There's got to be some effect if someone "games" the system and disproportionately removes most of the winners.
A more appropriate example: if I flip 10 coins, what's the probability that any given one is heads if some wise ass goes in ahead of you and turns all the heads over to tails!? Pretty much zero I'd say.
I just got back from the store with my iTunes Diet Pepsi. Message under the cap: PLEASE PLAY AGAIN. Oh well.
Interestingly, the shelf was fairly barren. Want to bet that the majority (if not all) of the remaining bottles are losers? I wonder what this does to the one in three odds?
So how much would it cost me to hire them to do my job? Of course, this would have to be hush hush. They would report directly to me... no need to know who I work for...
Ok fellow Linux Zealots -- set your secret internet decoder rings to destination BBC.com. We'll show them who they are messing with!
Clearly... I am kidding! By no means am I suggesting that we unleash a mydoom-style DDOS attack against the BBC (wink wink). Now cut that out! That's the sort of crap that gives us a bad name. I mean it! (wink wink) I give up. (wink wink) Must be a tic.
The intention is not to make it impossible to counterfeit currency. There are many ways to circumvent the system.
I think the idea is to discourage Joe Six-Pack from being tempted to try to print his own money and pass it off. He'll get busted and wind his ass in jail. This little feature might be all it takes to discourage him and thereby save the taxpayers the expense of having the secret service investigate... not to mention the expense of his incarceration!
Now if you really think you are smart enough to successfully counterfeit money (for example, you know to counterfeit pre-watermark older $20)... then this isn't going to be much of a deterent.
The real question is... what's in it for Adobe? Surely, there was some expense involved in adding the feature. And I'm sure it's not something their customers have been demanding. My guess? Adobe was pressured by the government to do so - either with the threat of pending legislation requiring the feature, or a monetary incentive. In any case, don't expect this to be the last product to add this feature... although perhaps not so publically!
If I were a wireless networking company I'd be sending out reprints of this article to all my customers...
Oh, and then I'd work on fixing security, so some yahoo in the parking lot can't tap into the corporate network! On second thought, maybe I'd do this one first...
And the great thing is that music albums will soon be available on this new media. Once critical mass is reached pricing will most likely be lower than existing CDs. Of course, the initial price will be a little high as the industry retools to the new media... but don't worry the prices will drop... eventually... maybe.
2. There are trees, asphalt, and trucks somewhere on the MS campus. Sometimes there is sunshine.
Hey this is the Pacific NW we are talking about here! If word gets out that we have occasional sunshine, our quality of life will plummet! You think traffic is bad now...
Repeat after me... it always rains in Seattle. It always rains in Seattle.
The invention allows a program to execute on a remote server or other computers to calculate the viewing transformations and send frame data to the client computer thus providing the user of the client computer with interactive features and allowing the user to have access to greater computing power than may be available at the user's client computer.
Sounds like X-Windows to me.
And did anyone notice that the original inventor (not the current patent holder) is the University of California!? Please tell, me that none of my tax dollars went towards this...
Great. They took a simple digital time readout that takes up minimal screen space and replaced it with an analog representation that must take up at 1/64th of the screen!
And have they made ANY changes to Paint since Windows 3.1????
Correct me if I'm wrong (yeah, like Slashdot readers need prompting in this regards)... but any audio file needs to ultimately be delivered to a sound card in digital format. What's to stop me from writing a DirectSound driver that takes this nice clean digital stream and saves it as a MP3?
Heck, for that matter it seems like I can fire up CoolEdit and record the audio as it's played.
So if I can easily strip off the DRM stuff and use it with my existing MP3 players... why do they insist on selling it to me that way?!?! I'm still waiting for a music download site that will provide a high quality music file in a format that I can actually use... even if the company goes out of business, even if I reformat my harddrive, even if... well you get the idea.
I too thought it odd that he claimed hard drive manufacturers always used the metric interpretations of mega/giga.
I distinctly remember some manufacturers placing asterisks to explain that they used 1,000,000 to represent mega bytes (if memory serves me correctly, about the time of 500MB drives). But the article gave the impression that HD makers didn't know about the 1024 et. al. usage -- I suspect that most of them have CS/EE backgrounds and were fully aware of it. My guess is that marketing discovered a way to make their drives sound bigger with no added work. And once one did it (why do I want to say Maxtor?), the others followed suite.
Never one to question the technical accuracy of a major media news article... However, I wonder if they really have evidence that he hacked into their computers to send the emails or if they think that that was the only way to accomplish the feat. Just because I make a crank phone call and claim to be Joe Schmoe, doesn't mean that I broke into Mr. Schmoe's house to make the call! [Unless they have caller id evidence that the call was made from there].
Slashdot Mirror
There's got to be some effect if someone "games" the system and disproportionately removes most of the winners.
A more appropriate example: if I flip 10 coins, what's the probability that any given one is heads if some wise ass goes in ahead of you and turns all the heads over to tails!? Pretty much zero I'd say.
I just got back from the store with my iTunes Diet Pepsi. Message under the cap: PLEASE PLAY AGAIN. Oh well.
Interestingly, the shelf was fairly barren. Want to bet that the majority (if not all) of the remaining bottles are losers? I wonder what this does to the one in three odds?
