Like the old saying says - "You don't need a patent on bread to make a living as a baker."
Is that an old saying, or something you just made up and called old so it would have more gravitas? It can't be that old a saying, since it refers to patents.
I only ask 'cause I like it, and it's going in my quotefile.
Stewart's point wasn't that they should live up to the shining journalistic standard he sets. He runs a fucking comedy show. Hell, he said himself, "the show before mine is puppets making crank phone calls---what is wrong with you?!", when they kept needling him about not being a paragon of journalistic integrity.
Well, since US television tends not to make it to Britain for a long time after it airs here, it makes a bit of sense. A lot of shows have a one- or two-season lag time. It makes sense that fans who follow the show online would want to see the show as it comes out.
On the other hand, I score TV shows because I fucking hate commercials, and because I don't have an actual television any more. Funny how original Star Trek was about fifty-five minutes long, while newer "full hour" shows are more like forty-two minutes. That's nearly four times the ads. Yecch.
Also, it's convenient to be able to watch them when and how I'd like. And I get to insulate myself from the vast bulk of crap that's on TV most of the time, and pick the best of what's out there. (Firefly, Babylon 5 and perhaps some softcore lesbian porn: The L Word.)
So... the FLAC/MonkeyAudio/whatever files are $0.02/MB, or do you mean that files that are available in that format are $0.02/MB, regardless of the format they're in?
And where does the FAQ there say this? I'm not signed up, but I got the impression that it was all $0.02/MB.
I have two Athlon T-birds, a 750 and a 1000. My room requires an air conditioner well into the fall, and even though the AC is still in the wall, so head leaks out constantly, the room is only cool when the outside temperature drops well below freezing.
And I don't even have a CRT, just a nineteen-inch flat-panel which doesn't put out that much heat.
Well, it's $0.02 a MB now. And they allow lossless (FLAC etc.) encoding on some tracks. But their catalog has an unforgivable lack of 'Mindless Self Indulgence' at the moment, alas.
Is nobody here aware of the terms of the GFDL? Derived works must be released under the same license. The whole point of Wikipedia's license is that nobody can make it proprietary.
Sheesh! Has no one on Slashdot read the damned license?
If it's trivially improvable, then that's lovely. But my point is that the current HTML generation is bloaty and breaks Firefox sometimes. (Though Firefox should handle whatever gets thrown at it, this wouldn't be an issue if the code were standardized.)
So, my point---what's stopping Slashdot from modernizing its markup? The potential traffic savings are significant, and it won't spontaneously break on some browsers. Not to mention that as a shimmering beacon of open source fanboys everywhere, Slashdot should showcase some of those open standards we yammer on about all the time.
His point is that HN encourages bad code. Not that it enforces it. Like talking on a cell phone in a car encourages bad driving.
And, who knows, maybe he has a valid point. I'm working in Perl at the moment, so my variables, depending how you look at it, are either untyped, or have built-in HN. ($foo is a $calar, @bar is an @rray, and so forth.)
Then again, I have GUI components which might use various widgets, and I need to call different methods on them based on what widget they're using. (GetValue versus GetSelection, for instance.) So I'll call an OK-button $self->{b_ok}, because it helps and because I'm going to use it later.
Though I've never seen the point in labeling every single variable by the Hungarian method. I don't use this for local variables; I use it for maybe one in ten variables, because it helps.
Am I for or against HN? Now I can't even tell. It works for me, sometimes, in some contexts.
If I'm developing primarily on Linux, what sort of things do I need to look out for to make my application build on other Unices? On Mac OSX, which is sort of a pseudo-Unix in some ways?
Is there a good tutorial for this sort of thing? I'm sure folks would be better at not writing unportable kibble if they just knew better.
Ah, you beat me to it. I'm doing some wxPerl development (for FreeMED) at the moment, and moving from one platform to another is trivial. I especially like the use of native dialogs for file-selection, color-selection, printing and so forth. If it's all done right, you don't even know that the app uses Wx. (I didn't know that Audacity did until quite recently.)
(Though I wish Wx::Config were implemented in the Windows/ActivePerl port. I had much desired to make use of it.)
WMP can't play jack without hunting down codecs from all over.
I think that's more of an issue with the Windows DirectShow architecture than anything else. (I completely agree that the interface design is fugly, and needs to die die die.) The codec problem is still there in Media Player Classic, which, aside from that, is a rather good media player. (MPC gives better codec-not-found messages than WMP, though.)
