"And Photoshop is typically free to all the people I know who have warezed a copy."
Ooookay - we have a choice between:
a "free" copy of PS that requires hazarding getting a trojaned binary off of P2P and possible victimization to future DRM schemes, or...
a Free copy of a very capable program that can be downloaded with a clear conscience and clean binaries.
...and people wonder why their copy of Windows corrupts so easily:/
Sorry, but I recall a time when I ran Photoshop 7 and an earlier version of GIMP on the same Mac (and old G4 Cube)... I eventually gravitated to GIMP on performance alone (guess which one is lighter on resources?) Why? Because PShop is not only bloated code-wise (not as bad as, say, FrameMaker, but pretty bad all the same), but it's bloated features-wise. I don't need/want half of what's lurking in PShop (I play w/ photography, and keep any modifcations I make to a photograph down to as few as absolutely possible), and it seems a waste to dedicate that much RAM and HDD space to something I don't use half of.
'course, I'm not a professional graphics designer or anysuch, but seriously - you don't need an industrial concrete saw just to open a can of peaches. (I know, I know - geek license hereby revoked, etc etc:) )./P
Re:Does it have a "healing brush"?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
May want to be careful ab't using a healing brush in commercial projects... it's been the source of a lot of problems in the 3D/CG hobbyist market, where it has been implicated in a whole host of copyright violation issues IRT for-profit UV/Texture maps.
Not sure how closely that would reflect to professional graphic artists' work in the 2d arena, but I can see where it may cause trouble if you're using a 'template' as another layer.
...the current Bush (nor his father) != conservative. They can claim it all they want, but the facts say otherwise.
Personally, while the USPS has no interest in delaying a package, they also have no internally-generated interest in making sure it arrives in as timely a fashion as possible, whereas their competitors UPS and FedEx have a 100% vested interest in making sure an overnight package gets there overnight.
Also, I notice that toll roads seem to be less cluttered with lane-sucking construction areas, and overall defects in the road surface, than public highways carry.
This isn't to say that Verizon et al should have free license to start chopping up their pipes and squeezing out the less well-off at all, and if they took tax money (or even incentives) to put in the fiber, then they should be subject to (hypothetical) laws regarding availability.
Personally, I think that if anything, companies should compete amongst each other to lease ownership of publicly-funded long-haul fiber for a given period of time, then be forced into a review process every X years, much like television and radio stations are forced to do with airwaves. If too many complaints arise, they lose the rights and get no refund, then others get to bid on the given stretch (leaving the punished company banned from bidding for x number of years). If they want more fiber or want to chop it up into however, then let them each add the extra at their own expense, buy their own right-of-way to lay that extra fiber, and be subject to a lot of the same regulations that AT&T lived under when they were the big dog in telecommunications. Hell, the FCC can probably monitor most of it as it is now.
...but it also means that if the CEOs (and other board members of such companies) are passionate (which is the part of the company that TFA focuses on), he'll (she'll?) take on the larger number of hours --and more importantly-- the larger risk and liability than the average employee (there's a reason that most of them take in a lot of profit, no? After all, the majority of beancounters in Enron didn't go to jail... the CFO did, in spite of the suspicion that many of the mid- to higher-level beancounters had to know that something was fishy).
(.../me patiently awaits another down-mod because some grammar nazi hates my.sig:) )
I have no idea as to why they think these results are applicable for enterprise applications, but left out enterprise J2EE solutions. We run both Oracle and WebLogic (the latter being not entirely our fault, honest!) here in various implementations. We wouldn't even think of using, oh ferinstance, MySQL* for the multi-million object DB's that Oracle (in a RAC config, so it gets to sync everything on-the-fly w/ its partners for HA) chews away at on a daily basis.
*MySQL fans can kindly keep your flames to yourselves, plz - I know Google uses it and whatnot, but they also have a large staff just to maintain and modify it, not to mention the large cluster farms to run it - we don't have those luxuries here. If it's any consolation, MSSQL would be an even worse solution due to the ungodly underlying resource demand that it carries.
Tangents aside, if the "e" in "eWeek" is supposed to stand for "enterprise" (IIRC), then fer hell's sake they shouldn't exclude the mainline enterprise stacks in their benchmarks.
...unless they magically pull a G5/PPC version outta their backsides, it's kinda not useful to us old folks still clinging to our G5's. I know it wouldn't work for virtualizing x86 stuff, but damn it would be neat to harness a current dual-proc Mac to that kind of love (y'know, for things like having YellowDog Linux and OSX on the same box...)
bah, one could only hope, but damn this is nice to hear.
