I'm not so sure on a move to further crimilize this media. AFAIK the BBFC has gathered that in the days of e-commerce and international shipping that these "video nasties" are well beyond their control. Remember, just 10 years ago a lot of "adult" entertainment was completely illegal in the UK and you'd see things like "The Lovers Guide" in a bid to make it "educational". I'm pretty sure there was an official relaxing of the rules sometime in the last five or so years. I recall reading some video nasty reviews of things that were once banned.
Headbutts are also no longer censored. The Matrix fight scenes suddenly make a whole lot more sense! Well, not for me, I get a lot of films imported due to this. The website "Mellon Farmers" lists the differences, not sure if it is still online now though.
Roughly speaking, they found that people who play a lot of racing games drive more aggressively in racing games.
Excelent point, I remember seeing that study as well. They really should repeat it using real cars etc. I personally think there is a connection, having driven a little too fast in real life after playing games. Once I powerslid round a corner in the rain without even noticing I'd done it until 30 seconds later. It was a bit of an eye opener.
who are influenced to kill by what they see and hear.
Everyone is influenced to do everything they do based on what they see and hear. It's how humans and most animals learn. We observe and copy. You obviously don't have children.
Whenever you form an opinion on something, it is done by your brain searching through for relevant information and groking it for you. You are the sum of all your experiences.
A child brought up in a violent family tends to follow their ways. The question is, how much of an effect do games have? I'd say some, but very little in the grand scheme of things.
The point is that the law would discriminate against videogames, and not regulate the sales of violent movies or other media.
Those laws already exist, for example the UK has the BBFC which regulates domestic sales of media. IMHO extending the system to include games is a no brainer. It didn't make sense with pacman, but games are getting more and more imersive and this change is inevitable.
Unfortunately, the BBFC has a history of requiring cuts, for example headbutts are frowned upon, in order to release the film at all. And like with the MPAA ratings, producers will also cut scenes themselves in order to maximize profits by dropping the age requirement.
Go fuck yourself, you corporate tool -- no company spends massive amounts of research or money "for my fucking protection".
It is you who is the tool. When credit card companies get defrauded it's them that foots the bill, not the customer. That partly the point of credit cards. You can be damn well sure that they are willing to spend time and money of security problems like this.
Just this evening, I read in the local paper that the records of your passage over SF bay area bridges (using the passive toll collection transponders) is now being used in discovery IN CIVIL CASES, not criminal ones.
What does that breach of privacy have to do with an voice authentication system? You've already said who you are, you lost your "privacy" when you opened your mouth. It's not to ID someone based off the voice, that's old old tech. This is to confirm that it's the same person speaking that opened the account. I'm a privacy nut and I have no problem with that whatsoever, provided the data cannot be used to recreate your voice.
Board of Directors Statement and Recommendation AGAINST Stockholder Proposal
This is always the case at an AGM. I've never seen the board recommend FOR a stockholder proposal, nor have I ever seen one voted in. They are a waste of time regardless of the company.
Of course, Apple would love for web developers to make iPhone friendly websites, but that probably won't happen.
I wouldn't be so sure on that; there are many PDA-friendly websites already and most devices on the market already do a fairly decent job of displaying full-size websites. Some of my/. posts are written on my PDA. By the time Apple enter the market there will be a lot of content already.
The iPhone's web interface with Safari is being touted as the next best thing over current offerings but it's gonna have problems, too.
Not neccasarilly a good idea really. For example, Firefox has been ported to the PPC platform and frankly it's the worst browser available. It's far to heavy and it has little abilities to scale content to the small screen. The MS default, Pocket Internet Explorer is infinitely better, and Opera is even better than that.
When it comes to mobile devices, developing a specific lightweight client for the job is generally the best approach.
There are already some SD WiFi cards out there, I'd imagine that the new thing that this one provides is the shape i.e. it fits entirely into the SD card. Existing ones have an antenna or a part that sticks out usually.
