There are websites out there were people run captchas through OCR software to see how many can figure it out. The success rate is distressingly high, and even worse, the ones that the OCR fails on are the ones that humans have a lot of trouble with too. I know I dread seeing a captcha with 0 or O or 1 or I in it, because I know every one of those characters reduces my chance of guessing correctly by about 50%, and captcha writers LOVE those characters, they show up almost every time.
One kind that I liked had a whole bunch of stock photos and it asked the user to type in what they saw in the picture. It was easy stuff, like a picture of a dog, house, baseball, road, etc..., but just the sort of thing that computers are very bad at still. The downside of that scheme is that it requires a person to set it up, so it has a limited number of possibilities, and the bot writer is more than willing to go through and work up responses for a big subset of your images if it means his bots have free reign.
Maybe they should print it out in $100 bills and stack it on a palate, that would help me conceptualize it, especially if they ship it off to corrupt kleptomaniacs with no accountability.
That statement was from the perspective of a cellphone user, and other than the iPhone (which isn't even out yet), I dare you to tell me which phone has an interface you like.
One interesting side effect of that information: In the first few versions of PlayFair the authors of the program made sure to leave your contact information in the file after it was decrypted, just to drive home the point that it wasn't about piracy. However, Apple changed iTunes such that if it saw that information on an unencrypted file, it would reject the file and the PlayFair guys were forced to strip it out.
I thought the TCP/IP stack was fairly unique to Windows, which is why the API to use it was slightly different (just enough that a POSIX app would mysteriously fail to work). The commandline network applications (Telnet, FTP, etc...) were taken from BSD, but the BSD license allows that. The downside is that they took the absolute oldest versions of those applications they could find, skipping the years of improvements available for them.
My wife has a ROKR. It really took more of a beating than it deserved IMHO. The 100 song limit was retarded, but with the 512MB of memory onboard you were hard pressed to exceed it anyway. People didn't harp on the stuff that really mattered about the phone, like it's tendency to run the battery down after a mere two days of idle time and the flimsy proprietary data and power connectors. The default firmware setting was also a little confusing on it, since it was designed to go into "sleep mode" after 15 minutes, but in sleep mode it turned the radio off, which is completely retarded for what is primarily a cell phone.
That said, it had a good radio, good microphone, and the speaker was good enough that you didn't have to plug the headphones in to listen to music if you didn't want to. The interface on the phone was pretty good too, which is far from a given on modern cellphones.
The Rio was a disaster for many reasons, many of which were outlined in the Wiki.
The biggest was the extremely limited internal memory. Apple realized early on that nobody is going to buy a $200 piece of hardware that can only hold 12 songs. You can burn a CD for a heck of a lot less. Early flash based players all had that problem, which is why they were a joke product for years.
IMHO, it's kinda ugly too. I can tell they tried, but the front face is just too busy.
To be fair, people look back on the storyline to FF games with rose tinted glasses IMHO. Half of the time they make no sense or are a rehash of "giant evil guy wants to blow up the world for no good reason".
Denial of blood transfusions for religious purposes is hardly a unique viewpoint of Christian Scientists. Next time the young guys in white shirts/black pants and a tie[1] come to your door, ask them what their position on blood transfusions is. There is apparently an obscure bible passage about not mixing blood or something that prevents them from taking blood transfusions. They'll be happy to give you a brochure on it if you ask.
[1] I can't remember if they were Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. I do remember getting it mixed up once and have them hand me another brochure explaining how they weren't the other guys.
So do you not want to "get into what constitutes 'proof'" because that's exactly where Science and Religion diverge? It is true that scientists have to make guesses as to why something works the way it does before they can test to see if their guess is correct, however, in Religion you make a guess as to the way something works and then write it down in a book and deny anybody else's guesses.
