First of all the importance of the achievement of DVD jon depends entirely on how hard it was to break the DRM protection. Whatever insights he gained from succeeding might be useful to crack other things.
Second the very same thing could be said when he cracked CSS. After all one could always have sampled the output with some video equipment (macrovision permitting but that is defeatable) and then resampled. Only, it's not practical. Even burning to rewritable and then ripping is less practical than batch removing DRM from your collection. So, what's the point of TFA? I won't read it:D
IANAGCD but it still seems the obvious thing you shouldn't be able to patent. You got something encoded with integers, then you think: "Hey, now the cost of doing FP arithmetics is negligible, why not add resolution in the most transparent way by going to FP?". Happened to audio file and picture formats, maybe hundreds of times in the history of computing.
Well it may be a replay of the WWW standards war but the web is different now, with more separation between content and presentation and (barely) enough browser independent functionality.
Also, a growing number of users will be relying on the web for running web apps, so:
- IE6 is a PITA as a webapp client (try selecting from a longish dropdown menus typing the first letters on the keyboard...) - IE7 won't be available for web clients with linux embedded, a big market in the near future IMHO - FF2 spelling checker in the client is a very good idea - It is possible (and I suspect many web app developers will require their clients) to keep two browsers: FF configured for your web app (java and javascript on, flash off, persistent cookies, remembering passwords and fields, custom toolbar and feeds) and IE for... dunno, getting to microsoft support. - It is possible many businesses will prefer FF+web apps+openoffice to upgrading all machines for Vista and new Office stuff.
All of these make people discover FF, once they do the idea of a platform bound software like IE becomes irrelevant. If I were M$ i'd be developing IE7 for embedded and older hardware as fast as i can. For linux, too.
So long as he has a community of support, he won't commit another.
On the other hand, if our guy is guilty and dares to commit other crimes, we can always rename the FS to HellReiserFS, and see its popularity soar among teenagers...
Indeed the law should be fair and make sense. Now, in soviet Italy, same place that makes possible for people avoid judgement by running for a place in parliament, same place where a guy who killed 2 boys, raping one is going out of jail after 12 years (life sentence converted to 30 years, now the "indulto"), people risk up to 4 years for filesharing.
Not fair, makes no sense to criminalize people that way. Also i suspect majors are not mainly afraid of people pirating the music. Back in the day people could trade tapes and record em off the radio, but still we bought the stuff. I think They are afraid of the net becoming a channel for spreading music and film content which is not easily controllable like radios and tv. Once people grow up their own tastes, all the evil superstructure that is music and film promotion crumbles.
It's not artists against sharers, it's their managers. A well behaving RIAA would have people still buying music. We could trade tapes and record em off the radio, still we bought the stuff. Now it's war. Well too bad for them. Only OSS, used vynil and creative commons music for me.
I couldn't care less about US patents. I care if the OSS projects I use suddenly drop all US resident contributors.
Would US coders need subversion on tor to do perfectly ethical things while the administration of their country use The Law to do perfectly unethical things?
Shame on us all, we let a bunch of money hungry subhumans rule the world.
I had put online some anti patent banners back in the time we were discussing it in EU, seems I must do it again, more people need to know.
>Similarly, Debian's patches are of questionable quality and necessity.
Why a volunteer driven organization such as Debian should spend time making "unnecessary" patches is beyond me.
Indeed, the same wikipedia article I cited says they have probably unusable batteries. Even so, the training mujaheddin received has not expired. It is difficult for rich and revered Mr. Bin to get hold of a couple stingers, if he's after that kind of action at all.
I might be paranoid but this seems all a big charade. After hijacking the planes for 9/11, we witnessed repeated attempts at blowing planes up, first the guy with explosive under the shoe, then the other guys who wanted to come onboard with liquid explosives. The problem is that Al qaeda should have hundreds of surface to air missile launchers left from Afghanistan campaign when they fought for USA aganst Soviet Russia (in soviet russia terrorists fight for YOU!). Those are made to hit military planes, a civilian plane during takeoff is a joke for them, I guess.
Al quaeda seems not willing to embarass the US by using the arms they got from them, in the meantime western citizens are being trained to be questioned, searched, put in custody for merely losing patience.
