Cable TV is advertisement free? Not where I live. I suppose it may be different where you are (UK, I'd guess, if I had to guess, because I've only heard British people use 'advert' as short for 'advertisement'. In America, it's most often 'ad'), but here cable TV has just as many commercials as regular TV, except if you go to "premium" channels like HBO, for which you pay additional fees. The only real draw of cable is that you have a greater selection of programming than the (around) 10 regular broadcast stations in one market.
And the point is _____ ? Nobody's had a truly original plot on the basic level since early literature. Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies were pretty much all "derivative" from Greek and Roman (or other) works. Nobody now attacks them for that. Plot originality doesn't have a great deal of impact on the value of literature.
Now, as I'm thinking about this, you may mean "British Schoolboy Story" as the title of somebody else's book, but I can't find that anywhere else on the comments page right now. If you do mean it in this sense, and it really is plagiarismically close to the original, I believe there are some legal issues to be cleared up, but that doesn't necessarily discount the success of Rowling's works. She must have done something different if her books are selling millions, and few people have heard of the other title.
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 3
Well, you don't *have* to read it at all. Nobody's making you, just suggesting it, as they've enjoyed it. That said, it's probably more beneficial to someone who has or interacts with kids than for someone who does not ever see or deal with kids. (And to that person, I say you're missing out; kids are great)
Re:From the "Reminds me of this classic prose" guy
on
Review: Harry Potter
·
· Score: 2
As a "Merkin", and slightly older than a "child", I'll say that I don't know what a Philosopher's Stone is. (I'd be interested in knowing if somebody wants to follow this post up, or I'll just go google it.) I'm familiar with philosophers, and I'm familiar with stones, but I've never heard of a stone having any special significance to a philosopher.
In addition, we may be thinking of a different denotation or connotation of the word 'philosopher'. To me, and most Americans I know, a philosopher is a thinker, someone like Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzche, Kirkegard. A sorcerer is a more mystical figure, one who deals with magic (white/good or black/bad).
When I think of "Sorcerer's Stone", I think of the stone from the Arthurian legend of the sword in the stone, but I don't know if that's a common relation to many Americans.
There's a big difference between these two situations. First, with the Intel situation, any modifications to the code had to be done by the application developer. Secondly, there was no quality loss in the filter; the same filter produced the exact same results, only faster.
With ATI, the drivers took control of the quality settings, and achieved higher framerates by forcibly degrading image quality. These drivers were released by ATI to improve the ATI product's benchmark scores. Nobody can argue that going from 200fps to 220 fps is worth degrading image quality, a feature for which ATIs have come to be known and revered.
If Intel somehow made the Photoshop filters work on every other pixel/area to cut the processing time in half, that would be analagous to ATI's situation. However, if ATI wrote drivers that set small things and had optimizations for the QIII engine that worked at any image setting, nobody would be complaining; we'd be applauding ATI for releasing good drivers.
I don't know how far your support story goes for STB. I have a Velocity 4400 (RIVA TNT), and the drivers were really just bad. With the last release of the driver that I saw before they got sucked up by 3dfx, colors would be inverted and all funky in 2-d games like Starcraft. My first query about this got a message to the extent of "These drivers are not WHQL certified, so we don't expect them to work all the time."
Then the drivers got certified, as they were as far as I could tell, and there was no improvement. Another few e-mails and phone calls got no help, suggestions, or even more things to try, so I just switched over to Nvidia's Detonators.
Do macs have "native" (I'm not sure what the best word is) support for vfat drives? I know that with PC-formatted floppies, Macs don't have a good time with long filenames, and they also add resource.frk files to the disks when they're browsed. I've never tried a vfat formatted hard disk, and I don't know whether it has similar issues. Does anyone know how well they're supported?
While it'd be nice to play good 3d games on my Palm, that's far from a priority. I have some nice-looking games running on my Handspring Visor Prism already, including Race Fever (racing game) and Zap!2016 (vertical space shooter), which takes advantage of the full Visor Prism/Palm m505 palette of colors. It looks surprisingly nice, even though it slows down when it tries to render text and moving sprites at the same time.
