That's a strange rule... round these parts, we allow a player to sell off properties (to the creditor or to any other player) to pay a debt. It would be a very different game if you were required to keep a large enough cash float at all times to pay rent for anything you land on.
Um... you do know to treat all internet traffic as insecure by default? With the thickness of tinfoil hat you seem to be wearing, I would have assumed you use ssh and https anyway.
Yes, Slashdot had some strange preoccupations in the early(*) days... every other story seemed to be about a new development release of Enlightenment (and a bit later some cheesy themes.org upload) or the 2.1 Linux kernel.
Wait a sec - I think I probably prefer that to the speculation and corporate soap opera / press releases that clog up the front page these days.
(*) Not that early. I started reading when Netscape announced their plans to free their web browser.
There are good reasons for requiring copyright assignment. For the FSF it's reasonable enough since in return for the assignment they promise to license your contribution as free software. Sun are requiring copyright assignment and then planning to incorporate your code into the proprietary StarOffice, which some may see as unfair.
Some algorithms these days are quite literally better than humans at detecting the hidden text in captchas.
As the article said, by selection, these are bits of text that OCR algorithms cannot read. We can assume that CM is using the best available OCR, so even 'some algorithms' that you mention, which are better than humans at reading captchas in most ordinary cases, will be ineffective for these particular images.
In that story I don't see a 'First Post', rather, the first comment sorted by oldest first is #1815999.
Someone with access to the Slashdot database could straightforwardly find the first true First Post, and the ratio of real First Posts to unsuccessful attempts. I expect the first post ever on Slashdot goes to CmdrTaco.
It's been done: Pipedream by Mark Colton (also called View Professional) was a combined spreadsheet-WP-database app that ran on the BBC Micro, Archimedes and (even more weirdly) the Sinclair Z88 laptop computer. This Z88 review has a section describing Pipedream.
Thanks, that's the one - I tried searching for various combinations of 'linux', 'nerds', 'photo', 'propeller' and so on but all I found was a glamour photo of Linus himself.
Anyone got a link to the famous photograph of Linux users taken at a conference a year or two ago? You know, the one with the T-shirted lank-haired nerds standing around with hands in their pockets, and (my favourite bit) the random old bearded guy wearing a propeller beanie?
I think the best argument against the gold standard is that we used to have one, and it didn't really work out that well. (sterling's return to the gold standard after WW1; collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in the 70s.)
It's one thing to have $1000 exchangeable on demand for x grams of gold (or of silver), but it would get a bit daft if the central bank had to pay out 10g of gold, 0.1 bushels of wheat, three lean hogs and half a tonne of copper. The gold standard was maintained by shipping gold around the world to cover trade deficits and surpluses. This couldn't happen with 'soft' commodities.
The worst that can happen is that the FSF releases a licence that is too liberal and allows things you don't want to permit. Even if fifty years from now the FSF is bought by Warren Buffet's head in a jar and decides to monetize the base of GPL'd software, you haven't really lost anything and neither have the users since the original version is still usable.
More worrying, to me, is that the original author dies or becomes uncontactable (or just one of several copyright holders dies) and the software cannot ever be relicensed to a new GPL version. That is why I support the 'at your option, any later version' formula. It doesn't hurt to be a bit too liberal.
If you had said they use the exact same sounds, then this claim could be verified by watching the episode and the movie. To allege that they copied it, though, you'd need to cite someone working on the film saying that they recorded a TNG episode off the television and decided to copy bits of the soundtrack for their movie. Which doesn't sound terribly likely, does it?
What you say sounds completely reasonable, but I believe the point I was making remains true: you cannot choose to turn off DRM (even if it's your own PC, and you want to turn it off) and you cannot currently buy any operating system that plays HD-DVD movies without crippling the output (mostly because as you say there is an industry cartel operating to restrict access to this standard). So it's not really true to say that consumers have a free choice. The only choice is to buy Vista and suffer with DRM, or abstain entirely from watching HD-DVD movies on your PC. This resembles the East German elections where voters were given a fixed list of candidates and asked, not to choose the ones they wanted, but to vote either 'yes' or 'no' to the entire list. You'd hardly say that these voters had a free choice in choosing their representative when the only choice offered was 'take it or leave it'.
