in german article about this yesterday, a read that only three would actually land on mars.
imagine, travelling all the way, being in outer space in a tin can for eight months, and then one half has to stay in orbit, watch the others make history, have all the fun, and then listen to their stories about it all the way back...
- "that was _so cool_! you have to try it for yourselves some day... i wish i could do it _again_!"
how strange, i searched the comments but didn't find anything about spam filters made out of cyc. that was one of the first applications that came to my mind after reading about it some time ago.
DIN, the German Institute for Standardization, is a registered association, founded in 1917. Its head office is in Berlin. Since 1975 it has been recognized by the German government as the national standards body and represents German interests at international and European level.
they standartize everything. i wouldn't be surprised if there would be a DIN Norm for a government linux distro.
this looks like they were planning it, but against a stron opposition.
i coulnd't find a name in the articles to search for on the eu parliaments website. wonder what happened to this in the past three years.
first of all: if Macromedia can make this change without warning users, it can make other changes.
it is not a change without warning users, as i see it. i downloaded the flash 6 player public beta and the camera and microphone setting were the first thing that i noticed. they were there all the time, exept you count the version step as a change without warning users, which i am sure you don't.
the cam/mic usage are not official (i.e. documented ) features yet, they seem to wait for some communication server they want to sell with it later this year. if they would make these features public now, everybody would build video chat sites without buying this server. so they sort of save this feature to push a future product. if this is good marketing or not -- time will tell. but opening up swf and even providing people interested with an sdk for programms that generate swfs were good decitions.
it is very much possible that this article causes damage to macromedia, you are right about that. what saddens me is that this is without any apparent reason, as i don't think that 'hiding' the cam/mic setting behind a right-click is sneaky at all.
that the existance of the possibility to make web based video chats in flash, with default 'no' settings, is getting misinterpreted by/. readers as spyware could raise concerns about some readers ability to make technical decisions, rather than about macromedia. but i believe that they simply hate flash, without really knowing anything about it. this can only be described as ignorance, because flash has come a long way over the last two versions. actionscript (flashs ecma based scripting language) matured, and you can actually do very useful things in flash (needless to say, the possibilities to make really bad things increased, too). hell, you can even stream video:)
but to get back to the decision making, i don't think that your typical/. reader is in the position to block web development in flash for their company. they might be responsible for a companies security concept, or their network infrastructure, but when it comes to the company website the appropriate tools are chosen by the web developers/designers and the companies marketing department, not the server administrators (who, as you can read almost everywhere in this thread don't know anything about flash, its capabilities and its security model anyway).
the quote, "The data is not public, but the privacy of this data depends on the policies of the web site where the movie is hosted." could also be understood as "we can not say what the owners of that website do with the data", as in "they might store an id to track your movement on their site or your visiting habits of that site in general". its the same as with cookies, and just as with them you are free to switch it off.
they have made this one fault in the past, the one you were linking to further up this thread. and, to quote eEye from said security bulletin: "In this, we congratulate Macromedia for: locating the bug, fixing it, and releasing a new build in a timely fashion. This truly shows that they are dedicated to building secure products - kudos." and yes, they might make other mistakes, just like everybody. however, only one security hole that was fixed within a day, by version 6 of a product is not such a bad record. therefore i can't see why you say they have security on low priority, to the contrary.
maybe you would like to read their security white paper (pdf).
if they would take control of my computer without making it clear in advance what they were doing, i would totaly agree with you.
but i have been to a site that uses the microphone and the camera (for a chat) and the player asked me for my permission. it defaults to no and is very prominent.
the feature of being able to use the camera and the microphone is agood thing, in my opinion. if i would have to iplement it, i would default it to no, and ask for the users permission if a site tries to use the mic/cam, the exact same thing macromedia has done.
and untill i see any proof i have no reason to believe otherwise. an outgoing video/audio stream would be fairly easy to detect. and it would severly damage the company, a risk for no possible benefit i can see. you couldn't just explain such a 'feature' in the manuals.
adding the aud/vid streaming capability by itself is not evil. if they (or the site owners) could access the cam/mic without the users prior permission i would, as i said, agree with you. but that is simply not the case.
i have been to a site that uses the mic and the camera, as a chat.
first thing that happened was the player asking me for my permission to access the microphone and camera.
