Wyt ti'n tanysgrifio am y rhestr "Cymraeg-l", rhestr am ddysgwyr? Sgrifennwch email am listproc@lists.missouri.edu, sy'n dweud "subscribe CYMRAEG-L adam@rhywle.net Dy Enw".
Mae'n anodd iawn ymarfer siarad Cymraeg heb ffrindiau sy'n siarad yn dda. Mae cymraeg-l yn helpu fi dysgu sgrifennu, ond dydw i ddim siarad yn dda:-(
Oes ffrind gyda fi sy'n byw ym Mhontardawe - wyt ti wedi mynd yma?
Yes. However a company's shares are more of a bargain when its P/E ratio is *lower*. The novel idea is that Amazon's share price goes up when the company does badly.
I don't remember anyone ever stating that the OSS method of software development was necessarily the fastest.
I think open development is *eventually* faster than closed development, because a bunch of hackers will want to make something which is easy to hack. A project controlled by a single company will sooner or later sacrifice future hackability to meet a release date *now*. Notice I say "open development", not just "open source"; if all development is being done by one company then the same commercial pressures apply. But Mozilla *is* largely "open development" in spite of the high proportion of Netscape coders - decisions are taken by non-netscape developers too, so there are voices in there which aren't subject to Netscape's commercial pressures.
A price/earnings ratio is very good! It means that the shares cost nothing. I think you probably meant something more like "a price/earnings ration of infinity".
How long did it take to take apart CSS when a couple of people put their minds to it?
CSS is very flawed in many ways. Lots of parallel encryption keys, just to pick on one thing, is a really stupid idea which almost guarantees that CSS would get cracked at some point. I don't know if the film industry was just stupid, or if they wanted this to happen so they could force the lawsuit, or what. However, I'm sure that if they are trying to make a secure format, they won't repeat this again. Given enough research investment, they could probably manage to invent a bullet-proof watermarking scheme.
Does the pope saying [...] you must not have premarital sex stop [...] people? [...] Does video game piracy being illegal stop warez?
The pope doesn't punish you if you do have premarital sex. In countries where there is punishment for this, extramarital birth rates are much lower (even though abortions are illegal).
[Casual] warez trading usually goes unpunished today. Piracy by businesses, which does get punished, is less endemic and less blatant. This doesn't apply in developing countries; punishment for piracy doesn't happen there.
Do liquor laws prevent people under 18 [...] from drinking?
No, these laws are about sale of alcohol and aren't *meant* to stop underage drinking. In countries where drinking alcohol gets you punished, alcohol consumption is far lower.
You've shown that people don't obey rules just because they exist. But I am saying that the music industry will be able to *punish* people for casual piracy. If they can do that effectively then people will capitulate. I believe the techology to do it effectively is available; the DCMA and UCITA seem to make such "punishments" legal.
You can take one of those special players, remove the speaker leads, and attach an audio patch [...]
Yes, but that means you're redigitising sound which has gone through your hi-fi. Most people don't consider this to be very close to CD quality.
satellite subscribers [... are] restricted in a manner similar to your description. However there are people who have broken the hardware locks
Yes, but that system was comparatively insecure. If you have secure encryption, and decoding which happens inside a single chip, nobody will manage to break it.
To attempt to squelch something so many believe in doing is an exercise in futility
I don't think that's *necessarily* true. The DeCSS issue may yet turn out to be won by the music industry. As another example, take the US government managing to stamp out polygamy from Mormonism, even though it was universally accepted by Mormons. Squelching is only an exercise in futility if the opposition is well-organised and puts up a strong resistance. Most people who copy music do it for selfish reasons, not because they believe it is "right", and so they are easy to "disorganise" (just find some disincentive for them, and they'll stop). Unless we can persuade most people that restrictive licenses are *wrong* and not just annoying, they won't put up much of a fight when the record industry gets them to swallow this pill, maybe with some "sugar coating" initially.
I did that a year ago. It's occasionally irritating not having DOS/Windows, but it's well worth it for the security alone. I think people who are smug about how secure their Linux partition is, but who run windows some of the time, are under a false sense of security. It would be easy to write an ActiveX virus which, say, fiddles with your Linux/etc/passwd file to create a backdoor superuser account.
As long as the music has to be transformed from its encrypted format to something audible for us to hear it, it will be possible to copy it.
Possible, yes. Feasible, useful, perhaps not. You may only be able to get a redigitised analogue copy of the music, which most people find unacceptably inferior today. It may not be possible to filter out audible watermarks if the protocol for generating them is unknown, and a few high-profile imprisonments/fines would probably put most people off risking it.
When a sufficiently large portion of the population are doing something [...] illegal, [how can they] arrest everyone?
