You do realize that it is the third option in the right-click menu (right after "new" and "open"...) right? It is also ctrl-s, the same keystroke as in every MS Office app and whatnot. Not to get into an argument about whether there should be a pulldown menu as well (there should, and new versions of Gimp have it) but what did you spend those ten minutes doing???
Does it sound to anybody else like the rumours of Google hitting a deadend in the number of index position for the websearch are true? Especially given that it has been more than a year since they announced 4 billion.
Apparently pagerank assigns an unsigned int to every page as id, and their index is so huge they cannot convert it to a 64 bit number. (You wonder why they didn't think of that 2-billion pages ago when a UTF8 like solution would still have been possible).
They are competetive mega-corps, so of course they don't get along about everything. The post I was replying to implied that IBM would not touch OpenOffice because it is technology from Sun, something which I think IBM's involvement in java belies quite handsomely.
I mean, OpenOffice is GPL, IBM could fork it if they wanted to.
There are problems with Bluetooth by design. For one thing, no wireless protocol for interaction between devices can be truly secure unless peering requires physical contact between them (I place my phone next to my laptop, but the spook across the street has a directed antenna that is a thousand times stronger then the phone...)
It isn't like this hasn't come up before, Schneier predicted that Bluetooth would be a security nightmare three and a half years ago ! Quoting:
What amazes me is the dearth of information about the security of this protocol. I'm sure someone has thought about it, a team designed some security into Bluetooth, and that those designers believe it to be secure. But has anyone reputable examined the protocol? Is the implementation known to be correct? Are there any programming errors? If Bluetooth is secure, it will be the first time ever that a major protocol has been released without any security flaws. I'm not optimistic.
And what about privacy? Bluetooth devices regularly broadcast a unique ID. Can that be used to track someone's movements?
The stampede towards Bluetooth continues unawares. Expect all sorts of vulnerabilities, patches, workarounds, spin control, and the like. And treat Bluetooth as a broadcast protocol, because that's what it is.
Why do people keep thinking that the new Napster has something to do with P2P?
Yes, I know the answer: "Because that is what the DRM peddlers wanted them to think, which is why they bought the trademark. But at universities and especially here on Slashdot I think we can expect a little more.
What the schools are doing when they sign deals with the new Napster is to drive their students into the acceptance of proprietary, Windows only, closed, locked, DMCA protected file formats that you better not even think about trying to port to your operating system of choice. What they are doing is welcoming into their campuses the future where the devices we use to communicate are not tools tools for freedom, but chains designed to control us. It is the equivalent of putting out a press release that all the dorms have now installed the new "Trusted door" technology, which will only let students out of their dorms when they have a valid reason to do it (I mean, you can't trust students - we know that - so why not have trusted doors instead???)
Stop lauding this. Stop cheering it on. Fight it at every turn. Do not sign up. Do not give them your money. Shout as loudly as you can, at anyone involved, that you will start spending money on music again when it is sold to you, rather then given in some fucked up form of leasing where you own the computer, the law prevents you from figuring out how it works.
Linux is dead in the DRM future. The open web is dead in the DRM future. Everything this site celebrates has no chance of survival when the Internet has become a centralized entity of information control. We have to draw the line HERE because we are the only ones who can. Every time we mention these serives in a positive light we are sowing the seeds of our destruction.
No it isn't. Adding "I for one welcome our new... overlords" any subject does not automatically make it funny. Yes it was funny on the Simpsons. It was funny the first couple of times when it fit the story.
BUT IT'S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE. Stop moderating it up. ARG!
Yeah, the standards they used to measure "quality of life" are completely engineered, and ENGINEERED to make the scandinavian socialist "paradises" looked good. Read it, it contains stuff like "plus ten points for easy access to pine forrests".
Quality of life is subjective, wealth isn't. I would rather be a median American, then a median Swede any day.
The studio gets about two thirds the domenstic box office money, and about one third (or less) of the international box office. So the revenue estimate for WB from the theatre run of Revolutions is $175 million or so. Add the production and marketing budgets, and you will see that it is about ten million dollars short.
