The court ordered that wikileaks.ORG be shut off. The Wikileaks people argue that eNom incorrectly interpreted the temporary restraining order to also apply to wikileaks.INFO. Additionally, eNom kept the domain out of commission even after the original temporary restraining order had been dissolved and the wikileaks.org domain had been restored.
it is my understanding that prior to pursuing legal action for copyright infringement, one must register the copyrights but this may be different than enforcement as other forms of leverage may be applied in those cases
In the United States (and most other countries), you own the copyrights beginning at the moment of creation. Registering copyrights is not a prerequisite for pursuing someone for infringement, but does make it easier to do so.
The answer to your question lies in the false assumption that IEEE 1394 was "well-supported on all platforms". Apple adopted it enthusiastically, but others did not. That is what killed it, in a nutshell.
There are a few reasons for this. Apple initially wanted royalties for Firewire devices, which of course made them more expensive and less attractive to make. For peripheral makers, this was on top of the higher cost of implementation vs. USB on pure hardware costs. USB is dead simple and dead cheap to implement; take any serial (RS-232) device, slap an interpreter chip on it (less than $1 these days) and you're done. This is obviously not a high-performance solution, but if you have an existing device (mouse etc.) it is cheap and gets you to market quickly.
IEEE 1394 is technologically a very good standard (or set of standards, now), and has always been more advanced than USB. But USB has always been cheaper and easier, and "good enough" for most applications. And those things turn out to matter a great deal more in the marketplace.
They wanted to preserve rendering of "broken" pages hacked for IE6 and 7, while rendering standards-compliant pages correctly. This means that web developers that use a proper doctype will get something that renders the same in IE8 as it does in other browsers. Pages with tag soup targeted at IE6 are the most likely to have an incomplete (or no) doctype anyway.
Being able to force it to render things correctly is a good thing. Additionally, most other browsers (including Firefox and Opera) do essentially the same thing, deciding (Google cache because page had trouble loading for me) whether to use "standards mode", "quirks mode", or "almost standards mode" based entirely on the doctype.
This is the best way to preserve compatibility with pages targeted at IE6 (of which there are lots) while making life easier for web developers pissed at having to jump through hoops for IE (of which there are lots).
Indeed, his comments seem to echo exactly an interview I recently read (dead trees, so no link) with Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, which doesn't do open source. I read it not as "things that are characteristic of open source software development" but as "things that are characteristic of good development of any product whatsoever".
But then this is Slashdot, so any good idea mentioned by Microsoft or any of its employees must have originated in open source software somehow.
I've already had friends with their libraries of WMA changed into coaster because they reinstalled windows, or changed some hardware which triggered windows thinking that it is on a different PC.
Huh? Home-ripped WMA has no DRM, and it makes no difference if Windows needs to be reinstalled. The files can be freely moved to another system. Only tracks purchased from Walmart, Napster, etc. that use PlaysForSure DRM would have such problems.
There are other legitimate arguments against ripping your library in WMA, but this is not one of them.
The rest of your post really speaks to the marginality of Ogg Vorbis. Given the option of either ripping to MP3 and being able to buy anything on the market (including iPods and Zunes, the most popular devices on the market) or ripping to Ogg Vorbis and being able to buy something from Samsung or some anonymous Asian company... I'll stick with MP3.
As you say, I could rip in FLAC (or another lossless codec) and then transcode to Ogg Vorbis later... but why? It would make vastly more sense to rip to FLAC and transcode to MP3. If anything ever actually displaces MP3 (and certainly, there are plenty of techincally superior alternatives), then some day I could transcode from FLAC to that format. But right now? Makes no sense.
Britannica already provides an online edition, the free version of which includes only a subset of their content. The pay version ($70/year) apparently includes everything from the print encyclopedia as well as some other materials. There is a print version of the German Wikipedia, and there have been various (failed, AFAIK) efforts to create a print version of the English Wikipedia.
Since most of the other comments appear to be complaints about the overall state of journalism, I thought I would pause to point out that one of the Ziff Davis folks in the picture that Kotaku has is holding a sign that reads:
"Is This Good for the COMPANY?"
Just in case anyone missed the rather good Office Space reference.
Principally that the GFDL has some clauses that make odd but relatively minor requirements. It bars the makers of derivative works from removing any "invariant sections" from the original work (does not apply to Wikipedia). Distributing any GFDL work requires that you distribute with it a "transparent" copy of the entire license, which is impractical for a single printed Wikipedia article, for instance. But the core rights that the GFDL grants (duplication, derivative works, commerical or non-commercial use) are the same as those granted by CC-BY-SA. The GFDL just contains some "FSF-isms".
