So he blogged that he heard that AT&T might sue him to stop the talk, AT&T deny the rumour, it makes headlines.
To be honest, the first think I thought when I read his blog entry was "scapegoat". Maybe he realized his hack doesn't work quite right, or is flawed in some other way and wants an easy way out of giving the presentation? Claiming worry about a big lawsuit sounds pretty good for that.
I'm betting at this point that AT&T came forward because they:
1) Want to make sure he can't use them as an excuse, and 2) They really want to know (probably more than most people) if the hack really works.
I can easily see some top-level AT&T execs (and other providers probably) asking their technical people if such a hack is possible. After getting a bunch of "no, sir, it's impossible!" all around, they're likely eager to see if their tech people really know their stuff or were just blowing sunshine up their butts.
Providers themselves are probably the last group that would stop such a presentation. The FBI on the other hand, they might be first in line.
It feels like a rock solid piece of software. Yet judging from this discussion, it has a reputation for being flaky...?
I'm pretty sure it's a case of RealPlayer syndrome.
For years and years RealPlayer earned a special corner of hatred for many sysadmins. It was a pioneer in broken crapware and users who installed it deserved to be shunned if not verbally abused. Now, years later, it doesn't matter if RealPlayer has utterly mended its ways and is the best software out there -- for many experienced administrators it remains the spawn of an infested pool of the lowest scum and has no business being installed anywhere.
Eclipse is in much the same boat. I tried using it years ago and had nothing but problems with crashing, memory usage, deleting files, etc. For those reasons and more besides I avoided it outright and advised everyone who asked to do the same. However, about a year ago, I had to use it for a huge collaborative Java project and I found, much to my surprise and delight, that it has since become a very solid and well-designed IDE. It even has some simple yet useful features I wish Visual Studio (my normal world) would copy.
But they hardly needed to study games to figure this out. Go talk to people who are politically extreme and the validity of this theory will be obvious (Marxists and neo-cons, for example).
They aren't looking at extremely polar relationships like between a rabbi and a Nazi. It looks like it's more of a "once removed" relationship -- for example, "the friend of my enemy is my enemy". It is these kinds of relationships that have long been expected to be more stable when you consider a large social system. As they say in TFA:
Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where 'the friend of my enemy is my enemy' is more stable (and therefore more common) than 'the friend of my friend is my enemy'
They have an interesting picture as well but I wonder what a much larger picture showing various groups would look like. I'd almost expect it to be a kind of fractal with small groups linking to other groups by only a relatively few links, and then the superset of those groups linking to other supersets...
It makes sense, but it's always nice to see some evidence, even for "common sense" things. I suppose that's at least one good thing that's come from MMOs -- they consist of huge social networks which exist in a medium which allows for easy analysis of player inter-relationships and anything else of statistical interest.
Playing in network environments not hooked up to the Internet much?
Wow, fanboy much?
The simple fact is that there are MANY times and places where LAN support is very helpful, if not outright required. Several other posters have enumerated the latter, but for the former, you need to consider scale.
Sure, if you have 4-6 people playing then maybe going over the Internet to Battle.net is an okay (if lame) solution. What about a group of 20? 50? 200? Blizzard has repeatedly said they want Starcraft II to be a serious e-sport contender, both in Asia and in the US/Europe. During the beta, people trying to organize big LAN-style game sessions have noted that their plans completely fell apart when they discovered that Battle.net limited the number of players per IP address to 12. This might have changed, but the fact that they instituted any limit should be telling.
To pull this off, they will be required to implement some form of LAN play, something they've already said they will do:
"We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that."
Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.
I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard:(
Microsoft couldn't get basic speech to text to work reliably
For what it's worth, the issues with Vista's STT demonstration were explained pretty soon after the incident. Given the nature of the problems, most people at the time anticipated a training/hardware issue. Of course, that doesn't change how funny it was:)
As it happens, Vista and Win7's voice recognition is actually pretty good for software bundled with the OS.
I'm guessing that most of the intelligent, technically knowledgeable people have left Microsoft. So now non-technical employees are pretending to run a technological company.