I think it's like gPhoto: camera drivers are written modularly, to be camera drivers. They don't come with sixteen different sorts of cutesy crap-ridden software (which has some sort of "friendly" interface made of circles because they're friendlier); they're camera drivers, and that's all they do. Compare that to Windows, where you need to install a different kind of software, never mind a different driver, for a new camera.
Codecs are a bit like that. Want Real codecs? Whoops, you'll need RealPlayer. Want QuickTime codecs? Well, guess what.
There are hacks, like {Real,QuickTime}Alternative, but they're (a) not really legal, and (b) not widely used.
Sometimes I think the lack of mainstream software support for Linux is a good thing.
What the crap is this idea that if people can learn, they will? Don't you remember that the internet was supposed to Change Everything, and yet here we all are, still watching television?
Don't you remember how the internet was supposed to make us all into both content creators and consumers, transform the commercial monologue into a dialogue will millions upon millions of speakers? And how, gee, there's a lot of huge corporate presence on the internet, and the feedback button has gone out of vogue over the last few years, and most people use the internet the same way they used to use the television.
People who want to learn, will. Google and Wikipedia make it easier. But they won't enlighten humanity. The problem is, as it has always been, a people problem. And you can't solve those with technology.
I think America has every bit as much hatred, racism, and bigotry as other countries.
Then you either have a distorted picture of America, or of other countries.
Look, in places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, significant segments of the populace were ready, with not so much provocation, to rise up and slaughter other segments. We simply do not have that here. In the last thirty years, the largest civil unrest was the LA riots, confined to one city and a whole lot of property damage. Show me the mass graves, like they have in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Germany.
If you think being denied employment or shunned in school is the worst thing that happens in other places, you've clearly been reading too much "Indy Media" or something.
(Before you leap up and mention the locals who were here before the Americans came and drove them out/murdered them---that's not civil unrest. It's a horrific act of war, but it was carried out by one nation against another.)
I'm not saying there's no racism in America. But to throw one's hands up and state that everyone has racism, and we just pretend it isn't so bad... it's intellectually lazy, and dishonest.
Remember, those folks were sued for distributing. Say they sent pieces of a movie to a hundred people. (Yet they get sued for the whole thing; bear with me.) Now, the idea is that those hundred people clearly wanted the movie, and would have paid $24.99 retail for it. Thus, the record company has just lost sales of $2499. So there's their 'actual damages'.
This may sound silly, but Bob publishes a book and puts it on sale for $4, and you copy it without permission and sell a printed copy for $3... well, clearly you're making money that Bob has a right to.
Wait, I'm a little fuzzy on this 'statutory damages' bit. You mean you somehow get automatic money, despite having no conceivable real damage to yourself? Not even the debatable damages of lost sales?
Damn. I'm going to copyright everything I own and leave it in a public place with a "do not take" sign on it, then sue people to the four corners of the earth. Thanks!
You know that you have to show damages to be awarded money, right? You can't just demand mad cash money because "it's mine and he took it without my permission".
If you never had a sale or even an intent to sell your work, how do you propose to show damages?
The DMCA makes a whole lot of statements about copyright circumvention. But not much of anything about encryption. This is why CSS, with its laughably weak encryption, can be used, and anyone who pokes at the gaping goatse vulnerability-hole is then liable for horrible, horrible damages.
If you're not using encryption to protect your copyright---and if you're not selling all those "vacation" JPEGs and school papers, it's damn hard to show copyright damages---the DMCA is mute on this issue.
It is designed to protect copyright holders, not to protect anyone who uses encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
There are also valid reasons for having more than a single point of failure in a system.
--grendel drago
Man, I'd hit it. You hear that, kturner? I'd hit it! Judging from the back of her neck, that is.
--grendel drago
Recent W3C standards have been a complete joke...
Really? I thought CSS was frickin' brilliant.
--grendel drago
Like the old saying says - "You don't need a patent on bread to make a living as a baker."
Is that an old saying, or something you just made up and called old so it would have more gravitas? It can't be that old a saying, since it refers to patents.
I only ask 'cause I like it, and it's going in my quotefile.
--grendel drago
Stewart's point wasn't that they should live up to the shining journalistic standard he sets. He runs a fucking comedy show. Hell, he said himself, "the show before mine is puppets making crank phone calls---what is wrong with you?!", when they kept needling him about not being a paragon of journalistic integrity.
