I'm not certain, but I guess some software such as CPU-Z for Windows could still determine the original rating of the CPU. Or at least aid someone trying to find out. I'm not sure if the raw family and model ids help, but at the very least the cache sizes are both hard (impossible?) to fake and give you a general idea of the kind of CPU you are dealing with.
I'd like to know how 50 years transforms a universally accepted practice into something that makes one a "very stupid human being."
Actually, it's the other way round - the mere fact that something was an accepted practice doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing to do. And if you read a book, you'll find that only 50 years ago there were a lot of accepted practices that were very stupid.
On a sidenote, your criticism is invalid for another reason: I have a feeling that the OP would have less of a problem with fathers nervously sitting in the waiting room than he has with a father so disinterested in his wife giving birth that he prefers to work. That is 50 years ago, fathers didn't have the option to "be there" unlike this guy (who might as well be fictional, for all we know). Obviously, that totally changes the way one might evaluate their actions.
Sorry for taking so long to respond, I would have done so earlier if only the damn network admins at the CCC congress had fixed the damned wireless LAN...;)
First off, I readily admit that I am not an expert on CD media lifetimes. It's not something I dealt with in any detail, so my knowledge is limited to what I read by chance and what any computer user might pick up. This might serve to explain the inaccuracies and ambiguity you find in my posts. I think I do know that CDs are more reliable than floppy disks, and what I've read so far generally supports that.
F-117a fit on a single floppy and that was a military flight simulator game with at least two dozen missions and terrains from all over the world.
Okay, so current software in general and games in particular are bloated, whatever. I really want to get off the that trail here - it really hasn't got any relation to the issue I originally talked about, which is the fact (or if you will, opinion) that CDs are a more reliable medium than floppy disks, or, even more specifically, that CDs have a longer shelf lifetime than floppies.
The only FPS that came close to Marathon as far as storytelling is concerned is System Shock 2, in my experience. Deus Ex 1 was close, and all others are far, far behind.
CDs which are pressed from a mold do last longer, but I am talking about CD-R and CD-RW media, which are burned with a laser and are thus much more susceptible to sunlight, high temperature and physical damage.
Well, then you are wrong. There are media you can burn which are designed to last a long time, easily longer than 5 years. It's certainly not extremely good, but it's not necessarily - depending on the media you use - terrible bad, and it's a lot better than floppy disks.
Back in the floppy days I remember cramming 10+ games on a single 1.44 Mb floppy.
I remember Monkey Island 1 and Loom each coming on multiple floppies. And really, whether I use more CDs than floppies wasn't the point - it's that even though I've used floppies for maybe 5 years, and CDs for 10 I've had far more floppies go bad on me than CDs.
Well, Slashdot does post major event stories from time to time - in fact they make up a large part of the hall of fame. They typically deal with events that are related to the US, despite the fact that a significant part of the readership isn't American. Considering how the story summary is one order of magnitude off - many thousands, not hundreds died - this certainly is a major story and I don't mind seeing it on Slashdot.
On the other hand, why post this when you didn't report on the earthquake in Turkey, or the one in Iran about a year ago, etc? I guess it's because Sundays are slow news days.
so when the FSF asks you to assign copyright to them that's bullshit too?
This is nothing like the FSF, who releases works assigned to them under the GPL and much more like the music industry, who release works assigned to them under restrictive licenses. Judging by all of your posts under this topic you have a massive problem seeing the difference.
However, DRM obviously refers to the rights of a publisher and therefore it refers to "rights".
Considering how DRM gives publishers more than their original rights that's a bit weird. I think digital restrictions management really describes the technology very well, because that's just exactly what it does. If nothing else, it's more accurate and to the point.
But with CDs you just put a CD on the shelf for a year and you get data corruption and major data loss eventhough you never even used the CD once that whole time. Now that is just unacceptable to me, with floppies at least you knew you could expect damage due to use, but CDs just tend to go sour without you touching them.
Ehhh. I doubt that floppies had (or have) a longer average shelf life expectancy than CDs.
Googling suggests that floppies are fairly safe for about 5 years, after that all bets are off - I couldn't find any source that seemed authoritative, though. Certainly mostly everybody here will have seen floppy disks that were good a lot later, but that's the best case, not the average or worst case. CDs, on the other hand, are routinely designed to last 10 to 20 years, or even longer with certain specialised brands.
