I couldn't tell you why Google has made the decision to use IP address rather than the Accept-Language header to determine what language to serve up files, but obviously, it has a pretty stupid result.
That's interesting. I couldn't tell you what Google are doing right now, but I noticed a couple of months ago that they were doing language picking. I'd set the default locale on my work PC (WinNT 4, IE5) to Standard French to work on a bug that only manifested itself for our French customers. While in this mode, I happened to hit Google, and got the French version of the page. So I would suggest that they were at at least one time using the Accept-Language header. Why they changed it, I don't know. Maybe to catch OS/browser combinations that did not supply the needed data.
But this is wildly offtopic, so I'll just try to drag it back by saying: the info that Earthlink are providing could be used for good or evil, but it's all pretty pointless. Sure people might be willing to code up different versions of their site for different bandwidths, languages, whatever - but who will make that effort if it only handles customers of ONE ISP, using ONE browser? Daft. I'm sure the only purpose it so Earthlink can get an idea of what settings people have from when they hit the Earthlink homepage.
How can they be sure that everything on the CDDB is copyrighted? I'm sure that probably most of it is, but not ALL of it.
I'd be interested to hear from someone like, say, Chris Johnson on this one.. I remember him saying that he'd love to have his music blocked by Napster so he could kick their arses for restraint of trade (or something like that). So.. although I don't see any of your stuff on the CDDB.. it could well be put there. And then would Napster ban the trading of it? And if so, what would happen?
Yet, this new "Edge" is simply not that much better....
Cheers for the link to the comparison of the Edge to the Palm Vx.. but can someone tell me what the comparison is between the Edge and a Visor Deluxe or Visor Platinum? What exactly have they improved??
And as far as I know, Microsoft does not allow anyone to modify the source, let alone distribute patches. So much for the debugging...
The point of this isn't to get Windows debugged, it's to make life easier for people debugging their own (Windows) software. Enough weird shit happens when you're trying to develop under Windows, and although probably 99% of the time it's a bug in your code, at least the companies that get a hold of the Windows source will be able to check.
So yeah, the motivation here for Microsoft is to make Windows developers happy. This is something they've always been big on - they know full well that the platform that the developers support is the one that will win in the market. So they've seen one of the things that makes developing under an open source OS attractive, and tried to match it.
Hotels are such bastards when it comes to phone charges. I've had some rotten ones in my time, but my wife just got back from Atlanta where she was reporting on the IBM PartnerWorld conference.. while there, she had to dial back to the UK a few times to upload some stuff to her work - the hotel billed her $US30.00 a MINUTE for the international calls..
(don't know what they should cost, but our rate for calling the US from here is 3p (~4.5c) per minute)
So if they'll mark up a phone call to 600x it's actual price, I shudder to think what they'd charge you for high-speed internet access..
Why does this specify three alternative pronunciations for "Rijndael"? It's supposed to be an Advanced Encryption Standard, why can't they use the standard pronunciation? Come on guys, Dutch isn't that hard a language, and it makes a lot more sense once you can pronounce it (i.e. "zuid" = "south" is obvious when you know "zuid" is pronounced "soud")
I see no reason to reply to this beyond the sheer joy of posting (and the fact that I'm bored at work), but you don't actually know what a binding is, do you, AC?
Or do you think that gcj is some sort of magic toolkit pixie that compiles all the Swing references in your Java code into calls to whatever toolkit library you happen to be using? (I hear that the next version will be able to guess which you prefer out of QT and GTK+ if both are installed!).
p.s. When you grow up, you'll realise that trolling is more fun than flaming. But it also takes more skill (even in an article involving Java and KDE!), so maybe it's out of your reach..
Until the Indrema puts up, people will keep telling it to shut up.
It's like the hardware equivalent of a software project that has a page on SourceForge, a set of mailing lists, a white paper, a team of "developers".. and not a line of code.
And the reason why the worse flamers tend to be in the Linux community, I'll wager, is that they don't want "their" Linux associated with vaporware that they are sure will die with a whimper, and give them a bad name.