I guess if Microsoft is simply adhering to some law which mandates that high-def output can't be shown on HDMI ports (without begging for special permission from the copyright holder) then the feature is justified in some sense. But still it makes one uneasy that Microsoft jumped to implement it so eagerly.
When it's a question of conforming to technical standards like HTML, Kerberos or even the Latin-1 character set, we're used to seeing Microsoft drag its feet, half-heartedly or buggily implement the standard, bloat it with non-standard extensions, and often do it a few years late. Yet when it comes to a document specifying restrictions on people playing movies, Microsoft jumps to implement it in full with extra gold-plating to avoid any possibility that the user might be able to make his machine do what he wants rather than what the movie studios want.
Similarly, when legal bodies in the US, Europe and elsewhere have required Microsoft to keep in line with antitrust laws or to open details of its protocols, the company has fought every step of the way and dragged its feet when complying (e.g. trying to lock out Samba when the EU required that SMB/CIFS protocol extensions be documented). When the movie studios ask for something, they jump to attention. If there's a critical bug in Internet Explorer that can lead to systems being compromised, it can take weeks to fix (and many almost-as-serious bugs languish for months). Yet if there's a bug in Windows Media Player that might possibly allow you to play Disney's movies on an unlocked display, a patch is rushed out. As the original paper noted, your credit card number or your personal files are not encrypted by default, but Microsoft thinks a frame from a movie is so important that they are always encrypted if swapped out to disk.
Why the strange priorities? It seems that Microsoft has forgotten who its customers really are. It would be nice if the robust, even combative attitude we've seen from Microsoft towards competitors and governments could be applied a bit to the movie studios. Why is Microsoft too spineless to defend its own and its users' interests?
How exactly is it breaking the law to display a movie you bought on a TV you own in your own house?
I don't know about what everybody else wants, but I want to buy content legally and play it on my own PC without being at the mercy of binary-only drivers, content signing, deliberate crippling of functionality, and the increased hardware costs caused by needing to support all that anti-functionality.
I want to exercise my rights within copyright law and respect the publishers' right to exercise theirs. If there are to be changes to the copyright bargain, either to increase restrictions on the public or to loosen them, then these can be decided by the legislatures of individual countries and not imposed by Microsoft or any other company.
I think this is somewhat disingenuous, since by the same argument any business practice can be justified. It's not as if there is free competition in operating systems (if there were, a competitor to Microsoft selling a Windows-compatible system would produce a version that supported HD output on all devices, and consumers would buy it instead).
Let's face it, consumers cannot *choose* to turn off the DRM... there is no checkbox in the Vista control panel for 'do not cripple digital media output', even though it would be technically very easy for Microsoft to implement. Having no effective competitor in the marketplace they have no incentive to give users what they want.
The two writers disagree on the meaning of 'Vista will not display HD content on this monitor'. Ed Bott appears to contradict himself:
Vista will indeed display HD content on this monitor over the D-Sub and component video outputs, which are capable of outputting 1080p and 1080i signals, respectively. In the future, a content provider might choose to constrict the output to these devices,
In other words Vista will display HD images but only in un-DRM mode, and if you try to pay a movie that you have bought and paid for but which has the flag set for 'trusted output path' or whatever they call it, Vista will refuse to display it. Which is, I think, the point Peter Gutmann was trying to make.
Darn it, the whole point of making the direct XML feed was to reduce load on the website (and general hassle) caused by scraping HTML - in other words zap2it actively asked people to stop scraping their site, and worked hard to provide an alternative. If they've decided they don't want to continue with the XML service then it's not for us (the users) to go against that decision.
Yes - I realized my mistake as soon as I wrote the comment and posted a correction, but Slashdot disallowed it for coming less than 2 minutes after the previous comment. I didn't read that and closed the window. You are absolutely right, it should be 700 joule-hours per second per day.
