Yeah, but it's Linux; the virus is going to be a mass of outdated shell scripts that don't work on your distro, and C code that won't compile with your version of gcc.;-)
Seriously. I've read a bunch of factually-incorrect stuff on arXiv -- e.g., stuff contradicting well-known results from optimal control. I was lucky that I knew it was wrong.
A logically wrong argument is wrong regardless of whether its result benefits the people we personally like. I wish people on both sides of the aisle would recognize this simple fact.
I remember reading a whole bunch on this a while back -- on the web somewhere, perhaps even on Wikipedia. Anyway, now I can't find the same sites, but I may have found something better. You might want to check out this book. The key bit to look for in this or any other source would be pretty much anything to do with Maupertuis. I think I remember reading about intellectual predecessors even to him, who would perhaps give a yet tighter link to Christian theology, but I can't seem to remember or find much on them now...
The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is.
Does it need one? I feel like hierarchy solves this problem. Have a broad encyclopedic article on a subject, and then, if people really feel like reading some of the technical details, go to a more detailed article. This is already happening with many of the more technical articles, and I think it works rather well. I even feel like it's fine for "silly" pop-culture stuff as well. Obviously you wouldn't put the entire list of Battlestar Galactica episodes, with plot summaries, in the article titled "Television" or "Science Fiction" -- and perhaps not even in the main "Battlestar Galactica" article -- but it hurts nobody to have it as its own page, linked to from some more general article. And for some people the information it provides will be useful. That's the brilliant thing about Wikipedia: It doesn't need to fit on a shelf.
Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed. Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of the world.
I think this is a modern distinction. Even methods like Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics -- which began with the idea that some kind of "action" is minimized* by what Nature (/God) does -- were in fact heavily motivated by mystical and religious ideas.
(* It turns out that, in retrospect, nothing is minimized at all; the action is merely stationary [think: max/min/saddle-point]. But that wasn't the motivating idea.)
All the ideas that you criticize, QuoteMstr, you criticize rightly (I believe). And I agree with your critique of giving equal weight to opposing viewpoints a la "fair and balanced" Fox news.
However, I think it's entirely possible -- probable even, maybe -- that sycodon wasn't referring to economic policy, or even public policy at all. In person some of the most bigoted people I've met have been "open minded liberals;" these were people I went to college with. The sheer unrepentant racist shit they spewed was completely unacceptable. Nothing infuriated me more than listening to the globetrotting credit-card-spending children of upper-middle-class doctors rant angrily about white people and their money and privilege without a hint of irony. I'm pretty sure these were the most "liberal" people you could meet. But damn it if they weren't militant, closed-minded, arrogant bigots anyway.
Obviously it won't create great art. Hell, it won't even create songs that I'd call decent. But what do you expect? It's like expecting the Photoshop painterize filter to spontaneously generate the Mona Lisa. For the most part, this thing is a toy, and I think it's an interesting novelty with some nontrivial programming behind it. So I have no intention of ripping on a CS guy just because Microsoft pays his salary. And as for "destroying music" -- well, real musicians will keep doing what real musicians do; in that context this simply doesn't matter.
I have neither a Zune nor an iPod. So I might not know what I'm talking about. But on the other hand, I don't think I have any entrenched bias. And I've done a little googling. So take this reply in that context.
My understanding is that most of the restrictive Zune DRM has to do with the WiFi "squirt" feature. (Obviously this crippled what could have been the Zune's killer feature.) But iPods have no wifi at all; it seems silly to argue that iTunes DRM is less restrictive because it does not prevent you from doing things you couldn't do anyway.
As for moving music around, in some ways the Zune seems better. Music goes onto the iPod and never flows in the other direction. By contrast, you can move non-DRMed files from the Zune back onto your hard drive.