Although, unlike the BitBoys, Indrema are not faced with the hostility of roving Amiga zealots who think that their only claim to fame was doing PC demos that were bad imitations of years-older Amiga demos running on much lower end hardware.:-)
That said, in a perfect world, the Indrema would be/<-rAd. I'd get one!
Why would you add Qt/KDE bindings to Java? Doesn't that just limit the crossplatformness of Java?
(a) Some people see merit in Java beyond its crossplatformness. Some people think it is a nice language, easy to develop in, easy to write maintainable code in. (b) Objectively, the existence of bindings for any language is a good thing for any toolkit. The absence of such bindings is a bad thing. Hence this is good.
can you say sludge? I would imagine the speed of these apps running on anything less than a Wonderbox would be like watching snails.
You are aware that Java code can be compiled to a native executable, using a compiler such as gcj? You are also aware that much of the blame for slow Java applications has been placed upon the Swing toolkit, which you wouldn't be using if you were using QT?
Why not just stick with C++ or something?
Perhaps because you are a Java programmer who is not experienced with C++ (or who doesn't like C++), and yet still wish to develop for KDE
this is all we need, kde apps that need to start a jvm to run.
Not if they're compiled to native executables..
What was the KDE developement team thinking..
Maybe that.. oops! nearly replied to a qpt troll!
KDE has had problems in the past with licensing issues..
oops! nearly replied to an Ananova troll!
Disclaimer: I'm not a Java programmer, or a KDE developer. I actually get paid for writing VB (OK, feel free to moderate me -1, "Spawn of Satan")
My god... I'm using Lynx right now as I currently don't havea graphical text browser.
Guess that means I'm even worse than Satan's spawn as I don't even have the ability to turn banner ads on.
Well, you still get the alt-text and the possibility of clicking on the ad link, I presume? I don't even get that much.:-)
Re:If it's on the web, I'd say not..
on
eBook Security?
·
· Score: 2
I suspect he's not talking about an HTML/web version.
I thought not, at first, but it was his mention of people being able to access the stuff "even on the cheapest of library terminals" that made me think maybe he was after all?
The general "if it is on my computer I can copy it" argument still stands in this case.
Yep. And regardless of whether it's in HTML or some eBook format, if he's talking about people saving pages as text, then any watermarking is totally doomed. It's like the text equivalent of copying a watermarked audio track by plugging your audio out into a cassette recorder - loss of quality, but no watermark is going to get through.
Seems to me that in every discussion concerning banner ads, there's always someone who suggests that I am the spawn of Satan for daring to use an ad blocker, and therefore depriving good, honest, useful websites of the revenue they need to survive. Its interesting to see someone involved with the ad business say that I'm doing advertisers a favour by blocking their ads 'cos I wouldn't have responded anyway. Saves them bandwidth and saves them money, too. Not everyone's unhappy;-)
As for the "ad karma".. well, as the Cowboy Neal interview showed, Slashdot karma is a game, no matter how much the editors don't want it to be. If "ad karma" engendered the same feelings, hey, I'd almost be tempted to turn off the filter for OSDN sites to I could play too!
If it's on the web, I'd say not..
on
eBook Security?
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure exactly what sort of electronic publishing you're talking about here, but since you mention "telling your browser to save every page" and "identifying the account through which the book was stolen", I'll assume we're talking stuff on the web, but with registration and a login required to access it.
In this case: no, I don't think there is any way to prevent dissemination without requiring a plugin or special browser. If it can be displayed on a normal browser, it can be saved via "File->Save As...", or cut'n'pasted from the browser to an editor.
So that takes you to the issue of watermarking. A few ideas spring to mind here. Most naive idea - I guess the HTML is coming from a CGI or something, so put a comment in it with the username, date, IP address, etc. Obviously anyone can strip this out easily, but you might spring some naive thieves. More complex: encode this data into a string of some sort and use it in the code as an anchor or something (so an internal link in the page might be to "blah.html#Hg3sdFHsASIU", where the Hg3sdFHsASIU is a uuencoded user id/date/IP.
