Re:standardized locations, etc.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
/opt is where you place third party stuff with "static files" (according to man hier), and/usr/local is where you put things you compiled yourself. So I think that something like StarOffice would go into/opt, while if you compiled Gaim or something it would go in/usr/local.
But the fact of the matter is that you are agreeing to give up said rights. Like they pointed out you have a EULA, which spells out how you can and can't use the software in question. Maybe we don't agree with how this is written, but SOMEONE has to agree with this when the software is installed on the computer.
And I'm saying that this is not the way it should be. I'm saying that if a copyright holder releases his work, he should have only the rights granted by copyright. Intellectual property laws in this country are supposed to work for the public good, not individual advancement. Hence, when the holder of a copyright releases his work into the world, the only control he should have over it is that given by copyright. Not the ability to manufacture new restrictions. If they don't want to abide by copyright, they shouldn't release their stuff.
And it isn't like you are totally bound by this. If you purchased the softwared, decided that you didn't agree to the EULA, then you can return it. End of story.
This is almost an irrelevant point, but most vendors don't let you return software once it's been opened, and you have to open it to read the EULA.
I guess I don't have sufficient legal background to be talking, but my common sense tells me that this is absurd. You buy some software, but before you can use it you're required to give up some rights that you have been given? The doctrine of First Sale (conceived, iirc, in a case about contracts printed in books that said you couldn't resell the book) seems to apply here as well: why should you be forced to give up some of your rights in order to use a product you've bought?
An EULA held up in court, despite the fact that no one ever signed anything, and there were no witnesses... this sounds like a really bad ruling. My guess is that it will be appealed, and eventually struck down. Either way, I think this case is going to be big...
You're right about first sale--in fact, the doctrine of first sale has been largely ignored (see Lawrence Lessig, interview with Slashdot).
However, it is, in fact, illegal to do precisely the things you describein your second and third paragraphs, if the publisher has put in any kind of digital copy protection. Getting around those, even for perfectly benign purposes (like ripping a DVD to your hard drive so you can watch it while you're dvd player's being fixed/whatever) is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (I think section 1201a, but I'm not sure about that).
If normal, non-copyright-violating activities weren't being attacked here, I think a lot fewer people would be upset...
Yikes, scary indeed, for people who dual boot... but it seems to me that Windows could only infect Linux, and not the other way around. I'm reasonably certain that the permissions on block devices in Linux are such that you can't just go mounting anything without root access, whether you have your own filesystem code or not.
...Never mind that none of those utilities is actually able to unrar this particular rar file.:( anyone feel like hosting a [b | g]zipped version of this?
For DVDs on linux, the only real solution is ogle. It simply kicks ass, and offers a combination of perfect menu support, good speed, and a decent GTK interface.
Why, if he's not careful, he might--gasp--delete his home directory, and MAYBE several temporary files! The system will keep on running without even noticing this event;)
Redirection isn't a problem either; to redirect the stream you'd have to observe it, and by observing it you will change it, and make it impossible to view the messages.
I guess you could always kill the recipient and read his messages, but any form of cryptography short of biometric (and others have pointed out the flaws in that) will be vulnerable to that attack.
And yet, people can write for free software projects. Why? Because they're volunteers. I don't think the same restrictions on child labor apply to those under 18, though at least in my state (Missouri) you must be 14 or older to do volunteer work.
Re:Newsflash: LOTR was not the best picture of 200
on
LoTR Takes 4 Oscars
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· Score: 1
I don't think that Waking life was animated--it was just a filter over live action. A very good movie though (even if it tended towards pretension when the characters were espousing philosophy).
Not entirely sure what you mean by identifying trains: are the trains identified by colored stripes? by a sign on one of the windows?
Unless the trains have different contours (ie, some are snub nosed, others have a vertical front), you wouldn't be able to do the same kind of image matching these guys are. The trains are simply too similar.
If, however, they come with a colored stripe, I would think you could just set the camera up at the level of the stripe, do motion detection (there is a linux program "motion" that does this) and then find the predominant image color (really easy).
Be sure the check out MIT's Vismod page (use Google); there's a whole host of cool stuff there about computer vision. Also check out Intel's OpenCV package, it's an open source library intended to help people write programs involving computer vision.
With regards to your sig: I don't think it's nearly geeky enough. I did a lynx -dump of slashdot, put it in a text file, and then manually created a WAV header for it with a hex editor. You can find the result here. Have a nice day.
In my experience, false rejections are a LOT more common than false acceptances when doing any type of automatic image matching (face recognition, cat recognition, whatever). On the system I set up (a really hackish and amateur one, to be sure), we only got one false acceptance and a pretty large number of false rejections.