Here the 500-1500 stingers given to Bin Laden... all lost? If so, can't they buy anything second hand in Kosovo? Strange.
:) I guess that will come with Vista Urinals. But they'll weigh double the old urinals so people will have to rebuild their homes. That will create lots of short term/no perspectives jobs anyway
Heh. Misread that summary as "Linux urinals". I was wondering what sort of benefit Linux could bring to the porcelain pots
"Welcome to UrinalXP!
Your ToiletFlush(tm); license has expired. Please supply your Credit card details using morse code on the ToiletFlush(tm); button. The ToiletDoor(pat.pend.) will stay shut for safety reasons until you comply."
I want the apps in debian stable to be bug fixed not updated to the latest versions. And debian does that already. I don't want a newer version to ship with modified configuration files and option and having all the debian servers require to edit the configuration files just because the new config has a different default value. There's nothing more agile than debian stable updates when it comes to upgrading. Security updates often run as a cron job if one is not concerned with testing them before deploying.
If you want agility as in frequent updates go the debian unstable route, it's not like the box will crash often. I use unstable for a xen hosted server and it never went down unless the whole host did, so it's either very stable or is capable of taking down the host: both things seem very impressive to me:D. You need to know a lil about apt upgrade vs. dist-upgrade to do so.
I also don't get how other distro which ship big updates like fedora and IIRC ubuntu, are more agile than an unstable distro which has 100 mb of updates a week to be kept current, and updating is painless 999 out of 1000 times.
Dunno about magic quotes or even PHP. But, one guy who says that you can code equivalent Postgresql functionality using PHP is thinking everybody else has his coding skills. Sure it's possible, but it's better to leave data manipulation to a database, it's better design to do so.
Does the guy really expect the average programmer to correctly implement advanced db features in his apps and beat the performance of native postgresql code? And even if he can, is it really worthy to increase complexity and coupling of the app, when hardware performance gets two digit increase by the time the app is finished? It might be possible for somebody like him, working at yahoo, where taking linefeeds out of a web page saves you a couple servers for the reduced bandwidth. But what about the majority of sites and people?
I'd start with Postgres, and try out others if performance is not there even after trying tweaking params for performance. And throw away the app language/framework if migrating to a different db is too difficult:D
"M$" is not a joke, it's the most descriptive shortcut to describe the essence of the company. I do not mean offence. If I meant to be offensive I would have used... oh wait how can you be offensive to companies that touch new lows every year? This year they wanna patent verb conjugation.
1. Descent - 6 Degrees of freedom done right and one of the first games to push beyond earth normal physics arguably paving the way for other games to move outside reality.
Games beyond earth normal physics: SpaceWar! (first computer game evar)
With six degrees of freedom (sometimes in the game, not always) Star Wars. One of the first decent 3D FPS, too.
My favourites:
Asteroids (i never played spacewar!, so this is the best entertainment per Mhz)
Xevious (high endorfine release when playing at hard levels)
Joust (Funny for experts, funnier for newbies esp. in 2players)
Hard drivin' (best driving simulation per MHz, one of the most accurate evar, get to an original arcade unit if possible, and behold)
Lady Bug (Brought chicks to the arcade, had interesting gameplay for a dungeon game)
Yesterday at work I crashed Word on one machine and had another not recognizing a working smb/cifs share. M$ has still a lot of work to do to come near my mac and desktop linux (unless i use betas) experience.
I think vista will pull it off eventually. But only because of the existence of Linux, if M$ fails with vista it's kaputt.
In 100 years or so we'll be probably killing each other for food. Or there will be a soylent-like corporation who will produce the food we won't be able to get naturally through "old style" agriculture. Of course this is only a guess, but if it seems incredible to you, think about how loud our ancestor would have laughed if somebody told them that in the future drinkable water would have been precious.