If you're more interested in stopping copying rather than identifying the culprit, you can make life annoying. I wanted to save some books from the free library on www.informit.com - the fact that the pages were surrounded by sidebars, had all their internal links in absolute form rather than relative, and that all figures and diagrams were popped up by Javascript buttons (again with absolute paths) almost made this more trouble than it was worth. Being an enterprising soul, I whipped up some Perl to clean up the files, but most people wouldn't bother. (bonus irony point: the first book I was trying to rip off was a "teach yourself Perl" book - this taught me how to write the Perl script to clean up the saved HTML);-)
Of, and of course, since this is Slashdot: no way lamer!!! information wants to be free!!! tell the publishers to get fscked !!
According to the signs posted in Future Shop, as of January 1st, the levy on CD-RWs went from 5.2 to 21 cents each. The levy on CD-Rs went from 61 to 77 cents each, which is over half of the cost of most CD-Rs available.
The signs are wrong, I guess. According to the article, the levy on CD-Rs and CD-RWs goes from 5.2c to 21c, the levy on CD-R-Audio and CD-RW-Audio (ie, the ones that can be used in crippled "CD recorder" stereos) went from 60.8c to 77c. Same with MiniDiscs. So media that is "meant" for recording music gets hit a lot harder than media that "might" be used innocently. Feh.
and if you add a monitor on the site, the cost becomes much greater.
Damn right! Does anyone have any experience with Sun monitors, and if so, can they share any reason why you'd pay the outrageous $370 that they're asking for a 17" monitor?? (I was too scared to even check the price of the other 3, superior, monitors)
I find it a little worrying that so much of the work that has gone into the GeForce3 has been implementing unprecedented new features such as these vertex shaders, rather than improving more general stuff such as fillrate or transformation and lighting. This leads me to believe that Nvidia's goal with this chipset is not to improve the 3D gaming experience of their customers, but rather to lure developers into using these (admittedly excellent) new features.
How is this a bad thing, I hear you ask? Well, it looks to me like an "embrace & extend" tactic. If the developers use vertex shaders to make their games look cooler, then other 3D chipmakers have to either scramble to provide the same features, or all the cool new games will run like ass on anything non-Nvidia. Only Nvidia can get away with a tactic like this because of their present dominance of the market. Witness ATI's Radeon - they added some very innovative features (like all the z-buffer accelerating) tricks but they were all dedicated to improving performance with current software. They couldn't introduce radical new features because nobody would use them, supported as they were only by a minority chipmaker.
If you don't want to see the 3D industry completely monopolised by a single player, avoid the GeForce3, and avoid any games written to depend on its features. Support chipmakers that are seeking to make everything run better, like ATI and PowerVR.
Surely the thread earlier today concerning banner ads made in abundantly clear that most technically savvy net users (ie, the people who might be interested in your open source project) either
(a) Have Junkbuster or Proxomitron or some such filter blocking out banners, or..
(b) Have highly-trained eyes which skip straight over any banner as if it wasn't there.
We don't want to see banner ads for your project on Slashdot. We don't want to see banner ads for Slashdot on your web page. We won't see those ads because Proxomitron doesn't care whether a banner is for BZFlag or Punch-The-Monkey, they all get blocked. I suggest you seek other techniques for getting your project known to people who might be interested in it. Sorry !!
I know it's lame to reply to your own post, but after actually reading the article (hey, I couldn't do that before firing off my snappy one-liner, could I?), I see that the ambit claim was to increase the levy to $3.00!! Damn, I was just joking, but that really would have been more than people make from legit sales!
..if they jack up the levy just a little bit more, it'll be bigger than the amount of royalties an artist gets when they sell a legit copy (through a major label) !!
SDL is indeed worthy of praise, but I should point out that Linux, Win32 and BeOS are the only platforms that it _officially_ runs on. From their FAQs, MacOS "sort of" works (8-bit displays don't work properly, audio support is experimental). I mention this since the original questioner specifically asked about Mac support.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't tell you why Google has made the decision to use IP address rather than the Accept-Language header to determine what language to serve up files, but obviously, it has a pretty stupid result.
