And who's going to do all that free Ubuntu development and package management work for you on launchpad?
Power users already hate lauchpad and don't use it:
The day when working on Debian requires the use of a web interface will be the day that I hunt down and painfully kill the person responsible for doing it.
-- Andrew Suffield, on debian-devel, discussing http://launchpad.net/
If only! I would have voted for the guy in a heartbeat had he been an an atheist socialist.:)
I know! That's like my dream candidate too! Don't care if he or she is a Kenyan or what the color of their skin is! As it is, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008, because she was the Green party candidate, but I also got to one up my democrat friends by saying (tongue in cheek), "oh yeah? well my candidate is black AND a woman!"
There was a long argument over whether McCain was native born, there were even debates about whether George W Bush was native born, and have been about presidents going way back.
There's a big difference; for one, I *never* heard about McCain or Bush's nativity in the MSM - not once! Now granted, I don't pay much attention to the MSM, but I had to hear about McCain's birthplace here on slashdot, that "oh so liberal fount of hatred for everything conservative." So to even/pretend/ that these are in the same leagues, when *hardly anyone* talked about two white presidential candidates' birthplaces, and here we are *almost four fucking years later* and people are *still* screaming in the MSM that our first black president is a Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist. Of course, if he were a republican (or white), we never would have heard about any birth certificates.
There has been one serious Android tablet out for two months and its overpriced and glitchy. The other serious Android tablets are just now coming out, this week. Were they expected to grab half the market in a week?
I tried voting this article down in the firehose, esp. because it was obviously written by an Apple Fanboi. Unfortunately, the Apple Fanbois here on slashdot must have really high expectations of Google if they think they can kill the iPad in a week. I don't blame them tho; look at what Android phones are doing to iPhone sales. I *am* glad when they point out weakenesses, tho; all the better to find out what needs fixing and make the next version better:)
All crypto products should obviously be open source, that'd cover many VPN solutions. Wuala should be open source for the same reason.
All crypto should be open source, but for different reasons. Schneier wrote on this a bit; unfortunately, I don't have the links at hand, but here are some quotes:
As a cryptography and computer security expert, I have never understood the current fuss about the open source software movement. In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we have for decades. Public security is always more secure than proprietary security. It's true for cryptographic algorithms, security protocols, and security source code. For us, open source isn't just a business model; it's smart engineering practice.
-- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999
Cryptography has been espousing open source ideals for decades, although we call it "using public algorithms and protocols." The idea is simple:cryptography is hard to do right, and the only way to know if something was done right is to be able to examine it.
-- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999
Instead of using public algorithms, the U.S. digital cellular companies decided to create their own proprietary cryptography. Over the past few years, different algorithms have been made public. (No, the cell phone industry didn't want them made public. What generally happens is that a cryptographer receives a confidential specification in a plain brown wrapper.) and once they have been made public, they have been broken. Now the U.S. cellular industry is considering public algorithms to replace their broken proprietary ones.
-- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999
On the other hand, the popular e-mail encryption program PGP has always used public algorithms. And none of those algorithms has ever been broken. The same is true for the various Internet cryptographic protocols: SSL, S/MIME, IPSec, SSH, and so on.
-- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999
The counter-argument you sometimes hear is that secret cryptography is stronger because it is secret, and public algorithms are riskier because they are public. This sounds plausible, until you think about it for a minute. Public algorithms are designed to be secure even though they are public; that's how they're made. So there's no risk in making them public. If an algorithm is only secure if it remains secret, then it will only be secure until someone reverse-engineers and publishes the algorithms. A variety of secret digital cellular telephone algorithms have been "outed" and promptly broken, illustrating the futility of that argument.
-- Bruce Schneier, "Cryptogram" September 15, 1999
Is this what/. has come to? A story about a different color being available for an Apple product?
You can do what I was doing: put "apple" in the terms to exclude under your user options. I wasn't even aware of this nonstory until someone mentioned it in another article.
Another thing you can do is upvote truly interesting articles like the following:
What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero. Another example: Theora. Penetration? Zero.