Damn. I was hoping they would go with something like:
Lin-up-yours-billg
Oh Well
How disappointing. Where's all the HOT hacker chicks?
It's becoming clear to me that IT is no longer a growth industry. As of tomorrow, I'm starting telephone sanitizing school!
Well, if they are taking over our jobs, then I would think that reading/posting to slashdot would occupy a large part of their day.
So how much would it cost me to hire them to do my job? Of course, this would have to be hush hush. They would report directly to me... no need to know who I work for...
Being a lawyer for SCO.
Either that or one of those guys that makes up stories for the Weekly World News. Pretty much the same thing, actually.
As always the truth is not as it is made out to be...
If you read a transcript of his speech I think you'll see that Mr. Dean is not trying to take away everyone's personal freedom.
The FUD stops here.
Ok fellow Linux Zealots -- set your secret internet decoder rings to destination BBC.com. We'll show them who they are messing with!
Clearly... I am kidding! By no means am I suggesting that we unleash a mydoom-style DDOS attack against the BBC (wink wink). Now cut that out! That's the sort of crap that gives us a bad name. I mean it! (wink wink) I give up. (wink wink) Must be a tic.
We've got plenty of water! What we Americans want to know is when they find oil on Mars!
The intention is not to make it impossible to counterfeit currency. There are many ways to circumvent the system.
I think the idea is to discourage Joe Six-Pack from being tempted to try to print his own money and pass it off. He'll get busted and wind his ass in jail. This little feature might be all it takes to discourage him and thereby save the taxpayers the expense of having the secret service investigate... not to mention the expense of his incarceration!
Now if you really think you are smart enough to successfully counterfeit money (for example, you know to counterfeit pre-watermark older $20)... then this isn't going to be much of a deterent.
The real question is... what's in it for Adobe? Surely, there was some expense involved in adding the feature. And I'm sure it's not something their customers have been demanding. My guess? Adobe was pressured by the government to do so - either with the threat of pending legislation requiring the feature, or a monetary incentive. In any case, don't expect this to be the last product to add this feature... although perhaps not so publically!
If I were a wireless networking company I'd be sending out reprints of this article to all my customers...
Oh, and then I'd work on fixing security, so some yahoo in the parking lot can't tap into the corporate network! On second thought, maybe I'd do this one first...
And the great thing is that music albums will soon be available on this new media. Once critical mass is reached pricing will most likely be lower than existing CDs. Of course, the initial price will be a little high as the industry retools to the new media... but don't worry the prices will drop... eventually... maybe.
The statistics presented in newspapers are almost always flawed if not totally inaccurate...
Quite true! In fact, I've found that 83% of all statistics are either false or misleading. And the other 19% are often just plain fabricated!
2. There are trees, asphalt, and trucks somewhere on the MS campus. Sometimes there is sunshine.
Hey this is the Pacific NW we are talking about here! If word gets out that we have occasional sunshine, our quality of life will plummet! You think traffic is bad now...
Repeat after me... it always rains in Seattle. It always rains in Seattle.
From the patent abstract...
The invention allows a program to execute on a remote server or other computers to calculate the viewing transformations and send frame data to the client computer thus providing the user of the client computer with interactive features and allowing the user to have access to greater computing power than may be available at the user's client computer.
Sounds like X-Windows to me.
And did anyone notice that the original inventor (not the current patent holder) is the University of California!? Please tell, me that none of my tax dollars went towards this...
Great. They took a simple digital time readout that takes up minimal screen space and replaced it with an analog representation that must take up at 1/64th of the screen!
And have they made ANY changes to Paint since Windows 3.1????
Ummm... <raises hand meekly> it's occurred to me.
So what is a fair price? I'd put it around $0.25.
Correct me if I'm wrong (yeah, like Slashdot readers need prompting in this regards)... but any audio file needs to ultimately be delivered to a sound card in digital format. What's to stop me from writing a DirectSound driver that takes this nice clean digital stream and saves it as a MP3?
Heck, for that matter it seems like I can fire up CoolEdit and record the audio as it's played.
So if I can easily strip off the DRM stuff and use it with my existing MP3 players... why do they insist on selling it to me that way?!?! I'm still waiting for a music download site that will provide a high quality music file in a format that I can actually use... even if the company goes out of business, even if I reformat my harddrive, even if... well you get the idea.
I too thought it odd that he claimed hard drive manufacturers always used the metric interpretations of mega/giga.
I distinctly remember some manufacturers placing asterisks to explain that they used 1,000,000 to represent mega bytes (if memory serves me correctly, about the time of 500MB drives). But the article gave the impression that HD makers didn't know about the 1024 et. al. usage -- I suspect that most of them have CS/EE backgrounds and were fully aware of it. My guess is that marketing discovered a way to make their drives sound bigger with no added work. And once one did it (why do I want to say Maxtor?), the others followed suite.
Never one to question the technical accuracy of a major media news article... However, I wonder if they really have evidence that he hacked into their computers to send the emails or if they think that that was the only way to accomplish the feat. Just because I make a crank phone call and claim to be Joe Schmoe, doesn't mean that I broke into Mr. Schmoe's house to make the call! [Unless they have caller id evidence that the call was made from there].