To me, it sounds more like they're trying set a precedent for using microwave weapons against US citizens, and they've just decided this is the nicest way of going about doing that.
Maybe I'm just paranoid. But it doesn't seem like a good idea.
One day, it will be used to quell a violent outburst from some crowd. And, from then on, it could be used to take away our right to assembly. As if tear gas and rubber bullets weren't enough.
I'm all about keeping a crowd under control, but we can't allow something that could be used to -control- us.
Yes, I know it's blatantly obvious that you can record anything that has video out through a VCR or through a video capture card.
My whole point was that the author of the article should find that blatantly obvious, too, and that the idea of a "record function" is not based on fact, which is what a professional journalist is supposed to be reporting.
Right, but the point is that the author of the article states that there is some sort of "record function" for the Xbox, which is obviously not true.
I suppose it's possible if it's a modded Xbox, but, otherwise, I have no idea how they even got that idea. For an article on Machinima, you'd think they'd at least try to be accurate as to how the recording was done.
Fair or not, the customer doesn't care about the reasons behind their sound card not working. They just want it to work.
They don't care if the familiar OS that it actually works with is created by an evil, monopolistic company. Nor would they care that Linux is nice, open-source, and usually free, because 1) it's not familiar, and 2) their sound card doesn't work.
Sure, some hardcore/. geeks would give up having a working sound card just to follow their priniples, but those people are few and far between.
I can see your complaint, but Linux distro's aren't going to get "An A for Effort" just for trying to stand up to the big guy. They need to show results, rather then determination.
You're assuming that the consumers of pornography would otherwise be "normal" people if they weren't exposed to porn. The majority of people can look at porn without it becoming a problem. It is the minority who are affected, when "it undermines their relationships with others."
It's a big assumption to say that they are capable of having a normal relationship with others in the first place. Perhaps the reason they turn to porn is because they are, in fact, incapable. Porn is not the cause of problems, it is the effect.
And, similarly, taking it away doesn't fix those problems. In fact, if porn were made illegal, I think we'd see an increase in rapes and similar crimes -- from people who need other outlets for their sex drive.
Honestly, it's rather narrow-minded to believe that all people are "normal," and it's things like porn and drugs and alcohol that turn them into freaks. Of course the "normal" people can be content without porn and drugs and alcohol. They have good genes, they were raised right... They have what it takes to be happy, without needing vices to get them there.
Everybody else, though, needs certain things to help them through their struggles. If they need those things, then taking them away won't make their struggles any better, and would often make them worse.
So there's no benefit in going after porn. People who choose to view it do it for a reason. If they don't need porn to get them through life, fine. Nobody's forcing them to look at it. But if they do need it, then taking it away would be infringing upon their rights.
Remember: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Obligatory DNA text
on
Giant Sub-Woofer
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
I think most of the energy consumption does come from the processor itself, but you're correct in that laptops need to be thought of as completely different machines, and not simply miniture designs of power-hogging desktops.
Transmeta's Crusoe chip was, I believe, designed with the specific intent of being a mobile processor. I haven't really kept up with their progress, but it was an interesting niche to attempt to carve.
I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that Intel's mobile processors are simply versions of their desktop chips modified to consume less power and generate less heat. While both of those things are great, one would think there'd be more efficiency in creating a chip solely for mobile purposes.
Moore's law is an observation, not something that the industry is forced to follow. You can't just say "we need more efficiency - let's define a new Moore's law".
True. But I think Moore's law has been good in the sense that, instead of chip makers saying, "Oops, I guess we've reached our limit," they'll say, "Hm... There's got to be some way to do this," and they'll figure out how to get around their limitations.
Whereas without it they might give up (or at least not try as hard), Moore's law holds them to a consistent standard for the future, based on past experience.
I hope this doesn't get modded down as redundant or off-topic, because it's a legitimate question, but I'm wondering how to view metadata.
I've seen stories about it before, but there wasn't anything interesting enough to make me want to check it out until now. I noticed Zalewski linked to wvware in his article, but I didn't really understand how to view metadata with it. I am also running a Satan-worshipping OS.
So really I'm just wondering if someone can tell me what program to use to view hidden data, or explain how to get wvware to do it?
I believe what was supposed to be interesting about the European Xbox announcement was that it was simply re-using one from the American Xbox release.
With the exact same quote, coming from two separate people, referring to two separate events at two separate times. (Fall 2001 vs. Early 2002.)
"Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer," referring to the American launch, and "Sandy Duncan, Vice President, Xbox Europe" referring to the European launch.
And, very likely, the words came from neither one of their mouths. (But, as people have said in other posts, the words were written ahead of time by the PR person, and the people being quoted agreed to "say" it.)