They can wipe out wide-scale piracy (e.g. internet distribution) by court action. Then they could impose sanctions on casual pirates. If you're on their "blacklist", they won't sell you any music until you've paid your "fines", or perhaps ever. Since pirate copies will be quite hard to come by, people will be too scared of "excommunication" to dare to pirate. You can withstand public discontent if you have the power to scare people.
Remember the markets don't react to normal valuations. [...] It's about what is hot and what not and what stays hot.
If this is case over the long term, then shareholder capitalism is pointless. The only reason for having publically-traded shares is that "owner power" forces companies to behave profitably in a much more immediate way than mere "consumer power". If you believe that long-term share price is unrelated to profitability then we might as well abolish shareholder's rights and return to consumer-driven capitalism.
I'm not saying that this is absurd, just that it is the consequence of what you claim.
Why should I care, I've got my Rio, I've got my mpg123. 'They' cannot 'suppress' anything.
What about when they start releasing music in a secure format? One where you have to buy their special player? And where every copy of the music has its own individual signature hidden in the sound, so they can track piracy? And where they make you "pay per listen"? And where you no longer have the right to be an anonymous listener, because their special player uploads your listening details along with your credit card details? What about if they start charging heavy listeners increasingly more per listen? And this would all be perfectly legal under DCMA and UCITA, or whatever European equivalents we fail to lobby against hard enough. That's just what my twisted little mind could cook up in five minutes. Imagine what the music industry can cook up in a decade.
... but I believe there were examples of companies whose stock had very large price/earnings ratios in the 19th century, and who managed to maintain their share prices as they expanded and became more profitable. Of course 19th century stock markets were somewhat different from those today.
If eBay buy Sotheby's then the resulting firm is eBay+Sotheby's. If it doesn't perform at least as well as eBay + Sotheby's then the market won't be impressed. "Bloodsucking the revenues of the aquired company" may be good if those revenues can produce better returns in the e-industry than in the traditional industry. If not, the combined company's shareprice will dive when it fails to make good earnings.
For an internet company to buy a traditional company makes good sense, because it means more diversification and less risk. If the market suddenly gets scared of e-commerce then the whole company won't be worthless. This is just the same as big companies whose assets include Dollars, Yen and Euros. If one currency nosedives, then the company doesn't get hit too hard.
[...] I don't believe in buying something just to make a quick buck. [...] I thought eBay was above just grabbing quick distressed property.
I'm not sure I understand your objection here. I'm assuming it's that eBay is cheating Sotheby's' shareholders by snapping up Sotheby's for less than it's worth. But it's not possible to *force* the current shareholders to sell their stock; they will do so if and only if they think eBay's offer is sufficiently good.
If Sotheby's is involved in a scandal, no one should touch them.
I don't see why eBay shouldn't buy them, as long as they don't then allow the scandal to continue. In fact, a complete overhaul of the management might be just the thing to get Sotheby's behaving properly again.
I have a friend who uses CVS to maintain his Windows partition. (CVS is a program which is normally used to manage large trees of source code and keep track of changes made to them). That way, he can see all the changes an installer makes, and he can just roll the changes back if he doesn't like them.
The final quote by one of the "infected" GoHip.com visitors [was]: "I compliment GoHip for a fine marketing effort as I certainly know who they are. I hate them, but I know who they are.
I really don't understand people who think just because a company is good at making profit, that the company is working in the consumer interest. The free market is good for consumers because that *sometimes* holds. But it often doesn't.
Should we compliment serial rapists because they have a good evolutionary strategy? Some of their victims will become pregnant, and some of those won't have abortions, so the rapist's genes get passed on. (Obviously I'm not condoning rape, just criticising the reasoning that the GoHip visitor used).
Dydw i ddim eisiau darllen hon spwriel o gwbwl
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The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
Eh? "How much is my German?"
Too much, I think. I've got nothing against posts in German, just not when it's random, offtopic, offensive drivel. And turn caps lock off, or make friends with tolower() before posting.
Cool XOR pointer trick for doubly-linked lists
on
The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
I once saw a program which used a doubly-linked list. But instead of storing "next" and "prev" pointers, it only used one value - the XOR of prev and next!
That's a cool trick! Although it probably doesn't make the program especially readable. Does anyone else have any good tricks like this? Preferably relating to garbage collection but offtopic will do:-)
SGI wants you to think that they care about opensource, but really they don't.
What you say about SGI does sound disturbing. However, I would urge people to "support policies, not companies". SGI are releasing some good GPLed software which will help the free software community. We should praise this and use their GPLed software. From what you've said, it sounds like they are also ripping off some of their customers. If it's true, then this behaviour should be condemned. It's not hypocritical to give both praise and condemnation to a single company for different actions. What is hypocritical is to support the bad actions of a company just because you like something else which they are doing. Remember, public companies have a legal obligation to make money. This means that they will act with (enlightened?) self-interest. This means most companies will at different times act in ways which are good or bad from our point of view. It's not like with humans, where personality comes into it. All companies have the same selfish personality, just reacting differently because they are in different situations.
