What we're seeing is basically the same thing with software patents - immense twisting of IP laws to cope with stuff that really never occurred before.
After all, you used copyright for stuff you wrote, and that stuff you wrote was typically a book, a play, music, whatever, meant to be enjoyed by others. Or it could be an ancillary book like an instruction manual.
And patents usually applied to things that did stuff (not counting design patents) - utility patents. Machines that took something as input, ground through it, and produced something at the output.
But now you have written things that do machine things - software that is hardware (e.g., RTL). Software that replaces hardware (e.g., in machines where software replaces complex mechanical movements), software that creates hardware (3D printers). It's really never occurred before in the known history - we have created something revolutionary - software.
Hell, even in the old CNC days the CNC code was never an issue since they're usually customized for the machine and generated (either manually or through automation) from the basic CAD file.
We live in interesting times,and really, IP laws need to be revised because we can't squeeze software as either a copyright or a patent thing - it just leads to the mess we're in now.
If there's a niche for print news left in the world, they'd better find it quick. If they don't, someone else will find it and put it on a website.
How about simply having a pile of news available about stuff that one may not be interested in, but to simply have it available?
Sure you can read it on a website, but if you "pull" information (request it), people tend to just pull the things that interest them.
This leads to narrow mindedness and basically filtering of news. Take for example,/. - there's a pile of stuff/. does NOT cover, but one ought to know about if nothing more than general interest or to be a bit more "worldly" and informed about the world. (And judging by many conversations, the/. crowd is probably highly misinformed on a lot of things, even things that concern them, like IP laws).
Hell, when something not tech related gets posted on/., the first few comments are invariably "not news" or "irrelevant" - expecting that they'd read about it elsewhere (when in all likelihood, they won't).
A newspaper, though, has all the articles right there on the page. Perhaps an interesting photo or headline captures your interest, it's easy to skim it just to see if it's of more interest.
Or perhaps there's something particularly big happening because a lot of pages are dedicated to it - what was just a few links on a website suddenly takes a whole new form when you see pages of ink about it.
And hell, if nothing more, sometimes it's good to see just what the public cares about - because if you can't relate what you're saying to what they care about, you're like an unclicked link on a new website.
And yesterday's news is valuable - because it covers stuff that you probably missed or not cared enough about in real time. I don't obsess over the stock market to want to know it to the minute, but I might want to know how it did yesterday overall Or maybe it was something interesting that influenced the markets but I never would be interested otherwise. Or find out what's going on in the middle east which I don't care about knowing now, but if there's an article I could skim easily without having to click to read it, I would.
Newspapers also provide a good summary of what happened yesterday for stuff I didn't care about knowing immediately, but could wait a day. It's like the girlfriend who got woken up by her boyfriend on 9/11 and asked "does it affect me now?" and went back to sleep. Because it wasn't going to affect her, and she'd find out about it some other way. Even the next day would be sufficient.
I never understood its success given the lack of plot, but apparently the book was right. Form trumps content anytime. (but really, was a little bit of a plot linking the different ingredients that much to ask? I didn need an Oscar winning plot, just the kind of plot that gets childrens books going).
Or, perhaps it didn't need a plot beyond the basic because people went to see it for other reasons?
There are many reasons to see a movie. One of them is enjoyment - the movie makes you feel good in some way. Another is escapism - for a couple of hours, you leave the real world behind. Other reasons include education, trying to make the world a better place, story, etc.
Transformers did well because it delivered escapism - people went out to see humanoid robots that change into cars. That's it. Especially since many people who saw Transformers had the toys back in the 80s, so there's a bit of retro-nostalgia going on as well.
People don't all go out to see and read literature. A lot of material is pulp, pure unadulterated pulp. And it always has been - people produced more plays than Shakespeare and read more than Jane Eyre or the Grapes of Wrath or other books. Just like they saw more films than Gone With the Wind or somesuch. It's because that stuff sells and people watch it.
Of course, most of the pulp gets recycled in the end, which is fine - and why we think "times were better" - but they weren't. Tastes may have changed, but for every "literary" work that we know today, there were probably hundreds of others that we'd regard as pulp and end up forgetting about in a few decades. I'm fairly certain they all had the "summer blockbuster" that's rapidly forgotten about.
Good luck getting funding for a unique motion picture when the studios not only know what makes a profitable film, they can prove it. And because the average moviegoer could not care less, this is not going to change until the sun burns out. What makes matters worse is that each successive generation grows up watching these movies and will never know that there used to be something better -- which makes this approach even more profitable.
Depends on the motivation of the movie-goer.
Movies are just an entertainment medium - a way to escape life for a couple of hours. Depending on how you do it, you can see a standard summer blockbuster that'll give you visuals and effects that you won't see elsewhere outside of movies, or an artsy thought-provoking movie.
Fact is, most people go for shiny and don't want to think - the movie becomes a basic 2 hour vacation from the ills of life they don't want to think about (which is one reason we have entertainment).
That, and I'm sure a ton of people just hated English class when they read literature and had all the fun sucked out of books through critical thought and analysis, leaving people less willing to see "better" because it brings back days when they had to look for deeper meanings and such.
There will always be the classics - and then, like now, a bunch of crap was made. We're seeing the survivor effect - the ones we call classics today people remember. They just forgot that at the time, there was a ton of crap as well. The proportions of crap vs. good haven't changed, it's just the crap got forgotten and the good lasted. Movie theatres played more than Gone With the Wind in the past, after all.
" In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we're completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database."
"We knew about the vulnerability, and didn't do anything about it for months. Hopefully looking like we're doing all this to protect you means you won't sue us and find out."
