I'm always somewhat torn by stories like this one. On the one hand I think that handing down multi-year criminal sentences for altering software is unjustifiably harsh, and only happens at all because business has a strangle hold on government. By, for, and of the people, my ass.
On the other hand as software piracy becomes more expensive in legal terms to those who do it, it forces people to choose between paying for their commercial software, or learning about and possibly getting involved in open source, community supported software.
What do you plan to work on for your 33 months behind bars? Will you be permitted to have a computer, and if so, have you considered working with software that you can't possibly steal since it is freely given away?
I'm figuring it's an easter egg. The hacker who designed the pyramid put in a little extra room for his pet mouse that didn't show up on any of the approved plans. Behind the next wall there will be a tiny mouse sarcophagus replete with all of the things that a mouse would need in order to prosper in the afterlife.
In this course you will learn how to the ever useful macro-virus, an important basic tool for the...
I dread Microsoft turning every program in the world into a distorted version of MS Basic. It is like the old GNU joke that no program is complete
unless it includes the ability to check for new mail (see GNU Hello for details.)
I'm certain that the CAVE you used was not using LCD projectors. There is no current LCD projector that is capable of active stereo. Also the polarizers in the glasses would interfere with the polarizers in the LCD projectors. LCD shutter glasses have the same sort of polarizers as the passive polarizing glasses.
Not necessarily. The viewer watches the screen, not the projector. As long as the screen is diffuse the polarization of the LCD projector will be destroyed, and can thus be repolarized by the LCD glasses. I'm not sure what you mean by active stereo though; are you saying that no LCD projector is capable of switching images on each frame (ie switching pixel states 60fps)?
LCD Projectors use polarized light internally to build the display field. So unless you plan on turning one of the projectors 90 degrees to the other, you'll have problems trying to use LCD projectors.
Of course if you do use LCD projectors then you'll no longer need the external polarizers. You'd only have a square overlapping projection area to work with, and the display software would have to rotate one of the two images on the fly, but other than that it might be doable.
PHP, JSP, and ASP are not DHTML languages. DHTML is HTML + a scripting language to manipulate the DOM, like JavaScipt (EcmaScript) or VBScript.
I'll have to defer to the web programmers here. When I first heard of DHTML I thought it was still before JavaScript and other client side scripting were available, but this is all well out of my area of expertise. Thanks for the correction anyway.
... none whow ever felt the code flow would type something like even HTML as a first programming language.
As far as programming credits go, I first started programming in my late teens back in 1978, on various systems including the TRS-80, PDP 1170, and a
DEC 10. My first open source development effort was a little assembly language hack for CP/M that loaded a shell overlay (a free but not open source program distributed by DRI IIRC) in about 10 seconds from disk rather than the 40 seconds it took on its own. Back in the days of SunOS I open sourced 'acc', a shell for 'cc' that translated ANSI'isms to K&R, and also 'ctoh', a program that combines non-code generating and code generating code into a single source file, seperating them only at compile time. Commercially I've personally written tens of thousands of lines of C, about 100k lines of C++ (with CORBA), maybe 20k lines of Java. This doesn't begin to cover the number of shell scripts, lines of Perl, or anything else that I've written just to scratch an immediate itch. If you want to see examples of my code, I occasionally manage to add new code to my open sourced Dragon's Reach project, including what I think is a pretty good combination of RPC and XML in the xdrxml subdirectory.
So I don't think I'm trolling... I'm trying to get across something I think is actually quite important. You say HTML isn't code, I say that is because you want there to be a distinction between the elite coders and the non-elite HTML'ers; the means that they have to get a computer to do what they want are quite different from yours, but the things that they have accomplished would have been quite impossible starting from an ORB. The future of distributed programming belongs to loosely coupled systems, and thus to those with the web mindset, and not to you, for the same reason that NFS cannot be run effectively over an area larger than a LAN, while http protocols run everywhere.
HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. Markup languages embed metainformation within the data. Programming languages are instructions, specifying certain execution paths.
Programming languages combine declarative and imperative elements. HTML is declarative, PHP is imperative. I don't see your problem. Actually I'll go one further; I don't think the problem is so much with the world as it is with you... I see it as net positive that HTML coders consider themselves programmers. Perhaps not programming as I learned it, or you did, but still abstraction,
expression and execution. I think HTML coders have a refreshingly new perspective
on the ideas surrounding programming that those of us too heavily steeped in the
tradition of procedural and object oriented languages would have completely missed (and many people still do miss.)
