And I would like to ask all Canadian citizens reading this to do the same.
-------------
It is easy to overlook the erosion of our rights when faced with more pressing social issues, but I would like to ask you for a minute of your time to consider the implications of a change that the Conservative government is planning to make to Canadian copyright law.
I'm writing you as a professional software engineer who is concerned about the planned extension of Canadian copyright into what is called "Digital Rights Management." As a person who makes a living producing work which is protected under copyright, you may find it ironic that I am opposed to this legislation. One reason for this is that in reality DRM effectively creates a monopoly environment which locks out creative individuals who are not in the employ of large corporations, and empowers those corporations to engage in anti-competitive activities. It does this by forever binding the use of things rightfully purchased to the day to day wishes of these corporations. Including limiting their use to devices and software who's producers have a financial obligation to the controlling corporation.
I see no reason why our government should pass laws to protect the interests of these large foreign interests, at the expense of the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens. The very citizens whom you were elected to represent.
I don't have an HD TV, nor do I really have intent to get one in the next year. Same goes for the HD players.
As long as studios treat me like a video copying pirate, why should I give them more money?
Ironically, I don't want one either, but because I am a "video copying pirate."
Even with my typical 0.15 share ratio, it will be a long while 'till I have that kind of bandwidth to spare. As I download all movies and television I watch.
And I don't see why the studios are making such a headache for their paying customers. Their content protection will inevitably be broken long before people actually start wanting to swap that much HD online.
So, what's the deal with KDE and gnome needing different disks then? It seems bizzare to me that a group of hackers so tightly integrated the desktop into a set of apps that they cannot play nicely with other desktops. If it was M$ integrating a web browser into an OS well, that I get, but Linux is practically splitting into two OS's over the choice of window dressing and themes these days. What the heck is that?!? It's like M$ distributing two versions of XP, one with the classic desktop, and one with the XP theme. They would have been the laughing stock of the industry!!!
Not to come across pro M$ as I'm not, but this web standards thing is a bit too much for me. Frankly, M$ has 90% market share, but as far as I can tell they don't get much respect when trying to contribute to the standards process. E.g. their vector graphics extension just withered and died, but then apple's suddenly becomes vogue. If the official standards people are anti-M$ and M$ sets the defacto standard, can you blame M$ for feeling like being a little evil?
Here is a little history to back this up. M$ introduced one of the most useful extensions to the DOM: the innerHTML property. Instead of writing hundreds of lines of slow DOM code you can just assign a short HTML string which browsers are very fast at interpreting. This brilliant trick has been ignored by the standards people even though every browser implements it, and I can't help but think this is because it was M$'s idea and not theirs.
Again, the browser wars were hell and set the web back by years, and M$ is partially to blame for that. (Netscape implemented non-standard and incompatible stuff at the same time.) But I can't help but think that if the standards people would be a little less idealistic and be more willing to standardize *common practice* in the form of IE's extensions things would be going a little more smoothly.
Here is a counter argument. A global network of telephones *is in fact* complicated. However, people routinely acquire international connections via a number of connections using an array of communication technologies without endangering their privacy or security.
Software can and is becoming that easy to use. Things like the iPod, which are also software, will outlive more intimidating designs.
IE and windows are really one big insecurity mash-up that is hard to see individually. Remember the Netscrape lawsuit over bundling IE? When M$ was arguing in court that taking something as insecure as a web browser and tightly integrating it into something that is supposed to be secure like an OS was required for their continued innovation.
Anyway, I think this is absurd. IE6 had a patch available. It was IE7. M$ released IE7 as a "high priority security update" via their built in update process. In the same way that the patch for Firefox was distributed as a later version of the browser through their built in update process. I fail to see the difference. I can see this ending up on slashdot, but the Washington Post really should know better.
The cell has 8 SPUs which are stripped down vector processors and one PPU with is an only mildly stripped down PPC core. On the PS3 one of the SPUs are disabled to increase yield.
The problem with the cell is the the SPUs are hell to program if you have a problem that doesn't fit nicely in the 256k ram that an SPU has. And most programming tasks these days don't. If the programming is essentially DSP work then you are good to go, but hopefully AMD learns from Sony's mistake, and still allow all cores random access to memory.
However L2 cache eats up a *lot* of die space, so who knows what nightmares we have coming.
The ps2 linux kit had device drivers instead of direct access to the graphics hardware, which made it useless for developing competitive console games.