Since a watt is just a short way of saying one joule per second, this means
700 joules per second per hour per day
Do NASA really do their energy computations in this unit? Given their past problems getting to grips with the metric system, perhaps they might.
Surely it would be clearer to say 'the rover's solar panels have an average power output of about 29 watts'. Anyone could see that this is enough power to run a 100 watt lightbulb nearly one-third of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a strange rule... round these parts, we allow a player to sell off properties (to the creditor or to any other player) to pay a debt. It would be a very different game if you were required to keep a large enough cash float at all times to pay rent for anything you land on.
Um... you do know to treat all internet traffic as insecure by default? With the thickness of tinfoil hat you seem to be wearing, I would have assumed you use ssh and https anyway.
Yes, Slashdot had some strange preoccupations in the early(*) days... every other story seemed to be about a new development release of Enlightenment (and a bit later some cheesy themes.org upload) or the 2.1 Linux kernel.
Wait a sec - I think I probably prefer that to the speculation and corporate soap opera / press releases that clog up the front page these days.
(*) Not that early. I started reading when Netscape announced their plans to free their web browser.
There are good reasons for requiring copyright assignment. For the FSF it's reasonable enough since in return for the assignment they promise to license your contribution as free software. Sun are requiring copyright assignment and then planning to incorporate your code into the proprietary StarOffice, which some may see as unfair.
In that story I don't see a 'First Post', rather, the first comment sorted by oldest first is #1815999.
Someone with access to the Slashdot database could straightforwardly find the first true First Post, and the ratio of real First Posts to unsuccessful attempts. I expect the first post ever on Slashdot goes to CmdrTaco.
It's been done: Pipedream by Mark Colton (also called View Professional) was a combined spreadsheet-WP-database app that ran on the BBC Micro, Archimedes and (even more weirdly) the Sinclair Z88 laptop computer. This Z88 review has a section describing Pipedream.
Thanks, that's the one - I tried searching for various combinations of 'linux', 'nerds', 'photo', 'propeller' and so on but all I found was a glamour photo of Linus himself.
Anyone got a link to the famous photograph of Linux users taken at a conference a year or two ago? You know, the one with the T-shirted lank-haired nerds standing around with hands in their pockets, and (my favourite bit) the random old bearded guy wearing a propeller beanie?
I think the best argument against the gold standard is that we used to have one, and it didn't really work out that well. (sterling's return to the gold standard after WW1; collapse of Bretton Woods agreement in the 70s.)
It's one thing to have $1000 exchangeable on demand for x grams of gold (or of silver), but it would get a bit daft if the central bank had to pay out 10g of gold, 0.1 bushels of wheat, three lean hogs and half a tonne of copper. The gold standard was maintained by shipping gold around the world to cover trade deficits and surpluses. This couldn't happen with 'soft' commodities.
The worst that can happen is that the FSF releases a licence that is too liberal and allows things you don't want to permit. Even if fifty years from now the FSF is bought by Warren Buffet's head in a jar and decides to monetize the base of GPL'd software, you haven't really lost anything and neither have the users since the original version is still usable.
More worrying, to me, is that the original author dies or becomes uncontactable (or just one of several copyright holders dies) and the software cannot ever be relicensed to a new GPL version. That is why I support the 'at your option, any later version' formula. It doesn't hurt to be a bit too liberal.
Everyone knows that the first few versions tend to be buggy and not worth using. I'm waiting for Web 3.11 for Workgroups.
If you had said they use the exact same sounds, then this claim could be verified by watching the episode and the movie. To allege that they copied it, though, you'd need to cite someone working on the film saying that they recorded a TNG episode off the television and decided to copy bits of the soundtrack for their movie. Which doesn't sound terribly likely, does it?
What you say sounds completely reasonable, but I believe the point I was making remains true: you cannot choose to turn off DRM (even if it's your own PC, and you want to turn it off) and you cannot currently buy any operating system that plays HD-DVD movies without crippling the output (mostly because as you say there is an industry cartel operating to restrict access to this standard). So it's not really true to say that consumers have a free choice. The only choice is to buy Vista and suffer with DRM, or abstain entirely from watching HD-DVD movies on your PC. This resembles the East German elections where voters were given a fixed list of candidates and asked, not to choose the ones they wanted, but to vote either 'yes' or 'no' to the entire list. You'd hardly say that these voters had a free choice in choosing their representative when the only choice offered was 'take it or leave it'.
