Naturally occuring pun
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 1
Ok, gotta show my geek chops here and post my environmentally induced pun.
College, electrical engineering. Taking a class in discrete time systems. Difficult class, and the prof is a real know-it-all...the kind of guy who shows you the theory, let's you pound through 5 pages of calculation, then checks the result with a super-sneaky PhD trick in 4 lines.
Test #1 comes back, and the mood is grim.
He starts handing the tests back. "David Wright?" A paper passed. The next name was chinese, and difficult to pronounce. "Uh....Mr. Wong?"
I hit the floor laughing.
The prof wasn't so smart after all - he didn't know the difference between Wright and Wong.
This really did happen to me. I'm sure people think I'm insane to this day.
From the article: The draft policy now provides that all patents necessary to implement W3C specifications must be "royalty-free".
What does this imply for the now patented and non-royalty-free JPG and GIF? If I read this right (IANAL), I believe it says that only royalty-free patents can be a part of spec. In a nutshell, it appears JPG and GIF are SOL.
I think it would be great if W3C took a stand against abusive patents. This could be a really good thing, in disguise.
I'll throw in my $.02 and add my idea in. Dunno if anyone has thought of this before.
How about a 180 degree approach? Say for instance you host a site, somewhere.com. And run a mail server there. So, you set up a honeypot account, innocent@somewhere.com and post it everywhere. IRC, public forums, all over your webpages.
Every spammer in the galaxy will spam that account. Use the metrics gathered to protect your other users at somewhere.com to block spam for them.
Example - if innocent receives an email with a header like "herbal viagra slk234ksj23jsd23" from "Amy Smith", erase all "herbal viagra *" messages from "Amy Smith" incoming that day.
Would be great to have on relays too. Seems like a good-ish idea to me.
That's the damn funniest post I've read in days! Kudos to you:) Dear God but that would be funny if someone with a pet lawyer pressed the issue.
Re:How exactly does TopMoxie work?
on
Gnutella2?
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· Score: 1
In your example, the user links to Amazon from another web site. In this case, TopMoxie does nothing.
Ah, so TopMoxie in no way hijacks other people's commissions then. Good. This needed to be cleared up. Especially since this was the previous behavior, and a major sticking point with a lot of folks. Glad to see this fixed.
Re:How exactly does TopMoxie work?
on
Gnutella2?
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· Score: 1
Maybe I'm not understanding how TopMoxie makes any money at all then. Their website says this:
TopMoxie is a small program that runs autonomously on your computer. It simply notices when you land on selected sites and sends a message asking you if you want to shop on behalf of your favorite cause. At your request, the service then takes you directly to the merchant's page
So in my example assuming amazon.com is a "selected site" or affiliate or whatever the correct term is, a user clicks the "buy a book" link on the cookie baking page. TopMoxie will pop up and say something to the effect of "Would you like this purchase to be on behalf of LimeWire" or some such, right? And if the user clicks Yes, the book is purchased but LimeWire gets the commission.
If I'm wrong about how this works please let me know where I'm wrong.
Re:How exactly does TopMoxie work?
on
Gnutella2?
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· Score: 1
So how exactly does the newer version work? And does my flowchart-ish example with the cookies apply? If it doesn't, what part do I have wrong?
How exactly does TopMoxie work?
on
Gnutella2?
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· Score: 1
...it has affiliate programs with multiple web sites, and when you visit those sites, it pops up a really innocuous window (that times out and disappears) asking you if you would like your purchase to support LimeWire. If you click yes, we get the affiliate revenue.
So, if I read this right - let's say for instance that amazon.com is an affiliate. And I make a webpage with a lot of information about baking cookies, including a link to a book at amazon.com with a lot of good recipes.
A LimeWire/TopMoxie user surfs my site and likes it. Wants to buy the book. Clicks the link to buy it.
Now, if I read this right TopMoxie will pop up when I try to buy the book and ask if the user would like to redirect the bonus from the sale to LimeWire.