You see, though, (and this is waaay off-topic), people that took that intelligence with a grain of salt didn't believe it. It was only because people blindly followed it that we went to war on false intelligence.
So even if they admit now that it's false intelligence, it doesn't excuse them from believing it in the first place.
I even saw a texturing problem when the mom was fighting the big rock monster at the end.
I noticed that texturing problem, too, but I think it may have been intentional. That's what my suspension of disbelief led me to believe, anyway.
The monster was so low-poly compared to everything else that it would either have to be intentional, or extremely unprofessional.
It did look cheesy, but I think (and hope) that it was meant to be like that. Since it was in her in-game world, I think the big scary low-poly rock monster was just for dramatic effect.
That is theoretically true in America, but IP and fair-use laws are different in Europe. It's a pretty bad situation to be in, but hopefully somebody here will know how to handle it.
I'd call you a control freak, except I know that, essentially, that's the only way to be safe from viruses and spyware. It just seems like The Totalitarian's Guide to Home Computing or something.
(And then it makes me think of systems of government, and wonder whether giving people unlimited freedoms is a good thing or not. I'm all for it, in theory. But I see that, applied to computing, the consequences are things like viruses. There really are people that need to be protected from themselves... or at least protected from malicious behavior by others that can be activated by themselves.)
But back more-or-less to the topic, what is the proper way to protect? Set up some sort of terminal that can only execute approved programs, that doesn't install plug-ins, that only downloads updates from an official source...
That's right, your signature. You know, the one that reads: End acronym abuse today! The one that linked to your rant against the overuse of acronyms [slashdot.org]. The signature at the END of a very short post that still somehow managed to be riddled with words like "DRM" "MP3s" "WMA" and "AAC". Just struck me as ironic, I guess...
Hey, how's this for clarity?:
This will not destroy compatibility with existing
"Moving Picture Experts Group" Version 1, Layer 3 audio files, nor will it stop piracy from people ripping. They are just making a digital rights management-enabled "Moving Picture Experts Group" Version 1, Layer 3 audio file format for online music stores to sell so that Fraunhofer can start getting the royalties it was trying to get in the first place when it started charging for the "Moving Picture Experts Group" Version 1, Layer 3 audio file format. Microsoft is getting loads of cash for licensing Windows Media Audio, and Apple is getting wads of greenies for licensing Advanced Audio Coding, Fraunhofer is just trying to get in the game. There will still be "Moving Picture Experts Group" Version 1, Layer 3 audio files without digital rights management, just like there are Advanced Audio Coding and Windows Media Audio files without digital rights management.
No, there's probably not anything that can do it for a block of 1000, at least not that I know of.
But, er... At least for 4-digit combos, just think of four letter words that start with "M," "N," or "O." (Or was the 6??? just a hypothetical example?)
It really wouldn't be too hard to think of what combinations of things work and don't work, especially if you separate the 3-3-4 digits. Like "qpz" isn't going to be occurring in any word.
I don't know. It wouldn't be hard to write a program that could spit it out for you, but it'd be a bit harder trying to sort out potential good ones from crap.
I agree with you about the protective casing, but not just to save myself from myself.
It's incredibly frustrating, many times, to watch a rental DVD. A scratch here, a smudge there, and you end up missing entire (and presumably important) scenes. DVDs were supposed to be much better than VHS, primarily for higher resolution, but also because the quality wouldn't degrade. And it doesn't, on its own. But you add the dozens of people who rented a movie before you and don't know how to handle a CD, and it quickly becomes far worse than VHS.
Now, obviously, the solution isn't educating people about how to properly handle disc-shaped digital media. The solution is preventing them from handling it in the first place. I think the caddy system would be the only way to go for rentals of the DVD-replacement. And because nobody wants to buy into a separate format for rentals (ie, Divx), it would only make sense for the non-rentals to have caddies, also.
I really can't think of anything disadvantageous about caddies. Is there a reason anybody needs to touch the actual disc? (Okay, I'm thinking some people might want to keep their DVD-replacements in organizers or something, but that's how they get scratched up. In that case, it might be less convenient to have caddies, but it'd be entirely worth it if it prevented scratches, wouldn't it?)
And it's not as though caddied DVD-replacements would take up extra room on store shelves or anything. Just make a caddy that can fit inside a standard DVD box. There's plenty of room there.
I'm sure it's already far too late for something like that to be incorporated into the next-generation format, but I think it'd be incredibly important in whatever format comes after that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the key word is "hits," as opposed to "falls in," or "lands in."
If you shoot an arrow, and the arrow "hits" the apple, you worry that something might have happened to the apple.
If you shoot an arrow, and it "lands in" the forest... -- You're probably not too concerned for the forest.