The device must support the SD WiFi drivers and last I checked the level of support was pretty limited.
Even if the rendering engine is the same, surely Apple don't expect all iPhone compliant websites to be tested on the Safari Browser on Windows? For one the UI is entirely different, there is no mouse and keyboard on many phones. Granted it'll maybe show how it renders but it won't give you a feel for how it is to use.
In truth, criticism != negative criticism. You can give something positive criticism, the word isn't biased either way even though it is commonly misused as such.
Well the C of E is still a massive shareholder, so it could start by dumping the Sony stock and encouraging members to do the same.
Oh yes, the Church of Englands investments. I'd forgotten about them. They are fully behind the arms industry on that front, huge investments in multiple arms manufactures. So, we have a group that supports real war crying about a fake war on their own doorstep?
It's a tough choice, Church of England vs Sony, but I'm behind the new guys on this one; just how many people died in the DRM crusades?
But for the people who buy this that are just your average joes with some extra cash on their hands, how much will they care about being to install extra applications?
Here in the UK there is a huge market for games, ringtones, screensavers and backdrops on mobiles. On some TV channels adverts for these consist mostly of these services.
What was (honestly) disclosed was that no decision had been made about how open the phone would be to third-party developers.
Stop revising history, that's not what happened. It was quite clear that there would not be a public SDK. The only non-Apple people that would have seen it would have been Apple partners; huge companies like Google.
In fact, the integration with Google Maps points to exactly the opposite--third party services were integral to generating the hype and producing the product.
That's use of a third-party data service, not the development of third-party code. All mobile devices use third-party data services to run the mobile network.
But let me be clear about the kind: you have identified yourself as a gum-flapping moron who's never shipped code worth a damn in your life, especially an SDK for external developers.
The company I work for makes an SDK for their platform. It has all the usual things, code context assist, code completion, step debugging, graphical data adapters etc. It's a huge BPM platform. I personally have 13 years software development experience and I've "shipped code" with two of the five largest IT companies on the planet.
Who's the gum-flapping moron?
It's VERY hard to ship a new embedded platform in a timely manner with an SDK that supports arbitrary third-party development for a new product.
So? That isn't the reason there isn't an SDK for the iPhone. It's because they never planned to do it.
Register what types of data they hold. A nasty advocacy group has "sexual orientation" on their list for people they don't like
Make available ALL of the information they have on you on request. The comedian/activist Mark Thomas did this and got lots of emails saying "do not talk to Mark Thomas" about topic XYZ and so on. If it has your name on it (or any other personal data), you are entitled to see it and ammend it.
Companies MUST NOT
Share the information without your explict concent. The default is "not share", you have to tick the "allow" box.
Store infomation they have no need for.
Send or store the data in a country without similar protections.
"lose" or expose the data publicly. This is a chargable offence. So, all of the data leaks you read about in the states would have led to a procecution here.
The DPA is the UK implementation of a EU directive. Despite the best attempts of recent governments, the UK still has a lot of pro-citizen laws on the books. Our consumer protection is pretty good as a whole.
So, third-party apps on the iPhone will happen. Just in a very measured way.
Ballocks. The saw the intense negative criticism the original decision produced and changed their minds. The reason a sdk isn't available is because they'd never planned for one originally.
Great post, which adds to the discussion. However, you miss one key point: why make the seeds terminate? You say that the yield from second generation seeds is poor enough that most farmers buy new seed. That's fair enough, but it doesn't address the central question: why have them terminate at all? Is there any benefit to the farmer in this? They can choose to buy new seed next year if they want to. Monsanto seem to be forcing it upon them.
I've done the speaker thing myself. It's just a PC sitting in a cupboard with an old but decent AWE64 card hooked up to winamp and a web control plugin (browseamp). This feed goes around the house with separate amps in each room. I figured there wouldn't be much need for different feeds given the size for my place and the simplicity of the system is handy.