The burn-rip argument I dislike because (1) it degrades quality and (2) consumes media. More, it's nearly* just an application of the Analog Hole (I say "nearly" because CDs are digital. But you're still transcoding between lossy formats, which degrades quality), which of course exists for any device -- Zune, iPod, or some hypothetical completely-and-utterly locked-down player. But that said, it seems that you can burn CDs from WMAs from Microsoft's store too (Caveat: An option exists in WMA files to prevent users from burning them to CD. But it appears not to be in use anywhere.)
So I'm not seeing a clear win for Apple in DRM here.
But I think the most fundamental argument is: It sounds like you're saying Apple has "good DRM." Can such a thing exist?
Actually, C != C++ is a correct C-language expression which returns the logical value of the statement "the value of the variable C is different from the value of the variable C, after C has been incremented". If C is an integer, this expression will return obviously zero or false.
That's what I thought at first too. But what you get actually depends on whether you evaluate the left side or the right side of the expression first -- which I guess C doesn't specify. For this example, suppose C=10 before we evaluate this.
Left side first
C != C++
10 != C++
10 != 10 (Side effect: C=11)
false
Right side first
C != C++
C != 10 (Side effect: C=11)
11 != 10
true
We might be able to get consistent behavior out of C by enforcing a single evaluation order, but I guess this isn't in the standard. And presumably it might restrict compilers' ability to optimize.
Certainly bad of Microsoft. But Apple did it too -- and people didn't complain half as much. Why? Simply, I think, because they aren't used to thinking of Apple as "evil." Silly manipulable consumers.
The whole point of this exploit is that the malicious Javascript isn't on the banking site but on another site open in another tab or browser window. E.g., suppose you have your bank's page open in one tab and Slashdot open in another, and Slashdot loads third-party ads.
No, it is not *required*. Get your facts right. I've got Verizon DSL
Me to, and you're right; it's not required. But they tell you that it is. You and I may say to ourselves, "Stupid Verizon; I know better." But Jane average? She'll just follow instructions. And if Step 1 says "You have to insert the CD," well, when she inserts the CD and it doesn't work, she'll give up.
I blame Verizon -- for insisting that you need to install an assload of proprietary crap on your machine to get "The Internet." She was just following their instructions.
Internet access is a goddamn utility. The electricity company has no right to tell clueless people that they need to use special light bulbs before they can plug in their lamps; Verizon has no right to insist that people install their bullshit software so they can access the Internet.
No, here's what they should do: Give people an index card or a brochure, or a simple fucking piece of paper with the following instructions on it:
1 - Plug the ethernet cable into the computer at one end and the router at the other.
2 - Go to webmail.verizon.com to access your email.
* Additional, more advanced technical instructions can be found at www.verizon.net/somethingsomething
That's it. 99% of people will be satisfied by this index card. The other 1% who want to configure Thunderbird will look at the asterisk and go to the online instructions.
Internet access is a utility; it is not a software package. I swear we're still fighting the ghosts of Compuserve and AOL.
"Command economies and totalitarian ideologies seem to be good at the brute-force, metal-bashing, rule-of-thumb kind of engineering, but not stuff requiring higher levels of precision."
Like say launching rockets into orbit.
I was going to say! The Soviets controls community was really incredibly badass (and they had journals with wonderful names like "Kybernetica"). They must have also had some really good aeronautical engineers, because they put out some insane fighter jets too. All of this is pretty much the definition of high-precision. And while we're on the subject of "totalitarian ideologies" and "higher levels of precision," I should probably bring up Hitler's Germany. Y'know, the country that the U.S. got a lot of its postwar scientific big names (like Von Braun) from.
Recent versions of VLC have left me very disappointed. Video quality is just bad; VLC isn't even doing decent upsampling (I just get nearest neighbor!). Plus performance is abysmal on Linux. Hence, I have switched allegiances and now use SMPlayer* on both my Linux and Windows machines. SMPlayer has better video quality, a nicer GUI, and proper subtitle support. There is a codec pack to download, but installation is trivial.
(* It's really just a nice frontend for MPlayer.)
It's a pity, because VLC can do a bunch of awesome network streaming stuff. Sometimes I get the feeling that VLC's mission isn't very clear. There was a time when it set out to be something more interesting than just another movie player.