Now that I think about that, our ancestors would make the very same objection somebody does now on climate change: "but even powerful people have sons and daughter, why should make them inherit an inhabitable planet?" The answer is: powerful people will always be able to afford pure water, especially if they can make money off it. Today water, tomorrow air food or mandatory therapy for the effects of pollution. And no way to rebel. First you can't rebel to the past. Second, if you are unable to get water air and food on your own rebellion=death.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all the importance of the achievement of DVD jon depends entirely on how hard it was to break the DRM protection. Whatever insights he gained from succeeding might be useful to crack other things. Second the very same thing could be said when he cracked CSS. After all one could always have sampled the output with some video equipment (macrovision permitting but that is defeatable) and then resampled. Only, it's not practical. Even burning to rewritable and then ripping is less practical than batch removing DRM from your collection. So, what's the point of TFA? I won't read it :D
Then maybe SCO will sue them for stealing their business model.
IANAGCD but it still seems the obvious thing you shouldn't be able to patent. You got something encoded with integers, then you think: "Hey, now the cost of doing FP arithmetics is negligible, why not add resolution in the most transparent way by going to FP?". Happened to audio file and picture formats, maybe hundreds of times in the history of computing.
Well it may be a replay of the WWW standards war but the web is different now, with more separation between content and presentation and (barely) enough browser independent functionality.
Also, a growing number of users will be relying on the web for running web apps, so:
- IE6 is a PITA as a webapp client (try selecting from a longish dropdown menus typing the first letters on the keyboard...)
- IE7 won't be available for web clients with linux embedded, a big market in the near future IMHO
- FF2 spelling checker in the client is a very good idea
- It is possible (and I suspect many web app developers will require their clients) to keep two browsers: FF configured for your web app (java and javascript on, flash off, persistent cookies, remembering passwords and fields, custom toolbar and feeds) and IE for... dunno, getting to microsoft support.
- It is possible many businesses will prefer FF+web apps+openoffice to upgrading all machines for Vista and new Office stuff.
All of these make people discover FF, once they do the idea of a platform bound software like IE becomes irrelevant.
If I were M$ i'd be developing IE7 for embedded and older hardware as fast as i can. For linux, too.
Indeed the law should be fair and make sense. Now, in soviet Italy, same place that makes possible for people avoid judgement by running for a place in parliament, same place where a guy who killed 2 boys, raping one is going out of jail after 12 years (life sentence converted to 30 years, now the "indulto"), people risk up to 4 years for filesharing.
Not fair, makes no sense to criminalize people that way. Also i suspect majors are not mainly afraid of people pirating the music. Back in the day people could trade tapes and record em off the radio, but still we bought the stuff. I think They are afraid of the net becoming a channel for spreading music and film content which is not easily controllable like radios and tv. Once people grow up their own tastes, all the evil superstructure that is music and film promotion crumbles.
It's not artists against sharers, it's their managers. A well behaving RIAA would have people still buying music. We could trade tapes and record em off the radio, still we bought the stuff. Now it's war. Well too bad for them. Only OSS, used vynil and creative commons music for me.
The industry is soon going to make people fully aware of the importance of acronyms in the tech products they use. The lesson will start with 'DRM'...
I couldn't care less about US patents. I care if the OSS projects I use suddenly drop all US resident contributors.
Would US coders need subversion on tor to do perfectly ethical things while the administration of their country use The Law to do perfectly unethical things?
Shame on us all, we let a bunch of money hungry subhumans rule the world.
I had put online some anti patent banners back in the time we were discussing it in EU, seems I must do it again, more people need to know.
>Similarly, Debian's patches are of questionable quality and necessity. Why a volunteer driven organization such as Debian should spend time making "unnecessary" patches is beyond me.
Indeed, the same wikipedia article I cited says they have probably unusable batteries. Even so, the training mujaheddin received has not expired. It is difficult for rich and revered Mr. Bin to get hold of a couple stingers, if he's after that kind of action at all.
I might be paranoid but this seems all a big charade. After hijacking the planes for 9/11, we witnessed repeated attempts at blowing planes up, first the guy with explosive under the shoe, then the other guys who wanted to come onboard with liquid explosives. The problem is that Al qaeda should have hundreds of surface to air missile launchers left from Afghanistan campaign when they fought for USA aganst Soviet Russia (in soviet russia terrorists fight for YOU!). Those are made to hit military planes, a civilian plane during takeoff is a joke for them, I guess.