An interesting note about running network twisted pairs is that there are several technologies to use redundant wiring to send things like video and audio (non-IP). Should a mega-fast wifi come along, any old wiring can be used for other things. I'm not sure fibre will have much of that, if and when fibre becomes common, most things will be IP-aware.
My next project will likely be using my xbox running XBMC to replace the winamp PC as it also has a web server control system. I've not decided how to route the video yet, I've got a redundant RF run lying on the route I want to take it over. Might just take the cheap route and use an old PSX RF modulator to produce a tunable signal. But the only PC in this room is a laptop with wifi, so I might check out those twisted-pair video modulators. I believe there are ones that provide component connections.
Most of the world trades with Cuba, yet it's still a shithole.
No they don't. America has a trade law that states that any ship that has ever docked in Cuba at any point during it's lifetime cannot ever again enter an America port. Ever.
This makes trade with Europe and Africa practically impossible. No company is willing to keep special cargo ships aside specifically for trade with Cuba.
I still think software tools would make a better speed bump: if a process uses too much memory, have it automatically re-niced, logged, and pop off an email to your cell phone or something.
Absolutely. There are a few OSS ones out there IIRC, but it's not something I have to use personally.
Furthermore, the swapfile seems to have become, instead of the useful speed bump you desire, a crutch for application programmers.
Completely agree. Things have gotten really sloppy in regard to efficient memory usage.
And that would be better than just checking 'top' every so often and watching the percentage or having a program that automatically triggers when available memory reduces to a threshold, how?
How many machines do you manage?:-)
The best solution is of course to use proper management software to catch these problems the moment they start to occur.
If the performance loss occurs, then you still get a performance loss. You want to catch such things before they become a problem.
That's the point. Some performance loss is infinitely superior to a dead server in every respect. You can't even log into the dead server to see what happened. You need to reboot, provided you are either onsite or have some remote-reboot facility. Then you need to wait for it to occur again while you are watching it. That's if you even suspect a memory leak and are looking out for it. Often when the system runs out of memory it just completely dies and you get no logging to point out the bad process to you.
The swap is like a speed bump. The server is heading to it's own fate with the memory leak, but you will hold off it's inevitable death for as long as possible. If you are lucky you can get in and fix that service without any other services on the box having any downtime.
"a page file would be good here" it can be argued that the page file would work better as a ramdisk
I've never seen that argued successfully. Putting a page file in RAM? Zero benefit whatsoever, it only slows things down via the overhead of wrapping the memory pages up in disk files. Just use it as RAM.
Disk is cheap, RAM isn't. If the RAM is sufficient the page file will never be used (other than pre-caching). It's just a last resort.
I don't think there's any reason to think that they keys can't be extracted from the hardware -- that's just too good of a technical challenge to pass up.
That statement sums up the whole thing to me. The harder they make it, the more people will want to break it. People enjoy puzzles and challenges.
They still have stormtroopers (sorry. Military personnel) hanging around and big signs stating no pictures anywhere near the tunnel.
Neat, that ought to save the terrorists some money in image processing fees. They already know it's a worthy target, hence the security. Might as well put up a sign saying "please please please do not blow this up, we are a bit worried about that".
I can think of one good reason: memory leaks. If you have a service leaking memory, the server will start to page and this will be noticed in the performance. Without the page file, the server would just die when it had ran out of real memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not so sure on a move to further crimilize this media. AFAIK the BBFC has gathered that in the days of e-commerce and international shipping that these "video nasties" are well beyond their control. Remember, just 10 years ago a lot of "adult" entertainment was completely illegal in the UK and you'd see things like "The Lovers Guide" in a bid to make it "educational". I'm pretty sure there was an official relaxing of the rules sometime in the last five or so years. I recall reading some video nasty reviews of things that were once banned.
Headbutts are also no longer censored. The Matrix fight scenes suddenly make a whole lot more sense! Well, not for me, I get a lot of films imported due to this. The website "Mellon Farmers" lists the differences, not sure if it is still online now though.