Maybe I'm just a stickler. -- I think it could be easily misunderstood, though.
For what the story is...
The headline sort of makes you think of a Cold-War Russian rocket attack.
At least, it made me think that. -- And I'd already heard about the story.
To me, it sounds more like they're trying set a precedent for using microwave weapons against US citizens, and they've just decided this is the nicest way of going about doing that.
Maybe I'm just paranoid. But it doesn't seem like a good idea.
One day, it will be used to quell a violent outburst from some crowd. And, from then on, it could be used to take away our right to assembly. As if tear gas and rubber bullets weren't enough.
I'm all about keeping a crowd under control, but we can't allow something that could be used to -control- us.
Exactly. Thank you.
Yes, I know it's blatantly obvious that you can record anything that has video out through a VCR or through a video capture card.
My whole point was that the author of the article should find that blatantly obvious, too, and that the idea of a "record function" is not based on fact, which is what a professional journalist is supposed to be reporting.
Right, but the point is that the author of the article states that there is some sort of "record function" for the Xbox, which is obviously not true.
I suppose it's possible if it's a modded Xbox, but, otherwise, I have no idea how they even got that idea. For an article on Machinima, you'd think they'd at least try to be accurate as to how the recording was done.
In Burns's house in Austin, Tex., they gather to `shoot' the episodes using the game console's record function.
Is my Xbox missing something, or is this a lovely little piece of misinformation?
Fair or not, the customer doesn't care about the reasons behind their sound card not working. They just want it to work.
/. geeks would give up having a working sound card just to follow their priniples, but those people are few and far between.
They don't care if the familiar OS that it actually works with is created by an evil, monopolistic company. Nor would they care that Linux is nice, open-source, and usually free, because 1) it's not familiar, and 2) their sound card doesn't work.
Sure, some hardcore
I can see your complaint, but Linux distro's aren't going to get "An A for Effort" just for trying to stand up to the big guy. They need to show results, rather then determination.
You're assuming that the consumers of pornography would otherwise be "normal" people if they weren't exposed to porn. The majority of people can look at porn without it becoming a problem. It is the minority who are affected, when "it undermines their relationships with others."
It's a big assumption to say that they are capable of having a normal relationship with others in the first place. Perhaps the reason they turn to porn is because they are, in fact, incapable. Porn is not the cause of problems, it is the effect.
And, similarly, taking it away doesn't fix those problems. In fact, if porn were made illegal, I think we'd see an increase in rapes and similar crimes -- from people who need other outlets for their sex drive.
Honestly, it's rather narrow-minded to believe that all people are "normal," and it's things like porn and drugs and alcohol that turn them into freaks. Of course the "normal" people can be content without porn and drugs and alcohol. They have good genes, they were raised right... They have what it takes to be happy, without needing vices to get them there.
Everybody else, though, needs certain things to help them through their struggles. If they need those things, then taking them away won't make their struggles any better, and would often make them worse.
So there's no benefit in going after porn. People who choose to view it do it for a reason. If they don't need porn to get them through life, fine. Nobody's forcing them to look at it. But if they do need it, then taking it away would be infringing upon their rights.
Remember: "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. "
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
I think most of the energy consumption does come from the processor itself, but you're correct in that laptops need to be thought of as completely different machines, and not simply miniture designs of power-hogging desktops.
Transmeta's Crusoe chip was, I believe, designed with the specific intent of being a mobile processor. I haven't really kept up with their progress, but it was an interesting niche to attempt to carve.
I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that Intel's mobile processors are simply versions of their desktop chips modified to consume less power and generate less heat. While both of those things are great, one would think there'd be more efficiency in creating a chip solely for mobile purposes.
Moore's law is an observation, not something that the industry is forced to follow. You can't just say "we need more efficiency - let's define a new Moore's law".
True. But I think Moore's law has been good in the sense that, instead of chip makers saying, "Oops, I guess we've reached our limit," they'll say, "Hm... There's got to be some way to do this," and they'll figure out how to get around their limitations.
Whereas without it they might give up (or at least not try as hard), Moore's law holds them to a consistent standard for the future, based on past experience.
Slashdot *did* post this on March 31rd, so if it is an April Fool's Day joke, it wasn't scheduled very well.
:)
Is that pronounced "thirty-fird?"
I could start a company, charge a monthly fee and hold monthly membership sweepstakes (only for people who were members last month of course...)
Heh... I'd like to start one of those. I'd get a bunch of people to subscribe, and tell them they're ineligible until the next month.
And then I'd take their money and run off before the next month came. "Oops!"
I hope this doesn't get modded down as redundant or off-topic, because it's a legitimate question, but I'm wondering how to view metadata.
