly across a huge spectrum of publications with wildly different readerships and usage patterns. I understand the desire and need to find the ways to monetize news investigation, reporting, analysis and gossip, and concede that they way things are being done now may not be the best. But does Murdoch really believe that what works for Wall Street Journal the will work for The Sun?
Seriously. The "blogosphere" may not create much usefull content in and of itself but it is an increadable tool for redirecting visitors to content and for providing discussion on that content. If you setup a paywall, you block yourself out of that market and the ad revenue it generates. For some publications it probably won't matter. For those that thrive on discussion and gossip it will matter dearly. If Murdoch can't understand the difference then he needs to retire.
There was no codec that was suitable to all the needs of the major browser developers. Having to pay royalties was an impossibility for Mozilla and Opera, and thus made H.264 (or any of the official MPEG codecs) unsuitable for them. Apple's concern about submarine patents on Theora technology was legitimate, as was the lack of hardware implementation (although that would've been resolved in time). Furthermore, Google's concerns about quality were legitimate if the goal is to move things forward beyond the crap that YouTube currently serves, rather than being content to be almost as good as the worst H.264 implementation available (the Flash implementation). Dirac is in an even worse position, and it processing requirements would be very undesirable for handheld devices.
So all but one (Theora) were absolutely not suitable for implementation by the browsers, and even that one was questionable. I don't know if VP8 will be any better - it's technology seems to be much more similar to the modern MPEG codecs than Theora, which makes me think that On2 is probably cross-licensing patents which Google will not be able to open up, but I may be wrong.
How would it help? Google is pretty much entirely dependent on other software to get video content to the user, whether it is Flash, video plugins or the browser alone. Owning the codec means nothing if they can't convince the browsers to implement it. As things stand now VP8 is in an even worse position to be adopted by browsers than either H.264 or Theora.
If they do open it up, with a royalty-free transferable patent license, then it has a pretty good chance. Mozilla's and Opera's problem with H.264 was that it was impossible for them to pay patent licenses for each copy they distributed. An opened up VP8 would not have that problem. One of Apple's problem with Theora is that they weren't confident that there were no patent liabilities. Since On2 has been commercially licensing it's codecs for a while now, and no-one else has sued for patent royalties, it is on a bit firmer ground than Theora in that regard. Apple's other problem was that there weren't any hardware implementations of Theora. AFAIK, VP8 doesn't either, although there were(are?) VP6 decoders so maybe On2 has some products in development that they haven't announced yet.
My biggest question is whether On2 holds all the patents for the VP* codecs or whether they are cross-licensing various patents from other folks that apply to many other codecs like VC-1 and H.264. If that is the case then Google will have a very difficult time opening up the On2 codecs any more than the various MPEG codecs already are.
Ah yes. About 1 in 5 times my laptop wouldn't suspend when I closed the lid, and I'd get home to see the "Your computer crashed because it overheated in your laptop bag" boot message. I've given up on ever getting suspend to work reliably in Windows or Linux.
Yes. Rebooting after installing an update will be faster now. Corporate always seems to push out those mandatory patches at the most inopportune times.
Yeah, it beat the 80's Horror Film Peak, but there were plenty before that. Ridley himself pitched the movie as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Space" when trying to sign on people who were initially not enthused about doing a SciFi film.
But wasn't "just" a horror movie. It was an awesome horror movie.
That's not the same thing. For starters it only works on a line by line basis, and changes to a line in the beginning of a paragraph don't affect the formatting of lines further down in the paragraph. You still have to manually invoke M-q to refill the paragraph in that situation.
Furthermore it inserts actual newline characters at the column limit, which is really annoying when editing or displaying the document in other applications.
No, X-Windows was installed as SUID root. SUID is a file flag in the standard unix permision system that indicates that when anyone (who has permission) executes a file, the user ID for the process is set to that of the file owner, in this case root. So, basically you have been running the X server as root and you didn't know it.
Setting the SUID flag of root-owned files is strongly frowned upon. If you are doing this you are basically stating that you trust that application as much as you trust the kernel, because if there are any exploitable bugs in it, you've just given all your users complete root access. But for X there was no option till now because it handled it's own hardware access.