If you want to know more about what I was working on, um... too bad, I haven't documented it except in this slashdot comment.
The link to the source code given in that comment is outdated, though, use this one.
I do have some experience with this, as a matter of fact. A friend and I, armed with an aging color quickcam and a bit of ingenuity, set out to build just such a home brew recognition system.
We started out by going to the VisMod page at MIT (too lazy to link at the moment), where we found the software package "facerec", which claimed to do simple face recognition using the Eigenface method (there are plenty of papers on this in PS and PDF format at the VisMod page). After a bunch of tweaking to get the software (originially designed to work with 10 year old UNIX machines) to work with Linux/BSD, and figuring out what their image format was, we did a bit of testing.
The system worked pretty well, but we found that the major flaw was that it didn't do any "normalization" of the images; that is, it directly compared them without first checking to see if they were in the right position or even if there was anyone in the picture at all!
Right now, we're looking into face detection, which should allow us to crop the picture to include only the face, and then scale it to match the database images, before actually doing Eigenface comparisons.
The field is a fascinating one, especially when you consider the recent privacy concerns. An interesting tidbit: the very same company that was monitoring people at the SuperBowl uses (in modified form) software licensed from MIT--in other words, they were working with roughly the same base we were.
You can grab facerec, updated to work with Linux and with a bunch of bugfixes (though sadly, the X display still doesn't work--any fixes to that would be appreciated) here
I've just tested it with the most recent linux beta (6.0 Beta 1), and while the main page does, in fact, render correctly, the HOWTO has a new problem: it fails to recognize the
tags I put inside blockquotes. Let me note that *even Netscape 4* manages to do this correctly. It's improved, but it isn't the best, as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, everyone always says that Opera has the best gosh-darn CSS/HTML support they've ever seen, but in the pages I write (which I always check for HTML/CSS compliance), I've had nothing but problems. On my main page the background color of the top "Links" box doesn't show up, and in this simple HOWTO, Opera changes all my text to fixed-width after the first blockquote. Perhaps the version I'm using is just too old (Opera 5.0 for Linux - 20010510 Build 024), but I really don't see why everyone gushes about its compliance.
Slashdot Mirror
/opt is where you place third party stuff with "static files" (according to man hier), and /usr/local is where you put things you compiled yourself. So I think that something like StarOffice would go into /opt, while if you compiled Gaim or something it would go in /usr/local.
+1, Insightful, for telling us all what the hell the name means :)
Since my DSL upload (a puny 15 k/s) is flooded right now, have a shot at my school's fractional T1 (60 k/s).
Here.
Full article mirror. Produced with:
wget -p --convert-links http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6011
His karma is low enough that his default posting level is -1.
But the fact of the matter is that you are agreeing to give up said rights. Like they pointed out you have a EULA, which spells out how you can and can't use the software in question. Maybe we don't agree with how this is written, but SOMEONE has to agree with this when the software is installed on the computer.
And I'm saying that this is not the way it should be. I'm saying that if a copyright holder releases his work, he should have only the rights granted by copyright. Intellectual property laws in this country are supposed to work for the public good, not individual advancement. Hence, when the holder of a copyright releases his work into the world, the only control he should have over it is that given by copyright. Not the ability to manufacture new restrictions. If they don't want to abide by copyright, they shouldn't release their stuff.
And it isn't like you are totally bound by this. If you purchased the softwared, decided that you didn't agree to the EULA, then you can return it. End of story.
This is almost an irrelevant point, but most vendors don't let you return software once it's been opened, and you have to open it to read the EULA.
I guess I don't have sufficient legal background to be talking, but my common sense tells me that this is absurd. You buy some software, but before you can use it you're required to give up some rights that you have been given? The doctrine of First Sale (conceived, iirc, in a case about contracts printed in books that said you couldn't resell the book) seems to apply here as well: why should you be forced to give up some of your rights in order to use a product you've bought?
An EULA held up in court, despite the fact that no one ever signed anything, and there were no witnesses... this sounds like a really bad ruling. My guess is that it will be appealed, and eventually struck down. Either way, I think this case is going to be big...
You're right about first sale--in fact, the doctrine of first sale has been largely ignored (see Lawrence Lessig, interview with Slashdot).
However, it is, in fact, illegal to do precisely the things you describein your second and third paragraphs, if the publisher has put in any kind of digital copy protection. Getting around those, even for perfectly benign purposes (like ripping a DVD to your hard drive so you can watch it while you're dvd player's being fixed/whatever) is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (I think section 1201a, but I'm not sure about that).