Even better: We're replacing our antiquated hardware, making software updates we've been putting off for months, and upgrading our RDBMS.
Or, as what normally happens, it's a pile of mishmash that developers put up and they found that old dusty Mac running MacOS classic was still serving up stuff long after people forgotten about it.
Given it was a developer site, there's probably a lot more experimentation that goes on there (and Apple IT probably ended up leaving it up to the developers because they always protest when they have to follow dumb rules about paperwork and change orders). And face it, it happens - developers need to test some feature that they forget to notify IT about, and scramble to set up a test server that ends up being a production server inadvertently, and so forth.
Methinks Apple IT at least kept some oversight to the "developers playground" to discover it and maintain at least some protection on the data. But now they're probably going through everything that developers touched and adding it to the IT database and centralized management system - no more "don't update that box!" excuses.
And probably at the same time removing a bunch of crufty machines that were long forgotten about. Even though Apple probably has a good development/qa/test/production flow and line, developers always seem to try to want to circumvent the process and push to production directly.
In very rare cases does someone need to take any supplements at all. If one pays attention to having a proper diet one can get all the vitamins needed naturally. Part of the whole vitamin craze is how lazy people are. It can take some thought and effort to eat a healthy diet containing all the nutrients a body needs to thrive. It's quite worth doing so though.
Exactly!
In fact, North Americans have the most expensive urine in the world - because the supplements just get flushed down the toilet because the body has enough and got rid of the extra.
I thought the same thing when I first read the title, but from what I tell, there is a subtle difference. Instead of a "major" Firefox release full of nothingness basically every fucking month like it is now, they intend every third release to be less boring and actually bring new/major features. So... they're bringing back the "major versions" they threw out on their Google copying spree, only they won't be designated by major version numbers... they'll be designated by every third major version number.
If that means we no longer hear about every god damn Firefox release on Slashdot and other technology news sites, then I'll be happy. Just skipping versions 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, etc. and covering only versions 23, 26, 29, 32, etc. would be a hell of an improvement. Especially assuming these versions really *are* worth writing about (ie. more than just a bug-fix release with a major number bump).
In other words, get ready for major UI breakage or other crap every 3 releases now, rather than oddball times.
Why Mozilla insists on consistently screwing up the UI, I don't know. Chrome at least tends to keep things the same, but Firefox keeps breaking things and it's not always obvious how to fix it.
Like my pet peeve introduced a few months ago - firefox autocomplete stopped completing deep URLs, and only does up to the hostname. Which is a royal PITA if you need to access something via a deep URL, or on a different port. Hell, entering forums directly can be problematic if they put it in a subdirectory. I haven't found an option to revert the behavior.
Perhaps if they did what Chrome does and quick breaking muscle memory, it won't be as screwed up as it is now. Hell, I expect half the options to revert back to old behavior to get removed "because no one uses it".
Wetsuit makers have been diddling around and experimenting with this for a long time, though. I know nothing about the specifics of why and wherefore, but I've been seeing suits with color schemes clearly intended to break the pattern for a long time. Sadly, I've never been atop a surfboard, but I come from Santa Cruz where surfing is something of an obsession for many. As a poor child with nothing to do and no money to do it with, I used to just ride around and go into stores and see what they were up to. O'Neill wetsuits on 41st had a big box of wetsuit scrap that you could rifle through; I imagine they thought I was on a mission for someone else. But what I was really doing was taking any pieces that I could cut good strips out of, then attacking them with scissors and making bracelets which I sold at school for a buck a piece until I was shut down by the faculty for economic activity. But the reason all this is relevant is that it got me into the store, where I could clearly see that many of the suits had big patches of baby blue or reflective silvery stuff around the midsection...
The patterns they put on wetsuits haven't really been anti-sharks. In fact, shark attacks on humans are remarkably rare (you're more likely to be struck by lightning).
The patterns on wetsuits is to accommodate style - for whatever purpose the wetsuit is for. If it's for surfing, well, it's to make the wearer look stylish when surfing and exiting the water. Sort of like how people wear branded clothes and such.
After all, if you believe the stereotype, people wear wetsuits practically constantly if they even intend to take a dip so they might as well go in looking good.
By far though, it appears black tends to be the generic color.
For most people this is the rational way of looking at it, yes. But Apple most certainly have managed to produce a more.. fervent.. kind of supporters. That far transcends the usual fan-boys many tech companies have. If you have managed to avoid them, good for you, a few years back I found that voicing any criticism of Apple brought them out in force (and I knew a couple of them real life too). And you can often see today when the shine has come off Apple somewhat that they now think that everybody loves to hate Apple, and voice this frequently.
It's not just Apple fanbois, it's Apple-haters as well. It's remarkably polarized, I find.
It's also a great source of income for blogger and such because only Apple stories generate the kind of clicks and ad views that Google, Microsoft and others can only dream about. Even Microsoft-haters have diminished somewhat. But Apple has constantly been hated ever since they were incorporated (what is it, 40-odd years of dying now?).
It's why people end up generating content- and news-less articles about Apple - because if you can rile up the Apple haters or Apple supporters, it's a significant boost to your income. (Either group works because it inevitably attracts the others).
Oh yeah, it's always been cool to hate Apple. And even with the shine off, it still gets the eyeballs, which is important.
For casual reading, e-books are fine but for technical materials I prefer hard copy that way there's no fear that the distributor won't change their TOS and I wind up losing a ton of C++ reference material or my favorite books on Roman History.