I just bought a three button mouse, put in on the floor, and mapped Ctrl, Meta, and Alt to them. Works great for Emacs, although my doctor said I'm the first case of Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome he has ever seen.
Does anyone know QtJambi is doing? I heard that Nokia has stopped maintaining it since purchasing trolltech. Is that a big deal, or was it largely community supported to begin with?
You are an idiot who can't even RTFS. This regulation would hurt the small sustainable ranchers who are teetering on the edge of being able to compete, while benefiting the large-scale industry that you abhor.
This is part of the USB spec. Originally USB hosts were only required to provide a certain amount of current to devices. Later they decided to increase this, but to provide backwards compatibility the device has to ask if the host is capable of sourcing that much current before it starts drawing it.
Yup, a local government will have a much harder time shutting down satellite and radio (HAM, CB, walkie-talkie) communications, and they will be infinitely more reliable than mesh networking.
First off, for mesh networking to work at all, you would need a large number of people that have the phones - a few people buying Freedom Handsets isn't going to cut it. Even then, your signal gets to the edge of down, and where does it go from there? Assuming you can link into the network, then why not just get a network enabled device to begin with and forget this mesh crap? Plus mesh networking will increase power requirements and unpredictability, requiring as big of a battery as a satellite phone.
If the buildings on a property is condemned, and the owner has had sufficient time to repair or rebuild, then I see no problem with the government tearing it down on their own. If entire blocks are like this then I see no reason why the government should spend money on roads, sidewalks or streetlamps. Rezone it and tear those down as well, save for a few major roads, and a few minor ones (basically extended driveways now) which can become gravel.
The people would still own the land, but wouldn't have to pay as high of property tax since it was undeveloped land and possibly out of city limits (and thus only responsible for county taxes). They would be able to sell it or redevelop if the city expands again in their lifetime. The few folks that are left living there will now have a house surrounded by natural vegetation, causing their property value to increase compared to when it was surrounded by an ex-urban junkyard.
Eminent domain is unnecessary, and doesn't need to be factored into the taxpayer cost. Instead things like yearly maintenance, and negative image on the city will need to be weighted against the one-time cost of cleanup.
The town where I grew up was at least half dirt and gravel roads. The average speed that people drove was probably 20-30 mph. Of course out here in the desert hard-packed clay made for a much better road than gravel. The worst thing they ever did to the post-office road was to grade and gavel it. The frequency of maintenance required quadrupled.
People who think the one-button mouse was a mistake seem to be unaware of what mice were like before Apple introduced the Macintosh. For example consider the Xerox Alto, which had three mouse buttons. Actions usually required multiple clicks with different buttons. Copying an object could be achieved by clicking it with the Red Button to select it and then clicking again with another (Yellow?) button to paste it. Clicking with the Blue button would delete an object. But clicking with the Red button then the Blue button would do something else, so you had to remember if you'd clicked or nor or you could screw things up.
This is off of memory of a manual that I stumbled upon in the library years ago, the details may be off. I wish I could find a copy of it to give better examples, but the point is it was a mess. You had to use all three buttons just to do the same tasks that we can do today using just the first.
The Macintosh team combined click-and-drag, click and double click in a way that enabled you to do all these things with a single mouse button, and more "intuitively" to boot. It was a genuine step forward in GUI development. In fact when Windows was released, it copied the Macintosh behavior for the left mouse button exactly. The second and third buttons were used sparingly and inconstantly at first and didn't add much to the experience - the main reason that most PC mice had three buttons at that time was for the DOS based CAD programs that needed them.
It wasn't until Windows 95 was released that they had completely standardized on using the right mouse button for context menus, and that too was a genuine step forward. And in fact all of the UI folks that worked on the original Mac agree on this. They've also since realized that if they had used two buttons for the mouse - one solely for selection and another for acting on objects, the could have avoided many of the problems involved with drag-and-drop text, and accidentally moving objects when adding to the selection. Unfortunately, momentum makes it too difficult to change at this point in the game.