Do the flags in Truetype fonts "effectively control" (as per the DMCA) access to those fonts?
You should read this phrase in the legal sense, not in the computer programmer sense. Effectively control in the legal sense means that in the past the technical measure had some effect on the ability to copy the specified product. The word 'effectively' means that the measure may not have been originally intended as a copyright control measure, but if it was ever used that way then it would qualify for the protections afforded by the law.
This wording allows the DMCA to apply to technical measures like MacroVision which use a technical measure (the brightness control) which wasn't originally intended to be a copy control device, to inhibit copying.
I've ranted about this before, but I have to say it again: Programming is taught ass-backwards in college. Assembly language should be the FIRST thing taught, and then gradually building up to higher and higher levels of abstraction. All algorithm theory should be taught in assembly. When you've implemented algorithms in assembly, then there's no question that you know them far better than when they're surrounded by 7 layers of syntactical fluff.
I remember my first job out of college I wrote a little preemptive multitasking
kernel in 286 assembly for MSDOS that I used to write a multithreaded spacecraft simulator
with one thread dedicated each to I/O, electrical subsystem, state vector
propagator, and telemetry. While assembly was a rite of passage for those of us who studied computers
in the 70's and 80's, you no more need to learn assembly now than you have to learn set theory and understand the axioms underlying mathematics in order to
understand how addition works.
People learn quickly if the things that they are learning are useful to them, and at the level of abstraction that people need to use a computer these days I would rather point them toward Java, Visual Basic, or even HTML as a first programming language (of course since HTML is declarative you would want to
use a corresponding DHTML language such as PHP, JSP, or ASP to round out the imperative elements of the course.) But starting with assembly would just bore students to tears; they would drop out simply because they weren't learning anything of any relevance to their actual use of computers.
Assembly, like compiler construction and operating systems design, should be
reserved for those who get some utility from the knowlege, or are planning on extending the field.
Basically the idea is that there isn't any specific reason why computers should be able to read RIAA or MPAA data at all. The next generation of music and movies may come prepared to be read only by hardware that takes special precautions to protect the content, and there may not be any hardware upgrade that is ever sold to allow you to read that content on a computer. No next gen CD drives with IDE busses; all proprietary special purpose busses just for stereo component manufacturers. Indeed, this was the music industry's approach to CD-Audio on
personal computers in the beginning; early CD drives simply would not read audio
data.
Despite the fears of Microsoft & HP in this regard, I'm not sure that the music or motion picture industries could step wholly away from PCs at this point, even if they had it in plan. It has been a long time since video disks
were the rage, and the digital medium is a great equalizer -- people will find ways to move the data to the devices that they want to use.
I did three years of solid Javadevelopment on two different projects, can only agree with you there. While introspection is occasionally useful, and I think that interfaces win out in utility over C++ multiple inheritance, the incomplete heap control, job control, and very poor operating system integration all combined make Java more trouble than useful IMO.
No, but if you go buy a BMW and remove the computer system to put it in your cavalier, and they gripe, will you honor their demands to stop using it?
Of course you will stop using it. Who would want to risk owing them $500k as the result of infringing their DMCA protected software rights (which if they come after you in the first place, they will almost certainly assert.) This said with tongue only half in cheek.
Perhaps I've missed a great new feature of OSX, but X11 is just as hard to configure on a Mac as it is on Linux. Harder even, if you count figuring out
how to make it play together nicely with the rest of the desktop.
I wouldn't even really agree that screen resolution is a system administration
task; it is really more of a software configuration task. The best system admin tool for Linux/Unix or MacOSX bar none, IMHO, is Webmin. It has more modules and is easier to use for more administration tasks than anything else I've run across.
No hardware changes needed? Really?
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems pretty disingenuous to me for them to claim that their technology is compatible with current hardware. Where hardware and firmware are sold as a
single entity, I read that expecting to find some sort of protection system
that would interact with current firmware, but they clearly need a trusted
client on the device to interact with the smart card since they have to rely
on that software not giving away the decrypt key. In other words, these
may play on the current mechanical hardware, but they certainly won't play on
current CD or DVD players without first getting a firmware upgrade. In all this isn't much different from shipping a separate smart card and CD-ROM.
At least I can't see any way to trust a client once it has been transferred
to the general purpose computing platform; at that point the software is open to inspection and its secrets won't remain hidden very long.