Filing for patents like this has absolutely nothing to do with technical people. What probably happened is something like:
1. Engineer designs cool interface with gestures and page animations 2. He shows his project manager neat interface 3. Project manager like it, sends it up the chain to see what higher ups think 4. VP over section likes the idea, sends it to legal (like everything else) to make sure it won't be a problem 5. Legal drone sees no prior patent filings for the interface idea. Sends idea to his boss. 6. Legal over-drone notes no existing patents and thus automatically files a patent for the interface idea. 7. ??? 8. Profit!
The software patents filed by a company have little or no bearing on the quality of the engineers working there.
One indication that the smart people have left is when a company brings out a new version of software, and the big change is in the menus. Menu changes are something people who don't care about technology can do.
(The Microsoft Vista operating system was, it is said, not a failure, but an intentional method of getting people to pay for two operating systems, by deliberately releasing an unfinished one.)
Said by somebody who almost certainly never even ran Vista. Vista's real problems were:
Hardware companies didn't want to adopt the new driver model (which they had years to plan for). Instead they released half-assed drivers, in part to make Microsoft look bad (for creating work for them).
The huge amount of third-party software available for Windows was filled with poorly-designed programs that required users to be administrators. Microsoft pushed UAC and limited-user rights to try and get this to start changing. There was absolutely no way to make this any easier on people than they did.
Vista did have higher hardware requirements than XP, and people were installing it expecting it to run well on their 256MB of RAM and Pentium 3. The "designed for Vista" logo/sticker just made things worse (and honestly, I think this is the biggest place Microsoft screwed up Vista. They should have been much clearer with regards to hardware requirements).
The way software patents work right now is every company is trying to get as many as possible. It's basically the Cold War all over again, except instead of nuclear weapons it's software patents. Microsoft is doing it for the same reasons Google, Apple, Palm, etc are: Mutual Assured Destruction.
Millions of people put peanutbutter on their bread. Millions of other people put jelly on their bread. But it takes a genius to think of combining these things, and should therefore be reasonably compensated for their services to mankind.
it was an iphone app long before it was an android app
What does it matter that it was on the iPhone before Android? It's hardly surprising, considering the iPhone was released years before the Droid. I admit there hasn't been the usual heavy complement of Apple stories today, but that doesn't mean you have to start looking for ways to create them from unrelated articles. In any case, this has almost nothing to do with any platform, except that the author wrote the code in Java so as to run it on Android.
Back on-topic, the author has posted an update which talks about the alleged patent infringment and includes the notices sent by the company. Classically, they hesitate to give actual patent numbers, but what it really comes down to is this: As the author says,
I've written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. [...] I'm just a programmer who likes to work on technical, mathematical algorithms in his spare time. And if enough people ask for the source code, I'd be happy to give it to them. Who would have thought that creating something at home in a weekend could result in a possible patent infringement!?
But oh, no! Landmark claims
Landmark Digital Services owns the patents that cover the algorithm used as the basis for your recently posted "Creating Shazam In Java".
Well butter my biscuit and call me Daisy! Case closed! After all, they have a patent on "the algorithm". To be fair, the biggest instigator of this entire fiasco is probably his choice of using the commercial software's name in the article title. Going just by "Creating Shazam In Java", you might at first think he's attempting to completely re-create the software (for who knows what purpose). Of course, if you bother to read even the first few paragraphs it painfully clear that it's nothing of the sort. But because of this,
The code isn't published yet, but I was planning on releasing it under Apache License to the open source community soon. [...] Since I don't want to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov, with the possibility of a lawsuit, I'm not going to publish the code anymore...
If crap like this continues, independent software development in general (including a large chunk of FOSS) is doomed.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe he could point out that in-game grief has resulted in the deaths of real people? Everyone knows kdawson has (serious) editing flaws, but it doesn't require any "spin" to make this look like a terrible decision on Blizzard's part.