The continued use of a one-button mouse is a mistake, but it's creation was not.
Dell should just save us the trouble and put the information here www.dell.com/coupons.
But you said it yourself, you don't care if you have to scour for that information. If they made the information too easily available, then those that do care about having to waste time looking for coupons, and normally wouldn't bother, would start getting the discounts as well and Dell would not make as much money. And you wouldn't have the satisfaction of finding a great hidden deal:)
No it wouldn't. Most legitimate sites don't do anything exotic with the visited property, they just change color or font properties. Even those that do use the background property or some other property that accepts urls will have a single url that applies to all or a large class of visited links. The only sites that would generate a lot of bandwidth are the tiny minority that intentionally have a different visited resource for each link on their site. They have an interest in keeping this bandwith low themselves and will make those resources to be as small as possible. Hell, the CSS dictating all these resources might even be as large as the resources themselves. Honestly, this is a complete non-issue compared to the bandwidth problems caused by plain old bad site design.
I absolutely agree with this principle. However "digital rights" are a useful thing to think about when composing your statements of fundamental rights. Sometimes technology changes things in a way that wasn't predicted, which may cause the particular wording of your constitution to not really cover issues that it should.
For example, the 4th Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This wording is quite specific to physical objects, and the extensions of these rights (or not) to data and communications has been very patchy, and often based on whichever analogy is most convenient to those in power. The existence and increasing scope of supposedly legal warrantless wiretapping is a strong reminder of this.
There are absolutely better ways to word this to be more technology agnostic. It is important when developing this wording to enumerate all the specific cases you can think of, and then as you write the generic wording go back and make sure that it at least covers the currently known and easily foreseeable cases.
You're right. They haven't told Microsoft what is acceptable, and in the meanwhile Microsoft has a product to ship. They make a decision that ought to satisfy any reasonable logical human being.
But the EC says we're still going to pursue this as an antitrust case even though there is no longer any antitrust concern. We don't like your solution so we are going to come up with our own and mandate you use it even though the solution you put forth breaks no laws.
Furthermore, all of the information coming out of the EC's office for the last several months makes it very clear that what they intend to do is to force Microsoft to either bundle or provide a splash screen dialog to download alternate browsers. It isn't the least bit presumptuous to assume that the EC is going to do exactly what it has been threatening to do.
Good. Now can we return back to having site-specific badges that are appropriate for the level of work being done at different federal facilities? Or we can use this new common ID that creates a single point of failure in the creation of badges, makes it easier to wander unescorted in facilities that you don't have access to, and adds significant cost and delay in getting people badged. Either way.
There are anti-hacker laws, but they generally read along the lines of
Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access... Whoever intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer... Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access
(From 18.USC 1030, the law Lori Drew was charged with)
Darren Berkovitz gave explicit permission when he announced this contest, so they had authorization to attempt to gain access by any means allowed by the rules. The only restrictions given were that you had to register first, and you couldn't get help from a StrongWebmail employee.
The rest of the rules looked innocuous to me. Most of it was standard broiler-plate which is required by law for any contest - a cereal box prize will have the same language. The last paragraph of the third section was all just Disclaimers of Liabilities - we aren't responsible for network congestion if someone tries to DoS us to win the prize, we aren't responsible if you download some script-kiddy software to use in the competition and it screws up your computer, etc.
If you did clearly break the rules that you could be charged under 18.USC 1030 as the access was unauthorized, knowing (you agreed to the rules), and fraudulent (you were attempting to cheat them out of prize money), and crossed state lines. But they weren't tricky rules to follow.
I definitely agree that the Catholic Church's stand on this issue is far more self-consistant and respectable than that of other religious groups that oppose stem cell research. Which is true of their stand on most issues involving the intersection of science and religion.
Slashdot Mirror
What is utterly mind boggling about this announcement is that it is being applied uniformly across a huge spectrum of publications with wildly different readerships and usage patterns. I understand the desire and need to find the ways to monetize news investigation, reporting, analysis and gossip, and concede that they way things are being done now may not be the best. But does Murdoch really believe that what works for Wall Street Journal the will work for The Sun?