It seems that xpaddr converts gamepad button presses to keystrokes, and autohotkey is used to send those keystrokes to the correct windows. These guys have gotten this much working. Yet although dual-mouse drivers exist, I have not found people who have gotten two mice working independently in different instances of the game. That said, if you're content with using a gamepad instead of a mouse, this seems to work.
It'd be nice if this mishmash of different software could be bundled together as a single "play games splitscreen" program -- which one could imagine also doing other things, like stripping game windows of borders and decorations, and aligning them all to precisely fill the screen automatically.
A completely different approach would be to use the split-screen desktop software that Microsoft should be releasing before too long, which should (hopefully) make this easy.
Finally, in all of this I haven't considered tricks with Wine and Linux; I assume that some things (like multiple mice) might be easier in such a framework. But I think that for games, a Windows-based approach is probably, if we're honest and not too ideological, much more practical.
These guys had the same idea. In the discussion beneath the video, they talk about using programs called "xpadder" and "autohotkey" to control both windows simultaneously. From the sounds of things, this is a promising approach, but people haven't invested a lot of time into figuring out these program's scripting languages in order to make this work.
A modern PC* can handily run four instances of Quake 3 at 80+ FPS. And yes, one instance can host a game and the others can connect to localhost. The only issue is control: I suspect that you can only control whichever instance has focus. But I wouldn't be surprised if a program could be written to send the appropriate messages to the different windows.
* Tested on a Thinkpad T61 w. nVidia Quadro NVS 140M and Core 2 Duo at 2.2 GHz.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it's Linux; the virus is going to be a mass of outdated shell scripts that don't work on your distro, and C code that won't compile with your version of gcc. ;-)
Seriously. I've read a bunch of factually-incorrect stuff on arXiv -- e.g., stuff contradicting well-known results from optimal control. I was lucky that I knew it was wrong.
peer reviewed
lol. Peer review. If you don't tell the proles that it hardly means anything these days, I won't....
[/cynicism]
A logically wrong argument is wrong regardless of whether its result benefits the people we personally like. I wish people on both sides of the aisle would recognize this simple fact.
Hear, hear. If only!
I remember reading a whole bunch on this a while back -- on the web somewhere, perhaps even on Wikipedia. Anyway, now I can't find the same sites, but I may have found something better. You might want to check out this book. The key bit to look for in this or any other source would be pretty much anything to do with Maupertuis. I think I remember reading about intellectual predecessors even to him, who would perhaps give a yet tighter link to Christian theology, but I can't seem to remember or find much on them now...
The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is.
Does it need one? I feel like hierarchy solves this problem. Have a broad encyclopedic article on a subject, and then, if people really feel like reading some of the technical details, go to a more detailed article. This is already happening with many of the more technical articles, and I think it works rather well. I even feel like it's fine for "silly" pop-culture stuff as well. Obviously you wouldn't put the entire list of Battlestar Galactica episodes, with plot summaries, in the article titled "Television" or "Science Fiction" -- and perhaps not even in the main "Battlestar Galactica" article -- but it hurts nobody to have it as its own page, linked to from some more general article. And for some people the information it provides will be useful. That's the brilliant thing about Wikipedia: It doesn't need to fit on a shelf.
Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed. Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of the world.
I think this is a modern distinction. Even methods like Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics -- which began with the idea that some kind of "action" is minimized* by what Nature (/God) does -- were in fact heavily motivated by mystical and religious ideas.
(* It turns out that, in retrospect, nothing is minimized at all; the action is merely stationary [think: max/min/saddle-point]. But that wasn't the motivating idea.)
All the ideas that you criticize, QuoteMstr, you criticize rightly (I believe). And I agree with your critique of giving equal weight to opposing viewpoints a la "fair and balanced" Fox news.