Flash has caused several very serious security breaches, and the company acknowledges this. A computer under my supervision was totally owned by someone exploiting a bug in a Macromedia product.
what security breaches?
You forgot something very important. Sometimes there has been more than one upgrade to Flash within a month. If a web site uses a later version of Flash than is installed, you see the message.
afaik, there are flash versions 3 thru 6, with about 2 years between the version steps. there is no flash 5.2.
The fact remains, when you use Flash, you are giving your customer list to Macromedia, and to whomever has access to Macromedia computers.
you are providing them with the urls of companies that have an swf on their site. this could have been any authoring tool that generates swf. but you're right, they probably do this so they don't have to search the web for swfs.
The viewer is not aware of any contract. The viewer is aware that he or she must wait. Again, this is extremely bad advertising.
the viewer doesn't have to do anything. either he or she waits, or decides that it wouldn't be worth it. swfs are small. you can make big swfs, and you can make swfs that really suck. you also can make pretty shitty html sites. if you have that sort of talent.
The company is like Microsoft in that they tend to push the limits of what people will accept so that they can make more money.
they opened up the standart. i don't know what you mean by pushing the limits of what people will accept. but as a company, macromedia wants to make money. just like any other company.
...does have direct voting in it, true. but it is only a part of it.
let me try to explain:
you have two votes to make. the first one is for a candidate of your electoral district (one of about 330, i believe, half of the number of seats altogether), whoever gets the most (relative majority) wins a seat.
the second vote is for a party, and the other half of the seats is distibuted among the parties that either won 3 direct candidates (first vote) or have got at least 5% of the second votes (to keep the radicals out), so that their over all percentage of seats is their percentage of second votes.
actually, it is even more complicated, but this is the basic idea.
the parliament then elects the chancellor and the government, so it is far from direct. you elect a parliament, not a government.
as far as i am informed, the ballots will still be counted locally (by hand), and the outcome will be transmitted to a central server, which then calculates which party gets how many seats in the parlament, a complicated process compared to other countries.
the biggest part of the software is probably specific for the german election system.
the most standartised characteristic should be that the one who got the most votes wins, and that wouldn't even be the case in a certain other democracy on the other side of the atlantic...
for the people who's video card doesn't have that feature, you can still use flashs built in zoom.
of course, this is only worth the effort if you really want/have to access the information.
well, in theory, the containers should stay intact.
imagine a slow moving train with a few containers, LOTS of policemen around it trying to keep the train going and the demonstrators trying to stop it. most just stand along the tracks, some try to get on the tracks to stop the train, few chain themselves to the tracks to stop the train for a longer time and a minority of radicals try to sabotage the tracks to keep the train from arriving at its goal.
the idea behind all this is to make the transportation of nuclear waste more expensive. if such a train would actually be derailed (which is highly unlikely because they check the tracks again and again), i don't belive it would make political sense to have another one going... i assume that's what they think, too.
Oh yeah, and it's bad for the company because although their information changes daily, it's so hard to change the custom-designed web page that it becomes useless in a matter of weeks because it's outdated. My church website is like that.
the problem with most of the comments here is that the oh-so-knowledgeable techies here know nothing about flash and are just prejudiced.
like you don't know about flashs xml capabilities, that would let your churches server update the sunday prayers on your mothers computer without her even having to reload it, with flash using the ECMA-262-based scripting language to update the content even with only 100Mhz.
by the way, assuming you have gone through at least two update cycles since the 100MHz days, you really could have build your parents a new computer out of the old parts. shame on you!
if you don't like it, just don't go there. noone makes you to.
those pages were not made for you. they were made for people interested in experimental interfaces, to show off, or just because something cool came out of an experiment.