Not to side with Novell, but the GPL won't let them knowingly redistribute patented stuff. Period. This is a big publicity stunt on Microsoft's part, which they paid Novell a lot for, but doesn't change the actual legal landscape meaningfully. So Novell tries to distribute some legally questionable code. So what? It does change the perceived legal position of open source code, but I think everyone needs to stop freaking out. I was so impressed with how calmly everyone wrote off SCO all those years ago. Well, these days we have potential patent troll problems, but that isn't news, it's just going to require major cooperate backing to proceeded further into the enterprise. How that backing can come about without killing "unsupported" distributions remains to be seen, but it will get worked out.
I'm Katz is what/. implemented filtering by author for. In theroy the content is catagorized in some way that you can sort for what you want, without just thinking poster == crap.
Anyone out there even filtering out a specific person posting content these days?
satisfy the needs of a computer scientist or seasoned software developer who needs all of the good algorithms that he or she can get.
I'm assuming you don't write mainstream commercial software. And in that case you should be doing better research, not archaeology.
There is a reason why the K&R book hasn't been updated since 1989
The reason they don't update it is because then it wouldn't be the overpriced sacred fossil that it is. Seriously, I have tried loaning my copy to people who were learning C and it never went well. People learn much better when there are detailed explanations with examples.
My book is worn out out of 2 years of use, but I love it).
I highlight the symbol and press F1. But I like using computers, I'm funny that way.
Seriously. The older a drive is, in my experience the less likely it is to die. The first six months are the worst.
But then I'm running a pair of drives as raid 0 for speed, and figure if you loose important files due to disk crash, you needed to learn your lesson about backups the hard way.
Next time I'll do raid 1 as I'm told that some controllers manage to combine reads from both drives to get the same speed as raid 0. Size is so cheap these days there isn't much point not to do raid 1. Twice the speed of a normal drive and a vastly reduced chance of having to reinstall everything.
The only worthwhile part of Knuth's work is the first book on sorting, and even then it is dry. Just because he can sling nasty formulas around when comparing algorithms doesn't mean a lot. These days we are using hardware that resemble DSPs and locality of reference problems can outweigh counting the number of multiplies by a long shot. Just learning O notation, what is an L2 cache miss and *to actually profile your code* instead of theorizing about it is much more important. His formulas aren't relevant on modern hardware.
The K&R's C Programming Language is only useful to people who already know C. And C is such a small language that you shouldn't need a reference book once you know it. However, if you are a language geek and like that kind of thing, get the actual C standard and read it. Seriously, it isn't that big. The C++ standard on the other hand, *that* is hard core.
$100/hr??? 99% of my clients are lawyers and they regularly bill upwards of $300/hr
Of all the people to attempt to deprive of their rights, lawyers would be right at the bottom of my list. They seem quite well equipped to defend themselves.
So yeah, I'm not remotely worried about this. If Paypal wanted to prevent homeless people from asking for spare change via Paypal over the internet, then I guess I'd take even that a little more seriously.
"Either Google is lying or they're poaching MS execs just to be dicks."
If I were Google I would do it just for that reason. And consider it a bonus if Ballmer to throws another chair.
How demoralizing is it to the rank and file at Microsoft when senior executives are going to Google? Other people as Microsoft are going to quit, just to go somewhere that isn't a sinking ship. When someone as big as Microsoft has sworn to "fucking crush" you, and you have the money Google has, this is money well spent on psychological operations.
The kid could just trace regular porn you print out, and then color it in.
Then he would have two different things to do, *and* and he'd be learning what boy and girl parts are for.
People exchange CDs without using the internet. First they go outside...
Anyway, in Canada we have a piracy tax on CDs. And we have laws against taxing illegal behaviour. Isn't that one obvious? So the tax buys us a certain guarantee of freedom. We actually have the *right* to copy and *download* music. (But not to upload/broadcast to the public.)
Just recently I was posting saying the tax was a good thing for Spain. Trying to explain that they were headed towards our situation. With this P2P madness, I have to admit I was totally wrong.
As for criticising the P2P restrictions. It's so obviously wrong, that the only thing I can think of is going trolling...
As a canadian who pays a similar tax on media, I have to disagree with your assesment.
This tax is one step further *away* from loosing your right to copy audio files. A step away from legally protected DRM.