Too bad Darl and friends have already made their millions from SCO's little stock kiting scheme, but it'll at least be a small comfort to see SCO finally begin to implode. I think I'll be checking the Salt Lake Tribune (I live here) for the eventual bankruptcy sale... maybe buy one of their logoed signs and mount it on a trophy plaque. (well, a man can dream, can't he?)
Agreed to a point. OTOH, at least you'd stand a better chance of catching it in operation on a non-Windows OS, if for no other reason than transparency - No NTFS alternate data streams and the like to hide active processes in.
But yeah, it sounds like a bug in virtualization itself, and not an OS... though the OS can either help hide or uncover it in process.
...coming soon! a ubersecure site that uses Arcnet for its internal network and a small IPX/SPX DMZ! Then every odd week, we switch it all to AppleTalk internally and Banyan VINES in the DMZ - they'll never see it coming!
(Of course, no one will ever be able to get anything done, but the geek factor would be impressive if you could actually make a 'musical protocols' plan work...)
/P
Re:A big waste, considering the commodity...
on
Encrypted Ammunition?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"I think it's going to be wrapped around the ass end of the casing, or might even be the firing pin mechanism itself."
The casing would be more plausible (you, like, reuse the firing pin because they're usually sort of built into the weapon, eh?)
"Second, EMP? Haha haaHahaHAAHA! Do you have any idea how EMPs are generated, aside from using a nuclear weapon? You have a coil wrapped around a high explosive, you charge the coil with a lot of current, generating a strong magnetic field, and then you detonate the explosive."
I do (considering that the acronym is a very loose term and covers far more than just explosion-generated pulses), and apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that way...
This patent hasn't been built yet, and the link I just pointed to up there is capable of overriding automobile electronics from a respectable distance during a high-speed chase. Over time, the capacitors required for such a pulse are liable to shrink to a more portable size, as even Slashdot has reported.
OTOH, HERF devices I agree on very readily.;)
/P
A big waste, considering the commodity...
on
Encrypted Ammunition?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...not to mention that it's rather beyond belief when it comes to folks (like myself) who reload their own hunting and target shooting cartridges (where you take a spent cartridge, measure it for stretch and stability, then replace primer, powder, and bullet. How on Earth is someone going to talk millions of hunters and target shooters into adding a key encryption device to their already expensive repertoire of presses, measurement tools, and cleaning equipment?
Also, given the incredible insecurity of RFID technology, it wouldn't take much to "modify" the things.
To top it off, how is a radio signal of sufficient strength going to get past that much lead? And what's to keep a bank robber or other criminal to carry a small EMP generator to effectively disarm any cop whose pistol is so equipped?
Man, someone wasted a lot of money with that patent...
"And furthermore, you get good karma which ensures that you will go to heaven and receive 72 virgin powerbooks with infinite Altivec and a double dual core."
/me looks at the idea and thinks "and this is bad?"
"so if i have mp3s of my own, i cannot put them on an ipod?"
Yes, you can. In fact, I've never bought a single tune from ITMS but my iPod Nano is packed solid with music (haven't had to go to ITMS - I ripped my entire CD collection to mp3 a long time ago, and continue to do so - much cheaper to buy a used CD in many cases and use it as a 'master copy' of sorts).
You simply import the music into the iTunes library, make a playlist from it, and transfer it to the iPod.
If what you say is indeed true, then impeachment/conviction works wonders, no? It was a mechanism put into place specifically to rein in any elected or appointed individual who has demonstrably abused power beyond the law.
Of course, this will require some action on your part to contact those able to perform this (and from those who feel the same as you do).
"I have yet to hear one actual scenario in which a few hours decrypting threatened even a single life."
Problem is, it's not just some 24 plot style decrypt-the-code-and-save-the-world scenario. There is also 'urgent' on a relative scale.
A single 128-bit SSL session (as an example) takes literally years and beyond to decrypt w/o a key given current best-effort technologies. ( Google cache of relevant info) Similar encryption schemes could(can?) make it near-to-impossible for even the most valid law enforcement action to decrypt the hard way. Consider how much time that would give someone w/ bad intent to plan and execute their ideas.
I will not defend abuse by any authority, but I can certainly sympathize with the need to timely access to potentially harmful information between parties who may be a credible threat to life and liberty.
Balance is the key - not some polarized either-or scenario.
"That's nice. But being at war with a country is different than spying on your own citizens."
I'm very sure that both the UK and the United States during WW2 were very busy searching for saboteurs and pro-nazi sympathizers within their respective citizenry, and used quite an array of wiretapping and other techniques to do so.
"The problem is, far Far FAR FAR more often it is not."
Agreed, but it is still there. Another semi-related factor is that encrypted conversations are more likely to attract attention than non-encrypted ones, no?
"But it is ALWAYS subject to abuse."
