The "copyright black hole" is very real from a technical standpoint.
If Valve went away, who is going to let me download the Steam games I've purchased, but not installed? Who's going to unlock those games?
There have been games which have pretty much completely disappeared, due to their own copy protection not being cracked while the company was still around, and requiring obsolete hardware/software (a real, physical floppy drive, the original floppy, and DOS) in order to run. Even if they are legally public domain, you're not going to find them where they really should be -- a library, or an Internet archive of abandonware.
Yeah, disproven. There is no God. Religion is full of shit.
Great! Where's your counter-argument? If it's so thoroughly "disproven", this should be easy...
See, the problem is that there is no one definition of God. There are plenty I can disprove out of hand as internally inconsistent, but most people do not have a clearly defined God that they believe in.
Life is itself a problem-solving system, you'd think that we'd have abandoned a tool that's become as useless as religion, using Science instead!
"Teaches us great MORALS..."... just like Lot and his daughters. Or Noah who expels one of his sons who's seen him drunk. Two of the most evident...
That's all you've got?
Just look up the Laws, in particular what it says about rape. I'll admit there are a lot of morons out there who claim to believe the entire Bible, yet obviously have not read it.
Or Allah uh-akbar, let's go kill them all, God's with us, Blut und Ehre, and shit. Religion includes memes of the sort that gets the warriors jumping up and down, screaming "KILL! KILL!", when resources go down and people need to die to make room in the ecological niche.
You know, the Koran goes on for pages and pages about how merciful Allah is. Jesus says "love your neighbor as yourself". At a certain point, it is hard to say whether the Jihadist or the pacifist is a perversion of their religion, but both are founded in Scripture.
There are some religious people who do horrible things because of their religion -- the Crusades, terrorism, etc. And there are some good people who do good things because of their religion -- Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. And there are atheists who do horrible things anyway -- Stalin, China, etc.
All of which makes it very hard to argue for or against religion based on what the religious do.
Add to the above the fact that religion is generally useful to control people and that explains why we haven't waked up yet.
You could say that's bad science, sure. And I can say that anyone using God to tell other people what to do is practicing bad religion. The only difference is that science is defined clearly enough that your claim is actually true.
So, creation of the world - check. The origin of war and the link to religion - check.
Haven't seen either of those. There's your possibly-accurate description of the origin of war, but no mention of how that's at all relevant to religion.
Now, as to why there should be dialog with religious figures?
Because as long as the scientists don't put an asshat like you up there, we should be able to show, calmly and rationally, why science deserves to be taken seriously, and why the Pope does not (if, indeed, he does not).
That's a point in itself. Sorry it's lost on you...
The point is, if you really believe you're superior, it has to be depressing that right now, religious people have superior firepower. As in, they control the nukes, they control the government, they control the economy...
If you don't like being controlled by "lobotomized morons", you need to stop calling them that.
I know that on Linux, I cannot immediately tell the difference between an SMP-enabled kernel on a single-core Hyperthreading system, and an SMP-enabled kernel on a dual-core system with no hyperthreading.
In either case, I'm fairly sure I see at least two items in/proc/cpuinfo, I need an SMP kernel, etc. So if someone (Intel) suddenly decided to make a dual-core hyperthreaded design in which the "teams" actually shared a common pool, would I notice, short of Intel making an announcement?
As for your assertion, a quick scan of Wikipedia suggests that you're a bit naively wrong here. (But then, I'm the one pretending to know what I'm talking about from a quick scan of wikipedia; I suppose I'm being naive.) Wikipedia makes a distinction between Instruction level parallelism and Thread level parallelism, with advantages and disadvantages for each.
One of the advantages of thread-level parallelism is that it's software deciding what can be parallized and how. This is all the threading, locking, message-passing, and general insanity that you have to deal with when writing code to take advantage of more than one CPU. As I understand it, a pipelining processor essentially has to do this work for you, by watching instructions as they come in, and somehow making sure that if instruction A depends on instruction B, they are not executed together. One way of doing this is to delay the entire chain until instruction A finishes. Another is to reorder the instructions.
But even if you consider this a solved problem, it requires a bit of hardware to solve. I'm guessing at some point, it's easier to just throw more cores at the problem than to try to make each core a more efficient pipeline, just as it's easier to throw more cores at the problem than it is to try to make each core run faster.
There's also that user-level interface I talked about above. With multicore and no hyperthreading, the OS knows which core is which, and can distribute tasks appropriately -- idle tasks can take up half of one core, the gzip process (or whatever) can take up ALL of another core. With multicore and hyperthreading, the OS might not know -- it might simply see four cores. And with multicore, hyperthreading, and shared pipelines, it gets worse -- as I understand it, there's no longer any way, at that point, that an OS can specify which CPU a particular thread should be sent to. Threading itself may become irrelevant.
Well, anyway... What confuses me is that we still haven't adopted languages and practices that naturally scale to multiple cores. I'm not talking about complex threading models that make it easy to deadlock -- I'm talking about message-passing systems like Erlang, or wholly-functional systems like Haskell.
Hint: Erlang programs can easily be ported from single-core to multi-core to a multi-machine cluster. Haskell programs require extra work at the source code level to be made single-threaded, and can (like Make) use an arbitrary number of threads, specifiable at the commandline. They're not perfect, by far; Haskell's garbage collector is single-threaded, I think. But that's an implementation detail; most programs in C and friends, even Perl/Python/Ruby, will not be written with multiple cores in mind, and, in fact, have single-threaded implementations (or stupid things like the GIL).
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
Tell you what -- before I had a computer entirely my own, I was certainly allowed to have a pencil and paper. And I was allowed to keep it in a secret place, if I wanted to. And my parents did not read my various diaries (though there weren't many attempts).
When I went out, I could go pretty much anywhere, I just had to tell them where I was going, and not stay out too late (most of the time). When I got a cell phone, they didn't screen my calls, they didn't have access to my call logs.
My parents apparently did a good job teaching me mutual respect. And the process has nothing to do with the Internet. I suspect this sudden Puritanical paranoia has much more to do with the tendency of people to suspend all reason when it comes to computers.