And if you don't like the tax, buy harddrives. They are cheap, less likely to fail, and a lot easier to use. I have 30 movies and 8 *seasons* of television shows on one of my harddrives. Heck I'm too lazy to convert movies to XVID, I just dump them out raw. I have a flash based mp3 player and I set the auto-play options for audio cd's on my PC to just rip the thing. I view CDs/DVDs as an incovenince I am glad to be rid of.
Considering the pending obsolecence of shiny platic disks, this seems like a good thing for Spain. Enjoy the freedom to do what you want with your data while you have it.
I doubt people would be saying "Xbox 360 sucks because its games are on DVD!"
It sucks fitting games onto a DVD for the PS2! The large streaming worlds we are making are taxing the DVD as it is. With the absolutely massive texture sizes needed for HD and the expectation of streaming worlds for all games, the XBox360 is going to look like a cripple once the PS3 gets rolling. Possibly the XBox360 will have multiple-dvd games and that is how it will cope. However the data-read rate of a DVD is going to absolutely murder it's load times with next gen texture sizes. Feel like "installing" Xbox360 games to harddrive before playing anyone? Hahahah. And either way, a blue-ray drive will cost $15 to manufacture in a few years.
As to which will have better games, guess we'll just have to wait and see which one attracts more devs in the long run.
All games will be made for all platforms going forward. It will easily cost ~20 million to make a game for the new platforms. You would have to be right up out your mind to not port to one of the platforms. Once the PS3 gets cheap, it will be vastly superior in terms of ambient simulation. Gamers will pay a little more for the nicer toy, that is well established, and given the same set of games, eye candy will win.
The only question is, how long until Sony brings the price down. The current high prices are just intended make the system look like a bargain when they drop it to $250, while cashing in on early adopters. They haven't even shipped retail boxes. It is way to early to announce winners.
Telivision actors don't go limp enough when they pretend to get knocked unconcious. Which is why many people don't seem to realise someone who is really knocked out is all floppy.
Slashdot Mirror
And I would like to ask all Canadian citizens reading this to do the same. ------------- It is easy to overlook the erosion of our rights when faced with more pressing social issues, but I would like to ask you for a minute of your time to consider the implications of a change that the Conservative government is planning to make to Canadian copyright law. I'm writing you as a professional software engineer who is concerned about the planned extension of Canadian copyright into what is called "Digital Rights Management." As a person who makes a living producing work which is protected under copyright, you may find it ironic that I am opposed to this legislation. One reason for this is that in reality DRM effectively creates a monopoly environment which locks out creative individuals who are not in the employ of large corporations, and empowers those corporations to engage in anti-competitive activities. It does this by forever binding the use of things rightfully purchased to the day to day wishes of these corporations. Including limiting their use to devices and software who's producers have a financial obligation to the controlling corporation. I see no reason why our government should pass laws to protect the interests of these large foreign interests, at the expense of the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens. The very citizens whom you were elected to represent.
I don't have an HD TV, nor do I really have intent to get one in the next year. Same goes for the HD players.
As long as studios treat me like a video copying pirate, why should I give them more money?
Ironically, I don't want one either, but because I am a "video copying pirate."
Even with my typical 0.15 share ratio, it will be a long while 'till I have that kind of bandwidth to spare. As I download all movies and television I watch.
And I don't see why the studios are making such a headache for their paying customers. Their content protection will inevitably be broken long before people actually start wanting to swap that much HD online.
So, what's the deal with KDE and gnome needing different disks then? It seems bizzare to me that a group of hackers so tightly integrated the desktop into a set of apps that they cannot play nicely with other desktops. If it was M$ integrating a web browser into an OS well, that I get, but Linux is practically splitting into two OS's over the choice of window dressing and themes these days. What the heck is that?!? It's like M$ distributing two versions of XP, one with the classic desktop, and one with the XP theme. They would have been the laughing stock of the industry!!!
Not to come across pro M$ as I'm not, but this web standards thing is a bit too much for me. Frankly, M$ has 90% market share, but as far as I can tell they don't get much respect when trying to contribute to the standards process. E.g. their vector graphics extension just withered and died, but then apple's suddenly becomes vogue. If the official standards people are anti-M$ and M$ sets the defacto standard, can you blame M$ for feeling like being a little evil?
Here is a little history to back this up. M$ introduced one of the most useful extensions to the DOM: the innerHTML property. Instead of writing hundreds of lines of slow DOM code you can just assign a short HTML string which browsers are very fast at interpreting. This brilliant trick has been ignored by the standards people even though every browser implements it, and I can't help but think this is because it was M$'s idea and not theirs.