So are the FLIR heat-sensing cameras that most police helicopters come equipped with nowadays, and have carried since the mid-90's if memory serves. Those can see through quite a few obstacles that can otherwise conceal. That isn't a very valid excuse to intentionally hobble law enforcement authorities. If an authority is being abusive, we have the means and the right -- no, the duty -- to remove such people from positions of power, and punish them if necessary.
"Being Free means that we accept the risk that the "bad guys" will abuse that Freedom to hurt/kill some of our citizens."
Being 'Free' means that occasionally it may happen, not that we should refuse to prevent it from happening.
"Only we can do that by surrendering our Freedom for the illusion of "safety".
Freedom from...? Ever since the first Telegraph was put into place, governments can and have monitored them whenever they deemed it necessary. There are plenty of perfectly legal warrantless means of doing so....and it's not just me saying this.
"As I said, this is arduous...much harder than just listening to a line, but eavsedropping on American conversations shouldn't be easy."
Maybe, maybe not... but then, there are times when time is of the essence, and even the time taken to decrypt something the hard way in a timely manner is of utmost importance if there are potential lives at stake. The world's first electronic computer, Colossus, was built to decrypt German encryption during WW2, and was specifically built to be as fast and efficient as possible, because timely intelligence = lives saved.
While I doubt that decrypting a phone conversation nowadays usually isn;t exactly what one would call an urgent thing, there may be times where it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooookay - we have a choice between:
Sorry, but I recall a time when I ran Photoshop 7 and an earlier version of GIMP on the same Mac (and old G4 Cube)... I eventually gravitated to GIMP on performance alone (guess which one is lighter on resources?) Why? Because PShop is not only bloated code-wise (not as bad as, say, FrameMaker, but pretty bad all the same), but it's bloated features-wise. I don't need/want half of what's lurking in PShop (I play w/ photography, and keep any modifcations I make to a photograph down to as few as absolutely possible), and it seems a waste to dedicate that much RAM and HDD space to something I don't use half of.
'course, I'm not a professional graphics designer or anysuch, but seriously - you don't need an industrial concrete saw just to open a can of peaches. (I know, I know - geek license hereby revoked, etc etc :) ). /P
Not sure how closely that would reflect to professional graphic artists' work in the 2d arena, but I can see where it may cause trouble if you're using a 'template' as another layer.
Personally, while the USPS has no interest in delaying a package, they also have no internally-generated interest in making sure it arrives in as timely a fashion as possible, whereas their competitors UPS and FedEx have a 100% vested interest in making sure an overnight package gets there overnight.
Also, I notice that toll roads seem to be less cluttered with lane-sucking construction areas, and overall defects in the road surface, than public highways carry.
This isn't to say that Verizon et al should have free license to start chopping up their pipes and squeezing out the less well-off at all, and if they took tax money (or even incentives) to put in the fiber, then they should be subject to (hypothetical) laws regarding availability.
Personally, I think that if anything, companies should compete amongst each other to lease ownership of publicly-funded long-haul fiber for a given period of time, then be forced into a review process every X years, much like television and radio stations are forced to do with airwaves. If too many complaints arise, they lose the rights and get no refund, then others get to bid on the given stretch (leaving the punished company banned from bidding for x number of years). If they want more fiber or want to chop it up into however, then let them each add the extra at their own expense, buy their own right-of-way to lay that extra fiber, and be subject to a lot of the same regulations that AT&T lived under when they were the big dog in telecommunications. Hell, the FCC can probably monitor most of it as it is now.
(... /me patiently awaits another down-mod because some grammar nazi hates my .sig :) )
*MySQL fans can kindly keep your flames to yourselves, plz - I know Google uses it and whatnot, but they also have a large staff just to maintain and modify it, not to mention the large cluster farms to run it - we don't have those luxuries here. If it's any consolation, MSSQL would be an even worse solution due to the ungodly underlying resource demand that it carries.
Tangents aside, if the "e" in "eWeek" is supposed to stand for "enterprise" (IIRC), then fer hell's sake they shouldn't exclude the mainline enterprise stacks in their benchmarks.
Eh? Quake4 and UT2k4 run just fine on my old dual G5...
I find that quite often, the big games do indeed have two (even three incl. Linux) OS ports per game.
Now performance/quality issues between the ports? Oh yes, that's a whole other rant entirely...
Too bad Darl and friends have already made their millions from SCO's little stock kiting scheme, but it'll at least be a small comfort to see SCO finally begin to implode. I think I'll be checking the Salt Lake Tribune (I live here) for the eventual bankruptcy sale... maybe buy one of their logoed signs and mount it on a trophy plaque. (well, a man can dream, can't he?)
But yeah, it sounds like a bug in virtualization itself, and not an OS... though the OS can either help hide or uncover it in process.