That isn't to say they won't make the money back, today films make as much or more again on video and DVD sales and rentals (for the Matrix and LOTR films possibly much more) so it certainly isn't a money looser for them. But look at what happened after Reloaded: the franchise went from guaranteed super-blockbuster to decent performance. Would you be willing to bet that if there was a third, it wouldn't flop completely?
If I were a Hollywood exec, I would draw the opposite conclusion from The Matrix. Look at the numbers for Revolutions. It didn't even make it's production budget back, with a total that is HALF of what Reloaded made. Given that Revolutions was no better than Reloaded, what could WB be expecting if they had another $150 million matrix movie coming up?
The LOTR movies are remarkable in Hollywood history. Two Towers was the first sequel EVER to a blockbuster ($200 million +) to make more then it's prequel, and Return of the King was the second. They managed this because they were excellent movies: fan liked them, wide audiences liked them, critics liked them. But Revolutions gives you some idea of what would have happened if Fellowship had been a disappointment. It isn't pretty...
So, my lesson from the Matrix would be: WB should never have footed the bill for a second sequel until they knew if the first sequel worked (*). The lesson from LOTRs is really just: sometimes gutsy, risky calls pay off in a big way. Most of the time they don't...
(*) Of course, Hollywood would have looked at the numbers for Revolutions and decided that it did, instead of realizing that it made that money on the back of the first movie, and had no legs to stand on it's own.
When you take off the tinfoil hat, do you have any evidence that it works like this? What great technologies, exactly, have been killed off because people had too much to loose from abondoning less efficient alternatives?
Do you mean like how AOL and Compuserv killed the Internet? How Kodak and Fuji killed the digital camera? How Sun and IBM made Linux illegal? How the dial-up ISPs made sure DSL was never invented?
There is always a comment like this in stories about new technology here, but there is absolutely nothing that points to this being the case. In fact we have a system that is flexible and rewarding of new inventions.
This is simple. Just get two different sources of the video, and do a diff on them. Then you blank out or interpolate over the watermark (depending on whether it turns out to be value or position of the marks that they use).
But X already supports all this. The problem doesn't lie with X at all, it lies with application support for the excellent standard available. X.org cannot help that people are writing applications and toolkits that run on X yet do not do cut-n-paste properly or fully.
An important note: highlight and middleclick is not the same as copy-paste. X has a system for cut/copy/paste beyond the more often supported middleclick "dragging". And yes it supports data of every type, not just text.
The level where somebody needs to do something about cut-n-paste is not X.org, but Bruce Perens Userlinux initiative (is that still alive?) If I were in charge of Userlinux I would refuse to include any application that doesn't fully and properly support cut-n-paste.
This would end up working about as well Kazaa's user rating (or whatever it was called) thing. It had been out for how many days before people started showing up with their points maxed out? And it is worth noting that the second and third most common file sharing tools, dc++ and emule are both open source, so that anybody who feels like removing the controls can do so, and recompile.
Peer to peer networks that control what people communicate are possible. As are ones that control who talks to whoom, that people really allow the uploads they purport to, etc etc. As is any software that acts against, rather than for, the person that is running it. We just need to get Palladium in place first. What are you waiting for Microsoft!!!
It is true. The point is that X2000 can operate at 200 km/h and maintain passenger comfort on rails that don't normally allow that. (The tilting is only for passenger comfort in fact - the engines don't tilt.)
More modern pendular systems such as the ones build by the Swedish, the Italians or the Canadians, achieve 230-250 in commercial speed on reasonably modern classic tracks.
The Swedish X2000 maxes out at 210 km/h, and hardly ever reaches that in practice.
To make this more concrete, consider the given 750 mile distance between Shanghai and Beijing. Between Hiroshima and Kokura in Japan, the bullet train averages 262 km/h, so with few stops along the way it isn't unplausible that a newly built line could average 220 km/h over the entire distance.
In that case, the trip by train would take about five and half hours. And that time is spent calmly on board a train, where one can read, work, make phonecalls, and possibly even use the Internet. Compare that to a 90 minute flight, plus at least two and half hours of airport travel, embarking, taxying, disembarking, security etc etc.
Except for exceptional cases, conventional high speed rail always beats flying when the distance is less than 1500 km.