Although I assume you were actually kidding, I wouldn't be giving them any ideas. This is just the sort of crazy thing that Nvidia would do to destroy productivity everywhere. And besides, you'd need to wear gloves to deal with the heat, and have extra batteries in a belt pack or something just to power the damn thing.
I totally agree with you, but just to play the Open Source advocate:)...anybody can look at the code to see what each special function in gcc does, then write their own similar compiling function, since it's well-documented. So, if Intel had a goal of making the linux kernels compile, they could do it fairly easily by implementing handles for the special functions they call. Needless to say, they can't just grab the original gcc code and re-distribute it within their closed-source program (I'm pretty sure), but that's the nature of the beast.
From the MS bug page:
What?s the configuration change that will protects against this vulnerability?
Customers who are concerned about this vulnerability should disable active scripting. All web pages (and HTML e-mails, which are just web pages delivered via e-mail) are categorized into one of several zones, and the settings in each zone dictate what actions can be taken within it. By disabling active scripting in the Internet zone a user can prevent an attacker from exploiting either the web-borne or mail-borne versions of this attack.
How do I disable active scripting in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0?
* On the Tools menu, click Internet Options, click the Security tab, and then click Custom Level.
* In the Settings box, scroll down to the Scripting section, and click Disable under "Active scripting" and "Scripting of Java applets".
* Click OK, and then click OK again.
Their specific instructions say to disable. They don't mention 'prompt' mode at all. As well, when you go to Windows Update or another site that needs Active Scripting, their specific instructions say to 'enable', not 'prompt'. I agree with you that this seems like a fairly ideal interim solution, but if MS doesn't let anybody know about it, how can they be expected to use it?
Well, the Apple thing was a pretty obscure problem. If you'd read any of the stories that have been posted about it, you'd know that the bug only affected a small percentage of people who (1) didn't follow Apple's clear and explicit instructions, leaving their beta copy installed while trying to install the final version *and* (2) who had two separate volumes with spaces in their names, and a portion (the first word, I think) of the names identical.
That's not really a situation you can expect a company to test for when they're running QA on a release. If MS made this blunder, and reacted as quickly and satisfactorily, I would have appluaded them just as heartily as I do Apple.
Debian Linux has a community run software testing process that would never let something like iTunes ship as "stable".
The software itself is wonderfully stable. The only problem was the installer. As well...Debian hardly releases anything fairly innovative with their "stable" release. Nobody I know who uses Debian uses stable anymore, since it's just out of date right now. If you want Apple's equivalent of "stable," go back to OS 9.1...that's a pretty damn solid OS as far as I've seen.
Actually, in the security bulletin, the word "irresponsibly" is linked to a rather interesting article from Scott Culp, who is the Manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center. This seems like a source for Microsoft's position in the Security Focus story.
What they're complaining about is the bugfinder releasing the details to the public just "a few days" after giving it to them. I'm willing to agree that a few days is not enough time to publish and release a patch, but I'd take a guess that, if Microsoft had replied to the person who sent in the bug exploit with an informative response that provided information on their fix and how long it would take, and asking him to wait for a reasonable amount of time, then he wouldn't have released it to the public so soon. Most likely, he got a curt or no response from Microsoft, and felt like the only way he could get any response to such a major security flaw would be to publish it to a public forum.
As you've probably already seen from most of the other posts on the thread, we have tons of ID cards, driver's licenses being the most prominent and most widely acceptable. I think people are having trouble accepting the idea that an ID card ought to be able to be used for a 99.99% accurate identification, and be rather hard to forge. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but at my school, probably at least 5% of the people have fake IDs that let them buy beer/porn/cigarettes/whatever.
People are also concerned with the electronic aspect of the ID card, and tracking associated with it. However, the government doesn't have the time to track everybody...they really don't. If you're not committing felonies or conspiring with people who do, then you're probably not worth their time. While you may not want the government to know how often you buy condoms, you have to realize that they really don't care.
In essence, the only potential problem I see is if the ID card is electronic, and its security is comprimised. If we place total faith in the security of an ID card, then all it takes is one good attack to steal quite a few identities and wreak havoc. Think stealing credit card numbers on a much much larger and more impactful scale. Because the database would be centrally located, getting access to any of it would give you access to all 280 some million Americans, including the rich and powerful.