They sure are. Hell, for that matter I can think of plenty:
Card payment systems at Kinkos
ATM machines
Serve yourself lanes at grocery stores
Candy bar machines with led displays
Slot machines/video poker
...and oh yeah, about a million webstores created before 2002
This is concrete proof that the patent system is completely broken. I could prove the point by going out and making a patent for "...a single unit of mass, combining 8 substructures which for our purposes shall be called protons." Then charging everyone royalties on breathing. Idiots. It's no wonder why we're in the mess we're in.
And a simple chocolate company is cast in the role of hero. I'm donating to their fund tonight.
...distributing source for your drivers gives your competition a considerable edge.
Well, true. But speaking as someone who's been paid to develop Linux drivers I can tell you that the examples are already there in the kernel. Nobody starts from linux/kernel.h anymore. No need. So from that point of view, releasing your driver code hurts nothing.
That being said, I can see why companies would not want to release driver source code. I once worked on a project at another company that had a Xilinx chip onboard. On load, the driver would program the chip through it's jtag port. Dunno if I would want people poking around in that. Yeah, it could be reverse engineered...but you'd have to know what you were looking for. With the source it would be a no-brainer.
Betcha NVidia and their ilk have firmware in their drivers. That's probably why they have a bug in their shorts about releasing code.
But seeing as how it's a given in this case that the coattails are going to be ridden, what's the best way to do it?
The House * books are...well, someone else posted that they are like mediocre fan fiction. I agree. 100 pages into the first one and it became a game to spot mistakes. So given a choice between that and a notes compilation, I'll take the notes.
Your father was a very talented man, and we all enjoyed his work tremendously. Dune is my favorite work of SciFi. But...it's your father's work and not yours. If you'd like to please his fans and put a little cash in your own pocket, could you please take a lesson from Christopher Tolkien?
While your work is interesting, it's not Dune and can never be. Dune is the work of Frank Herbert, and none other. So, may I humbly suggest taking his unpublished work and notes and arrange those into a book? I'd throw down cash today for a Dune:Silmarillion type work. I'll bet a lot of other people would too.
...completely alienating their core audience. These guys are the ultimate corporate pawns/bozos.
I mean really, going from Metal Up Your Ass to covering frikkin' Bob Segar tunes? And then having the audacity to blame their flagging sales on Napster??
Fuck Metallica. Fuck 'em with the rough end of a pineapple.
I agree completely. The surest way to kill a technical idea is pass it around a bunch of suits for comments. And with any luck that'll be what kills Palladium.
Or the ever present 16 year old Dutch kid. As soon as one of the keys somehow drops to the public, you'll see DePalladium that week.
Let Big Media thrash around all it wants. This is an unworkable idea.
how can we call a thing 1/100 ths dencity of our sun as super massive?
Because density and mass are not the same thing. They're related, but not identical.
Density is mass per unit volume, as in 100 kilograms per cubic meter. So, if you had a cubic meter of space with that density, you'd have 100 kilograms of mass.
These objects are called super massive because even though the density is small compared to other black holes, the size is staggering. A lesser density over a greater area is still a lot of mass.
A black hole is defined by it's event horizon. But as it turns out by the math, the density has to be very high for small regions of space to be considered black holes. These are your classic "event horizon about the size of the sun" black holes.
But the math also says that if the density drops, to get the correct amount of mass to make a black hole...the size has to increase. And that's what makes a supermassive black hole. Enormous mass and volume, and lower density.
I'm not defending the original article's viewpoint that streaming media is like the tragedy of the commons! I agree with both you and Skjellifetti. It isn't.
You asserted that the cow+1 farmer would be clubbed by other farmers, therefore the commons tragedy doesn't work. My assertion was that the model of the commons tragedy isn't invalid for that reason - other webcasters cannot club competing webcasters. That's all I was trying to say.
I have a headache now. I'm going to go take a nap. =)
Slashdot Mirror
No problem. In fact, one was in a bond movie.
Weaselmancer
Ok, gotta show my geek chops here and post my environmentally induced pun.
College, electrical engineering. Taking a class in discrete time systems. Difficult class, and the prof is a real know-it-all...the kind of guy who shows you the theory, let's you pound through 5 pages of calculation, then checks the result with a super-sneaky PhD trick in 4 lines.