Normally I don't respond to AC's, but you're a fucking liar. My phone, portable music player, laptop, my wife's phone, my wife's laptop, and my wife's music player all play Vorbis and FLAC. The only ones that don't play Theora are the music players (which don't have color screens). Music players that support Vorbis aren't that hard to find.
as much facts as the reality that current WebM encoders do a worse job in terms of video quality than x264 does for H.264. End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.
WebM is open and free in every sense of the word; the submarine patent issues apply equally to H.264; and hardware support for WebM is coming along rapidly. Face it, WebM is the future, and that's a good thing.
Note how Microsoft and Apple are both members of the above groups (in case you haven't heard of BSA, they're basically the MPAA and RIAA of the software world). Google isn't a member of either group.
Any complaints that can be leveled against WebM can be leveled against H.264 (that is, it is just as likely that submarine patents exist for H.264 as for WebM). The difference is that Google is pushing for open standards that don't require license fees to use (including no license fees for playback or distribution). Google is doing the right thing, and Apple and Microsoft, as usual, are trying to lock customers into their products, limit choice, and stifle competition. Anyone who can't see that is deluding themselves, and is probably either a shill or shameless fanboi.
I don't blame Apple or Microsoft, though; if I had to compete against Linux, I'd try dirty political weasely tricks like this, because it's obvious Apple and Microsoft can't compete technically.
As someone with experience in the subject, what traits do you think the system programming language of the future needs?
Actually, I don't think I'm all that qualified; I've never written my own OS. But looking at people that have (Torvalds, Tannenbaum, Ritchie, et al), I would have to say that a programming language that wants to be used for OS implementation will have to displace C. That is, it needs to have the power of C (low-level HW access at a minimum), but also have that something little extra that gives it an advantage. The more expressive and succint you can make a language, the more powerful it will probably be.
Oh, and never write a programming language for someone else to use; make sure any software you write is something you would want to use, otherwise it will probably suck.
Actually, you probably will. I don't like 3D movies and I ended up with a 3D capable TV just because most of the really good new TV's have this capability. If I could have bought the exact same model without 3D, I would have.
And this, is precisely what all the haters on the story here don't get. "If you don't want 3D, don't buy it! No one's forcing you, why do you say it's a gimmick and it sucks? You're just a luddite/ignorant/old fogie." Maybe because it is a gimmick that's been trotted out every few decades for over 150 years, yet it's still not standard, like color visuals or stereo sound. Why might that be? Might it be because it doesn't work reliably? Or because people tend to tackily tack it on offerings that would otherwise be ignored? And the market soundly refutes it every time.
Only this time, you don't have a choice. You can't buy a high end TV without 3D, whether you want it or not. Suck it, losers! The free* market triumphs again!
* - for certain definitions of "free", ie where the megacorps are free to foist upon you whatever they please, and you have the "freedom" of choice between buying it or not.
Title is a quote from an email I received yesterday from the Open Goldberg project. Here's the quote in full:
I wish to thank the Music Publishers Association of the UK for retracting their DMCA complaint to GoDaddy. GoDaddy's standard response to a DMCA copyright complaint of this nature is to freeze the domain for 10 days, instead of referring the complaint to the site owner. Thus we all owe the MPA-UK sincere thanks for their retraction.
WTF?! No, what MPA (and GoDaddy)/deserve/ are heaping helpings of scorn. That they realized their mistake and fixed it is just a token act in a tragedy that *they* caused, and shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Sometimes they do release military software to the public, but in that case if the compiled binary isn't classified, the source has to have been scrubbed for classified information before compilation. So releasing source wouldn't be an issue anyway.
The GP is an ignoramus. Software made while in the employ of the US government (think civil servants, not contractors) is public domain; it's right in the copyright law. It might take a little time getting through the red tape, especially to make sure there's nothing sensitive, but you can get the source code to government projects.
Now the n900 wasn't perfect, but if it had a capacitive screen, 3g on AT&T, and a 1ghz+ chip, it would have been.
