For instance General Motors owns the name "General Motors" and we cannot use it for any purpose
You're completely and utterly wrong. Sorry.
If a company were to start up and call itself General Motors, and manufactured electric motors, General Motors (the motor vehicle company) would have no right whatsoever to demand use of the domain, let alone sue for use of a trademark. If General Motors (motor vehicle company) were then to start manufacturing electric motors, they would be in breach of trademark laws if they sold them under the name General Motors. Funny old world, but still.
Trade marks are exactly that, and only apply within that particular trade. I could start making Microsoft toilet paper if I wanted to, and Bill G would have no comeback whatsoever.
"The universe is between 11.2 and 20 billion years old" could be interpreted as meaning "The universe is 15.6bn years old +/- 4.4 billion", which is +/-28% accuracy.
To be 95% sure at this accuracy level isn't actually all that bad, when you think about the normal distribution, bell curves and the like. However, it does imply that there's some considerable discrepancy between each estimate, as you may well expect for something we don't really know much about.
We got cable a couple of years ago, which left all our old TV aerial wiring totally unused. This was great, because we needed a network cable running from a room downstairs with a TV aerial socket to a room upstairs. I found the other end of the aerial cable, poked a hole through the loft, and brought the cable down. Then it was just a matter of putting a BNC end on that cable, and changing the wall socket downstairs to a BNC socket. Hey presto - a nice, simple solution using existing wiring and technology! Who'd have thought it?
"Score another one for Linux on the desktop". Maybe. But if you read the article it states that the machines replace both UNIX and Windows boxes, which implies that there was some un*x presence in the first place.
IMHO, you will find that, in scientific and academic establishments, un*x and Linux are used a lot, because that's what they have been working with for a long time, and that's where the programming languages are free. If the academics could have their way, a lot of universities would be running Linux already on all their desktop PCs. What? They are? Well, that'll be due to the fact that Linux is now more than passable as an OS for your everyday user.
There's a difference, though, between university students and academics running Linux, and your average office secretary running Linux. It's a difference which I think will still take a long time to erode.
...what effect would this have? It could go either way - the Mac/Linux/Mozilla users, who are in the minority, would be disgruntled by this, and would either give in, or just not visit sites that choose to use a proprietary format.
IMHO, any proprietary format on the Internet is bad. Flash is all very well for doing supplementary things (games etc) but not for features essential to the operation of a website. Common sense would tell you not to use Flash for content provision, but people seem to think otherwise.
It is most likely, however, that either this deal will not go ahead, or that MS will keep the standard fairly open. Remember, MS are moving towards semi-open standards -.NET is usable by anyone, but MS gets to declare what the standards are. Perhaps MS are actually becoming a little more honest, on the face of things?
Have they even evaluated just doing worldwide releases and saving the cash? I mean really, the days before macromedia didn't kill off the movie industry, and the easily available radio shack macromedia disabler didn't kill em off either.
The fact of the matter is, as long as there is a disabling technology (Macrovision et al), there will be a re-enabling technology (Macrovision Disabler) which renders this useful again.
The reason why there is so much money in piracy is because the entertainment industry is creating opportunities for piracy to make money. If DVDs weren't (a) encrypted, (b) so expensive, then there wouldn't be so much of a call for ways round the problem, and these semi-legal* systems wouldn't have to be made.
*semi-legal: Illegality under US law is constantly under doubt; such actions in other countries are often legal.
Everywhere we look, all we can see is licensing. Regardless of whether the product be a tangible item (such as a games console), or a service (your phone connection, a piece of software), there are license agreements telling you what you may and may not do with it.
Is there going to come a point where we will not actually own anything, merely own a license to use it? Do we really want to owe our souls to the capitalist companies we work for?
Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but I think it's a future that, currently, is coming for us, and one that I certainly don't want to live in.
That's a fair point - over in the UK, a lot of 'independent local radio' stations are owned by the GWR Group, which I feel has suffered a similar plight. The station, which used to play a mix of music from the last two decades, now plays nothing but artists' most recent tracks 90% of the time.