most people here sound like they had a clockwork orange like treatment with bad flash sites.
most comments i have read by now either come up with some prejudice (you can't do this, it's too big, other nonsense) without really having a clue what they're talking about, or they really critisize bad programmed flash and the content (or lack thereof). this is just plain ignorant.
i can understand why people critisize bad flash sites, but they ahould critisize the programmer and not the tool. if there is important information that can't be read with a low tech browser, the site simply is made poorly. i do use lynx occationally, and i used to surf the web a lot with net+ (a non-javascript browser for the BeOS) and let me tell you i hate it when people use javascript to just open a link. that doesn't make javascript itself bad, does it? however, it does show that the one who did it should consider working in another area.
and believe it or not, "experience is the content" sites are a good thing. they are experiments in design and interfaces. they push the edge further. development does not only happen in technology, it happens in other areas as well. some of those sites are to be considered art. they are made for those interested.
there is quite a difference between euthanasia and suicide.
some people are not able to kill themselves. euthanasia usually is applied if someone who is going to die anyway preferres to die with dignity instead of slowly perishing through months of pain.
my sister's a nurse. they actually get asked by some patiants to "let them die", but it's illegal here, so they have to watch them suffer as the patiants often can't do it themselves.
but hey, if god lets them die slowly and painfully, they proberbly deserved it, right?
that is because the first -- and thus most important -- article reads "the dignity of humans is untouchable" (well, my translation:) ) and so it overrides the no censorship part.
for example, stating that there was no holocaust is considered touching the dignity of those who were murdered in concentration camps.
good thing.
the onlything that might potentially happen is that your kid will get a letter from germany when it is 18, stating it has to do it's military service.
that happened once, and as far as i know the guy (only males can be drafted) didn't have to do it, and everybody was making fun of the situation.
there are thousands of children with german mothers and american fathers, and _of course_ they are free to live with their parents, wherever that may be. i personally knew a girl like that, moved to the us when her dad was transferred. no problem.
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
so we know it by definition, which is pretty accurate. it has to be, our definition of a meter depends on it.
but you wouldn't believe how a kilogram is defined...
you test two rgb values being distinguishable, don't you?
because if you just pick two colors in CIELab and test them, then convert to RGB you would be outside of its gamut most of the time.
i thought i'd ask, just to make sure.
Slashdot Mirror
imagine, travelling all the way, being in outer space in a tin can for eight months, and then one half has to stay in orbit, watch the others make history, have all the fun, and then listen to their stories about it all the way back...
- "that was _so cool_! you have to try it for yourselves some day... i wish i could do it _again_!"
yet again, our european mesurment system is easyer and more intuitive than what they use in the US.
did you plan on making a fetish site?
how strange, i searched the comments but didn't find anything about spam filters made out of cyc. that was one of the first applications that came to my mind after reading about it some time ago.
DIN, the German Institute for Standardization, is a registered association, founded in 1917. Its head office is in Berlin. Since 1975 it has been recognized by the German government as the national standards body and represents German interests at international and European level.
they standartize everything. i wouldn't be surprised if there would be a DIN Norm for a government linux distro.
this looks like they were planning it, but against a stron opposition.
i coulnd't find a name in the articles to search for on the eu parliaments website. wonder what happened to this in the past three years.
where'd you get that from?
the cam/mic usage are not official (i.e. documented ) features yet, they seem to wait for some communication server they want to sell with it later this year. if they would make these features public now, everybody would build video chat sites without buying this server. so they sort of save this feature to push a future product. if this is good marketing or not -- time will tell. but opening up swf and even providing people interested with an sdk for programms that generate swfs were good decitions.