You can overclock the N900. I've not tried it, but some people claim to get it to 1GHz. As for the touchscreen, I kind of like being able to use my fingernails. The lack of 3G on AT&T sucks, but then AT&T sucks in general. I switched to T-Mobile and while I don't get 3G where I live (in the boonies), I regularly get 3.5G in more populated areas.
As for music, I started to hear nothing but the greed, lies and narcissism and it put me right off. Every now and again I,ll listen to some out of copyright oldies.
Anyone who's interested in public domain and creative commons licensed music should check out archive.org and Jamendo. Others have listed other services in past discussions, but those are the two that come to my mind.
These lectures were filmed by Caltech, and it's awful to have anybody "own" them. It's just the kind of thing that shouldn't be locked up in some corporations IP portfolio -- and I don't care if it's Microsoft, Sony, or Time Warner.
Oh and I have worked on Linux driver code. I was shocked with just how much you can do at such a high level. I was afraid I was going to have to brush off my assembly but I added the features I needed with just c.
It is lovely and at the same time scary just how much OO has creeped into the Linux kernel, just out of pure necessity. It's been awhile since I've had to hack on the Linux kernel, but I'm glad to hear things have continued to improve.
Or you know you have code already written in C or C++ that you don't want to have to spend time and money rewriting. Not everyone who wants to use the NDK is doing it for stupid reasons.
Ah, I didn't see the GP; I was assuming they were referring to coding things in assembly; to me,/that's/ low-level. One of my big gripes with Android has always been that they want you to rewrite applications in Java. There's so much open source out there that's not Java that I think that approach is foolish. Heck, in my fantasy-land, Android was going to be Linux on a phone where at worst you had to redesign the V&C, and at best you could just recompile for ARM. Too bad it didn't turn out that way.
Hardware banging is a pretty bad idea in this day and age. It isn't always avoidable, but it should be avoided any time it can be.
As a past embedded, kernel, and driver developer, I'm always tempted to laugh at people who think they "need to program closer to the hardware", but I usually refrain and ask them these questions instead:
Are you writing embedded/kernel/driver code?
Have you profiled your code and found the hot spots?
Have you analyzed your design to find a better algorithm?
If the answers to all of the above is "no", then they don't need to be programming closer to the hardware.
Or just read the article summary, where it says 50% of new player sales were Blu-Ray. That seems fairly mainstream.
To be perfectly honest, most people already own a perfectly good DVD player, so it's actually surprising to me that something new and shiny isn't making even better sales. Actually, looking at reasons to avoid Blu-Ray in this thread, it's not that surprising.
What might be more informative would be to look at how many Blu-Ray discs vs DVDs are being sold over a given timeframe (month, quarter, etc). Although, again, we should expect Blu-Ray to be outselling by a huge margin, since most people already have a lot of DVDs. But again, figures I've seen indicate that Blu-Ray sales are severely lacking, which I can only guess that it's mostly for reasons listed by comments here. There's no indication sales will pickup or displace DVDs anytime soon, unless something drastic changes (doubtful).
As for sales of players, you might want to look on that at as people buying them because they'll play DVDs, or the market pushing those on the consumer, etc, etc. Here's a good question: how well are sales of *dedicated* Blu-Ray players doing, you know, ones that will *only* play Blu-Rays?
I prefer to own, so I do. Maybe "owning" the media will no longer be possible in the future, but I'm sticking with that concept like the public sticks with DVDs.
I can understand the sentiment, and somewhat agree with it, but for the vast majority of film, I'm more than likely only ever going to watch it once. That, and a lot of crap is rerun all the time on cable (which I would get rid of, but the wife likes it for background noise). Buying a movie without seeing it is stupid; going to see a movie you might not like in the theater is stupid; renting (especially streaming) is really the only reasonable option. Picture and sound quality are not more important than writing or direction, but some movies that do benefit from it ("2001" comes to mind) and are good are sometimes worth owning. Most of the rest is garbage that is barely worth a rental, much less a purchase.
you're aware that one of the selling points of blu-ray is that the discs are (theoretically) unscratchable, right?