I'm sure the girl agrees with him in theory. The problem is that she also knows that the first thing all of her girlfriends are going to ask her after she mentions that she is engaged is to see the ring. Now even if she agrees that the ring is a load of shit that is being foisted on her by society, she'll have a hard time with the pitying looks from aquaintances who will incorrectly assume that he doesn't love her very much.
So to solve the petty angst she'll be feeling she will dump her disappointment
back on him, he'll get mad, they'll fight, and break up. Voila! He really didn't love her very much.:(
Ok, so that doesn't happen all the time. Still you might be better off if
you spend at least half again as much as you would have spent on the ring getting her something else that is visible adornment (that way she can say, oh, he didn't get me anything nearly as tacky as a diamond -- just look at this black star opal...) It really is important to make her feel special.
Pakistan especially has given no indication that they can control their extremists, let alone their nukes.
When it comes to controlling extremists, the US doesn't have that good
a record either. Still, I'm not particularly worried about any Skinheads,
KKK, Neo-Nazis, or Scientologists getting into the missile silos. Well, maybe the SciTi's.
To me this is an impressive endorsement. Given the overall support that AMD has given Linux over the years, it is great to see a little bit of that given back.
What endorsement is that? AMD has been utterly piggish with respect to
open source. GCC still produces awful optimizations when targeting any AMD
chip, and in fact has gotten worse between 2.9x and 3.x. Intel started out
contributing pgcc when Linux was still in its infancy, and code output for
Pentiums has gotten successively better. When bad optimization can halve
your effective computation rate, that I think speaks volumes.
That said, I have to agree with Linus on this one. Itanium would be a
disaster for free compilers, as heavily encumbered as it is by compiler
technology patents. And when it comes down to it, I'm not all that certain
I want my general purpose language compiler generating what is effectively
microcode anyway.
It would be nice if good hardware was actually adopted into the mainstream, but Mac and Sun are living proof that people want CHEAP hardware. Let's all pray this is a good median.
In this case I think you get your wish. EPIC hasn't been proved to be any
less expensive to manufacture than x86, and developing an optimizing compiler
for x86 is considerably more expensive. So in this case CHEAP and GOOD are living in the same tent.
Well, NTSC video has 29.97 frames per second (w/ 2 alternating "fields" per frame). So when the camera is held steady, that's about 30 sample exposures of a particular angle.
For full motion video, our brains do this kind of integration for us anyway through persistence of vision. For the techniques described on the site to be used the successive images would have to be partially overlapping, not fully overlapping. It is pointless to do some sort of isomorphic mapping when the frames are fully overlapping already.
The reason I mention it is that I've written software to knit together separate photographs into a single panoramic picture. My approach was quite different, based on applying a lens distortion to the digital image to make all of the images map into a consistent sperical space, then mapping them back to
an isomorphic image after they have been joined. The approach described here
appears at first reading to involve rotating the images into a common plane
and knit them together in that plane - quite an interesting approach, and one I wish I had thought of at the time I was working on my own problem.
But taking that and saying 'yeah, now we can restore old movies' is just
a bizarre misunderstanding of what the technique involves.
It talks about combining multiple frames from one camera to create higher resolution where they overlap. Perhaps you need to read the article.
If the camera is pointed only in one direction then you don't need an isomorphic mapping and knitting algorithm to clean up the signal, you can do it by directly overmapping sucessive frames. Again, this technique has nothing to do with cleaning up old video. I suppose if you had a movie that contained a slow pan of an area then you could map successive frames to get a wide angle still image of the same area, but that still wouldn't have anything to do with cleaning up video since the final output would be a still image.
To get improved video you would have to have continuously running frames from multiple angles, all shot from the same vantage point (or the same location if you prefer), just as I originally wrote.
Juding from the description found in that article, I believe that it is possible to enhance old video to higher qualities.
What in the description led you to this bizarre conclusion? The technique described is for seamlessly joining the output of multiple video cameras into a combined image with higher resolution than a single camera could manage if exposed to the same complete scene. Unless you know of a cache of old films which were shot at multiple partially overlapping angles but taken from the same primary vantage point, the system wouldn't seem to apply at all.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand as software piracy becomes more expensive in legal terms to those who do it, it forces people to choose between paying for their commercial software, or learning about and possibly getting involved in open source, community supported software.
What do you plan to work on for your 33 months behind bars? Will you be permitted to have a computer, and if so, have you considered working with software that you can't possibly steal since it is freely given away?