Excelent point, I remember seeing that study as well. They really should repeat it using real cars etc. I personally think there is a connection, having driven a little too fast in real life after playing games. Once I powerslid round a corner in the rain without even noticing I'd done it until 30 seconds later. It was a bit of an eye opener.
Everyone is influenced to do everything they do based on what they see and hear. It's how humans and most animals learn. We observe and copy. You obviously don't have children.
Whenever you form an opinion on something, it is done by your brain searching through for relevant information and groking it for you. You are the sum of all your experiences.
A child brought up in a violent family tends to follow their ways. The question is, how much of an effect do games have? I'd say some, but very little in the grand scheme of things.
Those laws already exist, for example the UK has the BBFC which regulates domestic sales of media. IMHO extending the system to include games is a no brainer. It didn't make sense with pacman, but games are getting more and more imersive and this change is inevitable.
Unfortunately, the BBFC has a history of requiring cuts, for example headbutts are frowned upon, in order to release the film at all. And like with the MPAA ratings, producers will also cut scenes themselves in order to maximize profits by dropping the age requirement.
It is you who is the tool. When credit card companies get defrauded it's them that foots the bill, not the customer. That partly the point of credit cards. You can be damn well sure that they are willing to spend time and money of security problems like this.
What does that breach of privacy have to do with an voice authentication system? You've already said who you are, you lost your "privacy" when you opened your mouth. It's not to ID someone based off the voice, that's old old tech. This is to confirm that it's the same person speaking that opened the account. I'm a privacy nut and I have no problem with that whatsoever, provided the data cannot be used to recreate your voice.
This is always the case at an AGM. I've never seen the board recommend FOR a stockholder proposal, nor have I ever seen one voted in. They are a waste of time regardless of the company.
I wouldn't be so sure on that; there are many PDA-friendly websites already and most devices on the market already do a fairly decent job of displaying full-size websites. Some of my /. posts are written on my PDA. By the time Apple enter the market there will be a lot of content already.
Not neccasarilly a good idea really. For example, Firefox has been ported to the PPC platform and frankly it's the worst browser available. It's far to heavy and it has little abilities to scale content to the small screen. The MS default, Pocket Internet Explorer is infinitely better, and Opera is even better than that.
When it comes to mobile devices, developing a specific lightweight client for the job is generally the best approach.
There are already some SD WiFi cards out there, I'd imagine that the new thing that this one provides is the shape i.e. it fits entirely into the SD card. Existing ones have an antenna or a part that sticks out usually.
The device must support the SD WiFi drivers and last I checked the level of support was pretty limited.
Even if the rendering engine is the same, surely Apple don't expect all iPhone compliant websites to be tested on the Safari Browser on Windows? For one the UI is entirely different, there is no mouse and keyboard on many phones. Granted it'll maybe show how it renders but it won't give you a feel for how it is to use.
In truth, criticism != negative criticism. You can give something positive criticism, the word isn't biased either way even though it is commonly misused as such.
Oh yes, the Church of Englands investments. I'd forgotten about them. They are fully behind the arms industry on that front, huge investments in multiple arms manufactures. So, we have a group that supports real war crying about a fake war on their own doorstep?
It's a tough choice, Church of England vs Sony, but I'm behind the new guys on this one; just how many people died in the DRM crusades?
Here in the UK there is a huge market for games, ringtones, screensavers and backdrops on mobiles. On some TV channels adverts for these consist mostly of these services.
Stop revising history, that's not what happened. It was quite clear that there would not be a public SDK. The only non-Apple people that would have seen it would have been Apple partners; huge companies like Google.
That's use of a third-party data service, not the development of third-party code. All mobile devices use third-party data services to run the mobile network.
The company I work for makes an SDK for their platform. It has all the usual things, code context assist, code completion, step debugging, graphical data adapters etc. It's a huge BPM platform. I personally have 13 years software development experience and I've "shipped code" with two of the five largest IT companies on the planet.