The studios are extremely unlikely to change their minds...
But "improbable" is not "impossible".
I also kind of fail to see why the studios would have a problem allowing mpeg streaming, and what that has to do with the writer's strike. I mean, do they (studios or writers) not like money?
Yes but that still doesn't require the internet at all, you just put in a lot of pre-programmed choices and frankly with BDJ you could simply provide an on the spot selection for order you wanted them played in.
With HDi also.
What makes it useful is the ability to target specific player models (which is a lot easier for the server to do, as players do set the user-agent), specific players (each player has a unique ID), or specific users -- a tech might have a specific list of tests they might run, and would want to have those remembered, rather than having to find them among thousands of permutations, or program them from scratch every time.
And we did think it was a rather strange idea, but someone did want us to make it.
I don't understand how the internet is even useful, since anything you define on the web you could have simply included as an option on the disc AND it will be les suser configurable.
Wait, how is the web less user configurable? We have PUT and POST, you know...
And yes, it could be included as an option on-disc, but then you have a choice:
Include every permutation you think is relevant, and piss off the people who need one that's not included
Don't save any lists, and instead let the tech manually select which pattern is needed, generally from a very large list
Burn specific discs for specific purposes, which costs a hell of a lot more than running a server
And of course, again it's a single theoretical example.
Agreed. But it is a valid one.
And just because I haven't thought of it, and you haven't thought of it, doesn't mean it's impossible, or that it wouldn't be useful. I admit that "we haven't thought of it" is not a particularly strong argument, but it has to be considered, especially when we're talking about a lifetime spanning a decade or more -- unless you're wrong and Internet distribution kills disc formats.
Look at the tricks HTTP continues to do.
My guess is only 20% of BD players ever get connected to the internet. And that is quite a high estimate, I figure.
Apple has less than 20% of the desktop/laptop market, but people do still make and sell Mac-only programs.
Bullshit. Find me a cracker app for Windows media DRM protected files. Doesn't exist.
Bullshit. Did exist, and will exist, if it doesn't right now.
Already done though, so I'm not sure I see why you are even arguing that point. It doesn't matter how hard it is if it's done! I can already download full rips from HD-DVD and Blu-Ray dsics today.
For the pirate, it's done. For the consumer, it's not.
What I can't do is download an open source HD-DVD or Blu-Ray ripper. I could get a list of keys from somewhere, but this still requires someone else to crack it, first.
Straight DVDs are completely cracked, which means consumers can crack them without even trying -- just play them in VLC.
Non mainstream examples are not useful nor pertinent.
I could say the same for unqualified, broad generalizations.
Understand that when I talk about moving to Internet distribution, I am generally talking about at worst Flash-bound, but never DRM-bound.
Since that has infinite cost (lifetime of payment) it's not cheaper at all.
You're not going to live forever. And if you did, would you still be listening to the same music?
1) you don't know there will always be a replacement, 2) the esoteric songs are exactly the ones I treasure the most.
And that is worth a premium. Still, it's worth calculating how much of a premium you're paying for that choice and reliability.
Anyway, I find I'm more annoyed by pleple who make stupid spelling errors seem to forget that comma exists type like drunk frget words... Not only are these people turning Slashdot into Myspace.com, there's actually no moderation for "-1 Learn English".
And there's also no moderation for "-1 Wrong", which really should be "-1 Factually Incorrect", although it may be difficult to train mods on the difference between that and "-1 Disagree", which doesn't exist (for good reason).
Well, at least if there's stuff you actually don't want to see, people have found ways to filter it. For instance, there's the Profanity Blacklist (which unfortunately blocks me, but I'm not censoring myself).
I'll post a follow-up from work, once I can check exactly what it's called (and maybe find a link), but maybe someone can beat me to it...
It's a keyboard which places the keys surrounding your fingers. Each finger will have a home-row key under it, and then a vertical key placed directly to the left, right, forward, and back.
I can't see myself actually learning it, but it's got to be the most ergonomic keyboard that still lets you type as fast as a standard 108-key. The way he describes it, when you start moving your finger towards the key you want to hit, you've probably already hit it.
If that is actually a reasonably accurate description -- that it's "impossible" -- well, there's Flash, which sucks, but works for YouTube, and there's a good ol' tag, with some actual mpeg streaming. I bet most machines would do well if you stuck a.mp4 file in there.
And before people start bitching about having to install a player... They're forcing what for many people is an OS upgrade (or wholesale switch), browser upgrade, and/or Windows Media Player upgrade (or fresh install). If they're going to force a download anyway, why not force one that will work anywhere, like, oh, VLC?
Oh right -- piracy. But then they should be saying "We don't want to", not "it's impossible". And besides, none of the technologies I suggested prevents you from watermarking, which is a much more effective piracy deterrent anyway.
Maybe it would help speed things along by listing your assumptions?
To be fair, I'll limit myself to the useful assumptions. I don't even take these absolutely on faith, but if I only listed the assumptions which I absolutely have faith in, you would have no hope of convincing me of anything.
This is probably not a complete list, but I'll try.
My own memory is generally trustworthy. I may not remember specific details -- names, dates, etc -- but if I remember having worked something out logically enough to believe it, I can continue to believe that without holding the entire proof in my head the whole time.
The world which I perceive is generally consistent. I reserve the right to cheat here -- if, for instance, I saw a giant purple dragon coming out of my garage, I might wonder if I had been drugged, or was simply dreaming. But it's generally not useful to ask whether this world is real -- real or not, it simply is. Convince me that God exists in this world, and that's probably real enough.
I, myself, am sane. This ties into "my own memory is trustworthy" -- my own logical processes are not wholly insane. I may make mistakes, but in general, if you say something that sounds insane, I might conclude that one of us must be insane. In such a case, I would also assume that it's you, by default. (No offense, but if I assume I'm not sane, I can't get anywhere.)
Ethics are not universal, but they rhyme. Murder without cause is wrong. In fact, killing for just about any reason other than self-defense (or defense of one's family, country, etc) is wrong. And ethics should be simple -- any time I choose to judge whether something is ethical or not, I can reduce it to simple principles like that.