Well, it's actually 128 petabytes. The 144 figure comes from the typical hard-drive manufacturer definition of 1MB=1000B, 1GB=1,000,000B, etc. using powers of 10 rather than powers of 2.
Well, for the most part, any disk over (I think) 8GB will have the same settings in the BIOS, for LBA (I may have the acronym wrong). The original Cyl/Tracks/etc. spec only goes so high, and older BIOSes cannot deal with large disks.
For example, I recently installed a 10GB disk into an older computer. Auto-detection recognized it at the maximum settings, providing about 8GB. Because the motherboard was proprietary, and there was no large-disk BIOS update, I had to install an intermediate BIOS from Western Digital (EZ-BIOS) to stand between the CMOS and the OS, and can now use all 10GB within the operating system.
Remember the 2Gb barrier? Today we are rapidly approaching the 128Gb barrier.
Actually, we've already passed it. Maxtor has come out with drives that are at least 160GB. Granted, this is currently achieved through a hack/kludge that bypasses ATA spec, and will likely not be a new standard, but people are already coming up with solutions and with large drives.
You know there's something good about the site when/. users flock to the site before posting comments, instead of the other way around, or even not going there at all.
Unfortunately, CRC seems to have a nearly Microsoft-ian grip on quite a few reference fields. From what I've seen, the CRC Handbooks are the de facto standards, and are really quite good, accurate, extensive guides. Since I can't get to the site right now (it's not responding), I can't read the whole story of what went on, but if Weisstein willingly gave in, then it's his fault. If not, then he might have grounds for a countersuit.
Heh, obvious since we don't have (call them) flats here:)
It could be interesting for some group to set up a wireless network that is open, with free (with advertisements through a transparent proxy or similar scheme) or low-cost access. I wonder how successful that'd be...pay a low cost for citywide wireless access - seems lucrative.
While it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is still the CDC. Check out their website, which is still www.cdc.gov, and see their logo. For further convincing, you could try going to www.cdcp.gov, and realize that that site doesn't exist, much less point to the CDC.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable TV is advertisement free? Not where I live. I suppose it may be different where you are (UK, I'd guess, if I had to guess, because I've only heard British people use 'advert' as short for 'advertisement'. In America, it's most often 'ad'), but here cable TV has just as many commercials as regular TV, except if you go to "premium" channels like HBO, for which you pay additional fees. The only real draw of cable is that you have a greater selection of programming than the (around) 10 regular broadcast stations in one market.
And the point is _____ ? Nobody's had a truly original plot on the basic level since early literature. Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies were pretty much all "derivative" from Greek and Roman (or other) works. Nobody now attacks them for that. Plot originality doesn't have a great deal of impact on the value of literature.
Now, as I'm thinking about this, you may mean "British Schoolboy Story" as the title of somebody else's book, but I can't find that anywhere else on the comments page right now. If you do mean it in this sense, and it really is plagiarismically close to the original, I believe there are some legal issues to be cleared up, but that doesn't necessarily discount the success of Rowling's works. She must have done something different if her books are selling millions, and few people have heard of the other title.
Well, you don't *have* to read it at all. Nobody's making you, just suggesting it, as they've enjoyed it. That said, it's probably more beneficial to someone who has or interacts with kids than for someone who does not ever see or deal with kids. (And to that person, I say you're missing out; kids are great)
As a "Merkin", and slightly older than a "child", I'll say that I don't know what a Philosopher's Stone is. (I'd be interested in knowing if somebody wants to follow this post up, or I'll just go google it.) I'm familiar with philosophers, and I'm familiar with stones, but I've never heard of a stone having any special significance to a philosopher.
In addition, we may be thinking of a different denotation or connotation of the word 'philosopher'. To me, and most Americans I know, a philosopher is a thinker, someone like Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzche, Kirkegard. A sorcerer is a more mystical figure, one who deals with magic (white/good or black/bad).
When I think of "Sorcerer's Stone", I think of the stone from the Arthurian legend of the sword in the stone, but I don't know if that's a common relation to many Americans.
There's a big difference between these two situations. First, with the Intel situation, any modifications to the code had to be done by the application developer. Secondly, there was no quality loss in the filter; the same filter produced the exact same results, only faster.