The point is, though, that if you remove the incentive for the stations to play this kind of music, and make all royalties exactly the same, the stations will have to play what the listeners want to hear, because if they don't, they don't make any more money, they lose listener share, and they lose advertising revenue.
The very fact that it is only the 'popular' music that is so promoted is the reason that CC are dominating: it is simply uneconomical to run 'alternative' stations.
Or, to put it more bluntly, stop overpromoting sh!t. IMHO, it'd work a lot better if they were banned from subsidising and promoting any tracks, and just let the radio stations decide what they want to play, while releasing the track simultaneously to radio stations and the public, so Joe Public doesn't get fed up of every new track before it's even released.
"And these renegotiated deals don't tend to tack on a lot of extra albums or dramatically increase the artist's obligation"
Which is to say that they could tend to tack on a few extra albums or moderately increase the artist's obligation, in addition to tacking on a lot of extra albums and/or dramatically increasing the artist's obligation in a smaller proportion of cases.
What it comes down to is this: If they're conning the artists who have been in the business a long time, they're hardly going to tell it to USA Today straight, are they?
I have recently been looking into the problems associated with secure document transmission. What this ultimately comes down to is the following: There comes a point where you have to define your level of trust. If you don't want anyone to copy a document, you can't distribute it in electronic format - after all, once it's on a screen, it's not safe. You have to have a controlled number of paper copies which you don't let out of your sight.
When applied to music, if you don't trust the reviewers at all, you make them come to a hotel room where you've set up a hi-fi, give them a comfy chair to sit in, and let them listen. You don't ever give them the CD. The best they can manage is smuggling a Minidisc recorder in, and the quality won't be great.
Glued-together Walkmans? I'd only settle for _that_ if they supplied quality headphones. You can't possibly review music properly on anything less than proper hi-fi equipment. Walkmans, micro systems and the like just don't have sufficient quality.
As the article says, despite all this hailing Ogg as the most wonderful format under the sun (as has been done quite a bit recently), look more carefully at what the article has to say: (translation follows)
Especially at 64kbps Ogg Vorbis won over convincingly, and left the competition behind. From 128kbit/s, the noticeable difference between the formats became significantly lower, such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate.
Yes, Ogg is good for low bitrates, and it'd be great to see it adopted as a streaming format, but I don't think there's really a need to convert to Ogg yet.
I've seen a fair few 3D systems lying around - already, universities have 3D projection systems, and these are often used in CAD visualisations.
To be able to view 3D images without 3D glasses is crucial to the success of such a system, especially if it is to be marketed to consumers. There are all kinds of systems involving glasses, from the basic red/green system to (I don't know if this has been tried; if not, I was there first!) using two projectors with polarising filters, and glasses with polarised lenses, which preserves colour.
I remember seeing on Tomorrow's World several years ago a demonstration of a 3D TV, which required glasses to view. Bizarrely, the footage of the TV displaying a 3D image appeared in 3D on my TV, without the need for glasses. What this shows (and, indeed, what projecting any 3D image on to a 2D surface shows) is that there must be a way of making a true 3D image on a standard CRT. Maybe the computational power is too much right now, but I can't help thinking that if you can get an image that looks 3D on to a flat surface, there has to be a way to display one on a monitor, without any special hardware.
This has been done before using fibre optics, I believe, so that you would effectively see through the person because they wore an outfit consisting of thin fibre optic wires routeing light straight through them. This was on TV once, although I don't know whether it was the actual suit being shown or merely some special effects to show what it _could_ look like. Either way, it looked obvious that there was someone there - anything longer than a brief glance would be time enough to tell.
...the release of "The Two Towers" was brought forward to September 11.
</tasteless>
It's all about the usability...
on
Pie-Menus in Mozilla
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
As much as I hate to say it, the studies by Nielsen et al are actually worth something here. A context menu arranged in a circle will be easier to navigate, because you memorise direction as well as distance (look at the answer to q7 on the page).
Also, pie menus will be advantageous because, unlike keyboard shortcuts, they will be displayed whenever called upon. Further, arrangements such as piemenu-Left to go back, piemenu-Right to go forward, are intuitive.
Overall, this is a development in UI design that I'd like to see used more. I first saw it used in the extra software supplied with a Genius wheel mouse.