Test #1 comes back, and the mood is grim.
He starts handing the tests back. "David Wright?" A paper passed. The next name was chinese, and difficult to pronounce. "Uh....Mr. Wong?"
I hit the floor laughing.
The prof wasn't so smart after all - he didn't know the difference between Wright and Wong.
This really did happen to me. I'm sure people think I'm insane to this day.
Weaselmancer
From the article: The draft policy now provides that all patents necessary to implement W3C specifications must be "royalty-free".
What does this imply for the now patented and non-royalty-free JPG and GIF? If I read this right (IANAL), I believe it says that only royalty-free patents can be a part of spec. In a nutshell, it appears JPG and GIF are SOL.
I think it would be great if W3C took a stand against abusive patents. This could be a really good thing, in disguise.
Weaselmancer
I'll throw in my $.02 and add my idea in. Dunno if anyone has thought of this before.
How about a 180 degree approach? Say for instance you host a site, somewhere.com. And run a mail server there. So, you set up a honeypot account, innocent@somewhere.com and post it everywhere. IRC, public forums, all over your webpages.
Every spammer in the galaxy will spam that account. Use the metrics gathered to protect your other users at somewhere.com to block spam for them.
Example - if innocent receives an email with a header like "herbal viagra slk234ksj23jsd23" from "Amy Smith", erase all "herbal viagra *" messages from "Amy Smith" incoming that day.
Would be great to have on relays too. Seems like a good-ish idea to me.
Weaselmancer
Dear God but that's funny/brilliant! Made my day.
Beautiful. Mind-bogglingly beautiful.
Weaselmancer
Agreed. Blaming P2P for piracy is like blaming Ford for drive-by shootings.
Weaselmancer
Yup. $20 for an XBox and 10 games preloaded.
Funny thing is, Microsoft is still swearing they make money on each sale.
Weaselmancer
That's the damn funniest post I've read in days! Kudos to you :) Dear God but that would be funny if someone with a pet lawyer pressed the issue.
In your example, the user links to Amazon from another web site. In this case, TopMoxie does nothing.
Ah, so TopMoxie in no way hijacks other people's commissions then. Good. This needed to be cleared up. Especially since this was the previous behavior, and a major sticking point with a lot of folks. Glad to see this fixed.
Maybe I'm not understanding how TopMoxie makes any money at all then. Their website says this:
TopMoxie is a small program that runs autonomously on your computer. It simply notices when you land on selected sites and sends a message asking you if you want to shop on behalf of your favorite cause. At your request, the service then takes you directly to the merchant's page
So in my example assuming amazon.com is a "selected site" or affiliate or whatever the correct term is, a user clicks the "buy a book" link on the cookie baking page. TopMoxie will pop up and say something to the effect of "Would you like this purchase to be on behalf of LimeWire" or some such, right? And if the user clicks Yes, the book is purchased but LimeWire gets the commission.
If I'm wrong about how this works please let me know where I'm wrong.
So how exactly does the newer version work? And does my flowchart-ish example with the cookies apply? If it doesn't, what part do I have wrong?
So, if I read this right - let's say for instance that amazon.com is an affiliate. And I make a webpage with a lot of information about baking cookies, including a link to a book at amazon.com with a lot of good recipes.
A LimeWire/TopMoxie user surfs my site and likes it. Wants to buy the book. Clicks the link to buy it.
Now, if I read this right TopMoxie will pop up when I try to buy the book and ask if the user would like to redirect the bonus from the sale to LimeWire.
Is my understanding of this correct or not?
They sure are. Hell, for that matter I can think of plenty:
This is concrete proof that the patent system is completely broken . I could prove the point by going out and making a patent for "...a single unit of mass, combining 8 substructures which for our purposes shall be called protons." Then charging everyone royalties on breathing. Idiots. It's no wonder why we're in the mess we're in.
And a simple chocolate company is cast in the role of hero. I'm donating to their fund tonight.
Weaselmancer
Well, true. But speaking as someone who's been paid to develop Linux drivers I can tell you that the examples are already there in the kernel. Nobody starts from linux/kernel.h anymore. No need. So from that point of view, releasing your driver code hurts nothing.