Why should a person when using logic limit themselves to your assumptions only?
They should not. They should only be aware of their own assumptions. In particular, weed out assumptions which are not useful, which don't ring true, which you cannot solely accept on faith. See what else falls apart if you don't assume that.
So, for example: It's possible for a person to logically believe in God. But there generally have to be different assumptions in place, and it's difficult to find a set of assumptions which prove God's existence which don't also include God's existence. (Maybe not impossible, I just don't think I've seen it done. Maybe Aquinas...)
Remember, that believing in God, or coming to that belief, opens up a whole can of new possible assumptions.
Well, or conclusions which you can use as assumptions.
Now I assume from what you have written that you are more an Agnostic than an outright Atheist, or at least a soft Atheist, so you have not discounted the possibility of God existing.
Partly. I have discounted a possibility of the Biblical God, as written, because the Bible is inconsistent. Also, there are things that the Biblical God does that have convinced me that, if such a deity did exist, I'd reject Him to His face, even side with Milton's Lucifer instead.
But, I have not discounted the possibility of any God existing, or of any God being good. Every argument I have heard and used against the existence of God is, naturally, against one definition of God, and there are many. One of them might be true, and it might even be one similar to one of those I've rejected.
However, I posit (is that even the correct word?) that what is logical develops as we learn. Years ago is would seem illogical to say that a particle of matter could exist in two places at the same time, or that two particles of matter could occupy the same time and space simultaneously. Now through the wonderful science of physics it has been proven via experimentation to be a theoretical possibility.
You see, it is not the logic itself which went away here. It is the assumptions t
Sure there would, the test patterns. Internet could easily be optional.
Understand, the test patterns are in whatever order was convenient at the time. The key feature of this disc was to be able to pick out only the test patterns you actually need to run on this particular consumer's TV, and run those.
If Internet was optional, it would require a lot more discs, or a lot more pre-programmed playlists (and a lot more fiddling to find the right one).
But we are not talking about what the players can do. We are talking about what studios can do.
Fine, the studios could band together and lean on the BDA, or whoever else they need to.
Fortunately, I suppose, you'll still have all your existing (working) discs. But is it so unbelievable that this standard could silently change, and new discs would silently include this copy protection, and you wouldn't find out until you had a dozen discs and your Internet went out?
It's more than enough, I didn't trust them before that and that episode just confirmed it.
Yeah, I feel the same way about Sony.
I buy online video myself but I have no illusions I'll be able to play it forever, or that I "own" it the same way I own movies I buy.
Depends where you buy it. If I lose the Sanctuary episodes I bought, that's my own fault. So I "own" it in the same way as DVDs, only moreso, because at least for now, if I lose the physical copy, I can still download another one (for free).
Online rental is a totally different matter, but you can't replace physical discs without having some form of "forever" media, people generally will not stand for it otherwise.
Point well taken.
However, there is one good argument for why rentals might. I don't like it, I prefer to pay more and actually own what I own, but it goes something like this: Sign up for a music service, like Napster or Zune. Download all the music you want. Add up how much it would've cost you to buy that music on iTunes. Calculate how many years you'll have to "rent" before it becomes more expensive than iTunes.
Even if one such service dies, another will replace it. What you lose is specific, esoteric songs, but the premise is that there will always be more, equally esoteric songs to replace them.
Aha! So you are saying that a product with DRM is equivalent to one without DRM.
I am saying that, for what the media industries are claiming to be trying to combat, it does nothing. No matter how hard the DRM is to crack, you only need one person to crack it, and the the cracked copy is online, forever. (Or at least, for long enough.)
For the consumer, it still sucks, unless you are going to become a pirate, or unless the DRM is completely cracked, the way DVDs are.
Except we can't, because physical media has been cracked and downloaded video has not.
Except that most downloaded video has, including downloaded video which comes without DRM. Physical media is not only going to be DRM'd, it's going to be in a format which we have to reverse engineer. (I've seen morons on Slashdot claim that HD-DVD is an "open standard"... HAHAHAHAHA)
Again, one person cracking it once and throwing it up on BitTorrent doesn't make it irrelevant for the purposes of consumer choice. Until I can just fire up VLC on Ubuntu and play a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, I absolutely consider the openness of a format to be a factor.
Sure you have. And they are supposed to meet these secret demands why again? I influence through money.
They are not "secret", I was just feeling a bit too lazy to write them up here. But it seems pretty plainly obvious what steps could be taken. Un-hypervisor-ing PS3 Linux would be a good start.
If they just plugged it in for five minutes, by themselves, and didn't like it (couldn't figure it out, etc), that's absolutely something we need to work on, but it's not a reason not to talk to people who you can actually support at least long enough to get them running.
Spec does not allow for this. Let me repeat - Not possible. You CANNOT mandate a disc have an internet connection. It can't be published, can't be AACS encoded without permission, etc. etc. etc.
Now, this seems a bit limiting in other ways.
Simplest example: One project we were planning was some sort of universal checkdisc. You'd throw every checkdisc video pattern imaginable on it, and let people download playlists -- maybe not actual playlists as the player understands them, but at least something the script would do.
There wouldn't be much point to having such a disc work without a network connection.
And trivial for your disc to never be published. Sorry about that, guess you should have been such a jerk in again a purely theoretical situation which will never happen even as our sun grows dim and expands to encompass the earth.
Somehow, I think the AACS licensing authority could be corrupted in less than five billion years.
I admit, I had not heard of that restriction, but there's no technological reason it can't be done, and nothing inherent in the players themselves. There are tons of things claiming to be DVD discs or CDs which have copy protection not allowed by the DVD or CD specs either, respectively.
MLB baseball clips from that online sportcasting place that folded anyone? Oops, gone. See, I use examples form things that actually happen in real life.
And that's a reason to not trust any service secured that way?
AltaVista is, while not gone, certainly no longer relevant. But I use Google all the time.
People accept the RM today and buy products with it, therefore the developers and businesses that include the DRM that sells are actually quite clever to get people to accept it. Never confuse evil with stupidity.