A while ago their was talk about the need for a hippocratic oath for programmers. However, most of the people talking about it were thinking about making programmers promise not to write software that could be used for bad things, like portscanners or whatever.
But the real Hippocratic oath doesn't say anything about only healing people if they will do good things. It says that a doctor must always serve the life and good of his patient, no matter the utilitarian arguments against it.
That is the oath that is needed for programmers. We act as agents for our users, and the software we write should serve it's users, not control them. I'm sure that your intentions are good and that the technology is cool, but by taking part in deploying a DRM system you have still broken this in my eyes.
One piece of this that is not getting much attention right now (that would probably be of interest to/. readers) is the registration system. I'm not getting into the politics of this, the DRM or the "right or wrong" arguments.
The funny thing is, you are one of the only posters here whoom I recognize by handle, and whose posts I used to respect...
The Register covered Carly's desicion to endorse closedness and control on Friday. At least it is good to know that HP are honest about exactly where they stand, unlike the wishy-washy contradictiveness of other companies that try to avoid the issue.
On the whole, it does not worry me that much. If Carly had announced that HP was in partnership with MS to support and develop Palladium that would have bothered me a lot more. That may be coming (as you say), but it seems more likely to me that HP are really just trying to grab some of the percieved DRM riches-to-come from Microsoft. Infighting among the bad guys can only be a good thing...
The harddisk players have no issues with jogging, walking, running, etc. None. Plenty of people jog with there ipods, and I have never heard of anyone having a problem with it.
While the old CD player may have had a couple of seconds of cache for skip protection, the ipod has half an hours worth. I have dropped mine on hard floors several times, and it doesn't even stop playing.
This is just a common misconception, carried down from the eightees when you weren't allowed to breath while files loaded for fear of crashing the read head...
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that it is the third option in the right-click menu (right after "new" and "open"...) right? It is also ctrl-s, the same keystroke as in every MS Office app and whatnot. Not to get into an argument about whether there should be a pulldown menu as well (there should, and new versions of Gimp have it) but what did you spend those ten minutes doing???
2^32 = 4.29 x 10^9
Does it sound to anybody else like the rumours of Google hitting a deadend in the number of index position for the websearch are true? Especially given that it has been more than a year since they announced 4 billion.
Apparently pagerank assigns an unsigned int to every page as id, and their index is so huge they cannot convert it to a 64 bit number. (You wonder why they didn't think of that 2-billion pages ago when a UTF8 like solution would still have been possible).
They are competetive mega-corps, so of course they don't get along about everything. The post I was replying to implied that IBM would not touch OpenOffice because it is technology from Sun, something which I think IBM's involvement in java belies quite handsomely.
I mean, OpenOffice is GPL, IBM could fork it if they wanted to.
Is this why IBM have never had anything to do with Java?
Nothing what so ever.
There are problems with Bluetooth by design. For one thing, no wireless protocol for interaction between devices can be truly secure unless peering requires physical contact between them (I place my phone next to my laptop, but the spook across the street has a directed antenna that is a thousand times stronger then the phone...)
It isn't like this hasn't come up before, Schneier predicted that Bluetooth would be a security nightmare three and a half years ago ! Quoting:
What amazes me is the dearth of information about the security of this protocol. I'm sure someone has thought about it, a team designed some security into Bluetooth, and that those designers believe it to be secure. But has anyone reputable examined the protocol? Is the implementation known to be correct? Are there any programming errors? If Bluetooth is secure, it will be the first time ever that a major protocol has been released without any security flaws. I'm not optimistic.
And what about privacy? Bluetooth devices regularly broadcast a unique ID. Can that be used to track someone's movements?
The stampede towards Bluetooth continues unawares. Expect all sorts of vulnerabilities, patches, workarounds, spin control, and the like. And treat Bluetooth as a broadcast protocol, because that's what it is.
I don't see anyone here "lauding" or "cheering this on." I certainly don't think these Napster deals at universities are a good idea.
If you haven't seen anybody here lauding and cheering on iTMS you have not been reading a lot comments.
Why do people keep thinking that the new Napster has something to do with P2P?