The only thing that I can think of is that it might be easier to store a CD wrong - ie leaving it in bright, direct sunlight for days. They're also more prone to physical damage, ie scratching. But then again, at least they don't have any moving parts and are unimpressed by magnets. Personally, I've been using CDs a LOT more than I've ever used floppies, and I've had heaps of floppies go bad on me (most of them pirated Atari games, maybe it was karma) and very few CDs.
It shouldn't matter, but I'm surprised the Slashdot blurb doesn't mention the fact that the author of the story (ie the "Grumpy Gamer") is Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island and Total Annihilation fame. Note his peculiar About page written in Latin. And he's geeky, too: Firefox and BSD links, and the whole thing is CC licensed.
If this sort of thing curbs piracy, then maybe the four-letter organizations will calm down about DRM.
It doesn't, but if it did, they still wouldn't. Calm down, that is. Why would they? DRM hurts everybody but them, at least that's what they think. And it's not like they are content with the privileges traditional copyright has given copyright holders.
The taste of the coffee is of course much dependent on smell,...
Yep - in fact, what people refer to as "taste" is typically mostly what they smell. Which is why many things taste odd or at least very bland when you've got a cold.
A simple proof of concept. Type sex. It says 0 results. But if you hit enter, you get a godzillion.
That's not a good proof of concept. Google seems to filter certain keywords deemed inappropriate, and sex is one of them. So this is deliberate and not a side-effect of caching the results in a lookup table on Google's side.
I don't actually know how Google does it - I agree that the naive approach probably stresses their servers too much to be widely used. OTOH this is only a beta test, and it's possible it never will be widely used. Creating a look-up table, as you say, does seem like a reasonable way to make the problem manageable, with the downsides you mention. But then, such a lookup table would be really, really large... After all you can't just store the number of occurances for a number of words, because you can't computer the number of results for slashdot effect (500k) from slashdot (~9m) and effect (153m). BTW, effect allegedly has 153m results, searching for it yields 145m. Searching for Slashdot actually only yields ~6m. So anyway, if there aren't any smart ways to reduce the tables size, you'd have to store an entry for every possible combination of characters a user might enter. To cache strings up to n characters long you'd have a table of n^27 entries. Not exactly viable. However, Google does have smart ways to reduce the size, non-sensical query strings don't give you a list of suggestions. So looking for "hxa su" doesn't give me any suggestions but 13,500 results.
Because there is a difference of quality, not only of quantity, between paying nothing and paying something. For the same reason, I prefer a flat fee internet service over one based on the time surfed - even if the latter would almost certainly cost me less. If I can download for free, there really is no reason to do it, if I have to pay a cent, I have to justify it - although, admittedly, one cent doesn't take a lot of justifying. Still, it'd feel different, I guess.
Intelligent people won't listen to you, just like they don't listen to either extreme fundamentalist Christians, or extreme fundamentalist athiests.
They don't have any choice, my karma is excellent and I post at +2!;)
That said, I'm not exactly fundamental. I used to be at peace (or at least, cease-fire) with the fact that I hypocritically violate my own moral beliefs in downloading stuff. I wasn't happy about that, but then again mostly everyone - and certainly everyone on Slashdot - is either acting hypocritically on occasion or is an idiot (because he doesn't realise his wrongs). For instance, I drive too fast (no more so than mostly everybody else) even though I know it's endangering myself and others.
But lately, I started wondering if maybe it's not my behavior that needs adjusting, but rather my morals - maybe there really is nothing wrong with downloading. Maybe copyright law is just a major error that should be abolished. It's certainly a limitation of my freedom, so it has to be justified - and maybe its merits just don't justify its downsides. Getting rid of it would certainly have an impact, the world would look different. But would it be worse?
You see, I don't have a problem with saying, yep, it would be worse, I want copyright to stay. But even thinking about this is prohibited, even on Slashdot - in the mainstream the thought just doesn't come up. Personally, I'm actually not sure if it would be worse, I've not thought about it that much yet. In many areas, despite copyright law, there already is quality, free content: music, application software, news, short stories, comics. In others, not so much: computer games, movies, TV series. I think the former would do all right, I'm not sure about the latter. But then, it's really hard to predict what exactly would happen, copyright is so entrenched into my mind.
The grandparent posed a rhetorical question: So giving owners copyrights over their own work is a bad thing, eh? The thought that there could be more than a simple answer to this question never seemed to cross his mind. That fucking sucks.
Finally, you say that intelligent people won't listen. Okay, so be it. From what I've seen, the problem typically isn't getting the intelligent people to listen but rather the fact that there are so few of them.
Assume 1 million songs get illegally downloaded that would usually cost $1, but the downloaders would be willing to pay at most $0.5. Then the loss is $500k, not zero or $1M.