Except that it doesn't really buy them anything other than a temporary advantage. It will be cracked, and when it is, they will lose to piracy -- again. Anything which makes a pirated product of higher value than the legitimate product is of questionable business sanity.
You only support companies you support.
No, that's not what I said. -1 Lack of reading comprehension.
Of course, you'll neevr actually change behaviour the way I will but at least your walled off from everything.
I actually came up with a list of things the companies I boycott could do to win me back. They haven't done them.
On a per movie basis for all the movies I will watch, a blu-ray player even today is insignificantly less expensive than an HD-DVD player.
Not relevant, when I rent most movies anyway.
If you consider the cost per Disney (read: Pixar) or Fox title your HD-DVD player is infinately expensive since it will not play them even as the sun grows to...
Ditto with your Blu-ray player, and Paramount/Universal titles. Where's Heroes on Blu-Ray, hmm?
"infinitely expensive" is a nonsensical statement. You could say that a Blu-Ray player has more worth, due to a better selection of movies. I'm not yet convinced it's a better value.
So will I, but it doesn't have the same unique titles.
In other words, I should buy all three?
For my money, the 360 and the Wii are better than a PS3. I just haven't seen any compelling PS3 exclusives, but there's Mass Effect and Halo on the 360, and Zelda and friends on the Wii.
Bonus: Nintendo has not actually screwed consumers over. Microsoft and Sony both have, Sony moreso in recent years.
Actually as a home theater component far better, since it is quieter.
Ah, true. But the 360 is certainly not cheaper with an HD-DVD drive, so I wasn't counting the home theater in that estimate.
If there's just a way (some tool or something) to monitor if patches are installed correctly then it should work nicely.
Well, there are many tools that do various things... I'm honestly not sure about the best way to make sure each machine got its patches. I do know there are at least a couple of tools which are designed to mass-SSH the same command out to every machine, so you could always run a command on all running computers to ensure that they got the patch.
But I think what's more likely is that you have a logging server somewhere, and you get flagged if a machine either stops logging or failed to install a patch. It seems a lot less likely that they'd miss the patch altogether.
Another possibility is that you simply require machines to be shut down at the end of the day, and run some kind of aggressively caching FS, essentially turning them all into diskless machines. Then, you'd know that if one machine got the patch, all of them did.
I will say this: There's unlikely to be a pre-packaged solution anywhere. At least, if there is, I don't know about it. But with a little shell-scripting glue, there's an absurd number of ways of doing this.
Well, you log in to your computer with domain account and that's it:)
That sounds incredibly insecure.
I'd assumed it was something more like: Install Windows on computer, configure Windows to join your corporate domain, configure the domain controller to recognize that computer. Then it becomes easy.
But unless I'm very much mistaken, there's still some initial step you have to take on each machine beyond just buying a beige box and plugging it in. And there is always going to be, regardless of the OS.
Once it's setup, then you have that simple, central contol.
Evolution is what it is because nothing else can explain observation. It flows from the facts.
No, it fits the facts.
It is not a hypothesis. It is a theory. Which means it is testable with experiment, and fits all observed facts. Nothing has ever been shown to prove otherwise. Ergo,
Ergo, it's the best we've got. The closest we have to fact.
Are Newton's theories fact?
How so? Is all fact open for debate? This subject is closed. It is not dogma. Is relativity dogma? Are plate tectonics dogma? What did I say that was stupid and dogmatic? Because I don't question every fact?
It's semantics: Your use of the word "fact".
Just because I say that people are stupid if they disagree with fact, does that make me dogmatic?
Yes. Because there is, again, the implicit assumption that it's fact.
As far as the relevant debate goes, it's a lot closer to "truth" (if there is such a thing) than things which don't even qualify as hypothesis (like Intelligent Design).
If you disagree with me on the cellular structure of a potato, just because, well, you are being stupid.
That is true. Same is true if someone disagrees with you on evolution. But...
I will call anybody who rejects evolution an idiot
That's pretty unnecessary. If someone disputes the cellular structure of a potato, you can show them with a Microscope. You don't have to be an asshole.
I accept it because it is what reality is, it is what is testable and observable.
Again, wrong. It is testable and observable. That doesn't make it real.
At the very least it is the quest to understand what is testable and observable.
That's the first humble thing you've said all day, and a lot closer to the mark than "this is reality, and you're stupid if you disagree".
First of all, Steam has no provision for third-party stuff, other than signing a deal with Valve. This makes it about as useless as Microsoft update, or Apple's Software Update.
But there are a number of things I can't do with Steam that I can do with real package managers:
Dependencies. If this is done at all, it's entirely hidden from the user.
Reverse dependencies. Uninstall an app, and all its dependencies (which aren't needed by other things) are uninstalled also.
Hold an app to a version. With Steam, if an app has been updated, you have to install the update in order to launch the app.
Scriptability. Steam updates when it wants, or you update it through a GUI. I can have automatic updates happen every Friday at 2 AM, except Friday the 13th, if I really wanted to.
Custom repositories. I can use any decent package manager to update my own software, or I can hook up to some third-party repository... Wouldn't it be cool if free mods like Natural Selection could be updated via Steam? I think so.
Caching/proxying/WSUS-style.
I could go on... Most of these seem pretty minor, though, aside from the fact that Steam is yet another proprietary auto-update mechanism, and thus only works with Steam games. So now I need Microsoft Update and Adobe Update and Sun Update and Firefox Update and Software Update and Steam Update, too.
So, really not a solution until it actually starts replacing the other auto-update mechanisms.
First of all, since network connectivity is not mandated - how would you design a disc to be remotely disabled? Sorry, not possible.
No, it'd just make you an asshole. All you have to do is warn that network connectivity IS mandated for your disc, and refuse to run if you can't connect to a server.
HD-DVD does mandate network connectivity in the playback device BUT does not require it be actually hooked up.
HD-DVD developer, remember? It's trivial for me to turn off the sound, put a big black box on top of the movie, and give you a notice that I need network connectivity to continue. It will technically still be playing (if I didn't pause it), but you couldn't tell.
Secondly, we're talking about problems we have *today* with real media.
And today, the servers have not gone away.