Yes, I know the answer: "Because that is what the DRM peddlers wanted them to think, which is why they bought the trademark. But at universities and especially here on Slashdot I think we can expect a little more.
What the schools are doing when they sign deals with the new Napster is to drive their students into the acceptance of proprietary, Windows only, closed, locked, DMCA protected file formats that you better not even think about trying to port to your operating system of choice. What they are doing is welcoming into their campuses the future where the devices we use to communicate are not tools tools for freedom, but chains designed to control us. It is the equivalent of putting out a press release that all the dorms have now installed the new "Trusted door" technology, which will only let students out of their dorms when they have a valid reason to do it (I mean, you can't trust students - we know that - so why not have trusted doors instead???)
Stop lauding this. Stop cheering it on. Fight it at every turn. Do not sign up. Do not give them your money. Shout as loudly as you can, at anyone involved, that you will start spending money on music again when it is sold to you, rather then given in some fucked up form of leasing where you own the computer, the law prevents you from figuring out how it works.
Linux is dead in the DRM future. The open web is dead in the DRM future. Everything this site celebrates has no chance of survival when the Internet has become a centralized entity of information control. We have to draw the line HERE because we are the only ones who can. Every time we mention these serives in a positive light we are sowing the seeds of our destruction.
I'll stop now. ARGGG.
(Score:2, Funny)
... overlords" any subject does not automatically make it funny. Yes it was funny on the Simpsons. It was funny the first couple of times when it fit the story.
No it isn't. Adding "I for one welcome our new
BUT IT'S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE. Stop moderating it up. ARG!
Yeah, the standards they used to measure "quality of life" are completely engineered, and ENGINEERED to make the scandinavian socialist "paradises" looked good. Read it, it contains stuff like "plus ten points for easy access to pine forrests".
Quality of life is subjective, wealth isn't. I would rather be a median American, then a median Swede any day.
The studio gets about two thirds the domenstic box office money, and about one third (or less) of the international box office. So the revenue estimate for WB from the theatre run of Revolutions is $175 million or so. Add the production and marketing budgets, and you will see that it is about ten million dollars short.
That isn't to say they won't make the money back, today films make as much or more again on video and DVD sales and rentals (for the Matrix and LOTR films possibly much more) so it certainly isn't a money looser for them. But look at what happened after Reloaded: the franchise went from guaranteed super-blockbuster to decent performance. Would you be willing to bet that if there was a third, it wouldn't flop completely?
If I were a Hollywood exec, I would draw the opposite conclusion from The Matrix. Look at the numbers for Revolutions. It didn't even make it's production budget back, with a total that is HALF of what Reloaded made. Given that Revolutions was no better than Reloaded, what could WB be expecting if they had another $150 million matrix movie coming up?
The LOTR movies are remarkable in Hollywood history. Two Towers was the first sequel EVER to a blockbuster ($200 million +) to make more then it's prequel, and Return of the King was the second. They managed this because they were excellent movies: fan liked them, wide audiences liked them, critics liked them. But Revolutions gives you some idea of what would have happened if Fellowship had been a disappointment. It isn't pretty...
So, my lesson from the Matrix would be: WB should never have footed the bill for a second sequel until they knew if the first sequel worked (*). The lesson from LOTRs is really just: sometimes gutsy, risky calls pay off in a big way. Most of the time they don't...
(*) Of course, Hollywood would have looked at the numbers for Revolutions and decided that it did, instead of realizing that it made that money on the back of the first movie, and had no legs to stand on it's own.
When you take off the tinfoil hat, do you have any evidence that it works like this? What great technologies, exactly, have been killed off because people had too much to loose from abondoning less efficient alternatives?
Do you mean like how AOL and Compuserv killed the Internet? How Kodak and Fuji killed the digital camera? How Sun and IBM made Linux illegal? How the dial-up ISPs made sure DSL was never invented?
There is always a comment like this in stories about new technology here, but there is absolutely nothing that points to this being the case. In fact we have a system that is flexible and rewarding of new inventions.
This is simple. Just get two different sources of the video, and do a diff on them. Then you blank out or interpolate over the watermark (depending on whether it turns out to be value or position of the marks that they use).