OK, so it's all very well that you can now use SACD with more accurate signal reproduction, or even DVD-A (isn't that a term used in porn movies? So I've heard) if you want better quality.
Whose ears are actually good enough to listen to 24-bit audio and tell the difference between that and 16-bit anyway? I have often heard it said that analogue transmission of audio is far worse than digital. I don't entirely agree with that, but supposing it's true - surely the cables between SACD player and amplifier, amplifier and speakers are going to withdraw a lot of the benefits of the more accurate signal?
Yes, we can only hear about 20-bit accuracy. The point of the additional accuracy is, therefore, questionable. The difference in quality it will make is miniscule. The LSB on 16-bit audio represents a variation of 0.0015% in the output signal. The LSB on 24-bit audio represents a variation of 0.000006% of the output signal. Can you hear that final bit? Does it make all the difference? Er, no.
Those who say that the MP3 format is too lossy for them might be interested to know that audiophiles can't actually hear the difference between 256kbps MP3 and the original CD recording. Those who think they need still more quality should perhaps check out the MAD plugin which has the ability to decode mp3s to 24-bit, recreating bits that weren't even there in order to improve quality.
As regards introducing watermarks as a kind of copy protection - well, that's just reducing the quality of the audio, which defeats the point of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
If such a scheme had been introduced within the EU on such a device, such that say you couldn't play CDs purchased in France on a British CD player, this would be in breach of European trading laws.
Why can't this be the same in the case of DVDs across the world? Because Hollywood thinks it has the right to delay release of films in different countries, to the extent that some UK-produced films are released in the US first.
It's time to stop the media attempts at controlling the world, and start thinking around the problem - many people order DVDs direct from the US, but there aren't many companies that specialise in importing such DVDs and selling region-free players.
Rather than comparing this to millions of years of evolution, perhaps it would be better to compare it to a bird just old enough to physically be able to fly.
The robot was physically equipped with all it needed to 'fly'; it was also equipped with all the wires in the right places. The fundamental difference between robots and living organisms is in the thinking: a newborn bird has to forge new synapses in its brain; this robot was designed with the purpose of 'learning to fly', so was given all the appropriate connections; it is just a matter of working out what sequence of events is required. Robots inherently have some form of co-ordination; birds, on the other hand, just like any other animal, have to develop such skills.
I believe the Russians have a very strong case here - the FBI invited them over to the USA and then asked them to hack a system, then bang them up for hacking. This is hardly fair - and the Russians are absolutely right: if the FBI were using keystroke-tracking software, they're the ones who were committing the offence.
It surprises me, though, that you have two very good hackers, and neither of them thought to err on the side of caution and check the computers they were working on for such things...
Yes, but why does Microsoft need a stand...
on
Linuxworld Fun
·
· Score: 5, Funny
when all the people at the show know about Microsoft software, and that's why they're running Linux?
If America outlaws devices that can be used to distribute copyrighted TV signals, what will happen? They'll just be developed in other countries. You'll be able to import them, somehow. There will be a decent trade for hardware and software that can handle TV images. There's no way that any amount of legislation can protect American "interests".
It's not going to help anyone introducing these laws. But what you have to remember is that they're only at preliminary stages now - whether or not they get introduced is another matter entirely. But when you have the "big fight" between large corporations and the public, large corporations seem to forget that they can't exist without the public.
After all, it's a very simple matter to recode your source to run on a new architecture, once the preliminary work has been done.
You can only get anywhere if you have backward compatibility. Whilst Windows software will have to be rewritten for 64-bit execution, much of what exists on Linux should just recompile. AMD's decision to implement backward compatibility means that they will certainly be the choice of the home user, even if they don't make it big in the world of the office.
If you're in the UK, buy a Psion Wavefinder for your PC and download a copy of DAB Bar.
If you're not, the old-fashioned method of hi-fi with self-timer and set to record on to a tape is surely as good as any? Failing that, there must be timer programs to control sound recording, and you could take the headphone output of any radio, plug it into your PC (laptop if it has to be portable), and leave the laptop switched on and the radio plugged into a timer switch... The possibilities are not quite endless, but many at least.