If normal, non-copyright-violating activities weren't being attacked here, I think a lot fewer people would be upset...
Yikes, scary indeed, for people who dual boot... but it seems to me that Windows could only infect Linux, and not the other way around. I'm reasonably certain that the permissions on block devices in Linux are such that you can't just go mounting anything without root access, whether you have your own filesystem code or not.
Tilde escapes still work in the s* programs. I often use ~. to get out of timed out ssh sessions...
...Never mind that none of those utilities is actually able to unrar this particular rar file. :( anyone feel like hosting a [b | g]zipped version of this?
What are things the MPAA/RIAA want to stick to your hard drive?
For DVDs on linux, the only real solution is ogle. It simply kicks ass, and offers a combination of perfect menu support, good speed, and a decent GTK interface.
Check it out
Why, if he's not careful, he might--gasp--delete his home directory, and MAYBE several temporary files! The system will keep on running without even noticing this event ;)
Redirection isn't a problem either; to redirect the stream you'd have to observe it, and by observing it you will change it, and make it impossible to view the messages.
I guess you could always kill the recipient and read his messages, but any form of cryptography short of biometric (and others have pointed out the flaws in that) will be vulnerable to that attack.
And yet, people can write for free software projects. Why? Because they're volunteers. I don't think the same restrictions on child labor apply to those under 18, though at least in my state (Missouri) you must be 14 or older to do volunteer work.
I don't think that Waking life was animated--it was just a filter over live action. A very good movie though (even if it tended towards pretension when the characters were espousing philosophy).
Not entirely sure what you mean by identifying trains: are the trains identified by colored stripes? by a sign on one of the windows?
Unless the trains have different contours (ie, some are snub nosed, others have a vertical front), you wouldn't be able to do the same kind of image matching these guys are. The trains are simply too similar.
If, however, they come with a colored stripe, I would think you could just set the camera up at the level of the stripe, do motion detection (there is a linux program "motion" that does this) and then find the predominant image color (really easy).
Be sure the check out MIT's Vismod page (use Google); there's a whole host of cool stuff there about computer vision. Also check out Intel's OpenCV package, it's an open source library intended to help people write programs involving computer vision.
Dear Sir,
With regards to your sig: I don't think it's nearly geeky enough. I did a lynx -dump of slashdot, put it in a text file, and then manually created a WAV header for it with a hex editor. You can find the result here. Have a nice day.
Sincerely,
moyix
In my experience, false rejections are a LOT more common than false acceptances when doing any type of automatic image matching (face recognition, cat recognition, whatever). On the system I set up (a really hackish and amateur one, to be sure), we only got one false acceptance and a pretty large number of false rejections.
If you want to know more about what I was working on, um... too bad, I haven't documented it except in this slashdot comment.
The link to the source code given in that comment is outdated, though, use this one.
Take a look at the home page. This isn't a lone hacker, it's an image detection company that did this as a neat trick.
I do have some experience with this, as a matter of fact. A friend and I, armed with an aging color quickcam and a bit of ingenuity, set out to build just such a home brew recognition system.
We started out by going to the VisMod page at MIT (too lazy to link at the moment), where we found the software package "facerec", which claimed to do simple face recognition using the Eigenface method (there are plenty of papers on this in PS and PDF format at the VisMod page). After a bunch of tweaking to get the software (originially designed to work with 10 year old UNIX machines) to work with Linux/BSD, and figuring out what their image format was, we did a bit of testing.
The system worked pretty well, but we found that the major flaw was that it didn't do any "normalization" of the images; that is, it directly compared them without first checking to see if they were in the right position or even if there was anyone in the picture at all!
Right now, we're looking into face detection, which should allow us to crop the picture to include only the face, and then scale it to match the database images, before actually doing Eigenface comparisons.
The field is a fascinating one, especially when you consider the recent privacy concerns. An interesting tidbit: the very same company that was monitoring people at the SuperBowl uses (in modified form) software licensed from MIT--in other words, they were working with roughly the same base we were.
You can grab facerec, updated to work with Linux and with a bunch of bugfixes (though sadly, the X display still doesn't work--any fixes to that would be appreciated) here
Okay, everyone always says that Opera has the best gosh-darn CSS/HTML support they've ever seen, but in the pages I write (which I always check for HTML/CSS compliance), I've had nothing but problems. On my main page the background color of the top "Links" box doesn't show up, and in this simple HOWTO, Opera changes all my text to fixed-width after the first blockquote. Perhaps the version I'm using is just too old (Opera 5.0 for Linux - 20010510 Build 024), but I really don't see why everyone gushes about its compliance.