I like it because a physical book has a way faster seek mechanism (but lousier search) - you can flip forward and backwards though the book far faster than you can scroll through pages.
Plus, it's way easier to flip through a bunch of bookmarks on a physical book than it is on screen - most readers still don't allow showing multiple portions of a book in several split views.
Plus, most screens are just not big enough to hold several reference texts open simultaneously on one screen - I find it easier at times to just print the various pages out and then reference them on the desk rather than try to switch between several reader windows.
The "strongly encouraged to change the password on the other service" bit is perhaps an open admission that they didn't salt; or maybe it's an admin lacking knowledge of the salt/no-salt situation and playing it safe by warning users. Still disappointing.
No, because cracking passwords, even salted one, is ridiculously easy. Hell, take a well salted database, a stolen password list, and a way to compute the password. You can probably find a good chunk of accounts with the basic set of passwords.
Salting just prevents the use of rainbow tables, which means cracking passwords takes a few hours instead of a few seconds. Hell, you probably could use one of those bitcoin miner ASICs to do it - cracking passwords is really just computing hashes, and the R&D in computing hashes faster and faster means hashed and salted passwords are getting easier to crack.
It's Windows, and it has no other software for decrypting DVDs installed.
Unless you're talking about Windows XP or Windows 8, it does, or at least the components for it.
Though, I think the Windows version of VLC also has libdvdcss on it.
However, it's not a very good version - there are plenty of DVDs that VLC will not play well or at all thanks to copy protection. It's usually easy to tell because you can get to the menu, but then you see artifacting all over the place.
Google watching your stuff as 'payment' for their services is not the same as the government watching you, as payment for being a citizen.
One is a choice.
Both are choices - if you don't like what your government does, immigrate. Of course, just like there's not necessarily a browser that fits your needs, there may not be a country that fits your needs either.
Of course, Google spying through the browser and many interconnected websites and ad networks (Google has what, 99% of the online ad market? Even all those popups and popunders and such). Just like countries may spy on the behalf of others.
By contrast, the trend on the Apple/Android app store seems to be towards studios that pop up out of nowhere, based in obscure parts of the world, with no kind of track record and no means of recourse when things go wrong.
Is this a good thing or bad thing? I mean, if you're a software developer in Russia, Romania, or other "obscure part of the world", how do you earn a living? Move?
Or how about a small time developer in middle of nowhere USA? Last time we deal with them, we usually called them "indie developers". It's just the App Stores make it so easy for indie devs to set up shop (selling software isn't easy - between setting up the necessary infrastructure to handle payments and all that) that we're seeing more and more of them pop up.
Of course, the fact that they're gathered all in one place also helps. And 90% of stuff is pretty much crap - just instead of dying in obscurity, they die on the app store shelf. (Yes, you may say "everything indie is good! Indie music rocks! indie games rock!" etc., but the real truth is you're only seeing the cream of the crop - the rest out there really is crap).
I'm not weighing in on whether or not iPads let you increase class size
Definitely not. The teacher's union already has class size limits in place. Even if adding an iPad means one less teacher (which might be useful for more rural areas), they won't be allowed to.
How is it a "huge problem"? ASCII has a number of control characters too. A whitelist is a great idea, but why is the whitelist so restrictive? Just grab a copy of the current Unicode Data file and whitelist all current non-control characters. And if you're concerned that Zalgo might come, I suppose you could omit any non-spacing chars from the whitelist without people complaining too much (though perhaps it'd be good to include the ones that are actual letters in various Indic scripts).
Actually, Zalgo did come -/. was one of the first sites it was messed with.
Personally I have no idea why people spend this kind of money on a car. My last brand new car (I don't usually buy brand new, but they had a lot of incentives) was about $16k (cdn), and I considered that a lot. A car is not an investment.....
Well, people spend thousands of dollars on a PC, when one can be had for around $300. I mean, if you look at Apple, a fully kitted out MacBook Pro Retina's nearly $5k or so. Why buy that when you can pick up a laptop for $300 at the local Best Buy? Amazon probably has them cheaper.
Granted, spending $5k on a PC is nothing like spending nearly $100K on a car, But neither is an investment, though the car does have residual value after a few years, the PC is basically zilch.
Though, it's interesting that it gets 95MPGe for what is, in effect, a luxury sedan. Luxury sedans have not traditionally been known to be gas misers (they're typically big lumbering beasts with huge engines to cope with their massive tonnage), nor do they usually take regular gas - typically premium is mandatory. And with gas prices as high as they are now, premium gas is, well...
They do have to care about that, because they are the ones doing the distributing and imposing the additional restrictions that violate the GPL.
WHAT restrictions?
That's the thing - VLC is/was (L)GPLv2.
The source code to VLC for iOS was always available, which I guess could technically violate the GPL since it's not Apple distributing the code (unless the developer embedded it in the.ipa file...). But that's it, really.
If you say you can't compile the source and use it on the device - well, $99 says you can, or jailbreaking. Or well, what clause does that violate on the GPLv2?
It's called TiVoization after TiVo Inc., locked up the kernel and filesystem after a bunch of TiVo hackers bricked their machines and did warranty claims, and the GPLv2 has allowed it.
It may violate the SPIRIT of the GPL, but not the letter of the license. It's why the GPLv3 is so toxic - because it gets rid of TiVoization, and that makes it ironically incompatible with GPLv2! (Because GPLv3 code imposes additional restrictions on GPLv2 code. The only way you can combine v2 and v3 code is if the v2 code is v2+ (version 2 or later). v2-only and v3 are incompatible, and fun happens if you have a mixed codebase of v2/v2+ and try to add v3 code.