Many people were upset with regards to Real ID on the Starcraft 2 forums during the previous phase of the beta [1] [2]. Of course, most people are not happy with the general direction Blizzard is taking Battle.net -- automatic Facebook integration, Real ID, and now this. I should be able to play an online game without telling everybody who I am and where I live. The best part of this whole thing is that Blizzard has given absolutely no justification for this incredible erosion of privacy and anonymity. All they do is babble buzzwords about "social network integration".
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. For most people, the Internet is not one of those places.
I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.
Of course they are, which is to be expected since this whole exercise is nothing more than registrars grabbing at cash.
The sad part is all the uninformed idiots posting here who support the idea -- if even a fair number of Slashdot posters still don't understand why this is such a horrible idea then it's no wonder ICANN caved. On the one hand, they look good to the morons who have been pushing for this stupid idea for years, and on the other they were probably bribed with a huge amount money. Win win!
For those wondering why.xxx is a terrible idea that is completely doomed to fail (at all the "official" goals at least, it will certainly succeed as the gravy train it's designed to be), read RFC 3675:.sex Considered Dangerous. It has all the same arguments being presented here, plus more.
I'll put in a plug for my favorite extension here: TreeStyleTab.
Interesting, I might have to give that a try.
When I surf, inevitably one thing leads to another thing, which leads to a site which leads to six more things. So I middle-click almost every link, and it all gets organized into a hierarchical history.
I usually break into multiple Firefox windows when I start having multiple disparate browsing sessions take place. I'll have a window for personal stuff (mail, Slashdot), a window for all the documentation I've got open, and maybe a third window for miscellaneous things.
The other thing I've really liked using is Session Manager because it makes saving these sessions really easy. I have around a dozen saved sessions related to various research projects I've worked on. Need to remember all the pages I referenced when looking at options for authenticating Linux off Active Directory? Just load the session of 20 tabs into a new window. It also makes restoring crashed sessions and whatnot a lot more flexible.
My problem is that I kind of hate the Internet with NoScript.
You might take a look at YesScript (a JavaScript blacklisting plugin sans all the extra protection crud in NoScript). If you use it in conjunction with AdBlock+subscriptions you'll probably block quite a bit.
That said, I like NoScript in general because of just how much faster most sites are with their scripts disabled. It does get annoying though, as more and more sites are completely non-navigable without scripts enabled.
This, this, this, this, this. The terrible user interface responsiveness of Firefox is what kept me on IE for the longest time (and I only moved because of addons, not because Firefox itself is any better).
For a good test, open a Slashdot story with ~1000 comments and watch as the browser just stops dead in the water for 5-15 seconds while it renders the page. You can also try opening the browser when you have 10 or more tabs saved in your session. Again, the entire interface is useless while the pages are rendering. If the browser really is multithreaded in any meaningful fashion, then the rendering threads obviously have a priority higher than the UI, which seems like a bad thing.
I'd rather have this improved than move plugins into an external process. Since I started using NoScript I haven't had Firefox crash because of Flash. Ever. However, I still read Slashdot so I do deal with the lagging on a regular basis.
Geez, some serious failure there on my part. I misread two words and my entire post is crap. Teach me to post at 2am with 4 hours of sleep...
That said, there is still some congruency. Google indexes information that people make available copyrighted or not, but torrent trackers do the same thing. Going after trackers instead of the people uploading the copyrighted material is the same as going after Google for indexing something copyrighted. In both cases they are attacking the wrong party.
People who follow the search results ALSO get authorized copies.
Well, I don't know if all that really applies in this case (Google does own YouTube, for example), but what you describe there sounds an awful lot like torrents.
The Pirate Bay does not host matieral it tracks.
Material it tracks is offered publicly.
People who download the torrents ALSO get authorized copies.
Yep, pretty much the same. We've seen how well that defense has worked for torrent trackers -- how long until the **AA's starts taking search engines to court for helping people find copyrighted material? If anyone has the finances to pull Google/Yahoo/Microsoft into court it's the RIAA and MPAA. Talk about the death of meaningful search engines.
I think it's exellent that the app does not alter the *original files* as the default setting.
How many people do you really think want transformations like rotations only applied as metadata in some unknown database someplace? When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image. If she uses Windows' interface to print the photo or emails it to a friend, it is the rotated image she cares about.