I'm figuring it's an easter egg. The hacker who designed the pyramid put in a little extra room for his pet mouse that didn't show up on any of the approved plans. Behind the next wall there will be a tiny mouse sarcophagus replete with all of the things that a mouse would need in order to prosper in the afterlife.
You will be receiving a bill for my services shortly.
In this course you will learn how to the ever useful macro-virus, an important basic tool for the...
I dread Microsoft turning every program in the world into a distorted version of MS Basic. It is like the old GNU joke that no program is complete unless it includes the ability to check for new mail (see GNU Hello for details.)
Not necessarily. The viewer watches the screen, not the projector. As long as the screen is diffuse the polarization of the LCD projector will be destroyed, and can thus be repolarized by the LCD glasses. I'm not sure what you mean by active stereo though; are you saying that no LCD projector is capable of switching images on each frame (ie switching pixel states 60fps)?
Of course if you do use LCD projectors then you'll no longer need the external polarizers. You'd only have a square overlapping projection area to work with, and the display software would have to rotate one of the two images on the fly, but other than that it might be doable.
I'll have to defer to the web programmers here. When I first heard of DHTML I thought it was still before JavaScript and other client side scripting were available, but this is all well out of my area of expertise. Thanks for the correction anyway.
As far as programming credits go, I first started programming in my late teens back in 1978, on various systems including the TRS-80, PDP 1170, and a DEC 10. My first open source development effort was a little assembly language hack for CP/M that loaded a shell overlay (a free but not open source program distributed by DRI IIRC) in about 10 seconds from disk rather than the 40 seconds it took on its own. Back in the days of SunOS I open sourced 'acc', a shell for 'cc' that translated ANSI'isms to K&R, and also 'ctoh', a program that combines non-code generating and code generating code into a single source file, seperating them only at compile time. Commercially I've personally written tens of thousands of lines of C, about 100k lines of C++ (with CORBA), maybe 20k lines of Java. This doesn't begin to cover the number of shell scripts, lines of Perl, or anything else that I've written just to scratch an immediate itch. If you want to see examples of my code, I occasionally manage to add new code to my open sourced Dragon's Reach project, including what I think is a pretty good combination of RPC and XML in the xdrxml subdirectory.
So I don't think I'm trolling... I'm trying to get across something I think is actually quite important. You say HTML isn't code, I say that is because you want there to be a distinction between the elite coders and the non-elite HTML'ers; the means that they have to get a computer to do what they want are quite different from yours, but the things that they have accomplished would have been quite impossible starting from an ORB. The future of distributed programming belongs to loosely coupled systems, and thus to those with the web mindset, and not to you, for the same reason that NFS cannot be run effectively over an area larger than a LAN, while http protocols run everywhere.
Programming languages combine declarative and imperative elements. HTML is declarative, PHP is imperative. I don't see your problem. Actually I'll go one further; I don't think the problem is so much with the world as it is with you... I see it as net positive that HTML coders consider themselves programmers. Perhaps not programming as I learned it, or you did, but still abstraction, expression and execution. I think HTML coders have a refreshingly new perspective on the ideas surrounding programming that those of us too heavily steeped in the tradition of procedural and object oriented languages would have completely missed (and many people still do miss.)
You should read this phrase in the legal sense, not in the computer programmer sense. Effectively control in the legal sense means that in the past the technical measure had some effect on the ability to copy the specified product. The word 'effectively' means that the measure may not have been originally intended as a copyright control measure, but if it was ever used that way then it would qualify for the protections afforded by the law.
This wording allows the DMCA to apply to technical measures like MacroVision which use a technical measure (the brightness control) which wasn't originally intended to be a copy control device, to inhibit copying.
I remember my first job out of college I wrote a little preemptive multitasking kernel in 286 assembly for MSDOS that I used to write a multithreaded spacecraft simulator with one thread dedicated each to I/O, electrical subsystem, state vector propagator, and telemetry. While assembly was a rite of passage for those of us who studied computers in the 70's and 80's, you no more need to learn assembly now than you have to learn set theory and understand the axioms underlying mathematics in order to understand how addition works.
People learn quickly if the things that they are learning are useful to them, and at the level of abstraction that people need to use a computer these days I would rather point them toward Java, Visual Basic, or even HTML as a first programming language (of course since HTML is declarative you would want to use a corresponding DHTML language such as PHP, JSP, or ASP to round out the imperative elements of the course.) But starting with assembly would just bore students to tears; they would drop out simply because they weren't learning anything of any relevance to their actual use of computers.