Then of course, once you know something is there it's a matter of how you download it, if I need to give them a CC number but am unwilling to do so, etc.
I'm not entirely sure if all of that adds up to the time needed to drive to a store, or to sign up for a Netflix account if I don't have one already. (Oh, and Sanctuary does Paypal. I'll let you decide if that's good or bad.)
But they do not do that, mostly because it's INSANLEY STUPID.
They do DRM at all, therefore, they are already insanely stupid. QED.
And they'll never be better if you don't support positive efforts.
So I do support positive efforts, from companies with a track record of positive efforts.
Except for the whole Blu-Ray player thing
Still quite a bit more expensive than an HD-DVD player.
and some really unique titles like LittleBigPlanet coming down the pike.
For unique titles, I'll buy a Wii.
If you don't care that much about Mass Effect or Halo though, most everything else interesting is either cross platform or has equivalents on the PS3.
So the PS3 is "good enough", or about as good as the 360? Fine, but the 360 was cheaper, last I checked, so really the only thing left is the Blu-Ray player.
Also, X Windows programs mostly had x's so you knew an X environment was required.
Nowdays, that helps when installing a package. If it has a K prefix, I run KDE, so I know it's going to have most of the libraries it needs already installed, already in RAM, in fact. If it has an X prefix, I know it's going to have an ass-ugly interface, and probably won't be incredibly intuitive. If it has a g prefix, or if it contains the word "gnome", I know it's going to require a ton of libraries I probably don't have already, and is going to take twice as long to start the first time as any KDE app.
What if you want KDE apps in your Gnome menu or Gnome apps in your KDE menu?
THEN WHY THE F*** DO THEY STILL NEED TO BE DIFFERENTIATED?
Well, I can put Wine apps in my KDE menu, too. But I would hope I care about the difference between a native Linux app and a Windows app under Wine.
Exactly my point. It is useless. And what does a K prefix tell us? That it needs KDE? Who cares about that?
Tell that to SteveJobs. Maybe next year Apple will put out the Phone, the Pod, Tunes, Photo, and so on.
My point is that whether it has a point or not, you only ever hear people bitching about the K nowdays. No one says a word about the iStuff anymore.
As for "who cares" that it needs KDE? Well, KDE pulls in a ton of libraries. So does GNOME, by the way. Qt and GTK+ themselves aren't as bad, but if something is prefixed with K, or is explicitly a GNOME app (not just a GTK+ app), I'd think twice about installing it if I didn't have all those libraries already.
Specifically: If I had GNOME installed, but not KDE, I'd probably want gedit. If I had KDE installed, and not GNOME, I'd probably want Kate. They're both just text editors, although I am a bit partial to Kate, but generally, you don't want to install the dependencies of an entire desktop environment if you just want the one app.
Think of it this way: If you're on a Mac, you probably want to know ahead of time if the app you're downloading requires X11, for two reasons: If you don't already have it, you're going to have to find your install DVD, and it'll eat up a chunk of your disk space; and X11 takes awhile to start up (can be as long as Classic) just for one app.
How come the classic UNIX commands didn't have prefixes like that on the front of them?
Because there were no alternatives. The very second there started to be alternatives, you started to see prefixes. Example: gcc is an alternative to cc. Before gcc, there was THE C Compiler, no choice. You ran cc or nothing at all. After gcc, you could run 'cc' or 'gcc'.
Of course, most of the time, especially on Linux (as opposed to BSD) the g-stuff is the default, and the g prefix isn't needed. I type make, not gmake. But it's still there, and you can even create a file called "GNUMakefile" instead of a Makefile.
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The "copyright black hole" is very real from a technical standpoint.
If Valve went away, who is going to let me download the Steam games I've purchased, but not installed? Who's going to unlock those games?
There have been games which have pretty much completely disappeared, due to their own copy protection not being cracked while the company was still around, and requiring obsolete hardware/software (a real, physical floppy drive, the original floppy, and DOS) in order to run. Even if they are legally public domain, you're not going to find them where they really should be -- a library, or an Internet archive of abandonware.
Great! Where's your counter-argument? If it's so thoroughly "disproven", this should be easy...
See, the problem is that there is no one definition of God. There are plenty I can disprove out of hand as internally inconsistent, but most people do not have a clearly defined God that they believe in.
You must be very lonely.
Science absolutely does not solve everything.
Of course, having fun and falling in love don't require religion, or any particular belief.
That's all you've got?
Just look up the Laws, in particular what it says about rape. I'll admit there are a lot of morons out there who claim to believe the entire Bible, yet obviously have not read it.
You know, the Koran goes on for pages and pages about how merciful Allah is. Jesus says "love your neighbor as yourself". At a certain point, it is hard to say whether the Jihadist or the pacifist is a perversion of their religion, but both are founded in Scripture.
There are some religious people who do horrible things because of their religion -- the Crusades, terrorism, etc. And there are some good people who do good things because of their religion -- Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc. And there are atheists who do horrible things anyway -- Stalin, China, etc.
All of which makes it very hard to argue for or against religion based on what the religious do.
Science can control people just as easily.
You could say that's bad science, sure. And I can say that anyone using God to tell other people what to do is practicing bad religion. The only difference is that science is defined clearly enough that your claim is actually true.
Haven't seen either of those. There's your possibly-accurate description of the origin of war, but no mention of how that's at all relevant to religion.
Now, as to why there should be dialog with religious figures?
Because as long as the scientists don't put an asshat like you up there, we should be able to show, calmly and rationally, why science deserves to be taken seriously, and why the Pope does not (if, indeed, he does not).
That's a point in itself. Sorry it's lost on you...
The point is, if you really believe you're superior, it has to be depressing that right now, religious people have superior firepower. As in, they control the nukes, they control the government, they control the economy...
If you don't like being controlled by "lobotomized morons", you need to stop calling them that.
I know that on Linux, I cannot immediately tell the difference between an SMP-enabled kernel on a single-core Hyperthreading system, and an SMP-enabled kernel on a dual-core system with no hyperthreading.