Not only that, but if you are backing up your photos to an external source like a good user, imagine the frustration when years of transformations, edits, tags, etc are all lost when you recover from a failed hard drive using your backup. You did everything right, but because you didn't include some hidden little.dat file buried in your profile as part of the backup you lost hundreds of hours of work.
Modifications to the files should be applied to the files. Metadata should be stored in the files. To do either otherwise is asking for problems.
Words are just words, they have as much or as little meaning as the person saying them wishes to express.
That said, having somebody say "how's it going?" as you quickly walk past them does annoy me. Why bother saying something like that if you're never going to hear an answer? I usually will just nod or say hello instead of asking an obviously empty question like that.
Security is NOT about patching holes, a system must be designed from the ground up to be secure. Doze and it's predecessors were NEVER designed this way.
Is that why Ubuntu 8.04 prompts me to install some hundred or more security updates after installing it? No software is perfect and anyone who thinks that the only secure system is on that is "designed from the ground up to be secure" either A) has never worked on a large software project and/or B) doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.
What is so fundamentally more secure from a design perspective about the Linux kernel compared with the WinNT kernel? How about a distribution like Ubuntu compared with Windows XP/Vista/7? Since one was "designed from the ground up to be secure" I sure hope you can point out a few design choices specifically.
Since all software (even the Linux kernel and its ilk) have security holes, the ability and speed at which you discover the exploits and issue fixes for them is at least as important as the initial design and coding of the program. It's naive and obtuse to think any complex system will be perfect from the get-go.
What in the world does alleged lying have to do with empathy? Poor performance of the intelligence community hardly seems relevant, but at least you're making your bias clear from the get go I suppose.
the lies about drugs
Which lies? That they often unhealthy (both legal and illegal ones), that they're unnecessary and even counter-productive to live a happy and productive life? Or some other lies?
people telling you that is perfectly normal to own a gun
What is abnormal about owning a gun? Of course, if you're hopped up on drugs you probably shouldn't own a weapon.
that it is normal to shoot at someone just for trespassing/burglary
I see, maybe we should punish them with love instead? Breaking into someone's home is akin to invading another country. All bets are off when it comes to protecting family and property. If you come into my home with violent intent, just how much violence is too much? Baseball bat? Knife? Gun? Should I just ask you to leave nicely and hand over my wallet if you won't?
That is cool to join the army and fuck up another sorry son of a bitch that you had absolutely no conflict with
That's kind of the definition of war. How many Nazis did WWII soldiers have personal conflicts with?
The people who are selfish are the people that drive the ferrari's around at wallstreet
Being wealthy and choosing how you want to spend your wealth is selfish?
They are being held up as icons by a complete generation
People on Wall Street are about as far from an "icon" for young people as is possible.
No I am not surprised. Just very worried.
No reason to be, I doubt humans are less empathetic in general now than ever before, only that people are more honest about it now. I imagine this might be from a certain amount of the GIFT extending from online communities into real-world interactions. We've gone from interacting only with a small local community to dealing with thousands/millions of people online plus our local community. It's harder to feel empathy with so many anonymous people communicating only with text so it isn't too surprising that some apathetic feelings creep in.
When you're actually dealing with somebody sitting in front of you, face-to-face, I think most people would exhibit a higher level of empathy.
It's a method that is bound to gain enormous complexity - as it has - as the definition of "income" is stretched and mutilated by the government.
Actually it seems like the idea of income taxes is incredibly straightforward. Any "income" (easily definable as any wealth you receive) is taxable at a certain rate.
Complexity comes from tax deductions and tax breaks, not the taxes themselves. The sheer number of tax deductions and various rules you can use to reduce your taxable income is crazy. If you drive a blue car on Tuesdays and Fridays but never on Wednesday and you have at least 4 children (but not more than 7) then you're eligible to get a $500 deduction for the Nancy Drew Blue Family Living Credit.
I agree that the system could be simpler, but for many people with simple incomes, it already is pretty dang simple (single 1040, maybe a 1099-INT for bank interest). It's when you have a large income and/or from many sources that it gets complex, and again, almost entirely due to tax breaks and reductions.