About the contradictions in the bible. I've talked with guys like that (I don't know if they were Young Earth Creationists, but they were Bible literalists), and if you ask about a contradiction they just say it's not a contradiction and move on. Trying to get them to explain why it's not doesn't work, it just is not a contradiction and they move on. I think they must have to train to ignore all cognitive dissonance at some point I guess. Granted, there are some where they have explanations, but some of those explanations get rather convoluted.
I think it's strange how everybody blames Google for going along with the Chinese censorship instead of just saying no. They were just saying no for years and look what it got them: basically blocked from all of China. Having the state own the only ISP is sort of like having them own the only Radio and TV station. THEY get to decide what you see and what you hear, content providers in other parts of the world don't get a say. If you say stuff the government doesn't like, then they'll just cut you off from the country entirely (and even go so far as to jam your transmissions in cases like the Voice of America).
Somehow I doubt Jack would have been in any real danger at PAX. He probably would have slipped in the back a little before the debate started, walked up on stage as a surprise, endurded long rounds of jeers, and then left through that same back door. Gamers aren't actually the gun crazy nuts Jack thinks they are. I think it would have been amusing to hear the gasp when he walks out on stage.
But it's a hostile audience, no doubt. I don't know how hard it would have been to keep them civil (quiet) while he spouted his traditional "games cause people to turn evil" diatribe.
I think they have done your first suggestion. It's called the "nv" driver, and it ships with Xorg.
The second suggestion is interesting, and is in principal similar to what they do now. Parts of the driver are still compiled on the host OS, although usually just the kernel interface bits now. Moving more of the code out of the binary blobs really doesn't solve much though, since the binary blobs will still be necessary for the driver to work. Binary blobs are still binary blobs no matter how small you make them.
Because nVidia uses some of that code in their driver. They can't release that code because it isn't theirs, but without it the driver is useless. I'm guessing if they could write it themselves cost effectively they would have.
It's the same reason DooM's source code wasn't released as fast as the rest of ID's projects. DooM used a licensed sound module that they had to eventually rip out of the code before they could release it.
A good example of functionality that can trip up a driver release like this is Macrovision support on TV-Out ports. In some cases they are effectively required to support (thank you DMCA), but the licensing also requires that all drivers that enable the TV Out ports must enable it, yet the code to enable it is held by companies like Macrovision who would never release it open source. Even if it's just hardware register settings they'll call it proprietary information and forbid the release.
As I understand it, while they own all of the IP for the 2d driver, some parts of the 3d support are licensed from other companies and individuals (who hold the patents). The terms of those licenses forbid nVidia from releasing their code (naturally). In order to get a nVidia to open up the 3d support in the driver entirely, the open source community as a whole (or at least some part of it) would have to negotiate with them and convince the companies to open up like nVidia. Given that they make their money off of licensing IP and perhaps selling software (as opposed to selling hardware), this is highly unlikely.
It matters a lot though. Comparing my old 7100t Blackberry with the new Blackberry Pearl the most noticable difference is that the processor in the Pearl is way faster than on the 7100. You can really tell when the browser is open, but even the menus are snappier. The second thing you notice is that while the 7100t would easily get a week on a single charge, the Pearl is dying after two days. Both phones have big bright screens and use similar (identical?) batteries. Granted the Pearl has a bunch of other features (like EDGE support instead of just GPRS), but I'm suspecting the processor is the primary culprit in the dramatically shortened battery life.
Yeah, and ultimately you end up running the X server a lot, which is a bit of a memory hog on top of the already memory hoggy OSX. Worse, stuff like printing and even copy and paste can be hit and miss depending on what toolkit the application originally used and how well it was ported. Even more annoying is how some free applications suddenly become not-free when they are ported, often becoming crippleware.
I've always been a bit annoyed that hardware review sites almost always get cherry picked engineering samples to test. Normally this isn't a big deal, but they always test the overclockability of hardware these days (I swear Ars, HotHardware, HardOCP, and the like would overclock hard drives if they could) which is fairly pointless with a sample size of 1. Worse, they have no way of testing if that overclocking is going to cause the hardware to fizzed out after 2 months. They also rarely include factors like "will the manufacturer maintain driver support 3 months down the road and fix the bugs in the current driver?" which is far more important than clocking it up to 105% and running Supreme Commander.