it is very much possible that this article causes damage to macromedia, you are right about that. what saddens me is that this is without any apparent reason, as i don't think that 'hiding' the cam/mic setting behind a right-click is sneaky at all. /. readers as spyware could raise concerns about some readers ability to make technical decisions, rather than about macromedia. but i believe that they simply hate flash, without really knowing anything about it. this can only be described as ignorance, because flash has come a long way over the last two versions. actionscript (flashs ecma based scripting language) matured, and you can actually do very useful things in flash (needless to say, the possibilities to make really bad things increased, too). hell, you can even stream video :) /. reader is in the position to block web development in flash for their company. they might be responsible for a companies security concept, or their network infrastructure, but when it comes to the company website the appropriate tools are chosen by the web developers/designers and the companies marketing department, not the server administrators (who, as you can read almost everywhere in this thread don't know anything about flash, its capabilities and its security model anyway).
that the existance of the possibility to make web based video chats in flash, with default 'no' settings, is getting misinterpreted by
but to get back to the decision making, i don't think that your typical
the quote, "The data is not public, but the privacy of this data depends on the policies of the web site where the movie is hosted." could also be understood as "we can not say what the owners of that website do with the data", as in "they might store an id to track your movement on their site or your visiting habits of that site in general". its the same as with cookies, and just as with them you are free to switch it off.
they have made this one fault in the past, the one you were linking to further up this thread. and, to quote eEye from said security bulletin: "In this, we congratulate Macromedia for: locating the bug, fixing it, and releasing a new build in a timely fashion. This truly shows that they are dedicated to building secure products - kudos." and yes, they might make other mistakes, just like everybody. however, only one security hole that was fixed within a day, by version 6 of a product is not such a bad record. therefore i can't see why you say they have security on low priority, to the contrary.
maybe you would like to read their security white paper (pdf).
but i have been to a site that uses the microphone and the camera (for a chat) and the player asked me for my permission. it defaults to no and is very prominent.
the feature of being able to use the camera and the microphone is agood thing, in my opinion. if i would have to iplement it, i would default it to no, and ask for the users permission if a site tries to use the mic/cam, the exact same thing macromedia has done.
and untill i see any proof i have no reason to believe otherwise. an outgoing video/audio stream would be fairly easy to detect. and it would severly damage the company, a risk for no possible benefit i can see. you couldn't just explain such a 'feature' in the manuals.
adding the aud/vid streaming capability by itself is not evil. if they (or the site owners) could access the cam/mic without the users prior permission i would, as i said, agree with you. but that is simply not the case.
i have been to a site that uses the mic and the camera, as a chat.
first thing that happened was the player asking me for my permission to access the microphone and camera.
what security breaches?
You forgot something very important. Sometimes there has been more than one upgrade to Flash within a month. If a web site uses a later version of Flash than is installed, you see the message.
afaik, there are flash versions 3 thru 6, with about 2 years between the version steps. there is no flash 5.2.
The fact remains, when you use Flash, you are giving your customer list to Macromedia, and to whomever has access to Macromedia computers.
you are providing them with the urls of companies that have an swf on their site. this could have been any authoring tool that generates swf. but you're right, they probably do this so they don't have to search the web for swfs.
The viewer is not aware of any contract. The viewer is aware that he or she must wait. Again, this is extremely bad advertising.
the viewer doesn't have to do anything. either he or she waits, or decides that it wouldn't be worth it. swfs are small. you can make big swfs, and you can make swfs that really suck. you also can make pretty shitty html sites. if you have that sort of talent.
The company is like Microsoft in that they tend to push the limits of what people will accept so that they can make more money.
they opened up the standart. i don't know what you mean by pushing the limits of what people will accept. but as a company, macromedia wants to make money. just like any other company.
let me try to explain:
you have two votes to make. the first one is for a candidate of your electoral district (one of about 330, i believe, half of the number of seats altogether), whoever gets the most (relative majority) wins a seat.
the second vote is for a party, and the other half of the seats is distibuted among the parties that either won 3 direct candidates (first vote) or have got at least 5% of the second votes (to keep the radicals out), so that their over all percentage of seats is their percentage of second votes.
actually, it is even more complicated, but this is the basic idea.
the parliament then elects the chancellor and the government, so it is far from direct. you elect a parliament, not a government.
as far as i am informed, the ballots will still be counted locally (by hand), and the outcome will be transmitted to a central server, which then calculates which party gets how many seats in the parlament, a complicated process compared to other countries.