Slashdot Mirror
If a company were to start up and call itself General Motors, and manufactured electric motors, General Motors (the motor vehicle company) would have no right whatsoever to demand use of the domain, let alone sue for use of a trademark. If General Motors (motor vehicle company) were then to start manufacturing electric motors, they would be in breach of trademark laws if they sold them under the name General Motors. Funny old world, but still.
Trade marks are exactly that, and only apply within that particular trade. I could start making Microsoft toilet paper if I wanted to, and Bill G would have no comeback whatsoever.
"The universe is between 11.2 and 20 billion years old" could be interpreted as meaning "The universe is 15.6bn years old +/- 4.4 billion", which is +/-28% accuracy. To be 95% sure at this accuracy level isn't actually all that bad, when you think about the normal distribution, bell curves and the like. However, it does imply that there's some considerable discrepancy between each estimate, as you may well expect for something we don't really know much about.
...just use the old TV aerial wiring.
We got cable a couple of years ago, which left all our old TV aerial wiring totally unused. This was great, because we needed a network cable running from a room downstairs with a TV aerial socket to a room upstairs. I found the other end of the aerial cable, poked a hole through the loft, and brought the cable down. Then it was just a matter of putting a BNC end on that cable, and changing the wall socket downstairs to a BNC socket. Hey presto - a nice, simple solution using existing wiring and technology! Who'd have thought it?
"Score another one for Linux on the desktop". Maybe. But if you read the article it states that the machines replace both UNIX and Windows boxes, which implies that there was some un*x presence in the first place.
IMHO, you will find that, in scientific and academic establishments, un*x and Linux are used a lot, because that's what they have been working with for a long time, and that's where the programming languages are free. If the academics could have their way, a lot of universities would be running Linux already on all their desktop PCs. What? They are? Well, that'll be due to the fact that Linux is now more than passable as an OS for your everyday user.
There's a difference, though, between university students and academics running Linux, and your average office secretary running Linux. It's a difference which I think will still take a long time to erode.
...what effect would this have? It could go either way - the Mac/Linux/Mozilla users, who are in the minority, would be disgruntled by this, and would either give in, or just not visit sites that choose to use a proprietary format.
.NET is usable by anyone, but MS gets to declare what the standards are. Perhaps MS are actually becoming a little more honest, on the face of things?
IMHO, any proprietary format on the Internet is bad. Flash is all very well for doing supplementary things (games etc) but not for features essential to the operation of a website. Common sense would tell you not to use Flash for content provision, but people seem to think otherwise.
It is most likely, however, that either this deal will not go ahead, or that MS will keep the standard fairly open. Remember, MS are moving towards semi-open standards -
The fact of the matter is, as long as there is a disabling technology (Macrovision et al), there will be a re-enabling technology (Macrovision Disabler) which renders this useful again.
The reason why there is so much money in piracy is because the entertainment industry is creating opportunities for piracy to make money. If DVDs weren't (a) encrypted, (b) so expensive, then there wouldn't be so much of a call for ways round the problem, and these semi-legal* systems wouldn't have to be made.
*semi-legal: Illegality under US law is constantly under doubt; such actions in other countries are often legal.
Everywhere we look, all we can see is licensing. Regardless of whether the product be a tangible item (such as a games console), or a service (your phone connection, a piece of software), there are license agreements telling you what you may and may not do with it.
Is there going to come a point where we will not actually own anything, merely own a license to use it? Do we really want to owe our souls to the capitalist companies we work for?
Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but I think it's a future that, currently, is coming for us, and one that I certainly don't want to live in.
That's a fair point - over in the UK, a lot of 'independent local radio' stations are owned by the GWR Group, which I feel has suffered a similar plight. The station, which used to play a mix of music from the last two decades, now plays nothing but artists' most recent tracks 90% of the time.
The point is, though, that if you remove the incentive for the stations to play this kind of music, and make all royalties exactly the same, the stations will have to play what the listeners want to hear, because if they don't, they don't make any more money, they lose listener share, and they lose advertising revenue.