--grendel drago
Well, since US television tends not to make it to Britain for a long time after it airs here, it makes a bit of sense. A lot of shows have a one- or two-season lag time. It makes sense that fans who follow the show online would want to see the show as it comes out.
On the other hand, I score TV shows because I fucking hate commercials, and because I don't have an actual television any more. Funny how original Star Trek was about fifty-five minutes long, while newer "full hour" shows are more like forty-two minutes. That's nearly four times the ads. Yecch.
Also, it's convenient to be able to watch them when and how I'd like. And I get to insulate myself from the vast bulk of crap that's on TV most of the time, and pick the best of what's out there. (Firefly, Babylon 5 and perhaps some softcore lesbian porn: The L Word.)
--grendel drago
I think he was comparing high-power chips from 2005 to low-power chips from 2005, not to low-power chips from 1981.
--grendel drago
So... the FLAC/MonkeyAudio/whatever files are $0.02/MB, or do you mean that files that are available in that format are $0.02/MB, regardless of the format they're in?
And where does the FAQ there say this? I'm not signed up, but I got the impression that it was all $0.02/MB.
--grendel drago
I have two Athlon T-birds, a 750 and a 1000. My room requires an air conditioner well into the fall, and even though the AC is still in the wall, so head leaks out constantly, the room is only cool when the outside temperature drops well below freezing.
And I don't even have a CRT, just a nineteen-inch flat-panel which doesn't put out that much heat.
--grendel drago
Well, it's $0.02 a MB now. And they allow lossless (FLAC etc.) encoding on some tracks. But their catalog has an unforgivable lack of 'Mindless Self Indulgence' at the moment, alas.
--grendel drago
Is nobody here aware of the terms of the GFDL? Derived works must be released under the same license. The whole point of Wikipedia's license is that nobody can make it proprietary.
Sheesh! Has no one on Slashdot read the damned license?
--grendel drago
If it's trivially improvable, then that's lovely. But my point is that the current HTML generation is bloaty and breaks Firefox sometimes. (Though Firefox should handle whatever gets thrown at it, this wouldn't be an issue if the code were standardized.)
So, my point---what's stopping Slashdot from modernizing its markup? The potential traffic savings are significant, and it won't spontaneously break on some browsers. Not to mention that as a shimmering beacon of open source fanboys everywhere, Slashdot should showcase some of those open standards we yammer on about all the time.
--grendel drago
I assume you're referring to Slashdot's use of kludgy, bloated, nonstandard markup. I, too, wonder about this.
Is there a real reason Slashdot doesn't use modern markup? Others have already done the work. So what's the hold-up?
--grendel drago
His point is that HN encourages bad code. Not that it enforces it. Like talking on a cell phone in a car encourages bad driving.
And, who knows, maybe he has a valid point. I'm working in Perl at the moment, so my variables, depending how you look at it, are either untyped, or have built-in HN. ($foo is a $calar, @bar is an @rray, and so forth.)
Then again, I have GUI components which might use various widgets, and I need to call different methods on them based on what widget they're using. (GetValue versus GetSelection, for instance.) So I'll call an OK-button $self->{b_ok}, because it helps and because I'm going to use it later.
Though I've never seen the point in labeling every single variable by the Hungarian method. I don't use this for local variables; I use it for maybe one in ten variables, because it helps.
Am I for or against HN? Now I can't even tell. It works for me, sometimes, in some contexts.
--grendel drago
If I'm developing primarily on Linux, what sort of things do I need to look out for to make my application build on other Unices? On Mac OSX, which is sort of a pseudo-Unix in some ways?
Is there a good tutorial for this sort of thing? I'm sure folks would be better at not writing unportable kibble if they just knew better.
--grendel drago
I think the "first unix" figures for Linux are dwarfed by those for Mac OSX. I mean, its proponents keep assuring me that it's a "real unix"...
--grendel drago
Ah, you beat me to it. I'm doing some wxPerl development (for FreeMED) at the moment, and moving from one platform to another is trivial. I especially like the use of native dialogs for file-selection, color-selection, printing and so forth. If it's all done right, you don't even know that the app uses Wx. (I didn't know that Audacity did until quite recently.)
(Though I wish Wx::Config were implemented in the Windows/ActivePerl port. I had much desired to make use of it.)