The only thing that is "unscratchable" is streaming. Once I see rental places replace a majority of their DVDs with Blu-Ray, or start charging less to rent Blu-Ray, or I hear parents laud Blu-Ray's resilience in the hands of their kids, I might believe Blu-Ray's to be more durable than DVDs. It is telling that Netflix's streaming service has taken off and many parents rip their kids' DVDs (which is not so easy to do with Blu-Ray) for playback. One of Blu-Ray's advantages is also one of its Achille's heels: the higher data density means that it's much easier to corrupt.
I've got roughly 500 blu-ray movies and roughly 1300 DVDs, and believe me when I tell you that the blu-ray discs are FAR more resistant to scratching than the DVDs are.
Get back to me in ten years; that's probably how long you've had most of your DVDs; Blu-Ray hasn't been around that long, yet. Of course, by then, ripping Blu-Rays so you don't have to put up with unskippable ads and warnings or have to change disks will probably be quite common.
I've watched a number of movies lately that *could* be construed as "origin stories", but they weren't - and they were that much better for it. Let's face it, most origin stories are retreads; we already know what the end result is going to be. Sure, sometimes limits can help creativity, or really good writers can make an incredible story, with twists, that still fits into canon. But most of the time good writing and creativity get thrown out the window in favor of staying in canon (just look at the Star Wars prequels).
Blu-ray discs and players are clearly superior to DVDs, offering more features and a better picture overall.
Blu-ray is *not*/clearly/ superior - most people honestly can't tell the difference. Even on my 42in HDTV, I can't tell the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD unless I pause to see the jaggies. There was some study (done in Holland?) where they told people a picture was HD, then randomly showed them SD or HD; they couldn't tell the difference. In technical terms, Blu-Ray isn't that much of a jump from DVD either. Add to this the draconian copy protection, the higher probability that a Blu-Ray will become unplayable due to even minor scratches, the ridiculous pricing schemes, the unskippable ads and FBI warnings, the fact that streaming fixes a lot of these problems, and you have a product ready to go nowhere.
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Power users already hate lauchpad and don't use it:
I know! That's like my dream candidate too! Don't care if he or she is a Kenyan or what the color of their skin is! As it is, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008, because she was the Green party candidate, but I also got to one up my democrat friends by saying (tongue in cheek), "oh yeah? well my candidate is black AND a woman!"
There's a big difference; for one, I *never* heard about McCain or Bush's nativity in the MSM - not once! Now granted, I don't pay much attention to the MSM, but I had to hear about McCain's birthplace here on slashdot, that "oh so liberal fount of hatred for everything conservative." So to even /pretend/ that these are in the same leagues, when *hardly anyone* talked about two white presidential candidates' birthplaces, and here we are *almost four fucking years later* and people are *still* screaming in the MSM that our first black president is a Kenyan-Muslim-Socialist. Of course, if he were a republican (or white), we never would have heard about any birth certificates.
I tried voting this article down in the firehose, esp. because it was obviously written by an Apple Fanboi. Unfortunately, the Apple Fanbois here on slashdot must have really high expectations of Google if they think they can kill the iPad in a week. I don't blame them tho; look at what Android phones are doing to iPhone sales. I *am* glad when they point out weakenesses, tho; all the better to find out what needs fixing and make the next version better :)
All crypto should be open source, but for different reasons. Schneier wrote on this a bit; unfortunately, I don't have the links at hand, but here are some quotes:
You can do what I was doing: put "apple" in the terms to exclude under your user options. I wasn't even aware of this nonstory until someone mentioned it in another article.
Another thing you can do is upvote truly interesting articles like the following:
Normally I don't respond to AC's, but you're a fucking liar. My phone, portable music player, laptop, my wife's phone, my wife's laptop, and my wife's music player all play Vorbis and FLAC. The only ones that don't play Theora are the music players (which don't have color screens). Music players that support Vorbis aren't that hard to find.