With ATI, the drivers took control of the quality settings, and achieved higher framerates by forcibly degrading image quality. These drivers were released by ATI to improve the ATI product's benchmark scores. Nobody can argue that going from 200fps to 220 fps is worth degrading image quality, a feature for which ATIs have come to be known and revered.
If Intel somehow made the Photoshop filters work on every other pixel/area to cut the processing time in half, that would be analagous to ATI's situation. However, if ATI wrote drivers that set small things and had optimizations for the QIII engine that worked at any image setting, nobody would be complaining; we'd be applauding ATI for releasing good drivers.
I don't know how far your support story goes for STB. I have a Velocity 4400 (RIVA TNT), and the drivers were really just bad. With the last release of the driver that I saw before they got sucked up by 3dfx, colors would be inverted and all funky in 2-d games like Starcraft. My first query about this got a message to the extent of "These drivers are not WHQL certified, so we don't expect them to work all the time."
Then the drivers got certified, as they were as far as I could tell, and there was no improvement. Another few e-mails and phone calls got no help, suggestions, or even more things to try, so I just switched over to Nvidia's Detonators.
Do macs have "native" (I'm not sure what the best word is) support for vfat drives? I know that with PC-formatted floppies, Macs don't have a good time with long filenames, and they also add resource.frk files to the disks when they're browsed. I've never tried a vfat formatted hard disk, and I don't know whether it has similar issues. Does anyone know how well they're supported?
While it'd be nice to play good 3d games on my Palm, that's far from a priority. I have some nice-looking games running on my Handspring Visor Prism already, including Race Fever (racing game) and Zap!2016 (vertical space shooter), which takes advantage of the full Visor Prism/Palm m505 palette of colors. It looks surprisingly nice, even though it slows down when it tries to render text and moving sprites at the same time.
Although I assume you were actually kidding, I wouldn't be giving them any ideas. This is just the sort of crazy thing that Nvidia would do to destroy productivity everywhere. And besides, you'd need to wear gloves to deal with the heat, and have extra batteries in a belt pack or something just to power the damn thing.
I totally agree with you, but just to play the Open Source advocate :)...anybody can look at the code to see what each special function in gcc does, then write their own similar compiling function, since it's well-documented. So, if Intel had a goal of making the linux kernels compile, they could do it fairly easily by implementing handles for the special functions they call. Needless to say, they can't just grab the original gcc code and re-distribute it within their closed-source program (I'm pretty sure), but that's the nature of the beast.
Sorry, I got confused...I meant cartoons and said comics.
The comics are long gone, no?
From the MS bug page:
What?s the configuration change that will protects against this vulnerability?
Customers who are concerned about this vulnerability should disable active scripting. All web pages (and HTML e-mails, which are just web pages delivered via e-mail) are categorized into one of several zones, and the settings in each zone dictate what actions can be taken within it. By disabling active scripting in the Internet zone a user can prevent an attacker from exploiting either the web-borne or mail-borne versions of this attack.
How do I disable active scripting in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.0?
* On the Tools menu, click Internet Options, click the Security tab, and then click Custom Level.
* In the Settings box, scroll down to the Scripting section, and click Disable under "Active scripting" and "Scripting of Java applets".
* Click OK, and then click OK again.
Their specific instructions say to disable. They don't mention 'prompt' mode at all. As well, when you go to Windows Update or another site that needs Active Scripting, their specific instructions say to 'enable', not 'prompt'. I agree with you that this seems like a fairly ideal interim solution, but if MS doesn't let anybody know about it, how can they be expected to use it?
Well, the Apple thing was a pretty obscure problem. If you'd read any of the stories that have been posted about it, you'd know that the bug only affected a small percentage of people who (1) didn't follow Apple's clear and explicit instructions, leaving their beta copy installed while trying to install the final version *and* (2) who had two separate volumes with spaces in their names, and a portion (the first word, I think) of the names identical.
That's not really a situation you can expect a company to test for when they're running QA on a release. If MS made this blunder, and reacted as quickly and satisfactorily, I would have appluaded them just as heartily as I do Apple.
Debian Linux has a community run software testing process that would never let something like iTunes ship as "stable".