Again, the browser wars were hell and set the web back by years, and M$ is partially to blame for that. (Netscape implemented non-standard and incompatible stuff at the same time.) But I can't help but think that if the standards people would be a little less idealistic and be more willing to standardize *common practice* in the form of IE's extensions things would be going a little more smoothly.
Here is a counter argument. A global network of telephones *is in fact* complicated. However, people routinely acquire international connections via a number of connections using an array of communication technologies without endangering their privacy or security.
Software can and is becoming that easy to use. Things like the iPod, which are also software, will outlive more intimidating designs.
Hmm, forget I posted that. I'm a Firefox user, and thought IE7 was out longer seeing as they started talking about it a year and a half ago.
I wonder what windows would add up too
IE and windows are really one big insecurity mash-up that is hard to see individually. Remember the Netscrape lawsuit over bundling IE? When M$ was arguing in court that taking something as insecure as a web browser and tightly integrating it into something that is supposed to be secure like an OS was required for their continued innovation.
Anyway, I think this is absurd. IE6 had a patch available. It was IE7. M$ released IE7 as a "high priority security update" via their built in update process. In the same way that the patch for Firefox was distributed as a later version of the browser through their built in update process. I fail to see the difference. I can see this ending up on slashdot, but the Washington Post really should know better.
The washington Post should know better. AsThe cell has 8 SPUs which are stripped down vector processors and one PPU with is an only mildly stripped down PPC core. On the PS3 one of the SPUs are disabled to increase yield.
The problem with the cell is the the SPUs are hell to program if you have a problem that doesn't fit nicely in the 256k ram that an SPU has. And most programming tasks these days don't. If the programming is essentially DSP work then you are good to go, but hopefully AMD learns from Sony's mistake, and still allow all cores random access to memory.
However L2 cache eats up a *lot* of die space, so who knows what nightmares we have coming.
The ps2 linux kit had device drivers instead of direct access to the graphics hardware, which made it useless for developing competitive console games.
Not to side with Novell, but the GPL won't let them knowingly redistribute patented stuff. Period. This is a big publicity stunt on Microsoft's part, which they paid Novell a lot for, but doesn't change the actual legal landscape meaningfully. So Novell tries to distribute some legally questionable code. So what? It does change the perceived legal position of open source code, but I think everyone needs to stop freaking out. I was so impressed with how calmly everyone wrote off SCO all those years ago. Well, these days we have potential patent troll problems, but that isn't news, it's just going to require major cooperate backing to proceeded further into the enterprise. How that backing can come about without killing "unsupported" distributions remains to be seen, but it will get worked out.
I'm Katz is what /. implemented filtering by author for. In theroy the content is catagorized in some way that you can sort for what you want, without just thinking poster == crap.
Anyone out there even filtering out a specific person posting content these days?
I think this was characterized as break out of nano-technology by the admins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
Which is a self-replicating sludge of nano-tech which coats the entire world. And that is even cooler/worse than your case of herpes "last week."
satisfy the needs of a computer scientist or seasoned software developer who needs all of the good algorithms that he or she can get. I'm assuming you don't write mainstream commercial software. And in that case you should be doing better research, not archaeology. There is a reason why the K&R book hasn't been updated since 1989 The reason they don't update it is because then it wouldn't be the overpriced sacred fossil that it is. Seriously, I have tried loaning my copy to people who were learning C and it never went well. People learn much better when there are detailed explanations with examples. My book is worn out out of 2 years of use, but I love it). I highlight the symbol and press F1. But I like using computers, I'm funny that way.
Seriously. The older a drive is, in my experience the less likely it is to die. The first six months are the worst.
But then I'm running a pair of drives as raid 0 for speed, and figure if you loose important files due to disk crash, you needed to learn your lesson about backups the hard way.
Next time I'll do raid 1 as I'm told that some controllers manage to combine reads from both drives to get the same speed as raid 0. Size is so cheap these days there isn't much point not to do raid 1. Twice the speed of a normal drive and a vastly reduced chance of having to reinstall everything.
The only worthwhile part of Knuth's work is the first book on sorting, and even then it is dry. Just because he can sling nasty formulas around when comparing algorithms doesn't mean a lot. These days we are using hardware that resemble DSPs and locality of reference problems can outweigh counting the number of multiplies by a long shot. Just learning O notation, what is an L2 cache miss and *to actually profile your code* instead of theorizing about it is much more important. His formulas aren't relevant on modern hardware.