I've seen stories about it before, but there wasn't anything interesting enough to make me want to check it out until now. I noticed Zalewski linked to wvware in his article, but I didn't really understand how to view metadata with it. I am also running a Satan-worshipping OS.
So really I'm just wondering if someone can tell me what program to use to view hidden data, or explain how to get wvware to do it?
Thanks.
I believe what was supposed to be interesting about the European Xbox announcement was that it was simply re-using one from the American Xbox release.
With the exact same quote, coming from two separate people, referring to two separate events at two separate times. (Fall 2001 vs. Early 2002.)
"Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer," referring to the American launch, and "Sandy Duncan, Vice President, Xbox Europe" referring to the European launch.
And, very likely, the words came from neither one of their mouths. (But, as people have said in other posts, the words were written ahead of time by the PR person, and the people being quoted agreed to "say" it.)
You see, though, (and this is waaay off-topic), people that took that intelligence with a grain of salt didn't believe it. It was only because people blindly followed it that we went to war on false intelligence.
So even if they admit now that it's false intelligence, it doesn't excuse them from believing it in the first place.
I don't want to support TV piracy, but if somebody missed the show and wants to see it, you can find it here or here. (File is approximately 172MB.)
I even saw a texturing problem when the mom was fighting the big rock monster at the end.
I noticed that texturing problem, too, but I think it may have been intentional. That's what my suspension of disbelief led me to believe, anyway.
The monster was so low-poly compared to everything else that it would either have to be intentional, or extremely unprofessional.
It did look cheesy, but I think (and hope) that it was meant to be like that. Since it was in her in-game world, I think the big scary low-poly rock monster was just for dramatic effect.
That is theoretically true in America, but IP and fair-use laws are different in Europe. It's a pretty bad situation to be in, but hopefully somebody here will know how to handle it.
Wow...
I'd call you a control freak, except I know that, essentially, that's the only way to be safe from viruses and spyware. It just seems like The Totalitarian's Guide to Home Computing or something.
(And then it makes me think of systems of government, and wonder whether giving people unlimited freedoms is a good thing or not. I'm all for it, in theory. But I see that, applied to computing, the consequences are things like viruses. There really are people that need to be protected from themselves... or at least protected from malicious behavior by others that can be activated by themselves.)
But back more-or-less to the topic, what is the proper way to protect? Set up some sort of terminal that can only execute approved programs, that doesn't install plug-ins, that only downloads updates from an official source...
Will this be the future of Windows someday?
Hey, how's this for clarity?: Be careful what you wish for.
No, there's probably not anything that can do it for a block of 1000, at least not that I know of.
But, er... At least for 4-digit combos, just think of four letter words that start with "M," "N," or "O." (Or was the 6??? just a hypothetical example?)
It really wouldn't be too hard to think of what combinations of things work and don't work, especially if you separate the 3-3-4 digits. Like "qpz" isn't going to be occurring in any word.
I don't know. It wouldn't be hard to write a program that could spit it out for you, but it'd be a bit harder trying to sort out potential good ones from crap.
Google says: Pajama Slave Dancers.
What?
I just found out my number is 1-CLEAR-TAUNT.
Pretty cool. Clearly, I can taunt someone.
It's either that, or 1-ALE-AQUA-TOT.
I think I'm going to start telling people these instead of giving out my number.
I agree with you about the protective casing, but not just to save myself from myself.
It's incredibly frustrating, many times, to watch a rental DVD. A scratch here, a smudge there, and you end up missing entire (and presumably important) scenes. DVDs were supposed to be much better than VHS, primarily for higher resolution, but also because the quality wouldn't degrade. And it doesn't, on its own. But you add the dozens of people who rented a movie before you and don't know how to handle a CD, and it quickly becomes far worse than VHS.
Now, obviously, the solution isn't educating people about how to properly handle disc-shaped digital media. The solution is preventing them from handling it in the first place. I think the caddy system would be the only way to go for rentals of the DVD-replacement. And because nobody wants to buy into a separate format for rentals (ie, Divx), it would only make sense for the non-rentals to have caddies, also.
I really can't think of anything disadvantageous about caddies. Is there a reason anybody needs to touch the actual disc? (Okay, I'm thinking some people might want to keep their DVD-replacements in organizers or something, but that's how they get scratched up. In that case, it might be less convenient to have caddies, but it'd be entirely worth it if it prevented scratches, wouldn't it?)
And it's not as though caddied DVD-replacements would take up extra room on store shelves or anything. Just make a caddy that can fit inside a standard DVD box. There's plenty of room there.
I'm sure it's already far too late for something like that to be incorporated into the next-generation format, but I think it'd be incredibly important in whatever format comes after that.