That's interesting. I couldn't tell you what Google are doing right now, but I noticed a couple of months ago that they were doing language picking. I'd set the default locale on my work PC (WinNT 4, IE5) to Standard French to work on a bug that only manifested itself for our French customers. While in this mode, I happened to hit Google, and got the French version of the page. So I would suggest that they were at at least one time using the Accept-Language header. Why they changed it, I don't know. Maybe to catch OS/browser combinations that did not supply the needed data.
But this is wildly offtopic, so I'll just try to drag it back by saying: the info that Earthlink are providing could be used for good or evil, but it's all pretty pointless. Sure people might be willing to code up different versions of their site for different bandwidths, languages, whatever - but who will make that effort if it only handles customers of ONE ISP, using ONE browser? Daft. I'm sure the only purpose it so Earthlink can get an idea of what settings people have from when they hit the Earthlink homepage.
When the Nubian ship supposedly carrying Padme lands..
Just one question: what's a Nubian?
How can they be sure that everything on the CDDB is copyrighted? I'm sure that probably most of it is, but not ALL of it.
I'd be interested to hear from someone like, say, Chris Johnson on this one.. I remember him saying that he'd love to have his music blocked by Napster so he could kick their arses for restraint of trade (or something like that). So.. although I don't see any of your stuff on the CDDB.. it could well be put there. And then would Napster ban the trading of it? And if so, what would happen?
..is this the real moon we're talking about here, or the fake one in the soundstage that they filmed the Apollo landing at?
Yet, this new "Edge" is simply not that much better ....
Cheers for the link to the comparison of the Edge to the Palm Vx.. but can someone tell me what the comparison is between the Edge and a Visor Deluxe or Visor Platinum? What exactly have they improved??
And as far as I know, Microsoft does not allow anyone to modify the source, let alone distribute patches. So much for the debugging ...
The point of this isn't to get Windows debugged, it's to make life easier for people debugging their own (Windows) software. Enough weird shit happens when you're trying to develop under Windows, and although probably 99% of the time it's a bug in your code, at least the companies that get a hold of the Windows source will be able to check.
So yeah, the motivation here for Microsoft is to make Windows developers happy. This is something they've always been big on - they know full well that the platform that the developers support is the one that will win in the market. So they've seen one of the things that makes developing under an open source OS attractive, and tried to match it.
My nominations are "REM - Shiny Happy People" and any of the songs by Souxie(sp?) and the Banshees
I hope Siouxsie doesn't mind her stuff being on Napster - because nobody could provide a list of all the possible misspellings of her name!
Hotels are such bastards when it comes to phone charges. I've had some rotten ones in my time, but my wife just got back from Atlanta where she was reporting on the IBM PartnerWorld conference.. while there, she had to dial back to the UK a few times to upload some stuff to her work - the hotel billed her $US30.00 a MINUTE for the international calls..
(don't know what they should cost, but our rate for calling the US from here is 3p (~4.5c) per minute)
So if they'll mark up a phone call to 600x it's actual price, I shudder to think what they'd charge you for high-speed internet access..
So hows does Slashdot plan to keep its domain?
By not making a profit, obviously! Seems that LNUX is quite successful at that..
Why does this specify three alternative pronunciations for "Rijndael"? It's supposed to be an Advanced Encryption Standard, why can't they use the standard pronunciation? Come on guys, Dutch isn't that hard a language, and it makes a lot more sense once you can pronounce it (i.e. "zuid" = "south" is obvious when you know "zuid" is pronounced "soud")
Then you wouldn't need the bindings, stupid FUCK.
I see no reason to reply to this beyond the sheer joy of posting (and the fact that I'm bored at work), but you don't actually know what a binding is, do you, AC?
Or do you think that gcj is some sort of magic toolkit pixie that compiles all the Swing references in your Java code into calls to whatever toolkit library you happen to be using? (I hear that the next version will be able to guess which you prefer out of QT and GTK+ if both are installed!).
p.s. When you grow up, you'll realise that trolling is more fun than flaming. But it also takes more skill (even in an article involving Java and KDE!), so maybe it's out of your reach..
..the company is just going to pot since William Hewlett died..
Until the Indrema puts up, people will keep telling it to shut up.