That being said, I can see why companies would not want to release driver source code. I once worked on a project at another company that had a Xilinx chip onboard. On load, the driver would program the chip through it's jtag port. Dunno if I would want people poking around in that. Yeah, it could be reverse engineered...but you'd have to know what you were looking for. With the source it would be a no-brainer.
Betcha NVidia and their ilk have firmware in their drivers. That's probably why they have a bug in their shorts about releasing code.
Weaselmancer
Agreed...kinda.
But seeing as how it's a given in this case that the coattails are going to be ridden, what's the best way to do it?
The House * books are...well, someone else posted that they are like mediocre fan fiction. I agree. 100 pages into the first one and it became a game to spot mistakes. So given a choice between that and a notes compilation, I'll take the notes.
Weaselmancer
Duh! Pay attention to what you're reading.
Star Wars was "...a long time ago in a galaxy far far away", whereas Dune takes place in humankind's future, 10191 AG.
So yeah, Star Wars came first. Dune is a total Tattoine ripoff. ;^)
Weaselmancer
Brian, if you're reading this...
Your father was a very talented man, and we all enjoyed his work tremendously. Dune is my favorite work of SciFi. But...it's your father's work and not yours. If you'd like to please his fans and put a little cash in your own pocket, could you please take a lesson from Christopher Tolkien?
While your work is interesting, it's not Dune and can never be. Dune is the work of Frank Herbert, and none other. So, may I humbly suggest taking his unpublished work and notes and arrange those into a book? I'd throw down cash today for a Dune:Silmarillion type work. I'll bet a lot of other people would too.
Weaselmancer
...completely alienating their core audience. These guys are the ultimate corporate pawns/bozos.
I mean really, going from Metal Up Your Ass to covering frikkin' Bob Segar tunes? And then having the audacity to blame their flagging sales on Napster??
Fuck Metallica. Fuck 'em with the rough end of a pineapple.
Weaselmancer
That's a pretty piss-poor business plan, for both parties.
Nope, it's a piss-poor business plan but only for the buyer. It's a great business plan...if you happen to be a monopoly.
Weaselmancer
Some because there is no Linux client.
Wrong.
Weaselmancer
Perhaps the RIAA could take a few notes from him...
I'm sure they'd like nothing better than to take a few notes from him. And then sell them to other people. ;)
Weaselmancer
I agree completely. The surest way to kill a technical idea is pass it around a bunch of suits for comments. And with any luck that'll be what kills Palladium.
Or the ever present 16 year old Dutch kid. As soon as one of the keys somehow drops to the public, you'll see DePalladium that week.
Let Big Media thrash around all it wants. This is an unworkable idea.
Weaselmancer
how can we call a thing 1/100 ths dencity of our sun as super massive?
Because density and mass are not the same thing. They're related, but not identical.
Density is mass per unit volume, as in 100 kilograms per cubic meter. So, if you had a cubic meter of space with that density, you'd have 100 kilograms of mass.
These objects are called super massive because even though the density is small compared to other black holes, the size is staggering. A lesser density over a greater area is still a lot of mass.
A black hole is defined by it's event horizon. But as it turns out by the math, the density has to be very high for small regions of space to be considered black holes. These are your classic "event horizon about the size of the sun" black holes.
But the math also says that if the density drops, to get the correct amount of mass to make a black hole...the size has to increase. And that's what makes a supermassive black hole. Enormous mass and volume, and lower density.
Weaselmancer
Just the title for this had me laughing. People in my office are staring at me. Been a while since a /. post did that. Thanks =)
Weaselmancer
I'm not defending the original article's viewpoint that streaming media is like the tragedy of the commons! I agree with both you and Skjellifetti. It isn't.
You asserted that the cow+1 farmer would be clubbed by other farmers, therefore the commons tragedy doesn't work. My assertion was that the model of the commons tragedy isn't invalid for that reason - other webcasters cannot club competing webcasters. That's all I was trying to say.
I have a headache now. I'm going to go take a nap. =)
Weaselmancer