NOTE: GPLv3 is incompatible with all app stores - Apple's, Amazon's, Google's (Play Store has been adding DRM as of 4.2), Microsoft's, Valve's (Steam),...
How deliciously appropriate. Slashcode's truly embarrassingly archaic handling of Unicode finally comes front and center on the front page.
How hard is it to get Unicode support in this code? Seriously, it's freaking blogging software! It's not like you're doing byte-dependent low-level math requiring the exact codepoints of ASCII characters! You're just delivering text over HTTP! What is WRONG with you? Do you guys seriously want to show that as an example of "News for Nerds", or have you seriously finally killed off that byline once and for all because you can't understand something as simple as Unicode?
Actually, it does support Unicode. The problem is, a bunch of people misused it so now there's a whitelist of allowable Unicode characters.
Yes, a whitelist. Because people were abusing Unicode non-printing characters to the extreme. And yes, it's actually a huge problem because Unicode has a number of control characters.
What you are talking about was neat in 1995, today is redundant and a security nightmare. Today we have ActiveSync and IMAP idle. Both of these provide push email without handing your password over to RIM or putting you at risk of no email when they have one of their famous outages.
Except maintaining a persistent IP connection is expensive. Not expensive in the sense of money, but expensive in terms of battery life - instead of the phone being able to go into a low power idle mode ("camping") where it only pings the tower once a second semi-autonomously, it now has to maintain an IP connection and wake up far more often. It's why battery life drains so much quicker once you turn on email fetching. If you need to handoff, the modem does it automatically with just a little power drawn. But handing off the IP connection requires a bit more work as well.
What RIM does is their servers do the polling and IP connection maintenance for you. They then use a very efficient communications mechanism (SMS) to tell your phone that new email has arrived and the phone wakes up and establishes a connection to RIM (all BB traffic is routed through RIM, including BES) and transfers the new data.
If you're using BES, RIM proxies your connection to the BES server and the connection is encrypted from RIM (because BES and the BB made a key when the link was established).
If you're not using BES, RIM is providing you BES-like stuff through the proxy. And yes, it also means RIM can read your email (they need to compress/transform attachments/process/etc the mail for the device - better to do it on beefy processors in a datacenter versus having to have the phone understand all the file formats). This also means attachments can stay on the server without being transferred over the data connection, or previews created, etc).
Which architecture is better? It depends. Full autonomy makes the iOS and Android way of the phone making the data connection, at the expense of battery life.
Flexibility and lower cost means a central server is nicer, but then it's like cloud email.
Liquidmetal isn't anything new, Samsung and Nokia have used it on some phones. The distinction is that they've generate been restricted to smaller components and not entire shells because of the expense and limitations in manufacturing. Interestingly enough, this technology was developed at Caltech and is marketed by this Liquidmetal Technologies. Perhaps someone more informed can explain how that works.
As far as the technology itself is concerned, it seems promising. However, from what I've read, the benefit isn't that they can produce "futuristic-looking" devices but rather that this metal is supposed to be much more wear resistant. It is true that the forming process is more akin to molding plastic, but I don't think we've been restricted by our ability to shape metal in recent years. Whether this tech lives up to promises remains to be seen. From what I've read of owners of Liquidmetal equipped Omega watches aren't too impressed; wear resistance doesn't seem to be any better than other materials the company has used.
I think it's one of those things where on paper it looks impressive, but in real life the forces these materials are subjected to generally far exceeds their tolerances. It's kind of like gorilla glass. People still manage to scratch up their screens when they don't break them outright. But still, any technological evolution is a good one.
The thing that surprised me was to learn that Apple acquired an exclusive, perpetual license with the company to use this technology in consumer electronics. So this isn't an example of Apple innovating, but rather preventing any competitors from getting their hands on the same technology.
Easy. Caltech did the research, and the researchers spun off a company (Liquidmetal technologies) to commercialize the technology. Caltech gets royalties from licensing and all that (so they recoup the research money that way, as well as get perpetual royalties). The company markets and exploits the technology in a commercially viable fashion - if they flop, some other group of researchers can try (Caltech owns the basic research, after all) in case the original folks are just bad business people (happens quite often - most academics are) as well as being free of liabilities.
Anyhow, wear resistance is just one aspect of it. Other aspects include having interesting properties that you don't see with standard crystalline metals - perhaps this enables thinner metal cases (== lighter weight). Or, instead of having to cast-and-machine as per standard metalworking, this can be injection molded and out pops a part made from metal, rather than plastic.
And yes, the problem so far has been mass production of this stuff - it's only been used in low volumes and in small parts because that's all the entire production line was capable of.
The innovation here was a company like Apple figured out how to mass produce it. That's why they got a perpetual license - because having the material and being able to make small amounts of things isn't sufficient - it doesn't scale up very well. Apple instead brought a whole pile of money to the table to further the commercialization of it - i.e., actually be able to use it for huge volumes (millions) and in rather large pieces.
The basic research is Caltech and Liquidmetal's. Apple's innovation is making it commercially viable to make great chunks of it economically.
Basically before what you had was really equivalent to using a 3D printer in the construction of some product. You can use it, but when you get to larger volumes, a 3D printer is just too slow and too expensive. You can always brute force it by buying a ton of 3D printers nad having them churn away building parts, but it's suboptimal. What Apple and Liquidmetal did was invent a way to do mass-manufacture economically (e.g., switching from 3D prints to injection molding and such).
The SIM eject tool "test" was probably straining the ability of the machines to make something out of Liquidmetal. The existing process couldn't scale up to make say, the phone enclosure.