Wouldn't it be better to put more communty effort into a [...] GPL'ed solution instead of trying to port Irix's existing product and possibly getting a half-baked license?
I think SGI have been quite good about licenses generally. Their journaling file system, XFS, is released under the GPL, as is NFS 3 and probably more of their stuff. So let's wait to see what license they use here before assuming it will be the sort that Sun try to fob us off with.
Re:Windows forces costly upgrades for home users.
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Making Linux Beautiful
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· Score: 2
If "your mum" wants to use Star Office and Netscape, then I can only hope she has decent hardware.
Star Office and Netscape are both non-free. You can only expect the "everlasting software" effect from free software, because anyone *can* keep supporting it so someone almost certainly *will*. Nevertheless, I used to use Netscape 4.5 on a 486, and although it takes minutes to load, it's quite useable after that - even for Java.
The hardware requirements for [...] Star Office are steeper than those for [...] MS Office
That's true. But I'm saying free software is future-proof, not past-proof. Maybe there wasn't a suitable office package in 1994. However, *if* "your mum" can find suitable software now that works on her current hardware/OS, *then* she will be able to find future releases which work on that hardware/OS. This doesn't apply to Star Office or Netscape because they are non-free. But when Gnome Office / K Office / Mozilla become available, people who find them suitable won't at a future date be left in the lurch and forced to upgrade hardware/software. File formats will be forwards-compatible, or at least someone will write an import filter for the old version of the package. Someone, somewhere will compile new software linked to legacy libraries, unless it heavily uses features which aren't present in the old libraries. But above all, upgrades will be freely available and will mostly work on old hardware at least as well as the old versions did, and if not then the old version will be maintained by *somebody* for a considerable period of time.
Re:FLT not undecideable
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SSH v. SRP
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I should have said that the products m*...*m were meant to be k times.
If FLT were undecideable, we'd be able to find a model of the natural numbers in which it was false. There would be a counterexample a^k + b^k = c^k in this model. But (a,b,c,k) is a finite [ordered] set of natural numbers, so it is a decideable set, so it exists in any model of the natural numbers, and so a^k + b^k = c^k would hold in any model. But then (Exists x,y,z)(x*...*x + y*...*y = z*...*z), so we have a disproof of FLT which holds in any model.
there are Diophantine equations which are unprovable in Gödel's sense
Not quite - what Chaitin showed was that there's no single algorthim for solving all Diophantine equations.
Slashdot Mirror
Oes cwrs Cymraeg yma.
Wyt ti'n tanysgrifio am y rhestr "Cymraeg-l", rhestr am ddysgwyr? Sgrifennwch email am listproc@lists.missouri.edu, sy'n dweud "subscribe CYMRAEG-L adam@rhywle.net Dy Enw".
Mae'n anodd iawn ymarfer siarad Cymraeg heb ffrindiau sy'n siarad yn dda. Mae cymraeg-l yn helpu fi dysgu sgrifennu, ond dydw i ddim siarad yn dda
Oes ffrind gyda fi sy'n byw ym Mhontardawe - wyt ti wedi mynd yma?
Hwyl!
David
Dysgwr ydw i hefyd! Dydw i ddim yn byw yng Nghymru - Saes ydw i - ond dwi'n hoffi Cymraeg a dwi eisiau gwella!
Does ddim llawer o Gymraeg am Slashdot.
Cymro ydy Alan Cox? Mae e wedi astudio ym Mhrifysgol Cymru Abertawe.
Hwyl!
Yes. However a company's shares are more of a bargain when its P/E ratio is *lower*. The novel idea is that Amazon's share price goes up when the company does badly.
I think open development is *eventually* faster than closed development, because a bunch of hackers will want to make something which is easy to hack. A project controlled by a single company will sooner or later sacrifice future hackability to meet a release date *now*. Notice I say "open development", not just "open source"; if all development is being done by one company then the same commercial pressures apply. But Mozilla *is* largely "open development" in spite of the high proportion of Netscape coders - decisions are taken by non-netscape developers too, so there are voices in there which aren't subject to Netscape's commercial pressures.
Hmm, how would you define a "distribution" then? Do you count, say, Debian as a "distribution"?
A price/earnings ratio is very good! It means that the shares cost nothing.
I think you probably meant something more like "a price/earnings ration of infinity".
CSS is very flawed in many ways. Lots of parallel encryption keys, just to pick on one thing, is a really stupid idea which almost guarantees that CSS would get cracked at some point. I don't know if the film industry was just stupid, or if they wanted this to happen so they could force the lawsuit, or what. However, I'm sure that if they are trying to make a secure format, they won't repeat this again. Given enough research investment, they could probably manage to invent a bullet-proof watermarking scheme.