It's not merely that it's stupid to define "1 GB" as 1024 MB (which it is, but tolerably so), it's that defining it as "sometimes 1024 MB and sometimes 1000 MB, based on context" is really stupid. If the whole world decided that, now and forever, 1 GB is 1024 MB, that would be an improvement on the status quo. It would remove the ambiguity problem. It's an imperfect solution, but it gets the job done. However, it seems very unlikely that will happen any time soon (especially since every hard drive manufacturer and every system seller has now settled into using a footnote to define "gigabyte"). It looks like we are stuck with the status quo for a while.
As for your claim that a switch in earnest to using GiB, MiB, etc. would make GB, MB, etc. (the base-10 definitions) useless, that is not true. Those meanings are used extensively (and consistently) in communications systems (for serial systems, Gb, Mb, etc. are usually used). It's only storage that has fallen into this particular quagmire.
Virtually no wafer fabs are located in China, for several reasons. The labor needed for a fab is skilled labor, so China offers no real advantages there. There are also a lot of issues regarding the export of "high tech" stuff to China. Most wafer fabs are located in the US, Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore.
Intel is actually currently talking about building a fab in China. In order to stay on the good side of US regulators, it would be an "old tech" 90 nm fab. They would use it to make more "mature" products.
Now, that's not to say they don't have any manufacturing facilities in China. In fact, they have 2 package and test plants located in China. AMD has one as well. These facilities are the next step after fabrication.
Intel provides a full list of where its fabs and package and test facilities are.
I know you were kidding, but believe it or not there are some types of manufacturing that are decidedly not being shipped to China.
No, it does not. Not at all. It comes from the litho engineers that chose 45 nm as the minimum feature size, a physical constant of the manufacturing process. And it was chosen because it is half of 90 nm. The marketing department would have literally nothing to do with such a selection.
When you put CDs on a spindle, you are making it very difficult for them to incur any damage. Much more so than if they are loose and able to rub horizontally. CDs have a raised ring (top and bottom surfaces) near the center hole; when placed on a spindle, this ring and the very edge of the disc are all that come into contact with the discs above and below. Spindle storage is very safe as a result.
The people are many and nebulous. It takes a lot of people to pull something like this off.
By contrast, there are just two rovers on Mars. People know their names.
And they are easy to anthropomorphize. There they are, alone in a harsh landscape far from home. "Surviving" far longer than anyone had expected. And let's face it, they're kind of cute in a way.
The Hubble telescope is a similar situation. For that matter, so are manned launches. It's a lot easier to idolize the handful of astronauts who put their lives in danger than to give the dozens of engineers their due as well. This is a pattern we see all over: ask people to name anyone in a particular band, and you're far more likely to get the singer's name than any other member of the band.
It isn't really fair, but that's just how it goes.
DailyTech belongs to AnandTech. AnandTech doesn't want to destroy its relationships with other sites. Conversely, it's willing to shine a spotlight on some of the good guys (Tech Report) because that improves their relationship.
Microwaves: I wish someone had the sense to build one with just a big knob to set the time, a small knob to set the power level (clicking to an off position if you just want to use the timer), and a big start/stop button. Put the timer on a logarithmic scale up to whatever the maximum sane length of time you might run a microwave for is (or use a continuous encoder with some acceleration programmed in the software), and read the value out on the display as you spin it.
Samsung has a low-end model with 2 big knobs. The time knob works like many egg timers; it just gradually rotates counter-clockwise until it clicks to 0, and then cooking stops. It doesn't work very well in practice, largely because time increments below 1 minute are impossible to gauge and it screws up if the time knob is bumped while it's running.
Use a relay connected to the motherboard "power switch" header of the target system. A momentary "high" voltage is all you would need. Or if you want to (rudely) shut down all other connected devices, use a relay to shut down the power strip everything is connected to.
Let's think about the actual downsides of DRM. Needing a special player? Turntables are not exactly readily available all over. Not being able to make copies? How do you intend to make copies of a vinyl album? Not being able to just drop songs on your MP3 player and go? Not going to be easy with vinyl.
If you want to produce a readily-transportable, widely compatible, copy-able file from a vinyl album (such as an MP3), you're going to need to record the output from playing it on a turntable, and then digitize that. Which you could do with any DRMed file. The old "analog hole".
I know this is/., but not every story that involves audio needs to whine about DRM.
This past week I (a college student, with financial aid) got a letter stating I was pre-approved for a loan of $3,500 on condition of proving I own a home.
I live in a dorm. At a school in another state.
Apparently their "prescreening" folks can't even figure things out when they have a large chunk of my personal information staring them in the face.