DNT had exactly one use: to determine whether or not advertisers respect the wishes of people who do not want their browsing habits tracked. The verdict is in, and to nobody's surprise advertisers have no respect for anyone. Now we know that we are justified in using ad-blocking plugins and building browsers that block ads by default.
Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads. Sure it's google ads today, but Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks and commands practically all the online ad markets, and if they're paying off the ad blockers to whitelist...
And of course, Google is naturally tracking you. Especially whitelisted.
I encourage people to always adblock on techreport, because they threaten to nuke user accounts that talk about using adblocking. That's not the right approach.
It depends. Sites depend on ads to pay for content and hosting, and many with "premium" options do not allow talk of ad blockers as well. Even reputable ones - like Ars Technica. Even the merest hint of ad blocking without whitelisting the site in question is out. I got banned for mentioning noscript and didn't even mention blocking the site's ads, just it happened to block a good chunk of ads.
Of course, one side effect of this is sites get desperate for money and they end up getting sold and re-sold to other companies. It's only a matter of time before pretty much online ads disappear as we know them because websites are all purchased up and owned by a few media conglomerates who bought them for the user information and all that.
Of course, the little guy with a blog who wants to make a couple of bucks won't be able to attract any advertisers because they all went to the big guys with their massive data pools from buying up websites left and right.
Safari isn't OS-specific either, but the primary Safari market is OS X users. So if it's exploiting Safari, then it's probably aimed at Mac users.
It was demonstrated on Safari, but apparently it works on Chrome as well. And I'd say it'll probably work on Firefox too.
It's especially annoying since the browser helpfully restores your last session when they crash, so this site and its 150 popups make it persistent indeed.
Bruce Schneier saw this coming. And he's got a point...on one hand, we argue against the policies of countries like Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, China when it comes to free, uncensored and unmonitored use of the Internet (or lack thereof in the aforementioned countries). And then, oh...look what we're doing with all those network links that pass through our own country. You can argue that the motives are different, the means are more surgical (but only to a point since 1, they are classified programs and 2, intelligence agencies lie their assess off, by necessity, to foreign powers) but the argument still won't carry much weight.
There IS a difference though.
The US, despite PRISM, still has a free and uncensored internet. The NSA isn't keeping you from posting your CP pics on your picasa page or whatever, and you're still free to criticize Obama however you want online. You can also freely access whatever the hell you want online until the authorities come and get you.
Many other countries (not just those on your list - many countries have "great firewalls" and speech restrictions) do not allow their citizens the ability to speak freely or access the full uncensored internet with potentially unpopular decisions or critical remarks about the government.
Now, you could argue that a free and uncensored internet is a good thing for PRISM because it gets people to "open up" and post stuff that can be indexed and stored and people classified, but that's a happy coincidence.
Censoring and freely snooping on data that's available (not necessarily openly though) are two completely different, not mutually exclusive things.
OSE is always behind the commercial version. I stopped using OSE for precisely the same reason you did.
If oracle ever decides to drop virtualbox then I hope they release the commercial code so it can be merged into OSE.
OSE and Commercial are one and the same these days - actually. (I think it changed in Vbox4). So the version you get with Linux is the same Oracle distributes, unless they decided to compile it themselves. But as long as they didn't change the interfaces, it's still good.
What Oracle had in the commercial version they put out in an "expansion pack" which is the bits they commercially licensed. You can install it on the OSE version of Vbox these days.
Of course, you sort of wonder why no one has developed a GPL equivalent for the extension features (e.g., rdp server, usb2...).
Slashdot Mirror
The reverse also happens - you can get DMCA takedowns on objects to print. And this happened years ago.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/the-next-napster-copyright-questions-as-3d-printing-comes-of-age/
What we're seeing is basically the same thing with software patents - immense twisting of IP laws to cope with stuff that really never occurred before.
After all, you used copyright for stuff you wrote, and that stuff you wrote was typically a book, a play, music, whatever, meant to be enjoyed by others. Or it could be an ancillary book like an instruction manual.
And patents usually applied to things that did stuff (not counting design patents) - utility patents. Machines that took something as input, ground through it, and produced something at the output.
But now you have written things that do machine things - software that is hardware (e.g., RTL). Software that replaces hardware (e.g., in machines where software replaces complex mechanical movements), software that creates hardware (3D printers). It's really never occurred before in the known history - we have created something revolutionary - software.
Hell, even in the old CNC days the CNC code was never an issue since they're usually customized for the machine and generated (either manually or through automation) from the basic CAD file.
We live in interesting times ,and really, IP laws need to be revised because we can't squeeze software as either a copyright or a patent thing - it just leads to the mess we're in now.
How about simply having a pile of news available about stuff that one may not be interested in, but to simply have it available?
Sure you can read it on a website, but if you "pull" information (request it), people tend to just pull the things that interest them.
This leads to narrow mindedness and basically filtering of news. Take for example, /. - there's a pile of stuff /. does NOT cover, but one ought to know about if nothing more than general interest or to be a bit more "worldly" and informed about the world. (And judging by many conversations, the /. crowd is probably highly misinformed on a lot of things, even things that concern them, like IP laws).
Hell, when something not tech related gets posted on /., the first few comments are invariably "not news" or "irrelevant" - expecting that they'd read about it elsewhere (when in all likelihood, they won't).
A newspaper, though, has all the articles right there on the page. Perhaps an interesting photo or headline captures your interest, it's easy to skim it just to see if it's of more interest.
Or perhaps there's something particularly big happening because a lot of pages are dedicated to it - what was just a few links on a website suddenly takes a whole new form when you see pages of ink about it.