I know I'm being a little unfair here, but it's one of the main reasons that I rarely bother with hardware review sites anymore unless I'm actively looking to buy a particular piece of hardware. Well, that and their tendency to spread articles out over hundreds of pages with as little content as possible on each page.
A good example of this is the 120 page article on Core2Duo heatsinks posted to Slashdot a few days ago. At no point did the hardware review guys examine the fans to see if they were bottom of the barrel "will die in 6 months" models, or if they were high quality fans worth the $50 price tag on the cooling solution.
Heh, yeah. On my old camera 2MB JPEG only, the 256MB CF card I bought for it is 280 or so pictures (at maximum size and quality). Given how slow it is when taking pictures it is hard to fill the card up. The new camera is a lot faster and has no trouble filling a 2GB card even though the pictures only have about 2.5x as many pixels.
Eh, the first generation iPods were pretty lame. iTunes was still in its infancy and the thing was way overpriced for what it did. Granted, the prices stay pretty high over time, but the feature set improved and more importantly, iTunes got a lot of work. Those other music players mentioned back in the day did have much better hardware, but none of them realized that the hardware was only half of the equation and as a result their crappy music management systems got p0wned by Apple.
Sure it would be a lot easier to build a lunar space elevator except for the fact that there are no people on the moon and thus nobody wants to get off of it. Plus, you gotta lug all of the materials to build it (and it's tons and tons of materials) all the way to the moon or at least carry a high capacity manufacturing facility with you to the moon to build it.
Yeah, but next time they run for office their TV ads will include the phrase "Representative Tool worked hard to keep corrupting influences out of the hands of children, because Representative Tool cares about the children."
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There are websites out there were people run captchas through OCR software to see how many can figure it out. The success rate is distressingly high, and even worse, the ones that the OCR fails on are the ones that humans have a lot of trouble with too. I know I dread seeing a captcha with 0 or O or 1 or I in it, because I know every one of those characters reduces my chance of guessing correctly by about 50%, and captcha writers LOVE those characters, they show up almost every time.
One kind that I liked had a whole bunch of stock photos and it asked the user to type in what they saw in the picture. It was easy stuff, like a picture of a dog, house, baseball, road, etc..., but just the sort of thing that computers are very bad at still. The downside of that scheme is that it requires a person to set it up, so it has a limited number of possibilities, and the bot writer is more than willing to go through and work up responses for a big subset of your images if it means his bots have free reign.
Maybe they should print it out in $100 bills and stack it on a palate, that would help me conceptualize it, especially if they ship it off to corrupt kleptomaniacs with no accountability.
That statement was from the perspective of a cellphone user, and other than the iPhone (which isn't even out yet), I dare you to tell me which phone has an interface you like.
One interesting side effect of that information: In the first few versions of PlayFair the authors of the program made sure to leave your contact information in the file after it was decrypted, just to drive home the point that it wasn't about piracy. However, Apple changed iTunes such that if it saw that information on an unencrypted file, it would reject the file and the PlayFair guys were forced to strip it out.
Yeah, there are ways to find IP addresses, but it will defiantly be harder than it is today.
I thought the TCP/IP stack was fairly unique to Windows, which is why the API to use it was slightly different (just enough that a POSIX app would mysteriously fail to work). The commandline network applications (Telnet, FTP, etc...) were taken from BSD, but the BSD license allows that. The downside is that they took the absolute oldest versions of those applications they could find, skipping the years of improvements available for them.
My wife has a ROKR. It really took more of a beating than it deserved IMHO. The 100 song limit was retarded, but with the 512MB of memory onboard you were hard pressed to exceed it anyway. People didn't harp on the stuff that really mattered about the phone, like it's tendency to run the battery down after a mere two days of idle time and the flimsy proprietary data and power connectors. The default firmware setting was also a little confusing on it, since it was designed to go into "sleep mode" after 15 minutes, but in sleep mode it turned the radio off, which is completely retarded for what is primarily a cell phone.