They probably don't do that because it would be monumentally stupid. Large companies survive by diversification. Office and Windows are cash cows right now, but they may not always be. You should just as well ask why Google has anything other than search.
Slashdot Mirror
The court ordered that wikileaks.ORG be shut off. The Wikileaks people argue that eNom incorrectly interpreted the temporary restraining order to also apply to wikileaks.INFO. Additionally, eNom kept the domain out of commission even after the original temporary restraining order had been dissolved and the wikileaks.org domain had been restored.
In the United States (and most other countries), you own the copyrights beginning at the moment of creation. Registering copyrights is not a prerequisite for pursuing someone for infringement, but does make it easier to do so.
I am not a lawyer, etc.
The answer to your question lies in the false assumption that IEEE 1394 was "well-supported on all platforms". Apple adopted it enthusiastically, but others did not. That is what killed it, in a nutshell.
There are a few reasons for this. Apple initially wanted royalties for Firewire devices, which of course made them more expensive and less attractive to make. For peripheral makers, this was on top of the higher cost of implementation vs. USB on pure hardware costs. USB is dead simple and dead cheap to implement; take any serial (RS-232) device, slap an interpreter chip on it (less than $1 these days) and you're done. This is obviously not a high-performance solution, but if you have an existing device (mouse etc.) it is cheap and gets you to market quickly.
IEEE 1394 is technologically a very good standard (or set of standards, now), and has always been more advanced than USB. But USB has always been cheaper and easier, and "good enough" for most applications. And those things turn out to matter a great deal more in the marketplace.
Wikia is supposed to become both a wiki host and a search engine.
They wanted to preserve rendering of "broken" pages hacked for IE6 and 7, while rendering standards-compliant pages correctly. This means that web developers that use a proper doctype will get something that renders the same in IE8 as it does in other browsers. Pages with tag soup targeted at IE6 are the most likely to have an incomplete (or no) doctype anyway.
Being able to force it to render things correctly is a good thing. Additionally, most other browsers (including Firefox and Opera) do essentially the same thing, deciding (Google cache because page had trouble loading for me) whether to use "standards mode", "quirks mode", or "almost standards mode" based entirely on the doctype.
This is the best way to preserve compatibility with pages targeted at IE6 (of which there are lots) while making life easier for web developers pissed at having to jump through hoops for IE (of which there are lots).
Indeed, his comments seem to echo exactly an interview I recently read (dead trees, so no link) with Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, which doesn't do open source. I read it not as "things that are characteristic of open source software development" but as "things that are characteristic of good development of any product whatsoever".
But then this is Slashdot, so any good idea mentioned by Microsoft or any of its employees must have originated in open source software somehow.
Huh? Home-ripped WMA has no DRM, and it makes no difference if Windows needs to be reinstalled. The files can be freely moved to another system. Only tracks purchased from Walmart, Napster, etc. that use PlaysForSure DRM would have such problems.
There are other legitimate arguments against ripping your library in WMA, but this is not one of them.
The rest of your post really speaks to the marginality of Ogg Vorbis. Given the option of either ripping to MP3 and being able to buy anything on the market (including iPods and Zunes, the most popular devices on the market) or ripping to Ogg Vorbis and being able to buy something from Samsung or some anonymous Asian company... I'll stick with MP3.
As you say, I could rip in FLAC (or another lossless codec) and then transcode to Ogg Vorbis later... but why? It would make vastly more sense to rip to FLAC and transcode to MP3. If anything ever actually displaces MP3 (and certainly, there are plenty of techincally superior alternatives), then some day I could transcode from FLAC to that format. But right now? Makes no sense.
Because CNet does make its money from ads ;)
Britannica already provides an online edition, the free version of which includes only a subset of their content. The pay version ($70/year) apparently includes everything from the print encyclopedia as well as some other materials. There is a print version of the German Wikipedia, and there have been various (failed, AFAIK) efforts to create a print version of the English Wikipedia.
Since most of the other comments appear to be complaints about the overall state of journalism, I thought I would pause to point out that one of the Ziff Davis folks in the picture that Kotaku has is holding a sign that reads:
"Is This Good for the COMPANY?"
Just in case anyone missed the rather good Office Space reference.
The Free Software Foundation.
Principally that the GFDL has some clauses that make odd but relatively minor requirements. It bars the makers of derivative works from removing any "invariant sections" from the original work (does not apply to Wikipedia). Distributing any GFDL work requires that you distribute with it a "transparent" copy of the entire license, which is impractical for a single printed Wikipedia article, for instance. But the core rights that the GFDL grants (duplication, derivative works, commerical or non-commercial use) are the same as those granted by CC-BY-SA. The GFDL just contains some "FSF-isms".