--grendel drago
WMP can't play jack without hunting down codecs from all over.
I think that's more of an issue with the Windows DirectShow architecture than anything else. (I completely agree that the interface design is fugly, and needs to die die die.) The codec problem is still there in Media Player Classic, which, aside from that, is a rather good media player. (MPC gives better codec-not-found messages than WMP, though.)
I think it's like gPhoto: camera drivers are written modularly, to be camera drivers. They don't come with sixteen different sorts of cutesy crap-ridden software (which has some sort of "friendly" interface made of circles because they're friendlier); they're camera drivers, and that's all they do. Compare that to Windows, where you need to install a different kind of software, never mind a different driver, for a new camera.
Codecs are a bit like that. Want Real codecs? Whoops, you'll need RealPlayer. Want QuickTime codecs? Well, guess what.
There are hacks, like {Real,QuickTime}Alternative, but they're (a) not really legal, and (b) not widely used.
Sometimes I think the lack of mainstream software support for Linux is a good thing.
--grendel drago
1995 called; they want their blind optimism back.
What the crap is this idea that if people can learn, they will? Don't you remember that the internet was supposed to Change Everything, and yet here we all are, still watching television?
Don't you remember how the internet was supposed to make us all into both content creators and consumers, transform the commercial monologue into a dialogue will millions upon millions of speakers? And how, gee, there's a lot of huge corporate presence on the internet, and the feedback button has gone out of vogue over the last few years, and most people use the internet the same way they used to use the television.
People who want to learn, will. Google and Wikipedia make it easier. But they won't enlighten humanity. The problem is, as it has always been, a people problem. And you can't solve those with technology.
--grendel drago
I think America has every bit as much hatred, racism, and bigotry as other countries.
Then you either have a distorted picture of America, or of other countries.
Look, in places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia, significant segments of the populace were ready, with not so much provocation, to rise up and slaughter other segments. We simply do not have that here. In the last thirty years, the largest civil unrest was the LA riots, confined to one city and a whole lot of property damage. Show me the mass graves, like they have in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, in Germany.
If you think being denied employment or shunned in school is the worst thing that happens in other places, you've clearly been reading too much "Indy Media" or something.
(Before you leap up and mention the locals who were here before the Americans came and drove them out/murdered them---that's not civil unrest. It's a horrific act of war, but it was carried out by one nation against another.)
I'm not saying there's no racism in America. But to throw one's hands up and state that everyone has racism, and we just pretend it isn't so bad... it's intellectually lazy, and dishonest.
--grendel drago
Remember, those folks were sued for distributing. Say they sent pieces of a movie to a hundred people. (Yet they get sued for the whole thing; bear with me.) Now, the idea is that those hundred people clearly wanted the movie, and would have paid $24.99 retail for it. Thus, the record company has just lost sales of $2499. So there's their 'actual damages'.
This may sound silly, but Bob publishes a book and puts it on sale for $4, and you copy it without permission and sell a printed copy for $3... well, clearly you're making money that Bob has a right to.
--grendel drago
Wait, I'm a little fuzzy on this 'statutory damages' bit. You mean you somehow get automatic money, despite having no conceivable real damage to yourself? Not even the debatable damages of lost sales?
Damn. I'm going to copyright everything I own and leave it in a public place with a "do not take" sign on it, then sue people to the four corners of the earth. Thanks!
--grendel drago
You know that you have to show damages to be awarded money, right? You can't just demand mad cash money because "it's mine and he took it without my permission".
If you never had a sale or even an intent to sell your work, how do you propose to show damages?
--grendel drago
Either that's really fucking awesome, or you just figured out a way to make ten thousand Slashdotters all get baby powder on themselves.
I suppose I'll go acquire some baby powder and find out.
Either way, kudos to you.
--grendel drago
Yes, they can.
The DMCA makes a whole lot of statements about copyright circumvention. But not much of anything about encryption. This is why CSS, with its laughably weak encryption, can be used, and anyone who pokes at the gaping goatse vulnerability-hole is then liable for horrible, horrible damages.
If you're not using encryption to protect your copyright---and if you're not selling all those "vacation" JPEGs and school papers, it's damn hard to show copyright damages---the DMCA is mute on this issue.
It is designed to protect copyright holders, not to protect anyone who uses encryption.
--grendel drago