Okay, but your exemplary assumption of 50c is probably some ways off. (I realise, of course, you didn't claim otherwise.) I'm sure many people download a lot of stuff that they would be willing to pay exactly nothing for. The same is true for application software, games, books, everything. One download just doesn't equal one missed sale at any price.
Growth through acquisition may allow them to surpass the US's total GDP (they may already have), but it won't make the EU surpass the US in per-capita GDP.
Be that as it may, it's not relevant in this context. China has a very low GDP per capita, it's still an important political and economical power.
Actually, both make perfect sense. Of course, FTP doesn't give them headaches, because it's not used by the broad public, and because the legal usage probably is on about the same level as the illegal usage. BitTorrent is in fact a protocol, in exactly the same way as ED2k is - both also have programs of the same name realizing the protocol, although I'd assume among file sharers of both protocols the original programs have decreased in popularity.
However, whether it's a protocol or not really isn't relevant in the given sentence. Saying that Suprnova gives them a headache would be more specific, but it's not only Suprnova worrying them, but rather all the sites and people using BT. BitTorrent is basically used to refer to all of the problems associated with it. This might strike you as unfair to all the legal usage, and imprecise as well, but it's really a fairly normal thing to do in language.
Cue the typical Blizzard fanboy. Posting with extreme hyperbole (he passed out?!) and pathetic ignorance (among others, EQ1 allows UI editing using XML) - invariably leading to the conclusion that Blizzard is oh so innovative.
Not that I don't think this is cool. Like many other aspects, Blizzard seems to have taken the best of the games that defined the genre and is building on them. Nothing wrong with that, quite to the contrary. (And of course, in other aspects they do genuinely innovate - but so have all other large MMORPGs released to date.)
So who's to say the authors have agreed to the one but not the other? Since Usenet relies on the redistribution of its authors' content, they give some sort of implicit consent to redistribute their works. To an observer without a technical background, there really isn't a big difference between distributing Usenet posts via NNTP or vie HTTP.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain, but I guess some software such as CPU-Z for Windows could still determine the original rating of the CPU. Or at least aid someone trying to find out. I'm not sure if the raw family and model ids help, but at the very least the cache sizes are both hard (impossible?) to fake and give you a general idea of the kind of CPU you are dealing with.
I'd like to know how 50 years transforms a universally accepted practice into something that makes one a "very stupid human being."
Actually, it's the other way round - the mere fact that something was an accepted practice doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing to do. And if you read a book, you'll find that only 50 years ago there were a lot of accepted practices that were very stupid.
On a sidenote, your criticism is invalid for another reason: I have a feeling that the OP would have less of a problem with fathers nervously sitting in the waiting room than he has with a father so disinterested in his wife giving birth that he prefers to work. That is 50 years ago, fathers didn't have the option to "be there" unlike this guy (who might as well be fictional, for all we know). Obviously, that totally changes the way one might evaluate their actions.
Sorry for taking so long to respond, I would have done so earlier if only the damn network admins at the CCC congress had fixed the damned wireless LAN... ;)
. htm
First off, I readily admit that I am not an expert on CD media lifetimes. It's not something I dealt with in any detail, so my knowledge is limited to what I read by chance and what any computer user might pick up. This might serve to explain the inaccuracies and ambiguity you find in my posts. I think I do know that CDs are more reliable than floppy disks, and what I've read so far generally supports that.
So, anyway, without further ado: http://www.mam-a.com/technology/quality/longevity
F-117a fit on a single floppy and that was a military flight simulator game with at least two dozen missions and terrains from all over the world.
Okay, so current software in general and games in particular are bloated, whatever. I really want to get off the that trail here - it really hasn't got any relation to the issue I originally talked about, which is the fact (or if you will, opinion) that CDs are a more reliable medium than floppy disks, or, even more specifically, that CDs have a longer shelf lifetime than floppies.
I think everyone who had a Mac and was interested in gaming back then knew about Marathon. Granted, that's not a lot of people.
The only FPS that came close to Marathon as far as storytelling is concerned is System Shock 2, in my experience. Deus Ex 1 was close, and all others are far, far behind.
CDs which are pressed from a mold do last longer, but I am talking about CD-R and CD-RW media, which are burned with a laser and are thus much more susceptible to sunlight, high temperature and physical damage.
Well, then you are wrong. There are media you can burn which are designed to last a long time, easily longer than 5 years. It's certainly not extremely good, but it's not necessarily - depending on the media you use - terrible bad, and it's a lot better than floppy disks.