That said, it had a good radio, good microphone, and the speaker was good enough that you didn't have to plug the headphones in to listen to music if you didn't want to. The interface on the phone was pretty good too, which is far from a given on modern cellphones.
The Rio was a disaster for many reasons, many of which were outlined in the Wiki.
The biggest was the extremely limited internal memory. Apple realized early on that nobody is going to buy a $200 piece of hardware that can only hold 12 songs. You can burn a CD for a heck of a lot less. Early flash based players all had that problem, which is why they were a joke product for years.
IMHO, it's kinda ugly too. I can tell they tried, but the front face is just too busy.
To be fair, people look back on the storyline to FF games with rose tinted glasses IMHO. Half of the time they make no sense or are a rehash of "giant evil guy wants to blow up the world for no good reason".
Denial of blood transfusions for religious purposes is hardly a unique viewpoint of Christian Scientists. Next time the young guys in white shirts/black pants and a tie[1] come to your door, ask them what their position on blood transfusions is. There is apparently an obscure bible passage about not mixing blood or something that prevents them from taking blood transfusions. They'll be happy to give you a brochure on it if you ask.
[1] I can't remember if they were Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. I do remember getting it mixed up once and have them hand me another brochure explaining how they weren't the other guys.
So do you not want to "get into what constitutes 'proof'" because that's exactly where Science and Religion diverge? It is true that scientists have to make guesses as to why something works the way it does before they can test to see if their guess is correct, however, in Religion you make a guess as to the way something works and then write it down in a book and deny anybody else's guesses.
About the contradictions in the bible. I've talked with guys like that (I don't know if they were Young Earth Creationists, but they were Bible literalists), and if you ask about a contradiction they just say it's not a contradiction and move on. Trying to get them to explain why it's not doesn't work, it just is not a contradiction and they move on. I think they must have to train to ignore all cognitive dissonance at some point I guess. Granted, there are some where they have explanations, but some of those explanations get rather convoluted.
I think it's strange how everybody blames Google for going along with the Chinese censorship instead of just saying no. They were just saying no for years and look what it got them: basically blocked from all of China. Having the state own the only ISP is sort of like having them own the only Radio and TV station. THEY get to decide what you see and what you hear, content providers in other parts of the world don't get a say. If you say stuff the government doesn't like, then they'll just cut you off from the country entirely (and even go so far as to jam your transmissions in cases like the Voice of America).
Somehow I doubt Jack would have been in any real danger at PAX. He probably would have slipped in the back a little before the debate started, walked up on stage as a surprise, endurded long rounds of jeers, and then left through that same back door. Gamers aren't actually the gun crazy nuts Jack thinks they are. I think it would have been amusing to hear the gasp when he walks out on stage.
But it's a hostile audience, no doubt. I don't know how hard it would have been to keep them civil (quiet) while he spouted his traditional "games cause people to turn evil" diatribe.
I think they have done your first suggestion. It's called the "nv" driver, and it ships with Xorg.
The second suggestion is interesting, and is in principal similar to what they do now. Parts of the driver are still compiled on the host OS, although usually just the kernel interface bits now. Moving more of the code out of the binary blobs really doesn't solve much though, since the binary blobs will still be necessary for the driver to work. Binary blobs are still binary blobs no matter how small you make them.
Because nVidia uses some of that code in their driver. They can't release that code because it isn't theirs, but without it the driver is useless. I'm guessing if they could write it themselves cost effectively they would have.
It's the same reason DooM's source code wasn't released as fast as the rest of ID's projects. DooM used a licensed sound module that they had to eventually rip out of the code before they could release it.