Seriously. The "blogosphere" may not create much usefull content in and of itself but it is an increadable tool for redirecting visitors to content and for providing discussion on that content. If you setup a paywall, you block yourself out of that market and the ad revenue it generates. For some publications it probably won't matter. For those that thrive on discussion and gossip it will matter dearly. If Murdoch can't understand the difference then he needs to retire.
There was no codec that was suitable to all the needs of the major browser developers. Having to pay royalties was an impossibility for Mozilla and Opera, and thus made H.264 (or any of the official MPEG codecs) unsuitable for them. Apple's concern about submarine patents on Theora technology was legitimate, as was the lack of hardware implementation (although that would've been resolved in time). Furthermore, Google's concerns about quality were legitimate if the goal is to move things forward beyond the crap that YouTube currently serves, rather than being content to be almost as good as the worst H.264 implementation available (the Flash implementation). Dirac is in an even worse position, and it processing requirements would be very undesirable for handheld devices.
So all but one (Theora) were absolutely not suitable for implementation by the browsers, and even that one was questionable. I don't know if VP8 will be any better - it's technology seems to be much more similar to the modern MPEG codecs than Theora, which makes me think that On2 is probably cross-licensing patents which Google will not be able to open up, but I may be wrong.
Owning VP7 can't hurt.
How would it help? Google is pretty much entirely dependent on other software to get video content to the user, whether it is Flash, video plugins or the browser alone. Owning the codec means nothing if they can't convince the browsers to implement it. As things stand now VP8 is in an even worse position to be adopted by browsers than either H.264 or Theora.
If they do open it up, with a royalty-free transferable patent license, then it has a pretty good chance. Mozilla's and Opera's problem with H.264 was that it was impossible for them to pay patent licenses for each copy they distributed. An opened up VP8 would not have that problem. One of Apple's problem with Theora is that they weren't confident that there were no patent liabilities. Since On2 has been commercially licensing it's codecs for a while now, and no-one else has sued for patent royalties, it is on a bit firmer ground than Theora in that regard. Apple's other problem was that there weren't any hardware implementations of Theora. AFAIK, VP8 doesn't either, although there were(are?) VP6 decoders so maybe On2 has some products in development that they haven't announced yet.
My biggest question is whether On2 holds all the patents for the VP* codecs or whether they are cross-licensing various patents from other folks that apply to many other codecs like VC-1 and H.264. If that is the case then Google will have a very difficult time opening up the On2 codecs any more than the various MPEG codecs already are.
Ah yes. About 1 in 5 times my laptop wouldn't suspend when I closed the lid, and I'd get home to see the "Your computer crashed because it overheated in your laptop bag" boot message. I've given up on ever getting suspend to work reliably in Windows or Linux.
Was that ever a problem?
Yes. Rebooting after installing an update will be faster now. Corporate always seems to push out those mandatory patches at the most inopportune times.
Yeah, it beat the 80's Horror Film Peak, but there were plenty before that. Ridley himself pitched the movie as "Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Space" when trying to sign on people who were initially not enthused about doing a SciFi film.
But wasn't "just" a horror movie. It was an awesome horror movie.
Yeah, EVE is the largest all-composite plane ever built. Not the first.
That's not the same thing. For
starters it only works on a line
by line basis, and changes to a
line in the beginning of a
paragraph don't affect the
formatting of lines further
down in the paragraph. You still
have to manually invoke M-q to
refill the paragraph in that
situation.
Furthermore it inserts actual
newline characters at the column
limit, which is really annoying
when editing or displaying the
document in other applications.
No, X-Windows was installed as SUID root. SUID is a file flag in the standard unix permision system that indicates that when anyone (who has permission) executes a file, the user ID for the process is set to that of the file owner, in this case root. So, basically you have been running the X server as root and you didn't know it.