But X already supports all this. The problem doesn't lie with X at all, it lies with application support for the excellent standard available. X.org cannot help that people are writing applications and toolkits that run on X yet do not do cut-n-paste properly or fully.
An important note: highlight and middleclick is not the same as copy-paste. X has a system for cut/copy/paste beyond the more often supported middleclick "dragging". And yes it supports data of every type, not just text.
The level where somebody needs to do something about cut-n-paste is not X.org, but Bruce Perens Userlinux initiative (is that still alive?) If I were in charge of Userlinux I would refuse to include any application that doesn't fully and properly support cut-n-paste.
Break once, run anywhere.
This would end up working about as well Kazaa's user rating (or whatever it was called) thing. It had been out for how many days before people started showing up with their points maxed out? And it is worth noting that the second and third most common file sharing tools, dc++ and emule are both open source, so that anybody who feels like removing the controls can do so, and recompile.
Peer to peer networks that control what people communicate are possible. As are ones that control who talks to whoom, that people really allow the uploads they purport to, etc etc. As is any software that acts against, rather than for, the person that is running it. We just need to get Palladium in place first. What are you waiting for Microsoft!!!
Is the distinction between trademarks and copyright really that difficult? Using a company's name has absolutely nothing to do with copyright...
I used that particular stretch because it is the fastest average speed of an operating trainline today.
It is true. The point is that X2000 can operate at 200 km/h and maintain passenger comfort on rails that don't normally allow that. (The tilting is only for passenger comfort in fact - the engines don't tilt.)
More modern pendular systems such as the ones build by the Swedish, the Italians or the Canadians, achieve 230-250 in commercial speed on reasonably modern classic tracks.
The Swedish X2000 maxes out at 210 km/h, and hardly ever reaches that in practice.
To make this more concrete, consider the given 750 mile distance between Shanghai and Beijing. Between Hiroshima and Kokura in Japan, the bullet train averages 262 km/h, so with few stops along the way it isn't unplausible that a newly built line could average 220 km/h over the entire distance.
In that case, the trip by train would take about five and half hours. And that time is spent calmly on board a train, where one can read, work, make phonecalls, and possibly even use the Internet. Compare that to a 90 minute flight, plus at least two and half hours of airport travel, embarking, taxying, disembarking, security etc etc.
Except for exceptional cases, conventional high speed rail always beats flying when the distance is less than 1500 km.
A while ago their was talk about the need for a hippocratic oath for programmers. However, most of the people talking about it were thinking about making programmers promise not to write software that could be used for bad things, like portscanners or whatever.
But the real Hippocratic oath doesn't say anything about only healing people if they will do good things. It says that a doctor must always serve the life and good of his patient, no matter the utilitarian arguments against it.
That is the oath that is needed for programmers. We act as agents for our users, and the software we write should serve it's users, not control them. I'm sure that your intentions are good and that the technology is cool, but by taking part in deploying a DRM system you have still broken this in my eyes.
One piece of this that is not getting much attention right now (that would probably be of interest to /. readers) is the registration system. I'm not getting into the politics of this, the DRM or the "right or wrong" arguments.
The funny thing is, you are one of the only posters here whoom I recognize by handle, and whose posts I used to respect...
The Register covered Carly's desicion to endorse closedness and control on Friday. At least it is good to know that HP are honest about exactly where they stand, unlike the wishy-washy contradictiveness of other companies that try to avoid the issue.
On the whole, it does not worry me that much. If Carly had announced that HP was in partnership with MS to support and develop Palladium that would have bothered me a lot more. That may be coming (as you say), but it seems more likely to me that HP are really just trying to grab some of the percieved DRM riches-to-come from Microsoft. Infighting among the bad guys can only be a good thing...
The harddisk players have no issues with jogging, walking, running, etc. None. Plenty of people jog with there ipods, and I have never heard of anyone having a problem with it.
While the old CD player may have had a couple of seconds of cache for skip protection, the ipod has half an hours worth. I have dropped mine on hard floors several times, and it doesn't even stop playing.
This is just a common misconception, carried down from the eightees when you weren't allowed to breath while files loaded for fear of crashing the read head...