A good example of functionality that can trip up a driver release like this is Macrovision support on TV-Out ports. In some cases they are effectively required to support (thank you DMCA), but the licensing also requires that all drivers that enable the TV Out ports must enable it, yet the code to enable it is held by companies like Macrovision who would never release it open source. Even if it's just hardware register settings they'll call it proprietary information and forbid the release.
As I understand it, while they own all of the IP for the 2d driver, some parts of the 3d support are licensed from other companies and individuals (who hold the patents). The terms of those licenses forbid nVidia from releasing their code (naturally). In order to get a nVidia to open up the 3d support in the driver entirely, the open source community as a whole (or at least some part of it) would have to negotiate with them and convince the companies to open up like nVidia. Given that they make their money off of licensing IP and perhaps selling software (as opposed to selling hardware), this is highly unlikely.
It matters a lot though. Comparing my old 7100t Blackberry with the new Blackberry Pearl the most noticable difference is that the processor in the Pearl is way faster than on the 7100. You can really tell when the browser is open, but even the menus are snappier. The second thing you notice is that while the 7100t would easily get a week on a single charge, the Pearl is dying after two days. Both phones have big bright screens and use similar (identical?) batteries. Granted the Pearl has a bunch of other features (like EDGE support instead of just GPRS), but I'm suspecting the processor is the primary culprit in the dramatically shortened battery life.
Yeah, and ultimately you end up running the X server a lot, which is a bit of a memory hog on top of the already memory hoggy OSX. Worse, stuff like printing and even copy and paste can be hit and miss depending on what toolkit the application originally used and how well it was ported. Even more annoying is how some free applications suddenly become not-free when they are ported, often becoming crippleware.
I've always been a bit annoyed that hardware review sites almost always get cherry picked engineering samples to test. Normally this isn't a big deal, but they always test the overclockability of hardware these days (I swear Ars, HotHardware, HardOCP, and the like would overclock hard drives if they could) which is fairly pointless with a sample size of 1. Worse, they have no way of testing if that overclocking is going to cause the hardware to fizzed out after 2 months. They also rarely include factors like "will the manufacturer maintain driver support 3 months down the road and fix the bugs in the current driver?" which is far more important than clocking it up to 105% and running Supreme Commander.
I know I'm being a little unfair here, but it's one of the main reasons that I rarely bother with hardware review sites anymore unless I'm actively looking to buy a particular piece of hardware. Well, that and their tendency to spread articles out over hundreds of pages with as little content as possible on each page.
A good example of this is the 120 page article on Core2Duo heatsinks posted to Slashdot a few days ago. At no point did the hardware review guys examine the fans to see if they were bottom of the barrel "will die in 6 months" models, or if they were high quality fans worth the $50 price tag on the cooling solution.
Heh, yeah. On my old camera 2MB JPEG only, the 256MB CF card I bought for it is 280 or so pictures (at maximum size and quality). Given how slow it is when taking pictures it is hard to fill the card up. The new camera is a lot faster and has no trouble filling a 2GB card even though the pictures only have about 2.5x as many pixels.
Eh, the first generation iPods were pretty lame. iTunes was still in its infancy and the thing was way overpriced for what it did. Granted, the prices stay pretty high over time, but the feature set improved and more importantly, iTunes got a lot of work. Those other music players mentioned back in the day did have much better hardware, but none of them realized that the hardware was only half of the equation and as a result their crappy music management systems got p0wned by Apple.
Sure it would be a lot easier to build a lunar space elevator except for the fact that there are no people on the moon and thus nobody wants to get off of it. Plus, you gotta lug all of the materials to build it (and it's tons and tons of materials) all the way to the moon or at least carry a high capacity manufacturing facility with you to the moon to build it.
I think everybody prefers that Commander Keen stay forgotten. ID pretty much said that themselves when they made map 32 in DooM 2.
Yeah, but next time they run for office their TV ads will include the phrase "Representative Tool worked hard to keep corrupting influences out of the hands of children, because Representative Tool cares about the children."