Setting the SUID flag of root-owned files is strongly frowned upon. If you are doing this you are basically stating that you trust that application as much as you trust the kernel, because if there are any exploitable bugs in it, you've just given all your users complete root access. But for X there was no option till now because it handled it's own hardware access.
I just bought a three button mouse, put in on the floor, and mapped Ctrl, Meta, and Alt to them. Works great for Emacs, although my doctor said I'm the first case of Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome he has ever seen.
Does anyone know QtJambi is doing? I heard that Nokia has stopped maintaining it since purchasing trolltech. Is that a big deal, or was it largely community supported to begin with?
You're off by several orders of magnitude there, although it's funny that both answers were the same to the first two digits.
9.4605x10^12 km is the distance that light travels in a year (in a vacuum).
You are an idiot who can't even RTFS. This regulation would hurt the small sustainable ranchers who are teetering on the edge of being able to compete, while benefiting the large-scale industry that you abhor.
This is part of the USB spec. Originally USB hosts were only required to provide a certain amount of current to devices. Later they decided to increase this, but to provide backwards compatibility the device has to ask if the host is capable of sourcing that much current before it starts drawing it.
Yup, a local government will have a much harder time shutting down satellite and radio (HAM, CB, walkie-talkie) communications, and they will be infinitely more reliable than mesh networking.
First off, for mesh networking to work at all, you would need a large number of people that have the phones - a few people buying Freedom Handsets isn't going to cut it. Even then, your signal gets to the edge of down, and where does it go from there? Assuming you can link into the network, then why not just get a network enabled device to begin with and forget this mesh crap? Plus mesh networking will increase power requirements and unpredictability, requiring as big of a battery as a satellite phone.
Why would we need to buy it?
If the buildings on a property is condemned, and the owner has had sufficient time to repair or rebuild, then I see no problem with the government tearing it down on their own. If entire blocks are like this then I see no reason why the government should spend money on roads, sidewalks or streetlamps. Rezone it and tear those down as well, save for a few major roads, and a few minor ones (basically extended driveways now) which can become gravel.
The people would still own the land, but wouldn't have to pay as high of property tax since it was undeveloped land and possibly out of city limits (and thus only responsible for county taxes). They would be able to sell it or redevelop if the city expands again in their lifetime. The few folks that are left living there will now have a house surrounded by natural vegetation, causing their property value to increase compared to when it was surrounded by an ex-urban junkyard.
Eminent domain is unnecessary, and doesn't need to be factored into the taxpayer cost. Instead things like yearly maintenance, and negative image on the city will need to be weighted against the one-time cost of cleanup.
The town where I grew up was at least half dirt and gravel roads. The average speed that people drove was probably 20-30 mph. Of course out here in the desert hard-packed clay made for a much better road than gravel. The worst thing they ever did to the post-office road was to grade and gavel it. The frequency of maintenance required quadrupled.
People who think the one-button mouse was a mistake seem to be unaware of what mice were like before Apple introduced the Macintosh. For example consider the Xerox Alto, which had three mouse buttons. Actions usually required multiple clicks with different buttons. Copying an object could be achieved by clicking it with the Red Button to select it and then clicking again with another (Yellow?) button to paste it. Clicking with the Blue button would delete an object. But clicking with the Red button then the Blue button would do something else, so you had to remember if you'd clicked or nor or you could screw things up.
This is off of memory of a manual that I stumbled upon in the library years ago, the details may be off. I wish I could find a copy of it to give better examples, but the point is it was a mess. You had to use all three buttons just to do the same tasks that we can do today using just the first.
The Macintosh team combined click-and-drag, click and double click in a way that enabled you to do all these things with a single mouse button, and more "intuitively" to boot. It was a genuine step forward in GUI development. In fact when Windows was released, it copied the Macintosh behavior for the left mouse button exactly. The second and third buttons were used sparingly and inconstantly at first and didn't add much to the experience - the main reason that most PC mice had three buttons at that time was for the DOS based CAD programs that needed them.