The software itself is wonderfully stable. The only problem was the installer. As well...Debian hardly releases anything fairly innovative with their "stable" release. Nobody I know who uses Debian uses stable anymore, since it's just out of date right now. If you want Apple's equivalent of "stable," go back to OS 9.1...that's a pretty damn solid OS as far as I've seen.
Actually, in the security bulletin, the word "irresponsibly" is linked to a rather interesting article from Scott Culp, who is the Manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center. This seems like a source for Microsoft's position in the Security Focus story.
What they're complaining about is the bugfinder releasing the details to the public just "a few days" after giving it to them. I'm willing to agree that a few days is not enough time to publish and release a patch, but I'd take a guess that, if Microsoft had replied to the person who sent in the bug exploit with an informative response that provided information on their fix and how long it would take, and asking him to wait for a reasonable amount of time, then he wouldn't have released it to the public so soon. Most likely, he got a curt or no response from Microsoft, and felt like the only way he could get any response to such a major security flaw would be to publish it to a public forum.
As you've probably already seen from most of the other posts on the thread, we have tons of ID cards, driver's licenses being the most prominent and most widely acceptable. I think people are having trouble accepting the idea that an ID card ought to be able to be used for a 99.99% accurate identification, and be rather hard to forge. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but at my school, probably at least 5% of the people have fake IDs that let them buy beer/porn/cigarettes/whatever.
People are also concerned with the electronic aspect of the ID card, and tracking associated with it. However, the government doesn't have the time to track everybody...they really don't. If you're not committing felonies or conspiring with people who do, then you're probably not worth their time. While you may not want the government to know how often you buy condoms, you have to realize that they really don't care.
In essence, the only potential problem I see is if the ID card is electronic, and its security is comprimised. If we place total faith in the security of an ID card, then all it takes is one good attack to steal quite a few identities and wreak havoc. Think stealing credit card numbers on a much much larger and more impactful scale. Because the database would be centrally located, getting access to any of it would give you access to all 280 some million Americans, including the rich and powerful.
Correlation != causation
Ahh yes, I'll grant you that. However, !Correlation == !Causation (usually)
Julia Childs's julienne child processes? I smell a new tongue-twisting phenomenon - a merger of cooking and coding.
Well, it's actually 128 petabytes. The 144 figure comes from the typical hard-drive manufacturer definition of 1MB=1000B, 1GB=1,000,000B, etc. using powers of 10 rather than powers of 2.
Well, for the most part, any disk over (I think) 8GB will have the same settings in the BIOS, for LBA (I may have the acronym wrong). The original Cyl/Tracks/etc. spec only goes so high, and older BIOSes cannot deal with large disks.
For example, I recently installed a 10GB disk into an older computer. Auto-detection recognized it at the maximum settings, providing about 8GB. Because the motherboard was proprietary, and there was no large-disk BIOS update, I had to install an intermediate BIOS from Western Digital (EZ-BIOS) to stand between the CMOS and the OS, and can now use all 10GB within the operating system.
Remember the 2Gb barrier? Today we are rapidly approaching the 128Gb barrier.
Actually, we've already passed it. Maxtor has come out with drives that are at least 160GB. Granted, this is currently achieved through a hack/kludge that bypasses ATA spec, and will likely not be a new standard, but people are already coming up with solutions and with large drives.
You know there's something good about the site when /. users flock to the site before posting comments, instead of the other way around, or even not going there at all.
Unfortunately, CRC seems to have a nearly Microsoft-ian grip on quite a few reference fields. From what I've seen, the CRC Handbooks are the de facto standards, and are really quite good, accurate, extensive guides. Since I can't get to the site right now (it's not responding), I can't read the whole story of what went on, but if Weisstein willingly gave in, then it's his fault. If not, then he might have grounds for a countersuit.
(not in America)
:)
Heh, obvious since we don't have (call them) flats here
It could be interesting for some group to set up a wireless network that is open, with free (with advertisements through a transparent proxy or similar scheme) or low-cost access. I wonder how successful that'd be...pay a low cost for citywide wireless access - seems lucrative.
While it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is still the CDC. Check out their website, which is still www.cdc.gov, and see their logo. For further convincing, you could try going to www.cdcp.gov, and realize that that site doesn't exist, much less point to the CDC.
Rinse. Repeat.