No, these laws are about sale of alcohol and aren't *meant* to stop underage drinking. In countries where drinking alcohol gets you punished, alcohol consumption is far lower.
You've shown that people don't obey rules just because they exist. But I am saying that the music industry will be able to *punish* people for casual piracy. If they can do that effectively then people will capitulate. I believe the techology to do it effectively is available; the DCMA and UCITA seem to make such "punishments" legal.
Yes, but that means you're redigitising sound which has gone through your hi-fi. Most people don't consider this to be very close to CD quality.
Yes, but that system was comparatively insecure. If you have secure encryption, and decoding which happens inside a single chip, nobody will manage to break it.
I don't think that's *necessarily* true. The DeCSS issue may yet turn out to be won by the music industry. As another example, take the US government managing to stamp out polygamy from Mormonism, even though it was universally accepted by Mormons. Squelching is only an exercise in futility if the opposition is well-organised and puts up a strong resistance. Most people who copy music do it for selfish reasons, not because they believe it is "right", and so they are easy to "disorganise" (just find some disincentive for them, and they'll stop). Unless we can persuade most people that restrictive licenses are *wrong* and not just annoying, they won't put up much of a fight when the record industry gets them to swallow this pill, maybe with some "sugar coating" initially.
I did that a year ago. It's occasionally irritating not having DOS/Windows, but it's well worth it for the security alone. I think people who are smug about how secure their Linux partition is, but who run windows some of the time, are under a false sense of security. It would be easy to write an ActiveX virus which, say, fiddles with your Linux
You can withstand public discontent if you have the power to scare people.
If this is case over the long term, then shareholder capitalism is pointless. The only reason for having publically-traded shares is that "owner power" forces companies to behave profitably in a much more immediate way than mere "consumer power". If you believe that long-term share price is unrelated to profitability then we might as well abolish shareholder's rights and return to consumer-driven capitalism.
I'm not saying that this is absurd, just that it is the consequence of what you claim.
That's just what my twisted little mind could cook up in five minutes. Imagine what the music industry can cook up in a decade.
... but I believe there were examples of companies whose stock had very large price/earnings ratios in the 19th century, and who managed to maintain their share prices as they expanded and became more profitable. Of course 19th century stock markets were somewhat different from those today.
If eBay buy Sotheby's then the resulting firm is eBay+Sotheby's. If it doesn't perform at least as well as eBay + Sotheby's then the market won't be impressed. "Bloodsucking the revenues of the aquired company" may be good if those revenues can produce better returns in the e-industry than in the traditional industry. If not, the combined company's shareprice will dive when it fails to make good earnings.
For an internet company to buy a traditional company makes good sense, because it means more diversification and less risk. If the market suddenly gets scared of e-commerce then the whole company won't be worthless. This is just the same as big companies whose assets include Dollars, Yen and Euros. If one currency nosedives, then the company doesn't get hit too hard.
I have a friend who uses CVS to maintain his Windows partition. (CVS is a program which is normally used to manage large trees of source code and keep track of changes made to them). That way, he can see all the changes an installer makes, and he can just roll the changes back if he doesn't like them.
I really don't understand people who think just because a company is good at making profit, that the company is working in the consumer interest. The free market is good for consumers because that *sometimes* holds. But it often doesn't.
Should we compliment serial rapists because they have a good evolutionary strategy? Some of their victims will become pregnant, and some of those won't have abortions, so the rapist's genes get passed on. (Obviously I'm not condoning rape, just criticising the reasoning that the GoHip visitor used).
Eh? "How much is my German?"
Too much, I think. I've got nothing against posts in German, just not when it's random, offtopic, offensive drivel.
And turn caps lock off, or make friends with tolower() before posting.
That's a cool trick! Although it probably doesn't make the program especially readable. Does anyone else have any good tricks like this? Preferably relating to garbage collection but offtopic will do
Remember, public companies have a legal obligation to make money. This means that they will act with (enlightened?) self-interest. This means most companies will at different times act in ways which are good or bad from our point of view. It's not like with humans, where personality comes into it. All companies have the same selfish personality, just reacting differently because they are in different situations.
I think SGI have been quite good about licenses generally. Their journaling file system, XFS, is released under the GPL, as is NFS 3 and probably more of their stuff. So let's wait to see what license they use here before assuming it will be the sort that Sun try to fob us off with.
File formats will be forwards-compatible, or at least someone will write an import filter for the old version of the package. Someone, somewhere will compile new software linked to legacy libraries, unless it heavily uses features which aren't present in the old libraries. But above all, upgrades will be freely available and will mostly work on old hardware at least as well as the old versions did, and if not then the old version will be maintained by *somebody* for a considerable period of time.
Sorry, I should have said that the products m*...*m were meant to be k times.