The very fact that it is only the 'popular' music that is so promoted is the reason that CC are dominating: it is simply uneconomical to run 'alternative' stations.
Or, to put it more bluntly, stop overpromoting sh!t. IMHO, it'd work a lot better if they were banned from subsidising and promoting any tracks, and just let the radio stations decide what they want to play, while releasing the track simultaneously to radio stations and the public, so Joe Public doesn't get fed up of every new track before it's even released.
"And these renegotiated deals don't tend to tack on a lot of extra albums or dramatically increase the artist's obligation"
Which is to say that they could tend to tack on a few extra albums or moderately increase the artist's obligation, in addition to tacking on a lot of extra albums and/or dramatically increasing the artist's obligation in a smaller proportion of cases.
What it comes down to is this: If they're conning the artists who have been in the business a long time, they're hardly going to tell it to USA Today straight, are they?
I have recently been looking into the problems associated with secure document transmission. What this ultimately comes down to is the following: There comes a point where you have to define your level of trust. If you don't want anyone to copy a document, you can't distribute it in electronic format - after all, once it's on a screen, it's not safe. You have to have a controlled number of paper copies which you don't let out of your sight.
When applied to music, if you don't trust the reviewers at all, you make them come to a hotel room where you've set up a hi-fi, give them a comfy chair to sit in, and let them listen. You don't ever give them the CD. The best they can manage is smuggling a Minidisc recorder in, and the quality won't be great.
Glued-together Walkmans? I'd only settle for _that_ if they supplied quality headphones. You can't possibly review music properly on anything less than proper hi-fi equipment. Walkmans, micro systems and the like just don't have sufficient quality.
As the article says, despite all this hailing Ogg as the most wonderful format under the sun (as has been done quite a bit recently), look more carefully at what the article has to say: (translation follows)
Especially at 64kbps Ogg Vorbis won over convincingly, and left the competition behind. From 128kbit/s, the noticeable difference between the formats became significantly lower, such that WMA, RealAudio, MP3Pro and also MP3, to most ears, was difficult to differentiate.
Yes, Ogg is good for low bitrates, and it'd be great to see it adopted as a streaming format, but I don't think there's really a need to convert to Ogg yet.
I've seen a fair few 3D systems lying around - already, universities have 3D projection systems, and these are often used in CAD visualisations.
To be able to view 3D images without 3D glasses is crucial to the success of such a system, especially if it is to be marketed to consumers. There are all kinds of systems involving glasses, from the basic red/green system to (I don't know if this has been tried; if not, I was there first!) using two projectors with polarising filters, and glasses with polarised lenses, which preserves colour.
I remember seeing on Tomorrow's World several years ago a demonstration of a 3D TV, which required glasses to view. Bizarrely, the footage of the TV displaying a 3D image appeared in 3D on my TV, without the need for glasses. What this shows (and, indeed, what projecting any 3D image on to a 2D surface shows) is that there must be a way of making a true 3D image on a standard CRT. Maybe the computational power is too much right now, but I can't help thinking that if you can get an image that looks 3D on to a flat surface, there has to be a way to display one on a monitor, without any special hardware.
This has been done before using fibre optics, I believe, so that you would effectively see through the person because they wore an outfit consisting of thin fibre optic wires routeing light straight through them. This was on TV once, although I don't know whether it was the actual suit being shown or merely some special effects to show what it _could_ look like. Either way, it looked obvious that there was someone there - anything longer than a brief glance would be time enough to tell.
...the release of "The Two Towers" was brought forward to September 11.
</tasteless>
As much as I hate to say it, the studies by Nielsen et al are actually worth something here. A context menu arranged in a circle will be easier to navigate, because you memorise direction as well as distance (look at the answer to q7 on the page).
Also, pie menus will be advantageous because, unlike keyboard shortcuts, they will be displayed whenever called upon. Further, arrangements such as piemenu-Left to go back, piemenu-Right to go forward, are intuitive.
Overall, this is a development in UI design that I'd like to see used more. I first saw it used in the extra software supplied with a Genius wheel mouse.
OK, so it's all very well that you can now use SACD with more accurate signal reproduction, or even DVD-A (isn't that a term used in porn movies? So I've heard) if you want better quality.