I guess if Microsoft is simply adhering to some law which mandates that high-def output can't be shown on HDMI ports (without begging for special permission from the copyright holder) then the feature is justified in some sense. But still it makes one uneasy that Microsoft jumped to implement it so eagerly.
When it's a question of conforming to technical standards like HTML, Kerberos or even the Latin-1 character set, we're used to seeing Microsoft drag its feet, half-heartedly or buggily implement the standard, bloat it with non-standard extensions, and often do it a few years late. Yet when it comes to a document specifying restrictions on people playing movies, Microsoft jumps to implement it in full with extra gold-plating to avoid any possibility that the user might be able to make his machine do what he wants rather than what the movie studios want.
Similarly, when legal bodies in the US, Europe and elsewhere have required Microsoft to keep in line with antitrust laws or to open details of its protocols, the company has fought every step of the way and dragged its feet when complying (e.g. trying to lock out Samba when the EU required that SMB/CIFS protocol extensions be documented). When the movie studios ask for something, they jump to attention. If there's a critical bug in Internet Explorer that can lead to systems being compromised, it can take weeks to fix (and many almost-as-serious bugs languish for months). Yet if there's a bug in Windows Media Player that might possibly allow you to play Disney's movies on an unlocked display, a patch is rushed out. As the original paper noted, your credit card number or your personal files are not encrypted by default, but Microsoft thinks a frame from a movie is so important that they are always encrypted if swapped out to disk.
Why the strange priorities? It seems that Microsoft has forgotten who its customers really are. It would be nice if the robust, even combative attitude we've seen from Microsoft towards competitors and governments could be applied a bit to the movie studios. Why is Microsoft too spineless to defend its own and its users' interests?
How exactly is it breaking the law to display a movie you bought on a TV you own in your own house?
I don't know about what everybody else wants, but I want to buy content legally and play it on my own PC without being at the mercy of binary-only drivers, content signing, deliberate crippling of functionality, and the increased hardware costs caused by needing to support all that anti-functionality.
I want to exercise my rights within copyright law and respect the publishers' right to exercise theirs. If there are to be changes to the copyright bargain, either to increase restrictions on the public or to loosen them, then these can be decided by the legislatures of individual countries and not imposed by Microsoft or any other company.
I think this is somewhat disingenuous, since by the same argument any business practice can be justified. It's not as if there is free competition in operating systems (if there were, a competitor to Microsoft selling a Windows-compatible system would produce a version that supported HD output on all devices, and consumers would buy it instead).
Let's face it, consumers cannot *choose* to turn off the DRM... there is no checkbox in the Vista control panel for 'do not cripple digital media output', even though it would be technically very easy for Microsoft to implement. Having no effective competitor in the marketplace they have no incentive to give users what they want.
I stopped reading the article when I got to the words 'perfect storm'.
Darn it, the whole point of making the direct XML feed was to reduce load on the website (and general hassle) caused by scraping HTML - in other words zap2it actively asked people to stop scraping their site, and worked hard to provide an alternative. If they've decided they don't want to continue with the XML service then it's not for us (the users) to go against that decision.
Yes - I realized my mistake as soon as I wrote the comment and posted a correction, but Slashdot disallowed it for coming less than 2 minutes after the previous comment. I didn't read that and closed the window. You are absolutely right, it should be 700 joule-hours per second per day.
700 watt-hours per day
Since a watt is just a short way of saying one joule per second, this means
700 joules per second per hour per day
Do NASA really do their energy computations in this unit? Given their past problems getting to grips with the metric system, perhaps they might.
Surely it would be clearer to say 'the rover's solar panels have an average power output of about 29 watts'. Anyone could see that this is enough power to run a 100 watt lightbulb nearly one-third of the time.
But on Slashdot, uids under 20000 are only for old people!