/proc/cpuinfo, I need an SMP kernel, etc. So if someone (Intel) suddenly decided to make a dual-core hyperthreaded design in which the "teams" actually shared a common pool, would I notice, short of Intel making an announcement?
In either case, I'm fairly sure I see at least two items in
As for your assertion, a quick scan of Wikipedia suggests that you're a bit naively wrong here. (But then, I'm the one pretending to know what I'm talking about from a quick scan of wikipedia; I suppose I'm being naive.) Wikipedia makes a distinction between Instruction level parallelism and Thread level parallelism, with advantages and disadvantages for each.
One of the advantages of thread-level parallelism is that it's software deciding what can be parallized and how. This is all the threading, locking, message-passing, and general insanity that you have to deal with when writing code to take advantage of more than one CPU. As I understand it, a pipelining processor essentially has to do this work for you, by watching instructions as they come in, and somehow making sure that if instruction A depends on instruction B, they are not executed together. One way of doing this is to delay the entire chain until instruction A finishes. Another is to reorder the instructions.
But even if you consider this a solved problem, it requires a bit of hardware to solve. I'm guessing at some point, it's easier to just throw more cores at the problem than to try to make each core a more efficient pipeline, just as it's easier to throw more cores at the problem than it is to try to make each core run faster.
There's also that user-level interface I talked about above. With multicore and no hyperthreading, the OS knows which core is which, and can distribute tasks appropriately -- idle tasks can take up half of one core, the gzip process (or whatever) can take up ALL of another core. With multicore and hyperthreading, the OS might not know -- it might simply see four cores. And with multicore, hyperthreading, and shared pipelines, it gets worse -- as I understand it, there's no longer any way, at that point, that an OS can specify which CPU a particular thread should be sent to. Threading itself may become irrelevant.
Well, anyway... What confuses me is that we still haven't adopted languages and practices that naturally scale to multiple cores. I'm not talking about complex threading models that make it easy to deadlock -- I'm talking about message-passing systems like Erlang, or wholly-functional systems like Haskell.
Hint: Erlang programs can easily be ported from single-core to multi-core to a multi-machine cluster. Haskell programs require extra work at the source code level to be made single-threaded, and can (like Make) use an arbitrary number of threads, specifiable at the commandline. They're not perfect, by far; Haskell's garbage collector is single-threaded, I think. But that's an implementation detail; most programs in C and friends, even Perl/Python/Ruby, will not be written with multiple cores in mind, and, in fact, have single-threaded implementations (or stupid things like the GIL).
Why do kids not have a right to privacy?
And why would such a right magically turn on at 18?
Tell you what -- before I had a computer entirely my own, I was certainly allowed to have a pencil and paper. And I was allowed to keep it in a secret place, if I wanted to. And my parents did not read my various diaries (though there weren't many attempts).
When I went out, I could go pretty much anywhere, I just had to tell them where I was going, and not stay out too late (most of the time). When I got a cell phone, they didn't screen my calls, they didn't have access to my call logs.
My parents apparently did a good job teaching me mutual respect. And the process has nothing to do with the Internet. I suspect this sudden Puritanical paranoia has much more to do with the tendency of people to suspend all reason when it comes to computers.
"We're not allowed to"... still not the same as "impossible". Just means "if we did it, we'd go to jail."
The studios are extremely unlikely to change their minds...
But "improbable" is not "impossible".
I also kind of fail to see why the studios would have a problem allowing mpeg streaming, and what that has to do with the writer's strike. I mean, do they (studios or writers) not like money?
With HDi also.
What makes it useful is the ability to target specific player models (which is a lot easier for the server to do, as players do set the user-agent), specific players (each player has a unique ID), or specific users -- a tech might have a specific list of tests they might run, and would want to have those remembered, rather than having to find them among thousands of permutations, or program them from scratch every time.
And we did think it was a rather strange idea, but someone did want us to make it.
Wait, how is the web less user configurable? We have PUT and POST, you know...
And yes, it could be included as an option on-disc, but then you have a choice:
Agreed. But it is a valid one.
And just because I haven't thought of it, and you haven't thought of it, doesn't mean it's impossible, or that it wouldn't be useful. I admit that "we haven't thought of it" is not a particularly strong argument, but it has to be considered, especially when we're talking about a lifetime spanning a decade or more -- unless you're wrong and Internet distribution kills disc formats.
Look at the tricks HTTP continues to do.
Apple has less than 20% of the desktop/laptop market, but people do still make and sell Mac-only programs.
Bullshit. Did exist, and will exist, if it doesn't right now.
For the pirate, it's done. For the consumer, it's not.
What I can't do is download an open source HD-DVD or Blu-Ray ripper. I could get a list of keys from somewhere, but this still requires someone else to crack it, first.
Straight DVDs are completely cracked, which means consumers can crack them without even trying -- just play them in VLC.
I could say the same for unqualified, broad generalizations.
Understand that when I talk about moving to Internet distribution, I am generally talking about at worst Flash-bound, but never DRM-bound.
You're not going to live forever. And if you did, would you still be listening to the same music?
And that is worth a premium. Still, it's worth calculating how much of a premium you're paying for that choice and reliability.
It's called "-1 Troll"
Anyway, I find I'm more annoyed by pleple who make stupid spelling errors seem to forget that comma exists type like drunk frget words... Not only are these people turning Slashdot into Myspace.com, there's actually no moderation for "-1 Learn English".
And there's also no moderation for "-1 Wrong", which really should be "-1 Factually Incorrect", although it may be difficult to train mods on the difference between that and "-1 Disagree", which doesn't exist (for good reason).
Well, at least if there's stuff you actually don't want to see, people have found ways to filter it. For instance, there's the Profanity Blacklist (which unfortunately blocks me, but I'm not censoring myself).
I'll post a follow-up from work, once I can check exactly what it's called (and maybe find a link), but maybe someone can beat me to it...
It's a keyboard which places the keys surrounding your fingers. Each finger will have a home-row key under it, and then a vertical key placed directly to the left, right, forward, and back.
I can't see myself actually learning it, but it's got to be the most ergonomic keyboard that still lets you type as fast as a standard 108-key. The way he describes it, when you start moving your finger towards the key you want to hit, you've probably already hit it.