Who's the gum-flapping moron?
So? That isn't the reason there isn't an SDK for the iPhone. It's because they never planned to do it.
Not in this case. The UK Data Protection laws are pretty decent. In short:
Companies MUST
Companies MUST NOT
The DPA is the UK implementation of a EU directive. Despite the best attempts of recent governments, the UK still has a lot of pro-citizen laws on the books. Our consumer protection is pretty good as a whole.
Ballocks. The saw the intense negative criticism the original decision produced and changed their minds. The reason a sdk isn't available is because they'd never planned for one originally.
Great post, which adds to the discussion. However, you miss one key point: why make the seeds terminate? You say that the yield from second generation seeds is poor enough that most farmers buy new seed. That's fair enough, but it doesn't address the central question: why have them terminate at all? Is there any benefit to the farmer in this? They can choose to buy new seed next year if they want to. Monsanto seem to be forcing it upon them.
I've done the speaker thing myself. It's just a PC sitting in a cupboard with an old but decent AWE64 card hooked up to winamp and a web control plugin (browseamp). This feed goes around the house with separate amps in each room. I figured there wouldn't be much need for different feeds given the size for my place and the simplicity of the system is handy.
An interesting note about running network twisted pairs is that there are several technologies to use redundant wiring to send things like video and audio (non-IP). Should a mega-fast wifi come along, any old wiring can be used for other things. I'm not sure fibre will have much of that, if and when fibre becomes common, most things will be IP-aware.
My next project will likely be using my xbox running XBMC to replace the winamp PC as it also has a web server control system. I've not decided how to route the video yet, I've got a redundant RF run lying on the route I want to take it over. Might just take the cheap route and use an old PSX RF modulator to produce a tunable signal. But the only PC in this room is a laptop with wifi, so I might check out those twisted-pair video modulators. I believe there are ones that provide component connections.
No they don't. America has a trade law that states that any ship that has ever docked in Cuba at any point during it's lifetime cannot ever again enter an America port. Ever.
This makes trade with Europe and Africa practically impossible. No company is willing to keep special cargo ships aside specifically for trade with Cuba.
Absolutely. There are a few OSS ones out there IIRC, but it's not something I have to use personally.
Completely agree. Things have gotten really sloppy in regard to efficient memory usage.
How many machines do you manage? :-)
The best solution is of course to use proper management software to catch these problems the moment they start to occur.
That's the point. Some performance loss is infinitely superior to a dead server in every respect. You can't even log into the dead server to see what happened. You need to reboot, provided you are either onsite or have some remote-reboot facility. Then you need to wait for it to occur again while you are watching it. That's if you even suspect a memory leak and are looking out for it. Often when the system runs out of memory it just completely dies and you get no logging to point out the bad process to you.
The swap is like a speed bump. The server is heading to it's own fate with the memory leak, but you will hold off it's inevitable death for as long as possible. If you are lucky you can get in and fix that service without any other services on the box having any downtime.
I've never seen that argued successfully. Putting a page file in RAM? Zero benefit whatsoever, it only slows things down via the overhead of wrapping the memory pages up in disk files. Just use it as RAM.
Disk is cheap, RAM isn't. If the RAM is sufficient the page file will never be used (other than pre-caching). It's just a last resort.
That statement sums up the whole thing to me. The harder they make it, the more people will want to break it. People enjoy puzzles and challenges.
Neat, that ought to save the terrorists some money in image processing fees. They already know it's a worthy target, hence the security. Might as well put up a sign saying "please please please do not blow this up, we are a bit worried about that".
I can think of one good reason: memory leaks. If you have a service leaking memory, the server will start to page and this will be noticed in the performance. Without the page file, the server would just die when it had ran out of real memory.
Of course they don't. How else are they going to sell us the same album in "remastered" form at the 1st, 5th, 10th or 20th anniversary?