Al quaeda seems not willing to embarass the US by using the arms they got from them, in the meantime western citizens are being trained to be questioned, searched, put in custody for merely losing patience. Here the 500-1500 stingers given to Bin Laden... all lost? If so, can't they buy anything second hand in Kosovo? Strange.
:) I guess that will come with Vista Urinals. But they'll weigh double the old urinals so people will have to rebuild their homes. That will create lots of short term/no perspectives jobs anyway
Your ToiletFlush(tm); license has expired. Please supply your Credit card details using morse code on the ToiletFlush(tm); button. The ToiletDoor(pat.pend.) will stay shut for safety reasons until you comply."
I want the apps in debian stable to be bug fixed not updated to the latest versions. And debian does that already. I don't want a newer version to ship with modified configuration files and option and having all the debian servers require to edit the configuration files just because the new config has a different default value. There's nothing more agile than debian stable updates when it comes to upgrading. Security updates often run as a cron job if one is not concerned with testing them before deploying. If you want agility as in frequent updates go the debian unstable route, it's not like the box will crash often. I use unstable for a xen hosted server and it never went down unless the whole host did, so it's either very stable or is capable of taking down the host: both things seem very impressive to me :D. You need to know a lil about apt upgrade vs. dist-upgrade to do so.
I also don't get how other distro which ship big updates like fedora and IIRC ubuntu, are more agile than an unstable distro which has 100 mb of updates a week to be kept current, and updating is painless 999 out of 1000 times.
Dunno about magic quotes or even PHP. But, one guy who says that you can code equivalent Postgresql functionality using PHP is thinking everybody else has his coding skills. Sure it's possible, but it's better to leave data manipulation to a database, it's better design to do so. Does the guy really expect the average programmer to correctly implement advanced db features in his apps and beat the performance of native postgresql code? And even if he can, is it really worthy to increase complexity and coupling of the app, when hardware performance gets two digit increase by the time the app is finished? It might be possible for somebody like him, working at yahoo, where taking linefeeds out of a web page saves you a couple servers for the reduced bandwidth. But what about the majority of sites and people? I'd start with Postgres, and try out others if performance is not there even after trying tweaking params for performance. And throw away the app language/framework if migrating to a different db is too difficult :D
Sorry, where is the FUD? Microsoft is about to violate the friggin' license. No fear, no uncertainty, no doubt.
:)
So people must constantly deal with the hassles of Microsoft licenses BSA auditing, WGA. While Microsoft does not respect licenses of others.
I see the bright side. Now one can legally say:
Free for all to share*
* unless you got a zune. Sucks to be you.
like googling for "dead dns" wouldn't yield reams of pages about dns servers which are down? :D
"M$" is not a joke, it's the most descriptive shortcut to describe the essence of the company. I do not mean offence. If I meant to be offensive I would have used... oh wait how can you be offensive to companies that touch new lows every year? This year they wanna patent verb conjugation.
Games beyond earth normal physics: SpaceWar! (first computer game evar)
With six degrees of freedom (sometimes in the game, not always) Star Wars. One of the first decent 3D FPS, too.
My favourites:
Yesterday at work I crashed Word on one machine and had another not recognizing a working smb/cifs share. M$ has still a lot of work to do to come near my mac and desktop linux (unless i use betas) experience.
I think vista will pull it off eventually. But only because of the existence of Linux, if M$ fails with vista it's kaputt.
One of the linked ads text for this page: Waste Receptacles The Spot To Find It! It Is All Here. Couldn't have put it better myself.
In 100 years or so we'll be probably killing each other for food. Or there will be a soylent-like corporation who will produce the food we won't be able to get naturally through "old style" agriculture. Of course this is only a guess, but if it seems incredible to you, think about how loud our ancestor would have laughed if somebody told them that in the future drinkable water would have been precious.
Now that I think about that, our ancestors would make the very same objection somebody does now on climate change: "but even powerful people have sons and daughter, why should make them inherit an inhabitable planet?" The answer is: powerful people will always be able to afford pure water, especially if they can make money off it. Today water, tomorrow air food or mandatory therapy for the effects of pollution. And no way to rebel. First you can't rebel to the past. Second, if you are unable to get water air and food on your own rebellion=death.