The K&R's C Programming Language is only useful to people who already know C. And C is such a small language that you shouldn't need a reference book once you know it. However, if you are a language geek and like that kind of thing, get the actual C standard and read it. Seriously, it isn't that big. The C++ standard on the other hand, *that* is hard core.
Does it acheive a goal that couldn't have been achived within the GIMP codebase with less effort? E.g. different UI modes?
Surely a name starting with a K instead of a G wan't enough?
I don't see how this kind of replication of effort best serves the adoption of Linux on the desktop in the long run.
$100/hr??? 99% of my clients are lawyers and they regularly bill upwards of $300/hr
Of all the people to attempt to deprive of their rights, lawyers would be right at the bottom of my list. They seem quite well equipped to defend themselves.
So yeah, I'm not remotely worried about this. If Paypal wanted to prevent homeless people from asking for spare change via Paypal over the internet, then I guess I'd take even that a little more seriously.
They could also be the first to have a -1 day exploit, which would look even worse.
"Either Google is lying or they're poaching MS execs just to be dicks."
If I were Google I would do it just for that reason. And consider it a bonus if Ballmer to throws another chair.
How demoralizing is it to the rank and file at Microsoft when senior executives are going to Google? Other people as Microsoft are going to quit, just to go somewhere that isn't a sinking ship. When someone as big as Microsoft has sworn to "fucking crush" you, and you have the money Google has, this is money well spent on psychological operations.
The kid could just trace regular porn you print out, and then color it in. Then he would have two different things to do, *and* and he'd be learning what boy and girl parts are for.
People exchange CDs without using the internet. First they go outside... Anyway, in Canada we have a piracy tax on CDs. And we have laws against taxing illegal behaviour. Isn't that one obvious? So the tax buys us a certain guarantee of freedom. We actually have the *right* to copy and *download* music. (But not to upload/broadcast to the public.) Just recently I was posting saying the tax was a good thing for Spain. Trying to explain that they were headed towards our situation. With this P2P madness, I have to admit I was totally wrong. As for criticising the P2P restrictions. It's so obviously wrong, that the only thing I can think of is going trolling...
As a canadian who pays a similar tax on media, I have to disagree with your assesment.
This tax is one step further *away* from loosing your right to copy audio files. A step away from legally protected DRM.
And if you don't like the tax, buy harddrives. They are cheap, less likely to fail, and a lot easier to use. I have 30 movies and 8 *seasons* of television shows on one of my harddrives. Heck I'm too lazy to convert movies to XVID, I just dump them out raw. I have a flash based mp3 player and I set the auto-play options for audio cd's on my PC to just rip the thing. I view CDs/DVDs as an incovenince I am glad to be rid of.
Considering the pending obsolecence of shiny platic disks, this seems like a good thing for Spain. Enjoy the freedom to do what you want with your data while you have it.
I doubt people would be saying "Xbox 360 sucks because its games are on DVD!"
It sucks fitting games onto a DVD for the PS2! The large streaming worlds we are making are taxing the DVD as it is. With the absolutely massive texture sizes needed for HD and the expectation of streaming worlds for all games, the XBox360 is going to look like a cripple once the PS3 gets rolling. Possibly the XBox360 will have multiple-dvd games and that is how it will cope. However the data-read rate of a DVD is going to absolutely murder it's load times with next gen texture sizes. Feel like "installing" Xbox360 games to harddrive before playing anyone? Hahahah. And either way, a blue-ray drive will cost $15 to manufacture in a few years.
As to which will have better games, guess we'll just have to wait and see which one attracts more devs in the long run.
All games will be made for all platforms going forward. It will easily cost ~20 million to make a game for the new platforms. You would have to be right up out your mind to not port to one of the platforms. Once the PS3 gets cheap, it will be vastly superior in terms of ambient simulation. Gamers will pay a little more for the nicer toy, that is well established, and given the same set of games, eye candy will win.
The only question is, how long until Sony brings the price down. The current high prices are just intended make the system look like a bargain when they drop it to $250, while cashing in on early adopters. They haven't even shipped retail boxes. It is way to early to announce winners.
"more rigid joints!"
Telivision actors don't go limp enough when they pretend to get knocked unconcious. Which is why many people don't seem to realise someone who is really knocked out is all floppy.More to the point, why would anyone upgrade to vista now?!?