However, I think it's entirely possible -- probable even, maybe -- that sycodon wasn't referring to economic policy, or even public policy at all. In person some of the most bigoted people I've met have been "open minded liberals;" these were people I went to college with. The sheer unrepentant racist shit they spewed was completely unacceptable. Nothing infuriated me more than listening to the globetrotting credit-card-spending children of upper-middle-class doctors rant angrily about white people and their money and privilege without a hint of irony. I'm pretty sure these were the most "liberal" people you could meet. But damn it if they weren't militant, closed-minded, arrogant bigots anyway.
...people wouldn't be ripping on it.
Obviously it won't create great art. Hell, it won't even create songs that I'd call decent. But what do you expect? It's like expecting the Photoshop painterize filter to spontaneously generate the Mona Lisa. For the most part, this thing is a toy, and I think it's an interesting novelty with some nontrivial programming behind it. So I have no intention of ripping on a CS guy just because Microsoft pays his salary. And as for "destroying music" -- well, real musicians will keep doing what real musicians do; in that context this simply doesn't matter.
I have neither a Zune nor an iPod. So I might not know what I'm talking about. But on the other hand, I don't think I have any entrenched bias. And I've done a little googling. So take this reply in that context.
My understanding is that most of the restrictive Zune DRM has to do with the WiFi "squirt" feature. (Obviously this crippled what could have been the Zune's killer feature.) But iPods have no wifi at all; it seems silly to argue that iTunes DRM is less restrictive because it does not prevent you from doing things you couldn't do anyway.
As for moving music around, in some ways the Zune seems better. Music goes onto the iPod and never flows in the other direction. By contrast, you can move non-DRMed files from the Zune back onto your hard drive.
The burn-rip argument I dislike because (1) it degrades quality and (2) consumes media. More, it's nearly* just an application of the Analog Hole (I say "nearly" because CDs are digital. But you're still transcoding between lossy formats, which degrades quality), which of course exists for any device -- Zune, iPod, or some hypothetical completely-and-utterly locked-down player. But that said, it seems that you can burn CDs from WMAs from Microsoft's store too (Caveat: An option exists in WMA files to prevent users from burning them to CD. But it appears not to be in use anywhere.)
So I'm not seeing a clear win for Apple in DRM here.
But I think the most fundamental argument is: It sounds like you're saying Apple has "good DRM." Can such a thing exist?
Actually, C != C++ is a correct C-language expression which returns the logical value of the statement "the value of the variable C is different from the value of the variable C, after C has been incremented". If C is an integer, this expression will return obviously zero or false.
That's what I thought at first too. But what you get actually depends on whether you evaluate the left side or the right side of the expression first -- which I guess C doesn't specify. For this example, suppose C=10 before we evaluate this.
Left side first
C != C++
10 != C++
10 != 10 (Side effect: C=11)
false
Right side first
C != C++
C != 10 (Side effect: C=11)
11 != 10
true
We might be able to get consistent behavior out of C by enforcing a single evaluation order, but I guess this isn't in the standard. And presumably it might restrict compilers' ability to optimize.
The use of DRM.
Certainly bad of Microsoft. But Apple did it too -- and people didn't complain half as much. Why? Simply, I think, because they aren't used to thinking of Apple as "evil." Silly manipulable consumers.
The whole point of this exploit is that the malicious Javascript isn't on the banking site but on another site open in another tab or browser window. E.g., suppose you have your bank's page open in one tab and Slashdot open in another, and Slashdot loads third-party ads.
Perhaps a wizard hat?
No, it is not *required*. Get your facts right. I've got Verizon DSL
Me to, and you're right; it's not required. But they tell you that it is. You and I may say to ourselves, "Stupid Verizon; I know better." But Jane average? She'll just follow instructions. And if Step 1 says "You have to insert the CD," well, when she inserts the CD and it doesn't work, she'll give up.
I blame Verizon -- for insisting that you need to install an assload of proprietary crap on your machine to get "The Internet." She was just following their instructions.
Internet access is a goddamn utility. The electricity company has no right to tell clueless people that they need to use special light bulbs before they can plug in their lamps; Verizon has no right to insist that people install their bullshit software so they can access the Internet.