Back in the floppy days I remember cramming 10+ games on a single 1.44 Mb floppy.
I remember Monkey Island 1 and Loom each coming on multiple floppies. And really, whether I use more CDs than floppies wasn't the point - it's that even though I've used floppies for maybe 5 years, and CDs for 10 I've had far more floppies go bad on me than CDs.
Well, Slashdot does post major event stories from time to time - in fact they make up a large part of the hall of fame. They typically deal with events that are related to the US, despite the fact that a significant part of the readership isn't American. Considering how the story summary is one order of magnitude off - many thousands, not hundreds died - this certainly is a major story and I don't mind seeing it on Slashdot.
On the other hand, why post this when you didn't report on the earthquake in Turkey, or the one in Iran about a year ago, etc? I guess it's because Sundays are slow news days.
so when the FSF asks you to assign copyright to them that's bullshit too?
This is nothing like the FSF, who releases works assigned to them under the GPL and much more like the music industry, who release works assigned to them under restrictive licenses. Judging by all of your posts under this topic you have a massive problem seeing the difference.
However, DRM obviously refers to the rights of a publisher and therefore it refers to "rights".
Considering how DRM gives publishers more than their original rights that's a bit weird. I think digital restrictions management really describes the technology very well, because that's just exactly what it does. If nothing else, it's more accurate and to the point.
But with CDs you just put a CD on the shelf for a year and you get data corruption and major data loss eventhough you never even used the CD once that whole time. Now that is just unacceptable to me, with floppies at least you knew you could expect damage due to use, but CDs just tend to go sour without you touching them.
Ehhh. I doubt that floppies had (or have) a longer average shelf life expectancy than CDs.
Googling suggests that floppies are fairly safe for about 5 years, after that all bets are off - I couldn't find any source that seemed authoritative, though. Certainly mostly everybody here will have seen floppy disks that were good a lot later, but that's the best case, not the average or worst case. CDs, on the other hand, are routinely designed to last 10 to 20 years, or even longer with certain specialised brands.
The only thing that I can think of is that it might be easier to store a CD wrong - ie leaving it in bright, direct sunlight for days. They're also more prone to physical damage, ie scratching. But then again, at least they don't have any moving parts and are unimpressed by magnets. Personally, I've been using CDs a LOT more than I've ever used floppies, and I've had heaps of floppies go bad on me (most of them pirated Atari games, maybe it was karma) and very few CDs.
It shouldn't matter, but I'm surprised the Slashdot blurb doesn't mention the fact that the author of the story (ie the "Grumpy Gamer") is Ron Gilbert of Monkey Island and Total Annihilation fame. Note his peculiar About page written in Latin. And he's geeky, too: Firefox and BSD links, and the whole thing is CC licensed.
Sure you do!
If this sort of thing curbs piracy, then maybe the four-letter organizations will calm down about DRM.
It doesn't, but if it did, they still wouldn't. Calm down, that is. Why would they? DRM hurts everybody but them, at least that's what they think. And it's not like they are content with the privileges traditional copyright has given copyright holders.
The taste of the coffee is of course much dependent on smell, ...
Yep - in fact, what people refer to as "taste" is typically mostly what they smell. Which is why many things taste odd or at least very bland when you've got a cold.
A simple proof of concept. Type sex. It says 0 results. But if you hit enter, you get a godzillion.
That's not a good proof of concept. Google seems to filter certain keywords deemed inappropriate, and sex is one of them. So this is deliberate and not a side-effect of caching the results in a lookup table on Google's side.
I don't actually know how Google does it - I agree that the naive approach probably stresses their servers too much to be widely used. OTOH this is only a beta test, and it's possible it never will be widely used.
Creating a look-up table, as you say, does seem like a reasonable way to make the problem manageable, with the downsides you mention. But then, such a lookup table would be really, really large... After all you can't just store the number of occurances for a number of words, because you can't computer the number of results for slashdot effect (500k) from slashdot (~9m) and effect (153m). BTW, effect allegedly has 153m results, searching for it yields 145m. Searching for Slashdot actually only yields ~6m.
So anyway, if there aren't any smart ways to reduce the tables size, you'd have to store an entry for every possible combination of characters a user might enter. To cache strings up to n characters long you'd have a table of n^27 entries. Not exactly viable.
However, Google does have smart ways to reduce the size, non-sensical query strings don't give you a list of suggestions. So looking for "hxa su" doesn't give me any suggestions but 13,500 results.
You will like it- Only _10_ lines of legalese!
Not a chance. Even Hello World takes up more than that in Legalese.