Yes, the original blog entry he wrote was written before he'd seen the movie and was just based on what he had read about it. He also posted a later entry after he'd seen the movie saying that he still stands by his first blog post and that everything was still accurate.
Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy.
That might be true, but it's also the case that they understate the technical limitations keeping pure electric vehicles off the road. Some of these (batteries, fuel cells, motors) are only just now reaching into the realm of practicality.
Slashdot Mirror
So he blogged that he heard that AT&T might sue him to stop the talk, AT&T deny the rumour, it makes headlines.
To be honest, the first think I thought when I read his blog entry was "scapegoat". Maybe he realized his hack doesn't work quite right, or is flawed in some other way and wants an easy way out of giving the presentation? Claiming worry about a big lawsuit sounds pretty good for that.
I'm betting at this point that AT&T came forward because they:
1) Want to make sure he can't use them as an excuse, and
2) They really want to know (probably more than most people) if the hack really works.
I can easily see some top-level AT&T execs (and other providers probably) asking their technical people if such a hack is possible. After getting a bunch of "no, sir, it's impossible!" all around, they're likely eager to see if their tech people really know their stuff or were just blowing sunshine up their butts.
Providers themselves are probably the last group that would stop such a presentation. The FBI on the other hand, they might be first in line.
It feels like a rock solid piece of software. Yet judging from this discussion, it has a reputation for being flaky...?
I'm pretty sure it's a case of RealPlayer syndrome.
For years and years RealPlayer earned a special corner of hatred for many sysadmins. It was a pioneer in broken crapware and users who installed it deserved to be shunned if not verbally abused. Now, years later, it doesn't matter if RealPlayer has utterly mended its ways and is the best software out there -- for many experienced administrators it remains the spawn of an infested pool of the lowest scum and has no business being installed anywhere.
Eclipse is in much the same boat. I tried using it years ago and had nothing but problems with crashing, memory usage, deleting files, etc. For those reasons and more besides I avoided it outright and advised everyone who asked to do the same. However, about a year ago, I had to use it for a huge collaborative Java project and I found, much to my surprise and delight, that it has since become a very solid and well-designed IDE. It even has some simple yet useful features I wish Visual Studio (my normal world) would copy.
So the short answer is "yes" :)
But they hardly needed to study games to figure this out. Go talk to people who are politically extreme and the validity of this theory will be obvious (Marxists and neo-cons, for example).
They aren't looking at extremely polar relationships like between a rabbi and a Nazi. It looks like it's more of a "once removed" relationship -- for example, "the friend of my enemy is my enemy". It is these kinds of relationships that have long been expected to be more stable when you consider a large social system. As they say in TFA:
Structural Balance Theory is an 80 year old psychological theory that suggests some networks of relationships are more stable than others in a society. Specifically, the theory deals with positive and negative links between three individuals, where 'the friend of my enemy is my enemy' is more stable (and therefore more common) than 'the friend of my friend is my enemy'
They have an interesting picture as well but I wonder what a much larger picture showing various groups would look like. I'd almost expect it to be a kind of fractal with small groups linking to other groups by only a relatively few links, and then the superset of those groups linking to other supersets...
It makes sense, but it's always nice to see some evidence, even for "common sense" things. I suppose that's at least one good thing that's come from MMOs -- they consist of huge social networks which exist in a medium which allows for easy analysis of player inter-relationships and anything else of statistical interest.
Playing in network environments not hooked up to the Internet much?
Wow, fanboy much?
The simple fact is that there are MANY times and places where LAN support is very helpful, if not outright required. Several other posters have enumerated the latter, but for the former, you need to consider scale.
Sure, if you have 4-6 people playing then maybe going over the Internet to Battle.net is an okay (if lame) solution. What about a group of 20? 50? 200? Blizzard has repeatedly said they want Starcraft II to be a serious e-sport contender, both in Asia and in the US/Europe. During the beta, people trying to organize big LAN-style game sessions have noted that their plans completely fell apart when they discovered that Battle.net limited the number of players per IP address to 12. This might have changed, but the fact that they instituted any limit should be telling.