Appropriately enough, the Wikipedia article on the GFDL includes a list of criticisms that cover this topic.
It's not merely that it's stupid to define "1 GB" as 1024 MB (which it is, but tolerably so), it's that defining it as "sometimes 1024 MB and sometimes 1000 MB, based on context" is really stupid. If the whole world decided that, now and forever, 1 GB is 1024 MB, that would be an improvement on the status quo. It would remove the ambiguity problem. It's an imperfect solution, but it gets the job done. However, it seems very unlikely that will happen any time soon (especially since every hard drive manufacturer and every system seller has now settled into using a footnote to define "gigabyte"). It looks like we are stuck with the status quo for a while.
As for your claim that a switch in earnest to using GiB, MiB, etc. would make GB, MB, etc. (the base-10 definitions) useless, that is not true. Those meanings are used extensively (and consistently) in communications systems (for serial systems, Gb, Mb, etc. are usually used). It's only storage that has fallen into this particular quagmire.
Virtually no wafer fabs are located in China, for several reasons. The labor needed for a fab is skilled labor, so China offers no real advantages there. There are also a lot of issues regarding the export of "high tech" stuff to China. Most wafer fabs are located in the US, Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore.
Intel is actually currently talking about building a fab in China. In order to stay on the good side of US regulators, it would be an "old tech" 90 nm fab. They would use it to make more "mature" products.
Now, that's not to say they don't have any manufacturing facilities in China. In fact, they have 2 package and test plants located in China. AMD has one as well. These facilities are the next step after fabrication.
Intel provides a full list of where its fabs and package and test facilities are.
I know you were kidding, but believe it or not there are some types of manufacturing that are decidedly not being shipped to China.
No, it does not. Not at all. It comes from the litho engineers that chose 45 nm as the minimum feature size, a physical constant of the manufacturing process. And it was chosen because it is half of 90 nm. The marketing department would have literally nothing to do with such a selection.
When you put CDs on a spindle, you are making it very difficult for them to incur any damage. Much more so than if they are loose and able to rub horizontally. CDs have a raised ring (top and bottom surfaces) near the center hole; when placed on a spindle, this ring and the very edge of the disc are all that come into contact with the discs above and below. Spindle storage is very safe as a result.
The people are many and nebulous. It takes a lot of people to pull something like this off.
By contrast, there are just two rovers on Mars. People know their names.
And they are easy to anthropomorphize. There they are, alone in a harsh landscape far from home. "Surviving" far longer than anyone had expected. And let's face it, they're kind of cute in a way.
The Hubble telescope is a similar situation. For that matter, so are manned launches. It's a lot easier to idolize the handful of astronauts who put their lives in danger than to give the dozens of engineers their due as well. This is a pattern we see all over: ask people to name anyone in a particular band, and you're far more likely to get the singer's name than any other member of the band.
It isn't really fair, but that's just how it goes.
DailyTech belongs to AnandTech. AnandTech doesn't want to destroy its relationships with other sites. Conversely, it's willing to shine a spotlight on some of the good guys (Tech Report) because that improves their relationship.
Samsung has a low-end model with 2 big knobs. The time knob works like many egg timers; it just gradually rotates counter-clockwise until it clicks to 0, and then cooking stops. It doesn't work very well in practice, largely because time increments below 1 minute are impossible to gauge and it screws up if the time knob is bumped while it's running.
Use a relay connected to the motherboard "power switch" header of the target system. A momentary "high" voltage is all you would need. Or if you want to (rudely) shut down all other connected devices, use a relay to shut down the power strip everything is connected to.
Are you quite serious?
Let's think about the actual downsides of DRM. Needing a special player? Turntables are not exactly readily available all over. Not being able to make copies? How do you intend to make copies of a vinyl album? Not being able to just drop songs on your MP3 player and go? Not going to be easy with vinyl.
If you want to produce a readily-transportable, widely compatible, copy-able file from a vinyl album (such as an MP3), you're going to need to record the output from playing it on a turntable, and then digitize that. Which you could do with any DRMed file. The old "analog hole".
I know this is /., but not every story that involves audio needs to whine about DRM.
This past week I (a college student, with financial aid) got a letter stating I was pre-approved for a loan of $3,500 on condition of proving I own a home.
I live in a dorm. At a school in another state.
Apparently their "prescreening" folks can't even figure things out when they have a large chunk of my personal information staring them in the face.
HDMI video quality is identical to DVI.
They probably don't do that because it would be monumentally stupid. Large companies survive by diversification. Office and Windows are cash cows right now, but they may not always be. You should just as well ask why Google has anything other than search.
Click on "search" instead of "go".