If that is actually a reasonably accurate description -- that it's "impossible" -- well, there's Flash, which sucks, but works for YouTube, and there's a good ol' tag, with some actual mpeg streaming. I bet most machines would do well if you stuck a .mp4 file in there.
And before people start bitching about having to install a player... They're forcing what for many people is an OS upgrade (or wholesale switch), browser upgrade, and/or Windows Media Player upgrade (or fresh install). If they're going to force a download anyway, why not force one that will work anywhere, like, oh, VLC?
Oh right -- piracy. But then they should be saying "We don't want to", not "it's impossible". And besides, none of the technologies I suggested prevents you from watermarking, which is a much more effective piracy deterrent anyway.
To be fair, I'll limit myself to the useful assumptions. I don't even take these absolutely on faith, but if I only listed the assumptions which I absolutely have faith in, you would have no hope of convincing me of anything.
This is probably not a complete list, but I'll try.
They should not. They should only be aware of their own assumptions. In particular, weed out assumptions which are not useful, which don't ring true, which you cannot solely accept on faith. See what else falls apart if you don't assume that.
So, for example: It's possible for a person to logically believe in God. But there generally have to be different assumptions in place, and it's difficult to find a set of assumptions which prove God's existence which don't also include God's existence. (Maybe not impossible, I just don't think I've seen it done. Maybe Aquinas...)
Well, or conclusions which you can use as assumptions.
Partly. I have discounted a possibility of the Biblical God, as written, because the Bible is inconsistent. Also, there are things that the Biblical God does that have convinced me that, if such a deity did exist, I'd reject Him to His face, even side with Milton's Lucifer instead.
But, I have not discounted the possibility of any God existing, or of any God being good. Every argument I have heard and used against the existence of God is, naturally, against one definition of God, and there are many. One of them might be true, and it might even be one similar to one of those I've rejected.
You see, it is not the logic itself which went away here. It is the assumptions t
Understand, the test patterns are in whatever order was convenient at the time. The key feature of this disc was to be able to pick out only the test patterns you actually need to run on this particular consumer's TV, and run those.
If Internet was optional, it would require a lot more discs, or a lot more pre-programmed playlists (and a lot more fiddling to find the right one).
Fine, the studios could band together and lean on the BDA, or whoever else they need to.
Fortunately, I suppose, you'll still have all your existing (working) discs. But is it so unbelievable that this standard could silently change, and new discs would silently include this copy protection, and you wouldn't find out until you had a dozen discs and your Internet went out?
Yeah, I feel the same way about Sony.
Depends where you buy it. If I lose the Sanctuary episodes I bought, that's my own fault. So I "own" it in the same way as DVDs, only moreso, because at least for now, if I lose the physical copy, I can still download another one (for free).
Point well taken.
However, there is one good argument for why rentals might. I don't like it, I prefer to pay more and actually own what I own, but it goes something like this: Sign up for a music service, like Napster or Zune. Download all the music you want. Add up how much it would've cost you to buy that music on iTunes. Calculate how many years you'll have to "rent" before it becomes more expensive than iTunes.
Even if one such service dies, another will replace it. What you lose is specific, esoteric songs, but the premise is that there will always be more, equally esoteric songs to replace them.
I am saying that, for what the media industries are claiming to be trying to combat, it does nothing. No matter how hard the DRM is to crack, you only need one person to crack it, and the the cracked copy is online, forever. (Or at least, for long enough.)
For the consumer, it still sucks, unless you are going to become a pirate, or unless the DRM is completely cracked, the way DVDs are.
Except that most downloaded video has, including downloaded video which comes without DRM. Physical media is not only going to be DRM'd, it's going to be in a format which we have to reverse engineer. (I've seen morons on Slashdot claim that HD-DVD is an "open standard"... HAHAHAHAHA)
Again, one person cracking it once and throwing it up on BitTorrent doesn't make it irrelevant for the purposes of consumer choice. Until I can just fire up VLC on Ubuntu and play a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, I absolutely consider the openness of a format to be a factor.
They are not "secret", I was just feeling a bit too lazy to write them up here. But it seems pretty plainly obvious what steps could be taken. Un-hypervisor-ing PS3 Linux would be a good start.
Wait, what about GP suggested they were an atheist?
How many customers had help?
If they just plugged it in for five minutes, by themselves, and didn't like it (couldn't figure it out, etc), that's absolutely something we need to work on, but it's not a reason not to talk to people who you can actually support at least long enough to get them running.
I like the "gritty" feel of those larger ice crystals, especially in sherbet.
Maybe I'm weird, but completely smooth ice cream almost tastes like it's melting... Not that it's bad, but I like the variety.
There was at least one open source Sim City project before this. Probably more than one.
That's assuming you think it's the right game for the job.
Now, this seems a bit limiting in other ways.
Simplest example: One project we were planning was some sort of universal checkdisc. You'd throw every checkdisc video pattern imaginable on it, and let people download playlists -- maybe not actual playlists as the player understands them, but at least something the script would do.
There wouldn't be much point to having such a disc work without a network connection.
Somehow, I think the AACS licensing authority could be corrupted in less than five billion years.
I admit, I had not heard of that restriction, but there's no technological reason it can't be done, and nothing inherent in the players themselves. There are tons of things claiming to be DVD discs or CDs which have copy protection not allowed by the DVD or CD specs either, respectively.
And that's a reason to not trust any service secured that way?
AltaVista is, while not gone, certainly no longer relevant. But I use Google all the time.
Except that it doesn't really buy them anything other than a temporary advantage. It will be cracked, and when it is, they will lose to piracy -- again. Anything which makes a pirated product of higher value than the legitimate product is of questionable business sanity.
No, that's not what I said. -1 Lack of reading comprehension.
I actually came up with a list of things the companies I boycott could do to win me back. They haven't done them.
Not relevant, when I rent most movies anyway.
Ditto with your Blu-ray player, and Paramount/Universal titles. Where's Heroes on Blu-Ray, hmm?