Assembly, like compiler construction and operating systems design, should be reserved for those who get some utility from the knowlege, or are planning on extending the field.
Despite the fears of Microsoft & HP in this regard, I'm not sure that the music or motion picture industries could step wholly away from PCs at this point, even if they had it in plan. It has been a long time since video disks were the rage, and the digital medium is a great equalizer -- people will find ways to move the data to the devices that they want to use.
I did three years of solid Javadevelopment on two different projects, can only agree with you there. While introspection is occasionally useful, and I think that interfaces win out in utility over C++ multiple inheritance, the incomplete heap control, job control, and very poor operating system integration all combined make Java more trouble than useful IMO.
Of course you will stop using it. Who would want to risk owing them $500k as the result of infringing their DMCA protected software rights (which if they come after you in the first place, they will almost certainly assert.) This said with tongue only half in cheek.
I wouldn't even really agree that screen resolution is a system administration task; it is really more of a software configuration task. The best system admin tool for Linux/Unix or MacOSX bar none, IMHO, is Webmin. It has more modules and is easier to use for more administration tasks than anything else I've run across.
At least I can't see any way to trust a client once it has been transferred to the general purpose computing platform; at that point the software is open to inspection and its secrets won't remain hidden very long.
So to solve the petty angst she'll be feeling she will dump her disappointment back on him, he'll get mad, they'll fight, and break up. Voila! He really didn't love her very much. :(
Ok, so that doesn't happen all the time. Still you might be better off if you spend at least half again as much as you would have spent on the ring getting her something else that is visible adornment (that way she can say, oh, he didn't get me anything nearly as tacky as a diamond -- just look at this black star opal...) It really is important to make her feel special.
When it comes to controlling extremists, the US doesn't have that good a record either. Still, I'm not particularly worried about any Skinheads, KKK, Neo-Nazis, or Scientologists getting into the missile silos. Well, maybe the SciTi's.
What endorsement is that? AMD has been utterly piggish with respect to open source. GCC still produces awful optimizations when targeting any AMD chip, and in fact has gotten worse between 2.9x and 3.x. Intel started out contributing pgcc when Linux was still in its infancy, and code output for Pentiums has gotten successively better. When bad optimization can halve your effective computation rate, that I think speaks volumes.
That said, I have to agree with Linus on this one. Itanium would be a disaster for free compilers, as heavily encumbered as it is by compiler technology patents. And when it comes down to it, I'm not all that certain I want my general purpose language compiler generating what is effectively microcode anyway.
IMHO of course.
In this case I think you get your wish. EPIC hasn't been proved to be any less expensive to manufacture than x86, and developing an optimizing compiler for x86 is considerably more expensive. So in this case CHEAP and GOOD are living in the same tent.
For full motion video, our brains do this kind of integration for us anyway through persistence of vision. For the techniques described on the site to be used the successive images would have to be partially overlapping, not fully overlapping. It is pointless to do some sort of isomorphic mapping when the frames are fully overlapping already.
The reason I mention it is that I've written software to knit together separate photographs into a single panoramic picture. My approach was quite different, based on applying a lens distortion to the digital image to make all of the images map into a consistent sperical space, then mapping them back to an isomorphic image after they have been joined. The approach described here appears at first reading to involve rotating the images into a common plane and knit them together in that plane - quite an interesting approach, and one I wish I had thought of at the time I was working on my own problem.
But taking that and saying 'yeah, now we can restore old movies' is just a bizarre misunderstanding of what the technique involves.
If the camera is pointed only in one direction then you don't need an isomorphic mapping and knitting algorithm to clean up the signal, you can do it by directly overmapping sucessive frames. Again, this technique has nothing to do with cleaning up old video. I suppose if you had a movie that contained a slow pan of an area then you could map successive frames to get a wide angle still image of the same area, but that still wouldn't have anything to do with cleaning up video since the final output would be a still image.
To get improved video you would have to have continuously running frames from multiple angles, all shot from the same vantage point (or the same location if you prefer), just as I originally wrote.
What in the description led you to this bizarre conclusion? The technique described is for seamlessly joining the output of multiple video cameras into a combined image with higher resolution than a single camera could manage if exposed to the same complete scene. Unless you know of a cache of old films which were shot at multiple partially overlapping angles but taken from the same primary vantage point, the system wouldn't seem to apply at all.