the biggest part of the software is probably specific for the german election system.
the most standartised characteristic should be that the one who got the most votes wins, and that wouldn't even be the case in a certain other democracy on the other side of the atlantic...
for the people who's video card doesn't have that feature, you can still use flashs built in zoom.
of course, this is only worth the effort if you really want/have to access the information.
they would probably use adobe live motion to produce swf content.
well, in theory, the containers should stay intact.
imagine a slow moving train with a few containers, LOTS of policemen around it trying to keep the train going and the demonstrators trying to stop it. most just stand along the tracks, some try to get on the tracks to stop the train, few chain themselves to the tracks to stop the train for a longer time and a minority of radicals try to sabotage the tracks to keep the train from arriving at its goal.
the idea behind all this is to make the transportation of nuclear waste more expensive. if such a train would actually be derailed (which is highly unlikely because they check the tracks again and again), i don't belive it would make political sense to have another one going... i assume that's what they think, too.
go to the german amazon, cut-and-paste "The Anarchist Cookbook" into the the search field on the top, it even has free shipping...
btw, you should be aware that sabotage of railroad tracks is not uncommon in germany to fight transports of nuclear waste.
the problem with most of the comments here is that the oh-so-knowledgeable techies here know nothing about flash and are just prejudiced.
like you don't know about flashs xml capabilities, that would let your churches server update the sunday prayers on your mothers computer without her even having to reload it, with flash using the ECMA-262-based scripting language to update the content even with only 100Mhz.
by the way, assuming you have gone through at least two update cycles since the 100MHz days, you really could have build your parents a new computer out of the old parts. shame on you!
those pages were not made for you. they were made for people interested in experimental interfaces, to show off, or just because something cool came out of an experiment.
most people here sound like they had a clockwork orange like treatment with bad flash sites.
most comments i have read by now either come up with some prejudice (you can't do this, it's too big, other nonsense) without really having a clue what they're talking about, or they really critisize bad programmed flash and the content (or lack thereof). this is just plain ignorant.
i can understand why people critisize bad flash sites, but they ahould critisize the programmer and not the tool. if there is important information that can't be read with a low tech browser, the site simply is made poorly. i do use lynx occationally, and i used to surf the web a lot with net+ (a non-javascript browser for the BeOS) and let me tell you i hate it when people use javascript to just open a link. that doesn't make javascript itself bad, does it? however, it does show that the one who did it should consider working in another area.
and believe it or not, "experience is the content" sites are a good thing. they are experiments in design and interfaces. they push the edge further. development does not only happen in technology, it happens in other areas as well. some of those sites are to be considered art. they are made for those interested.
not for you.
some people are not able to kill themselves. euthanasia usually is applied if someone who is going to die anyway preferres to die with dignity instead of slowly perishing through months of pain.
my sister's a nurse. they actually get asked by some patiants to "let them die", but it's illegal here, so they have to watch them suffer as the patiants often can't do it themselves.
but hey, if god lets them die slowly and painfully, they proberbly deserved it, right?
that is because the first -- and thus most important -- article reads "the dignity of humans is untouchable" (well, my translation :) ) and so it overrides the no censorship part.
for example, stating that there was no holocaust is considered touching the dignity of those who were murdered in concentration camps.
good thing.
that happened once, and as far as i know the guy (only males can be drafted) didn't have to do it, and everybody was making fun of the situation.
there are thousands of children with german mothers and american fathers, and _of course_ they are free to live with their parents, wherever that may be. i personally knew a girl like that, moved to the us when her dad was transferred. no problem.
according to the National Institute of Standarts and Technology.
so we know it by definition, which is pretty accurate. it has to be, our definition of a meter depends on it.
but you wouldn't believe how a kilogram is defined...
you test two rgb values being distinguishable, don't you?
because if you just pick two colors in CIELab and test them, then convert to RGB you would be outside of its gamut most of the time.
i thought i'd ask, just to make sure.