Because there is a difference of quality, not only of quantity, between paying nothing and paying something. For the same reason, I prefer a flat fee internet service over one based on the time surfed - even if the latter would almost certainly cost me less. If I can download for free, there really is no reason to do it, if I have to pay a cent, I have to justify it - although, admittedly, one cent doesn't take a lot of justifying. Still, it'd feel different, I guess.
Intelligent people won't listen to you, just like they don't listen to either extreme fundamentalist Christians, or extreme fundamentalist athiests.
;)
They don't have any choice, my karma is excellent and I post at +2!
That said, I'm not exactly fundamental. I used to be at peace (or at least, cease-fire) with the fact that I hypocritically violate my own moral beliefs in downloading stuff. I wasn't happy about that, but then again mostly everyone - and certainly everyone on Slashdot - is either acting hypocritically on occasion or is an idiot (because he doesn't realise his wrongs). For instance, I drive too fast (no more so than mostly everybody else) even though I know it's endangering myself and others.
But lately, I started wondering if maybe it's not my behavior that needs adjusting, but rather my morals - maybe there really is nothing wrong with downloading. Maybe copyright law is just a major error that should be abolished. It's certainly a limitation of my freedom, so it has to be justified - and maybe its merits just don't justify its downsides. Getting rid of it would certainly have an impact, the world would look different. But would it be worse?
You see, I don't have a problem with saying, yep, it would be worse, I want copyright to stay. But even thinking about this is prohibited, even on Slashdot - in the mainstream the thought just doesn't come up. Personally, I'm actually not sure if it would be worse, I've not thought about it that much yet. In many areas, despite copyright law, there already is quality, free content: music, application software, news, short stories, comics. In others, not so much: computer games, movies, TV series. I think the former would do all right, I'm not sure about the latter. But then, it's really hard to predict what exactly would happen, copyright is so entrenched into my mind.
The grandparent posed a rhetorical question: So giving owners copyrights over their own work is a bad thing, eh? The thought that there could be more than a simple answer to this question never seemed to cross his mind. That fucking sucks.
Finally, you say that intelligent people won't listen. Okay, so be it. From what I've seen, the problem typically isn't getting the intelligent people to listen but rather the fact that there are so few of them.
Assume 1 million songs get illegally downloaded that would usually cost $1, but the downloaders would be willing to pay at most $0.5. Then the loss is $500k, not zero or $1M.
Okay, but your exemplary assumption of 50c is probably some ways off. (I realise, of course, you didn't claim otherwise.) I'm sure many people download a lot of stuff that they would be willing to pay exactly nothing for. The same is true for application software, games, books, everything. One download just doesn't equal one missed sale at any price.
So giving owners copyrights over their own work is a bad thing, eh?
YES! Not clear enough? YES!!!
Growth through acquisition may allow them to surpass the US's total GDP (they may already have), but it won't make the EU surpass the US in per-capita GDP.
Be that as it may, it's not relevant in this context. China has a very low GDP per capita, it's still an important political and economical power.
Actually, both make perfect sense. Of course, FTP doesn't give them headaches, because it's not used by the broad public, and because the legal usage probably is on about the same level as the illegal usage.
BitTorrent is in fact a protocol, in exactly the same way as ED2k is - both also have programs of the same name realizing the protocol, although I'd assume among file sharers of both protocols the original programs have decreased in popularity.
However, whether it's a protocol or not really isn't relevant in the given sentence. Saying that Suprnova gives them a headache would be more specific, but it's not only Suprnova worrying them, but rather all the sites and people using BT. BitTorrent is basically used to refer to all of the problems associated with it. This might strike you as unfair to all the legal usage, and imprecise as well, but it's really a fairly normal thing to do in language.
Cue the typical Blizzard fanboy. Posting with extreme hyperbole (he passed out?!) and pathetic ignorance (among others, EQ1 allows UI editing using XML) - invariably leading to the conclusion that Blizzard is oh so innovative.
Not that I don't think this is cool. Like many other aspects, Blizzard seems to have taken the best of the games that defined the genre and is building on them. Nothing wrong with that, quite to the contrary. (And of course, in other aspects they do genuinely innovate - but so have all other large MMORPGs released to date.)
Expand your vocabulary - it doesn't seem to mind "fornicate". ;)
So who's to say the authors have agreed to the one but not the other? Since Usenet relies on the redistribution of its authors' content, they give some sort of implicit consent to redistribute their works. To an observer without a technical background, there really isn't a big difference between distributing Usenet posts via NNTP or vie HTTP.