Differences in quality between WebM and H.264 are negligable, at best. Most people won't notice or care. But how about that "end-user experience" of paying a royalty fee everytime you want to encode, decode, or distribute a video? Or not being able to play H.264 videos out of the box on Linux because the members of MPEG-LA can't compete any other way? Doesn't sound very fucking user-friendly to me.
WebM is open and free in every sense of the word; the submarine patent issues apply equally to H.264; and hardware support for WebM is coming along rapidly. Face it, WebM is the future, and that's a good thing.
Business Software Alliance members
MPEG-LA H.264 licensors
Note how Microsoft and Apple are both members of the above groups (in case you haven't heard of BSA, they're basically the MPAA and RIAA of the software world). Google isn't a member of either group.
Any complaints that can be leveled against WebM can be leveled against H.264 (that is, it is just as likely that submarine patents exist for H.264 as for WebM). The difference is that Google is pushing for open standards that don't require license fees to use (including no license fees for playback or distribution). Google is doing the right thing, and Apple and Microsoft, as usual, are trying to lock customers into their products, limit choice, and stifle competition. Anyone who can't see that is deluding themselves, and is probably either a shill or shameless fanboi.
I don't blame Apple or Microsoft, though; if I had to compete against Linux, I'd try dirty political weasely tricks like this, because it's obvious Apple and Microsoft can't compete technically.
Actually, I don't think I'm all that qualified; I've never written my own OS. But looking at people that have (Torvalds, Tannenbaum, Ritchie, et al), I would have to say that a programming language that wants to be used for OS implementation will have to displace C. That is, it needs to have the power of C (low-level HW access at a minimum), but also have that something little extra that gives it an advantage. The more expressive and succint you can make a language, the more powerful it will probably be.
Oh, and never write a programming language for someone else to use; make sure any software you write is something you would want to use, otherwise it will probably suck.
Really? Excuse me, I need to go write some software . . .
And this, is precisely what all the haters on the story here don't get. "If you don't want 3D, don't buy it! No one's forcing you, why do you say it's a gimmick and it sucks? You're just a luddite/ignorant/old fogie." Maybe because it is a gimmick that's been trotted out every few decades for over 150 years, yet it's still not standard, like color visuals or stereo sound. Why might that be? Might it be because it doesn't work reliably? Or because people tend to tackily tack it on offerings that would otherwise be ignored? And the market soundly refutes it every time.
Only this time, you don't have a choice. You can't buy a high end TV without 3D, whether you want it or not. Suck it, losers! The free* market triumphs again!
* - for certain definitions of "free", ie where the megacorps are free to foist upon you whatever they please, and you have the "freedom" of choice between buying it or not.
Title is a quote from an email I received yesterday from the Open Goldberg project. Here's the quote in full:
WTF?! No, what MPA (and GoDaddy) /deserve/ are heaping helpings of scorn. That they realized their mistake and fixed it is just a token act in a tragedy that *they* caused, and shouldn't have happened in the first place.
The GP is an ignoramus. Software made while in the employ of the US government (think civil servants, not contractors) is public domain; it's right in the copyright law. It might take a little time getting through the red tape, especially to make sure there's nothing sensitive, but you can get the source code to government projects.
You can overclock the N900. I've not tried it, but some people claim to get it to 1GHz. As for the touchscreen, I kind of like being able to use my fingernails. The lack of 3G on AT&T sucks, but then AT&T sucks in general. I switched to T-Mobile and while I don't get 3G where I live (in the boonies), I regularly get 3.5G in more populated areas.
Anyone who's interested in public domain and creative commons licensed music should check out archive.org and Jamendo. Others have listed other services in past discussions, but those are the two that come to my mind.
How about Apple?
It is lovely and at the same time scary just how much OO has creeped into the Linux kernel, just out of pure necessity. It's been awhile since I've had to hack on the Linux kernel, but I'm glad to hear things have continued to improve.