It wasn't until Windows 95 was released that they had completely standardized on using the right mouse button for context menus, and that too was a genuine step forward. And in fact all of the UI folks that worked on the original Mac agree on this. They've also since realized that if they had used two buttons for the mouse - one solely for selection and another for acting on objects, the could have avoided many of the problems involved with drag-and-drop text, and accidentally moving objects when adding to the selection. Unfortunately, momentum makes it too difficult to change at this point in the game.
The continued use of a one-button mouse is a mistake, but it's creation was not.
Dell should just save us the trouble and put the information here www.dell.com/coupons.
But you said it yourself, you don't care if you have to scour for that information. If they made the information too easily available, then those that do care about having to waste time looking for coupons, and normally wouldn't bother, would start getting the discounts as well and Dell would not make as much money. And you wouldn't have the satisfaction of finding a great hidden deal :)
No it wouldn't. Most legitimate sites don't do anything exotic with the visited property, they just change color or font properties. Even those that do use the background property or some other property that accepts urls will have a single url that applies to all or a large class of visited links. The only sites that would generate a lot of bandwidth are the tiny minority that intentionally have a different visited resource for each link on their site. They have an interest in keeping this bandwith low themselves and will make those resources to be as small as possible. Hell, the CSS dictating all these resources might even be as large as the resources themselves. Honestly, this is a complete non-issue compared to the bandwidth problems caused by plain old bad site design.
I absolutely agree with this principle. However "digital rights" are a useful thing to think about when composing your statements of fundamental rights. Sometimes technology changes things in a way that wasn't predicted, which may cause the particular wording of your constitution to not really cover issues that it should.
For example, the 4th Amendment reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This wording is quite specific to physical objects, and the extensions of these rights (or not) to data and communications has been very patchy, and often based on whichever analogy is most convenient to those in power. The existence and increasing scope of supposedly legal warrantless wiretapping is a strong reminder of this.
There are absolutely better ways to word this to be more technology agnostic. It is important when developing this wording to enumerate all the specific cases you can think of, and then as you write the generic wording go back and make sure that it at least covers the currently known and easily foreseeable cases.
You're right. They haven't told Microsoft what is acceptable, and in the meanwhile Microsoft has a product to ship. They make a decision that ought to satisfy any reasonable logical human being.
But the EC says we're still going to pursue this as an antitrust case even though there is no longer any antitrust concern. We don't like your solution so we are going to come up with our own and mandate you use it even though the solution you put forth breaks no laws.
Furthermore, all of the information coming out of the EC's office for the last several months makes it very clear that what they intend to do is to force Microsoft to either bundle or provide a splash screen dialog to download alternate browsers. It isn't the least bit presumptuous to assume that the EC is going to do exactly what it has been threatening to do.
Good. Now can we return back to having site-specific badges that are appropriate for the level of work being done at different federal facilities? Or we can use this new common ID that creates a single point of failure in the creation of badges, makes it easier to wander unescorted in facilities that you don't have access to, and adds significant cost and delay in getting people badged. Either way.
There are anti-hacker laws, but they generally read along the lines of
Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access... ...
Whoever intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer
Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access
(From 18.USC 1030, the law Lori Drew was charged with)
Darren Berkovitz gave explicit permission when he announced this contest, so they had authorization to attempt to gain access by any means allowed by the rules. The only restrictions given were that you had to register first, and you couldn't get help from a StrongWebmail employee.
The rest of the rules looked innocuous to me. Most of it was standard broiler-plate which is required by law for any contest - a cereal box prize will have the same language. The last paragraph of the third section was all just Disclaimers of Liabilities - we aren't responsible for network congestion if someone tries to DoS us to win the prize, we aren't responsible if you download some script-kiddy software to use in the competition and it screws up your computer, etc.
If you did clearly break the rules that you could be charged under 18.USC 1030 as the access was unauthorized, knowing (you agreed to the rules), and fraudulent (you were attempting to cheat them out of prize money), and crossed state lines. But they weren't tricky rules to follow.
I definitely agree that the Catholic Church's stand on this issue is far more self-consistant and respectable than that of other religious groups that oppose stem cell research. Which is true of their stand on most issues involving the intersection of science and religion.