No, here's what they should do: Give people an index card or a brochure, or a simple fucking piece of paper with the following instructions on it:
1 - Plug the ethernet cable into the computer at one end and the router at the other.
2 - Go to webmail.verizon.com to access your email.
* Additional, more advanced technical instructions can be found at www.verizon.net/somethingsomething
That's it. 99% of people will be satisfied by this index card. The other 1% who want to configure Thunderbird will look at the asterisk and go to the online instructions.
Internet access is a utility; it is not a software package. I swear we're still fighting the ghosts of Compuserve and AOL.
"Command economies and totalitarian ideologies seem to be good at the brute-force, metal-bashing, rule-of-thumb kind of engineering, but not stuff requiring higher levels of precision." Like say launching rockets into orbit.
I was going to say! The Soviets controls community was really incredibly badass (and they had journals with wonderful names like "Kybernetica"). They must have also had some really good aeronautical engineers, because they put out some insane fighter jets too. All of this is pretty much the definition of high-precision. And while we're on the subject of "totalitarian ideologies" and "higher levels of precision," I should probably bring up Hitler's Germany. Y'know, the country that the U.S. got a lot of its postwar scientific big names (like Von Braun) from.
For anybody who's interested: The old 0.8.6i release of VLC is good. Hopefully 1.0.0 will be of this quality or better.
Recent versions of VLC have left me very disappointed. Video quality is just bad; VLC isn't even doing decent upsampling (I just get nearest neighbor!). Plus performance is abysmal on Linux. Hence, I have switched allegiances and now use SMPlayer* on both my Linux and Windows machines. SMPlayer has better video quality, a nicer GUI, and proper subtitle support. There is a codec pack to download, but installation is trivial.
(* It's really just a nice frontend for MPlayer.)
It's a pity, because VLC can do a bunch of awesome network streaming stuff. Sometimes I get the feeling that VLC's mission isn't very clear. There was a time when it set out to be something more interesting than just another movie player.
f(x) = x*(x+1)/2
My algorithm runs in O(1) time. Gauss FTW!
(But yes, the loop version is the first thing I program, after "Hello World," whenever I look at an unfamiliar language.)
It's not like James Bond where the wings fold out electrically
Actually, from TFA, it is... The wings are actuated electromechanically; you just push a button in the cockpit.
Followup 4:
Another approach would be to set up a Xephyr multiterminal and run an instance of the game in each with Wine.
Followup 3:
It seems that xpaddr converts gamepad button presses to keystrokes, and autohotkey is used to send those keystrokes to the correct windows. These guys have gotten this much working. Yet although dual-mouse drivers exist, I have not found people who have gotten two mice working independently in different instances of the game. That said, if you're content with using a gamepad instead of a mouse, this seems to work.
It'd be nice if this mishmash of different software could be bundled together as a single "play games splitscreen" program -- which one could imagine also doing other things, like stripping game windows of borders and decorations, and aligning them all to precisely fill the screen automatically.
A completely different approach would be to use the split-screen desktop software that Microsoft should be releasing before too long, which should (hopefully) make this easy.
Finally, in all of this I haven't considered tricks with Wine and Linux; I assume that some things (like multiple mice) might be easier in such a framework. But I think that for games, a Windows-based approach is probably, if we're honest and not too ideological, much more practical.
Followup 2:
These guys had the same idea. In the discussion beneath the video, they talk about using programs called "xpadder" and "autohotkey" to control both windows simultaneously. From the sounds of things, this is a promising approach, but people haven't invested a lot of time into figuring out these program's scripting languages in order to make this work.
Followup:
A modern PC* can handily run four instances of Quake 3 at 80+ FPS. And yes, one instance can host a game and the others can connect to localhost. The only issue is control: I suspect that you can only control whichever instance has focus. But I wouldn't be surprised if a program could be written to send the appropriate messages to the different windows.
* Tested on a Thinkpad T61 w. nVidia Quadro NVS 140M and Core 2 Duo at 2.2 GHz.