"infinitely expensive" is a nonsensical statement. You could say that a Blu-Ray player has more worth, due to a better selection of movies. I'm not yet convinced it's a better value.
In other words, I should buy all three?
For my money, the 360 and the Wii are better than a PS3. I just haven't seen any compelling PS3 exclusives, but there's Mass Effect and Halo on the 360, and Zelda and friends on the Wii.
Bonus: Nintendo has not actually screwed consumers over. Microsoft and Sony both have, Sony moreso in recent years.
Ah, true. But the 360 is certainly not cheaper with an HD-DVD drive, so I wasn't counting the home theater in that estimate.
Well, there are many tools that do various things... I'm honestly not sure about the best way to make sure each machine got its patches. I do know there are at least a couple of tools which are designed to mass-SSH the same command out to every machine, so you could always run a command on all running computers to ensure that they got the patch.
But I think what's more likely is that you have a logging server somewhere, and you get flagged if a machine either stops logging or failed to install a patch. It seems a lot less likely that they'd miss the patch altogether.
Another possibility is that you simply require machines to be shut down at the end of the day, and run some kind of aggressively caching FS, essentially turning them all into diskless machines. Then, you'd know that if one machine got the patch, all of them did.
I will say this: There's unlikely to be a pre-packaged solution anywhere. At least, if there is, I don't know about it. But with a little shell-scripting glue, there's an absurd number of ways of doing this.
That sounds incredibly insecure.
I'd assumed it was something more like: Install Windows on computer, configure Windows to join your corporate domain, configure the domain controller to recognize that computer. Then it becomes easy.
But unless I'm very much mistaken, there's still some initial step you have to take on each machine beyond just buying a beige box and plugging it in. And there is always going to be, regardless of the OS.
Once it's setup, then you have that simple, central contol.
No, it fits the facts.
Ergo, it's the best we've got. The closest we have to fact.
Are Newton's theories fact?
It's semantics: Your use of the word "fact".
Yes. Because there is, again, the implicit assumption that it's fact.
As far as the relevant debate goes, it's a lot closer to "truth" (if there is such a thing) than things which don't even qualify as hypothesis (like Intelligent Design).
That is true. Same is true if someone disagrees with you on evolution. But...
That's pretty unnecessary. If someone disputes the cellular structure of a potato, you can show them with a Microscope. You don't have to be an asshole.
Again, wrong. It is testable and observable. That doesn't make it real.
That's the first humble thing you've said all day, and a lot closer to the mark than "this is reality, and you're stupid if you disagree".
First of all, Steam has no provision for third-party stuff, other than signing a deal with Valve. This makes it about as useless as Microsoft update, or Apple's Software Update.
But there are a number of things I can't do with Steam that I can do with real package managers:
I could go on... Most of these seem pretty minor, though, aside from the fact that Steam is yet another proprietary auto-update mechanism, and thus only works with Steam games. So now I need Microsoft Update and Adobe Update and Sun Update and Firefox Update and Software Update and Steam Update, too.
So, really not a solution until it actually starts replacing the other auto-update mechanisms.
What does this have to do with OpenOffice?
No, it'd just make you an asshole. All you have to do is warn that network connectivity IS mandated for your disc, and refuse to run if you can't connect to a server.
HD-DVD developer, remember? It's trivial for me to turn off the sound, put a big black box on top of the movie, and give you a notice that I need network connectivity to continue. It will technically still be playing (if I didn't pause it), but you couldn't tell.
And today, the servers have not gone away.
I'm not entirely sure if all of that adds up to the time needed to drive to a store, or to sign up for a Netflix account if I don't have one already. (Oh, and Sanctuary does Paypal. I'll let you decide if that's good or bad.)
They do DRM at all, therefore, they are already insanely stupid. QED.
So I do support positive efforts, from companies with a track record of positive efforts.
Still quite a bit more expensive than an HD-DVD player.
For unique titles, I'll buy a Wii.
So the PS3 is "good enough", or about as good as the 360? Fine, but the 360 was cheaper, last I checked, so really the only thing left is the Blu-Ray player.
Nowdays, that helps when installing a package. If it has a K prefix, I run KDE, so I know it's going to have most of the libraries it needs already installed, already in RAM, in fact. If it has an X prefix, I know it's going to have an ass-ugly interface, and probably won't be incredibly intuitive. If it has a g prefix, or if it contains the word "gnome", I know it's going to require a ton of libraries I probably don't have already, and is going to take twice as long to start the first time as any KDE app.
Well, I can put Wine apps in my KDE menu, too. But I would hope I care about the difference between a native Linux app and a Windows app under Wine.
Tell that to SteveJobs. Maybe next year Apple will put out the Phone, the Pod, Tunes, Photo, and so on.
My point is that whether it has a point or not, you only ever hear people bitching about the K nowdays. No one says a word about the iStuff anymore.
As for "who cares" that it needs KDE? Well, KDE pulls in a ton of libraries. So does GNOME, by the way. Qt and GTK+ themselves aren't as bad, but if something is prefixed with K, or is explicitly a GNOME app (not just a GTK+ app), I'd think twice about installing it if I didn't have all those libraries already.
Specifically: If I had GNOME installed, but not KDE, I'd probably want gedit. If I had KDE installed, and not GNOME, I'd probably want Kate. They're both just text editors, although I am a bit partial to Kate, but generally, you don't want to install the dependencies of an entire desktop environment if you just want the one app.
Think of it this way: If you're on a Mac, you probably want to know ahead of time if the app you're downloading requires X11, for two reasons: If you don't already have it, you're going to have to find your install DVD, and it'll eat up a chunk of your disk space; and X11 takes awhile to start up (can be as long as Classic) just for one app.
Because there were no alternatives. The very second there started to be alternatives, you started to see prefixes. Example: gcc is an alternative to cc. Before gcc, there was THE C Compiler, no choice. You ran cc or nothing at all. After gcc, you could run 'cc' or 'gcc'.
Of course, most of the time, especially on Linux (as opposed to BSD) the g-stuff is the default, and the g prefix isn't needed. I type make, not gmake. But it's still there, and you can even create a file called "GNUMakefile" instead of a Makefile.