(Of course, no one will ever be able to get anything done, but the geek factor would be impressive if you could actually make a 'musical protocols' plan work...)
The casing would be more plausible (you, like, reuse the firing pin because they're usually sort of built into the weapon, eh?)
"Second, EMP? Haha haaHahaHAAHA! Do you have any idea how EMPs are generated, aside from using a nuclear weapon? You have a coil wrapped around a high explosive, you charge the coil with a lot of current, generating a strong magnetic field, and then you detonate the explosive."
I do (considering that the acronym is a very loose term and covers far more than just explosion-generated pulses), and apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that way...
This patent hasn't been built yet, and the link I just pointed to up there is capable of overriding automobile electronics from a respectable distance during a high-speed chase. Over time, the capacitors required for such a pulse are liable to shrink to a more portable size, as even Slashdot has reported.
OTOH, HERF devices I agree on very readily. ;)
Also, given the incredible insecurity of RFID technology, it wouldn't take much to "modify" the things.
To top it off, how is a radio signal of sufficient strength going to get past that much lead? And what's to keep a bank robber or other criminal to carry a small EMP generator to effectively disarm any cop whose pistol is so equipped?
Man, someone wasted a lot of money with that patent...
(MetaCreations also produced Poser, Bryce, and Carrara. - all three of which are still alive and in use by the 3D hobbyist market).
Umm, you accept it all you want. The rest of us would like to carry on as far as we can, thanks.
Seriously, once we as a species accept that, then we all may as well just commit mass suicide and be done with it.
Yes, you can. In fact, I've never bought a single tune from ITMS but my iPod Nano is packed solid with music (haven't had to go to ITMS - I ripped my entire CD collection to mp3 a long time ago, and continue to do so - much cheaper to buy a used CD in many cases and use it as a 'master copy' of sorts).
You simply import the music into the iTunes library, make a playlist from it, and transfer it to the iPod.
Of course, this will require some action on your part to contact those able to perform this (and from those who feel the same as you do).
Problem is, it's not just some 24 plot style decrypt-the-code-and-save-the-world scenario. There is also 'urgent' on a relative scale.
A single 128-bit SSL session (as an example) takes literally years and beyond to decrypt w/o a key given current best-effort technologies. ( Google cache of relevant info) Similar encryption schemes could(can?) make it near-to-impossible for even the most valid law enforcement action to decrypt the hard way. Consider how much time that would give someone w/ bad intent to plan and execute their ideas.
I will not defend abuse by any authority, but I can certainly sympathize with the need to timely access to potentially harmful information between parties who may be a credible threat to life and liberty.
Balance is the key - not some polarized either-or scenario.
I'm very sure that both the UK and the United States during WW2 were very busy searching for saboteurs and pro-nazi sympathizers within their respective citizenry, and used quite an array of wiretapping and other techniques to do so.
"The problem is, far Far FAR FAR more often it is not."
Agreed, but it is still there. Another semi-related factor is that encrypted conversations are more likely to attract attention than non-encrypted ones, no?
"But it is ALWAYS subject to abuse."
So are the FLIR heat-sensing cameras that most police helicopters come equipped with nowadays, and have carried since the mid-90's if memory serves. Those can see through quite a few obstacles that can otherwise conceal. That isn't a very valid excuse to intentionally hobble law enforcement authorities. If an authority is being abusive, we have the means and the right -- no, the duty -- to remove such people from positions of power, and punish them if necessary.
"Being Free means that we accept the risk that the "bad guys" will abuse that Freedom to hurt/kill some of our citizens."
Being 'Free' means that occasionally it may happen, not that we should refuse to prevent it from happening.
"Only we can do that by surrendering our Freedom for the illusion of "safety".
Freedom from ...? Ever since the first Telegraph was put into place, governments can and have monitored them whenever they deemed it necessary. There are plenty of perfectly legal warrantless means of doing so. ...and it's not just me saying this.
Maybe, maybe not... but then, there are times when time is of the essence, and even the time taken to decrypt something the hard way in a timely manner is of utmost importance if there are potential lives at stake. The world's first electronic computer, Colossus, was built to decrypt German encryption during WW2, and was specifically built to be as fast and efficient as possible, because timely intelligence = lives saved.
While I doubt that decrypting a phone conversation nowadays usually isn;t exactly what one would call an urgent thing, there may be times where it is.
Sorry - forgot I was posting to Slashdot where such types of people may not always be a common occurence :)
For the same reason I keep the curtains drawn in my bedroom windows at night, esp. when the s/o gets frisky.
Just because me and my s/o's bedroom activities are perfectly legal doesn't mean I want everyone else (let alone the government) monitoring it.