Whose ears are actually good enough to listen to 24-bit audio and tell the difference between that and 16-bit anyway? I have often heard it said that analogue transmission of audio is far worse than digital. I don't entirely agree with that, but supposing it's true - surely the cables between SACD player and amplifier, amplifier and speakers are going to withdraw a lot of the benefits of the more accurate signal?
Yes, we can only hear about 20-bit accuracy. The point of the additional accuracy is, therefore, questionable. The difference in quality it will make is miniscule. The LSB on 16-bit audio represents a variation of 0.0015% in the output signal. The LSB on 24-bit audio represents a variation of 0.000006% of the output signal. Can you hear that final bit? Does it make all the difference? Er, no.
Those who say that the MP3 format is too lossy for them might be interested to know that audiophiles can't actually hear the difference between 256kbps MP3 and the original CD recording. Those who think they need still more quality should perhaps check out the MAD plugin which has the ability to decode mp3s to 24-bit, recreating bits that weren't even there in order to improve quality.
As regards introducing watermarks as a kind of copy protection - well, that's just reducing the quality of the audio, which defeats the point of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.
If such a scheme had been introduced within the EU on such a device, such that say you couldn't play CDs purchased in France on a British CD player, this would be in breach of European trading laws.
Why can't this be the same in the case of DVDs across the world? Because Hollywood thinks it has the right to delay release of films in different countries, to the extent that some UK-produced films are released in the US first.
It's time to stop the media attempts at controlling the world, and start thinking around the problem - many people order DVDs direct from the US, but there aren't many companies that specialise in importing such DVDs and selling region-free players.
Rather than comparing this to millions of years of evolution, perhaps it would be better to compare it to a bird just old enough to physically be able to fly.
The robot was physically equipped with all it needed to 'fly'; it was also equipped with all the wires in the right places. The fundamental difference between robots and living organisms is in the thinking: a newborn bird has to forge new synapses in its brain; this robot was designed with the purpose of 'learning to fly', so was given all the appropriate connections; it is just a matter of working out what sequence of events is required. Robots inherently have some form of co-ordination; birds, on the other hand, just like any other animal, have to develop such skills.
I believe the Russians have a very strong case here - the FBI invited them over to the USA and then asked them to hack a system, then bang them up for hacking. This is hardly fair - and the Russians are absolutely right: if the FBI were using keystroke-tracking software, they're the ones who were committing the offence.
It surprises me, though, that you have two very good hackers, and neither of them thought to err on the side of caution and check the computers they were working on for such things...
when all the people at the show know about Microsoft software, and that's why they're running Linux?
If America outlaws devices that can be used to distribute copyrighted TV signals, what will happen? They'll just be developed in other countries. You'll be able to import them, somehow. There will be a decent trade for hardware and software that can handle TV images. There's no way that any amount of legislation can protect American "interests".
It's not going to help anyone introducing these laws. But what you have to remember is that they're only at preliminary stages now - whether or not they get introduced is another matter entirely. But when you have the "big fight" between large corporations and the public, large corporations seem to forget that they can't exist without the public.
After all, it's a very simple matter to recode your source to run on a new architecture, once the preliminary work has been done.
You can only get anywhere if you have backward compatibility. Whilst Windows software will have to be rewritten for 64-bit execution, much of what exists on Linux should just recompile. AMD's decision to implement backward compatibility means that they will certainly be the choice of the home user, even if they don't make it big in the world of the office.
...if you can make a Tesla coil out of an old TV, can you make a few slight modifications to a CD-ROM to make a dentist's (finger quotes) laser...?
Come to think of it, Doctor Evil does look slightly like my dentist. Time to run, methinks.
If you're in the UK, buy a Psion Wavefinder for your PC and download a copy of DAB Bar.
If you're not, the old-fashioned method of hi-fi with self-timer and set to record on to a tape is surely as good as any? Failing that, there must be timer programs to control sound recording, and you could take the headphone output of any radio, plug it into your PC (laptop if it has to be portable), and leave the laptop switched on and the radio plugged into a timer switch... The possibilities are not quite endless, but many at least.