And hell, if nothing more, sometimes it's good to see just what the public cares about - because if you can't relate what you're saying to what they care about, you're like an unclicked link on a new website.
And yesterday's news is valuable - because it covers stuff that you probably missed or not cared enough about in real time. I don't obsess over the stock market to want to know it to the minute, but I might want to know how it did yesterday overall Or maybe it was something interesting that influenced the markets but I never would be interested otherwise. Or find out what's going on in the middle east which I don't care about knowing now, but if there's an article I could skim easily without having to click to read it, I would.
Newspapers also provide a good summary of what happened yesterday for stuff I didn't care about knowing immediately, but could wait a day. It's like the girlfriend who got woken up by her boyfriend on 9/11 and asked "does it affect me now?" and went back to sleep. Because it wasn't going to affect her, and she'd find out about it some other way. Even the next day would be sufficient.
Plus, most news websites are just terrible.
Or, perhaps it didn't need a plot beyond the basic because people went to see it for other reasons?
There are many reasons to see a movie. One of them is enjoyment - the movie makes you feel good in some way. Another is escapism - for a couple of hours, you leave the real world behind. Other reasons include education, trying to make the world a better place, story, etc.
Transformers did well because it delivered escapism - people went out to see humanoid robots that change into cars. That's it. Especially since many people who saw Transformers had the toys back in the 80s, so there's a bit of retro-nostalgia going on as well.
People don't all go out to see and read literature. A lot of material is pulp, pure unadulterated pulp. And it always has been - people produced more plays than Shakespeare and read more than Jane Eyre or the Grapes of Wrath or other books. Just like they saw more films than Gone With the Wind or somesuch. It's because that stuff sells and people watch it.
Of course, most of the pulp gets recycled in the end, which is fine - and why we think "times were better" - but they weren't. Tastes may have changed, but for every "literary" work that we know today, there were probably hundreds of others that we'd regard as pulp and end up forgetting about in a few decades. I'm fairly certain they all had the "summer blockbuster" that's rapidly forgotten about.
Depends on the motivation of the movie-goer.
Movies are just an entertainment medium - a way to escape life for a couple of hours. Depending on how you do it, you can see a standard summer blockbuster that'll give you visuals and effects that you won't see elsewhere outside of movies, or an artsy thought-provoking movie.
Fact is, most people go for shiny and don't want to think - the movie becomes a basic 2 hour vacation from the ills of life they don't want to think about (which is one reason we have entertainment).
That, and I'm sure a ton of people just hated English class when they read literature and had all the fun sucked out of books through critical thought and analysis, leaving people less willing to see "better" because it brings back days when they had to look for deeper meanings and such.
There will always be the classics - and then, like now, a bunch of crap was made. We're seeing the survivor effect - the ones we call classics today people remember. They just forgot that at the time, there was a ton of crap as well. The proportions of crap vs. good haven't changed, it's just the crap got forgotten and the good lasted. Movie theatres played more than Gone With the Wind in the past, after all.
Or, as what normally happens, it's a pile of mishmash that developers put up and they found that old dusty Mac running MacOS classic was still serving up stuff long after people forgotten about it.
Given it was a developer site, there's probably a lot more experimentation that goes on there (and Apple IT probably ended up leaving it up to the developers because they always protest when they have to follow dumb rules about paperwork and change orders). And face it, it happens - developers need to test some feature that they forget to notify IT about, and scramble to set up a test server that ends up being a production server inadvertently, and so forth.
Methinks Apple IT at least kept some oversight to the "developers playground" to discover it and maintain at least some protection on the data. But now they're probably going through everything that developers touched and adding it to the IT database and centralized management system - no more "don't update that box!" excuses.
And probably at the same time removing a bunch of crufty machines that were long forgotten about. Even though Apple probably has a good development/qa/test/production flow and line, developers always seem to try to want to circumvent the process and push to production directly.
Exactly!
In fact, North Americans have the most expensive urine in the world - because the supplements just get flushed down the toilet because the body has enough and got rid of the extra.
In other words, get ready for major UI breakage or other crap every 3 releases now, rather than oddball times.
Why Mozilla insists on consistently screwing up the UI, I don't know. Chrome at least tends to keep things the same, but Firefox keeps breaking things and it's not always obvious how to fix it.
Like my pet peeve introduced a few months ago - firefox autocomplete stopped completing deep URLs, and only does up to the hostname. Which is a royal PITA if you need to access something via a deep URL, or on a different port. Hell, entering forums directly can be problematic if they put it in a subdirectory. I haven't found an option to revert the behavior.
Perhaps if they did what Chrome does and quick breaking muscle memory, it won't be as screwed up as it is now. Hell, I expect half the options to revert back to old behavior to get removed "because no one uses it".
The patterns they put on wetsuits haven't really been anti-sharks. In fact, shark attacks on humans are remarkably rare (you're more likely to be struck by lightning).
The patterns on wetsuits is to accommodate style - for whatever purpose the wetsuit is for. If it's for surfing, well, it's to make the wearer look stylish when surfing and exiting the water. Sort of like how people wear branded clothes and such.
After all, if you believe the stereotype, people wear wetsuits practically constantly if they even intend to take a dip so they might as well go in looking good.
By far though, it appears black tends to be the generic color.
It's not just Apple fanbois, it's Apple-haters as well. It's remarkably polarized, I find.
It's also a great source of income for blogger and such because only Apple stories generate the kind of clicks and ad views that Google, Microsoft and others can only dream about. Even Microsoft-haters have diminished somewhat. But Apple has constantly been hated ever since they were incorporated (what is it, 40-odd years of dying now?).