Ah, I didn't see the GP; I was assuming they were referring to coding things in assembly; to me, /that's/ low-level. One of my big gripes with Android has always been that they want you to rewrite applications in Java. There's so much open source out there that's not Java that I think that approach is foolish. Heck, in my fantasy-land, Android was going to be Linux on a phone where at worst you had to redesign the V&C, and at best you could just recompile for ARM. Too bad it didn't turn out that way.
As a past embedded, kernel, and driver developer, I'm always tempted to laugh at people who think they "need to program closer to the hardware", but I usually refrain and ask them these questions instead:
If the answers to all of the above is "no", then they don't need to be programming closer to the hardware.
To be perfectly honest, most people already own a perfectly good DVD player, so it's actually surprising to me that something new and shiny isn't making even better sales. Actually, looking at reasons to avoid Blu-Ray in this thread, it's not that surprising.
What might be more informative would be to look at how many Blu-Ray discs vs DVDs are being sold over a given timeframe (month, quarter, etc). Although, again, we should expect Blu-Ray to be outselling by a huge margin, since most people already have a lot of DVDs. But again, figures I've seen indicate that Blu-Ray sales are severely lacking, which I can only guess that it's mostly for reasons listed by comments here. There's no indication sales will pickup or displace DVDs anytime soon, unless something drastic changes (doubtful).
As for sales of players, you might want to look on that at as people buying them because they'll play DVDs, or the market pushing those on the consumer, etc, etc. Here's a good question: how well are sales of *dedicated* Blu-Ray players doing, you know, ones that will *only* play Blu-Rays?
I can understand the sentiment, and somewhat agree with it, but for the vast majority of film, I'm more than likely only ever going to watch it once. That, and a lot of crap is rerun all the time on cable (which I would get rid of, but the wife likes it for background noise). Buying a movie without seeing it is stupid; going to see a movie you might not like in the theater is stupid; renting (especially streaming) is really the only reasonable option. Picture and sound quality are not more important than writing or direction, but some movies that do benefit from it ("2001" comes to mind) and are good are sometimes worth owning. Most of the rest is garbage that is barely worth a rental, much less a purchase.
Boy, that VPS setup with SSH and rsync doesn't sound so hard to setup now, does it?
PS - git instead of rsync also works pretty well.
The only thing that is "unscratchable" is streaming. Once I see rental places replace a majority of their DVDs with Blu-Ray, or start charging less to rent Blu-Ray, or I hear parents laud Blu-Ray's resilience in the hands of their kids, I might believe Blu-Ray's to be more durable than DVDs. It is telling that Netflix's streaming service has taken off and many parents rip their kids' DVDs (which is not so easy to do with Blu-Ray) for playback. One of Blu-Ray's advantages is also one of its Achille's heels: the higher data density means that it's much easier to corrupt.
Get back to me in ten years; that's probably how long you've had most of your DVDs; Blu-Ray hasn't been around that long, yet. Of course, by then, ripping Blu-Rays so you don't have to put up with unskippable ads and warnings or have to change disks will probably be quite common.
I've watched a number of movies lately that *could* be construed as "origin stories", but they weren't - and they were that much better for it. Let's face it, most origin stories are retreads; we already know what the end result is going to be. Sure, sometimes limits can help creativity, or really good writers can make an incredible story, with twists, that still fits into canon. But most of the time good writing and creativity get thrown out the window in favor of staying in canon (just look at the Star Wars prequels).
Blu-ray is *not* /clearly/ superior - most people honestly can't tell the difference. Even on my 42in HDTV, I can't tell the difference between Blu-Ray and DVD unless I pause to see the jaggies. There was some study (done in Holland?) where they told people a picture was HD, then randomly showed them SD or HD; they couldn't tell the difference. In technical terms, Blu-Ray isn't that much of a jump from DVD either. Add to this the draconian copy protection, the higher probability that a Blu-Ray will become unplayable due to even minor scratches, the ridiculous pricing schemes, the unskippable ads and FBI warnings, the fact that streaming fixes a lot of these problems, and you have a product ready to go nowhere.