It's like the hardware equivalent of a software project that has a page on SourceForge, a set of mailing lists, a white paper, a team of "developers".. and not a line of code.
And the reason why the worse flamers tend to be in the Linux community, I'll wager, is that they don't want "their" Linux associated with vaporware that they are sure will die with a whimper, and give them a bad name.
Although, unlike the BitBoys, Indrema are not faced with the hostility of roving Amiga zealots who think that their only claim to fame was doing PC demos that were bad imitations of years-older Amiga demos running on much lower end hardware. :-)
That said, in a perfect world, the Indrema would be /<-rAd. I'd get one!
Why would you add Qt/KDE bindings to Java? Doesn't that just limit the crossplatformness of Java?
(a) Some people see merit in Java beyond its crossplatformness. Some people think it is a nice language, easy to develop in, easy to write maintainable code in. (b) Objectively, the existence of bindings for any language is a good thing for any toolkit. The absence of such bindings is a bad thing. Hence this is good.
can you say sludge? I would imagine the speed of these apps running on anything less than a Wonderbox would be like watching snails.
You are aware that Java code can be compiled to a native executable, using a compiler such as gcj? You are also aware that much of the blame for slow Java applications has been placed upon the Swing toolkit, which you wouldn't be using if you were using QT?
Why not just stick with C++ or something?
Perhaps because you are a Java programmer who is not experienced with C++ (or who doesn't like C++), and yet still wish to develop for KDE
this is all we need, kde apps that need to start a jvm to run.
Not if they're compiled to native executables..
What was the KDE developement team thinking..
Maybe that.. oops! nearly replied to a qpt troll!
KDE has had problems in the past with licensing issues..
oops! nearly replied to an Ananova troll!
Disclaimer: I'm not a Java programmer, or a KDE developer. I actually get paid for writing VB (OK, feel free to moderate me -1, "Spawn of Satan")
My god... I'm using Lynx right now as I currently don't havea graphical text browser. Guess that means I'm even worse than Satan's spawn as I don't even have the ability to turn banner ads on.
Well, you still get the alt-text and the possibility of clicking on the ad link, I presume? I don't even get that much. :-)
I suspect he's not talking about an HTML/web version.
I thought not, at first, but it was his mention of people being able to access the stuff "even on the cheapest of library terminals" that made me think maybe he was after all?
The general "if it is on my computer I can copy it" argument still stands in this case.
Yep. And regardless of whether it's in HTML or some eBook format, if he's talking about people saving pages as text, then any watermarking is totally doomed. It's like the text equivalent of copying a watermarked audio track by plugging your audio out into a cassette recorder - loss of quality, but no watermark is going to get through.
Seems to me that in every discussion concerning banner ads, there's always someone who suggests that I am the spawn of Satan for daring to use an ad blocker, and therefore depriving good, honest, useful websites of the revenue they need to survive. Its interesting to see someone involved with the ad business say that I'm doing advertisers a favour by blocking their ads 'cos I wouldn't have responded anyway. Saves them bandwidth and saves them money, too. Not everyone's unhappy ;-)
As for the "ad karma".. well, as the Cowboy Neal interview showed, Slashdot karma is a game, no matter how much the editors don't want it to be. If "ad karma" engendered the same feelings, hey, I'd almost be tempted to turn off the filter for OSDN sites to I could play too!
I'm not sure exactly what sort of electronic publishing you're talking about here, but since you mention "telling your browser to save every page" and "identifying the account through which the book was stolen", I'll assume we're talking stuff on the web, but with registration and a login required to access it.
In this case: no, I don't think there is any way to prevent dissemination without requiring a plugin or special browser. If it can be displayed on a normal browser, it can be saved via "File->Save As...", or cut'n'pasted from the browser to an editor.
So that takes you to the issue of watermarking. A few ideas spring to mind here. Most naive idea - I guess the HTML is coming from a CGI or something, so put a comment in it with the username, date, IP address, etc. Obviously anyone can strip this out easily, but you might spring some naive thieves. More complex: encode this data into a string of some sort and use it in the code as an anchor or something (so an internal link in the page might be to "blah.html#Hg3sdFHsASIU", where the Hg3sdFHsASIU is a uuencoded user id/date/IP.