It's why people end up generating content- and news-less articles about Apple - because if you can rile up the Apple haters or Apple supporters, it's a significant boost to your income. (Either group works because it inevitably attracts the others).
Oh yeah, it's always been cool to hate Apple. And even with the shine off, it still gets the eyeballs, which is important.
I like it because a physical book has a way faster seek mechanism (but lousier search) - you can flip forward and backwards though the book far faster than you can scroll through pages.
Plus, it's way easier to flip through a bunch of bookmarks on a physical book than it is on screen - most readers still don't allow showing multiple portions of a book in several split views.
Plus, most screens are just not big enough to hold several reference texts open simultaneously on one screen - I find it easier at times to just print the various pages out and then reference them on the desk rather than try to switch between several reader windows.
No, because cracking passwords, even salted one, is ridiculously easy. Hell, take a well salted database, a stolen password list, and a way to compute the password. You can probably find a good chunk of accounts with the basic set of passwords.
Salting just prevents the use of rainbow tables, which means cracking passwords takes a few hours instead of a few seconds. Hell, you probably could use one of those bitcoin miner ASICs to do it - cracking passwords is really just computing hashes, and the R&D in computing hashes faster and faster means hashed and salted passwords are getting easier to crack.
Ars Technica details it better.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/how-i-became-a-password-cracker/
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
Unless you're talking about Windows XP or Windows 8, it does, or at least the components for it.
Though, I think the Windows version of VLC also has libdvdcss on it.
However, it's not a very good version - there are plenty of DVDs that VLC will not play well or at all thanks to copy protection. It's usually easy to tell because you can get to the menu, but then you see artifacting all over the place.
Of course, this can be fixed using AnyDVD...
Both are choices - if you don't like what your government does, immigrate. Of course, just like there's not necessarily a browser that fits your needs, there may not be a country that fits your needs either.
Of course, Google spying through the browser and many interconnected websites and ad networks (Google has what, 99% of the online ad market? Even all those popups and popunders and such). Just like countries may spy on the behalf of others.
Is this a good thing or bad thing? I mean, if you're a software developer in Russia, Romania, or other "obscure part of the world", how do you earn a living? Move?
Or how about a small time developer in middle of nowhere USA? Last time we deal with them, we usually called them "indie developers". It's just the App Stores make it so easy for indie devs to set up shop (selling software isn't easy - between setting up the necessary infrastructure to handle payments and all that) that we're seeing more and more of them pop up.
Of course, the fact that they're gathered all in one place also helps. And 90% of stuff is pretty much crap - just instead of dying in obscurity, they die on the app store shelf. (Yes, you may say "everything indie is good! Indie music rocks! indie games rock!" etc., but the real truth is you're only seeing the cream of the crop - the rest out there really is crap).
Definitely not. The teacher's union already has class size limits in place. Even if adding an iPad means one less teacher (which might be useful for more rural areas), they won't be allowed to.
Actually, Zalgo did come - /. was one of the first sites it was messed with.
And here's what some fun did...
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32808&cid=3541545
FYI, that's a Score:1 post, not a Score 5: Interesting.
Or http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543514&no_d2=1&cid=23306292
Face it, there are enough folks who basically ruin it for everyone. If not that, we'll just have upside down text soon enough.
Well, people spend thousands of dollars on a PC, when one can be had for around $300. I mean, if you look at Apple, a fully kitted out MacBook Pro Retina's nearly $5k or so. Why buy that when you can pick up a laptop for $300 at the local Best Buy? Amazon probably has them cheaper.
Granted, spending $5k on a PC is nothing like spending nearly $100K on a car, But neither is an investment, though the car does have residual value after a few years, the PC is basically zilch.
Though, it's interesting that it gets 95MPGe for what is, in effect, a luxury sedan. Luxury sedans have not traditionally been known to be gas misers (they're typically big lumbering beasts with huge engines to cope with their massive tonnage), nor do they usually take regular gas - typically premium is mandatory. And with gas prices as high as they are now, premium gas is, well...
WHAT restrictions?
That's the thing - VLC is/was (L)GPLv2.
The source code to VLC for iOS was always available, which I guess could technically violate the GPL since it's not Apple distributing the code (unless the developer embedded it in the .ipa file...). But that's it, really.
If you say you can't compile the source and use it on the device - well, $99 says you can, or jailbreaking. Or well, what clause does that violate on the GPLv2?
It's called TiVoization after TiVo Inc., locked up the kernel and filesystem after a bunch of TiVo hackers bricked their machines and did warranty claims, and the GPLv2 has allowed it.
It may violate the SPIRIT of the GPL, but not the letter of the license. It's why the GPLv3 is so toxic - because it gets rid of TiVoization, and that makes it ironically incompatible with GPLv2! (Because GPLv3 code imposes additional restrictions on GPLv2 code. The only way you can combine v2 and v3 code is if the v2 code is v2+ (version 2 or later). v2-only and v3 are incompatible, and fun happens if you have a mixed codebase of v2/v2+ and try to add v3 code.
NOTE: GPLv3 is incompatible with all app stores - Apple's, Amazon's, Google's (Play Store has been adding DRM as of 4.2), Microsoft's, Valve's (Steam), ...
Actually, it does support Unicode. The problem is, a bunch of people misused it so now there's a whitelist of allowable Unicode characters.
Yes, a whitelist. Because people were abusing Unicode non-printing characters to the extreme. And yes, it's actually a huge problem because Unicode has a number of control characters.
Except maintaining a persistent IP connection is expensive. Not expensive in the sense of money, but expensive in terms of battery life - instead of the phone being able to go into a low power idle mode ("camping") where it only pings the tower once a second semi-autonomously, it now has to maintain an IP connection and wake up far more often. It's why battery life drains so much quicker once you turn on email fetching. If you need to handoff, the modem does it automatically with just a little power drawn. But handing off the IP connection requires a bit more work as well.
What RIM does is their servers do the polling and IP connection maintenance for you. They then use a very efficient communications mechanism (SMS) to tell your phone that new email has arrived and the phone wakes up and establishes a connection to RIM (all BB traffic is routed through RIM, including BES) and transfers the new data.
If you're using BES, RIM proxies your connection to the BES server and the connection is encrypted from RIM (because BES and the BB made a key when the link was established).
If you're not using BES, RIM is providing you BES-like stuff through the proxy. And yes, it also means RIM can read your email (they need to compress/transform attachments/process/etc the mail for the device - better to do it on beefy processors in a datacenter versus having to have the phone understand all the file formats). This also means attachments can stay on the server without being transferred over the data connection, or previews created, etc).
Which architecture is better? It depends. Full autonomy makes the iOS and Android way of the phone making the data connection, at the expense of battery life.
Flexibility and lower cost means a central server is nicer, but then it's like cloud email.
Easy. Caltech did the research, and the researchers spun off a company (Liquidmetal technologies) to commercialize the technology. Caltech gets royalties from licensing and all that (so they recoup the research money that way, as well as get perpetual royalties). The company markets and exploits the technology in a commercially viable fashion - if they flop, some other group of researchers can try (Caltech owns the basic research, after all) in case the original folks are just bad business people (happens quite often - most academics are) as well as being free of liabilities.
Anyhow, wear resistance is just one aspect of it. Other aspects include having interesting properties that you don't see with standard crystalline metals - perhaps this enables thinner metal cases (== lighter weight). Or, instead of having to cast-and-machine as per standard metalworking, this can be injection molded and out pops a part made from metal, rather than plastic.
And yes, the problem so far has been mass production of this stuff - it's only been used in low volumes and in small parts because that's all the entire production line was capable of.
The innovation here was a company like Apple figured out how to mass produce it. That's why they got a perpetual license - because having the material and being able to make small amounts of things isn't sufficient - it doesn't scale up very well. Apple instead brought a whole pile of money to the table to further the commercialization of it - i.e., actually be able to use it for huge volumes (millions) and in rather large pieces.
The basic research is Caltech and Liquidmetal's. Apple's innovation is making it commercially viable to make great chunks of it economically.
Basically before what you had was really equivalent to using a 3D printer in the construction of some product. You can use it, but when you get to larger volumes, a 3D printer is just too slow and too expensive. You can always brute force it by buying a ton of 3D printers nad having them churn away building parts, but it's suboptimal. What Apple and Liquidmetal did was invent a way to do mass-manufacture economically (e.g., switching from 3D prints to injection molding and such).
The SIM eject tool "test" was probably straining the ability of the machines to make something out of Liquidmetal. The existing process couldn't scale up to make say, the phone enclosure.
Careful, advertisers like Google have paid Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads. Sure it's google ads today, but Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks and commands practically all the online ad markets, and if they're paying off the ad blockers to whitelist...
And of course, Google is naturally tracking you. Especially whitelisted.
It depends. Sites depend on ads to pay for content and hosting, and many with "premium" options do not allow talk of ad blockers as well. Even reputable ones - like Ars Technica. Even the merest hint of ad blocking without whitelisting the site in question is out. I got banned for mentioning noscript and didn't even mention blocking the site's ads, just it happened to block a good chunk of ads.
Of course, one side effect of this is sites get desperate for money and they end up getting sold and re-sold to other companies. It's only a matter of time before pretty much online ads disappear as we know them because websites are all purchased up and owned by a few media conglomerates who bought them for the user information and all that.
Of course, the little guy with a blog who wants to make a couple of bucks won't be able to attract any advertisers because they all went to the big guys with their massive data pools from buying up websites left and right.
It was demonstrated on Safari, but apparently it works on Chrome as well. And I'd say it'll probably work on Firefox too.
It's especially annoying since the browser helpfully restores your last session when they crash, so this site and its 150 popups make it persistent indeed.
There IS a difference though.
The US, despite PRISM, still has a free and uncensored internet. The NSA isn't keeping you from posting your CP pics on your picasa page or whatever, and you're still free to criticize Obama however you want online. You can also freely access whatever the hell you want online until the authorities come and get you.
Many other countries (not just those on your list - many countries have "great firewalls" and speech restrictions) do not allow their citizens the ability to speak freely or access the full uncensored internet with potentially unpopular decisions or critical remarks about the government.
Now, you could argue that a free and uncensored internet is a good thing for PRISM because it gets people to "open up" and post stuff that can be indexed and stored and people classified, but that's a happy coincidence.
Censoring and freely snooping on data that's available (not necessarily openly though) are two completely different, not mutually exclusive things.
OSE and Commercial are one and the same these days - actually. (I think it changed in Vbox4). So the version you get with Linux is the same Oracle distributes, unless they decided to compile it themselves. But as long as they didn't change the interfaces, it's still good.
What Oracle had in the commercial version they put out in an "expansion pack" which is the bits they commercially licensed. You can install it on the OSE version of Vbox these days.
Of course, you sort of wonder why no one has developed a GPL equivalent for the extension features (e.g., rdp server, usb2...).