If you're more interested in stopping copying rather than identifying the culprit, you can make life annoying. I wanted to save some books from the free library on www.informit.com - the fact that the pages were surrounded by sidebars, had all their internal links in absolute form rather than relative, and that all figures and diagrams were popped up by Javascript buttons (again with absolute paths) almost made this more trouble than it was worth. Being an enterprising soul, I whipped up some Perl to clean up the files, but most people wouldn't bother. (bonus irony point: the first book I was trying to rip off was a "teach yourself Perl" book - this taught me how to write the Perl script to clean up the saved HTML) ;-)
Of, and of course, since this is Slashdot: no way lamer!!! information wants to be free!!! tell the publishers to get fscked !!
According to the signs posted in Future Shop, as of January 1st, the levy on CD-RWs went from 5.2 to 21 cents each. The levy on CD-Rs went from 61 to 77 cents each, which is over half of the cost of most CD-Rs available.
The signs are wrong, I guess. According to the article, the levy on CD-Rs and CD-RWs goes from 5.2c to 21c, the levy on CD-R-Audio and CD-RW-Audio (ie, the ones that can be used in crippled "CD recorder" stereos) went from 60.8c to 77c. Same with MiniDiscs. So media that is "meant" for recording music gets hit a lot harder than media that "might" be used innocently. Feh.
and if you add a monitor on the site, the cost becomes much greater.
Damn right! Does anyone have any experience with Sun monitors, and if so, can they share any reason why you'd pay the outrageous $370 that they're asking for a 17" monitor?? (I was too scared to even check the price of the other 3, superior, monitors)
I find it a little worrying that so much of the work that has gone into the GeForce3 has been implementing unprecedented new features such as these vertex shaders, rather than improving more general stuff such as fillrate or transformation and lighting. This leads me to believe that Nvidia's goal with this chipset is not to improve the 3D gaming experience of their customers, but rather to lure developers into using these (admittedly excellent) new features.
How is this a bad thing, I hear you ask? Well, it looks to me like an "embrace & extend" tactic. If the developers use vertex shaders to make their games look cooler, then other 3D chipmakers have to either scramble to provide the same features, or all the cool new games will run like ass on anything non-Nvidia. Only Nvidia can get away with a tactic like this because of their present dominance of the market. Witness ATI's Radeon - they added some very innovative features (like all the z-buffer accelerating) tricks but they were all dedicated to improving performance with current software. They couldn't introduce radical new features because nobody would use them, supported as they were only by a minority chipmaker.
If you don't want to see the 3D industry completely monopolised by a single player, avoid the GeForce3, and avoid any games written to depend on its features. Support chipmakers that are seeking to make everything run better, like ATI and PowerVR.
Surely the thread earlier today concerning banner ads made in abundantly clear that most technically savvy net users (ie, the people who might be interested in your open source project) either
(a) Have Junkbuster or Proxomitron or some such filter blocking out banners, or..
(b) Have highly-trained eyes which skip straight over any banner as if it wasn't there.
We don't want to see banner ads for your project on Slashdot. We don't want to see banner ads for Slashdot on your web page. We won't see those ads because Proxomitron doesn't care whether a banner is for BZFlag or Punch-The-Monkey, they all get blocked. I suggest you seek other techniques for getting your project known to people who might be interested in it. Sorry !!
I know it's lame to reply to your own post, but after actually reading the article (hey, I couldn't do that before firing off my snappy one-liner, could I?), I see that the ambit claim was to increase the levy to $3.00!! Damn, I was just joking, but that really would have been more than people make from legit sales!
..if they jack up the levy just a little bit more, it'll be bigger than the amount of royalties an artist gets when they sell a legit copy (through a major label) !!
www.libsdl.org (BeOS, MacOS, Linux Win32 others?)
SDL is indeed worthy of praise, but I should point out that Linux, Win32 and BeOS are the only platforms that it _officially_ runs on. From their FAQs, MacOS "sort of" works (8-bit displays don't work properly, audio support is experimental). I mention this since the original questioner specifically asked about Mac support.