To pull this off, they will be required to implement some form of LAN play, something they've already said they will do:
"We will be addressing StarCraft II tournament functionality in a post launch patch to the game, soon after ship. This patch will include features to address the needs of location-based pro tournaments, but we have not discussed any specifics about tournament support beyond that."
Blizzard denies the rumors of a LAN-enabled "Professional Edition", but it sure sounds like that's the direction they're heading. On one hand Blizzard claims that "No LAN because Battle.net 2 is just so amazing we can't let anyone miss out!" and then on the other "Okay, LAN play is required but only high rollers get it, not the rest of you, you dirty pirates". Anyone who's played the beta knows how bad and lacking Battle.net 2 is. Yes, it's beta, but the final release is in less than 10 days. It's not like they're going to uncheck the "Battle.net sucks enabled" checkbox the day before.
I want to love Starcraft 2, but Blizzard-Activision is making it so hard :(
Microsoft couldn't get basic speech to text to work reliably
For what it's worth, the issues with Vista's STT demonstration were explained pretty soon after the incident. Given the nature of the problems, most people at the time anticipated a training/hardware issue. Of course, that doesn't change how funny it was :)
As it happens, Vista and Win7's voice recognition is actually pretty good for software bundled with the OS.
I shudder at the abuse we'll see attempted and if this thing learns from it's interactions. Ick.
It puts the lotion on it's skin...
I'm guessing that most of the intelligent, technically knowledgeable people have left Microsoft. So now non-technical employees are pretending to run a technological company.
Filing for patents like this has absolutely nothing to do with technical people. What probably happened is something like:
1. Engineer designs cool interface with gestures and page animations
2. He shows his project manager neat interface
3. Project manager like it, sends it up the chain to see what higher ups think
4. VP over section likes the idea, sends it to legal (like everything else) to make sure it won't be a problem
5. Legal drone sees no prior patent filings for the interface idea. Sends idea to his boss.
6. Legal over-drone notes no existing patents and thus automatically files a patent for the interface idea.
7. ???
8. Profit!
The software patents filed by a company have little or no bearing on the quality of the engineers working there.
One indication that the smart people have left is when a company brings out a new version of software, and the big change is in the menus. Menu changes are something people who don't care about technology can do.
You don't say?.
(The Microsoft Vista operating system was, it is said, not a failure, but an intentional method of getting people to pay for two operating systems, by deliberately releasing an unfinished one.)
Said by somebody who almost certainly never even ran Vista. Vista's real problems were:
The way software patents work right now is every company is trying to get as many as possible. It's basically the Cold War all over again, except instead of nuclear weapons it's software patents. Microsoft is doing it for the same reasons Google, Apple, Palm, etc are: Mutual Assured Destruction.
Millions of people put peanutbutter on their bread. Millions of other people put jelly on their bread. But it takes a genius to think of combining these things, and should therefore be reasonably compensated for their services to mankind.
Brilliant!
it was an iphone app long before it was an android app
What does it matter that it was on the iPhone before Android? It's hardly surprising, considering the iPhone was released years before the Droid. I admit there hasn't been the usual heavy complement of Apple stories today, but that doesn't mean you have to start looking for ways to create them from unrelated articles. In any case, this has almost nothing to do with any platform, except that the author wrote the code in Java so as to run it on Android.
Back on-topic, the author has posted an update which talks about the alleged patent infringment and includes the notices sent by the company. Classically, they hesitate to give actual patent numbers, but what it really comes down to is this: As the author says,
I've written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. [...] I'm just a programmer who likes to work on technical, mathematical algorithms in his spare time. And if enough people ask for the source code, I'd be happy to give it to them. Who would have thought that creating something at home in a weekend could result in a possible patent infringement!?
But oh, no! Landmark claims
Landmark Digital Services owns the patents that cover the algorithm used as the basis for your recently posted "Creating Shazam In Java".
Well butter my biscuit and call me Daisy! Case closed! After all, they have a patent on "the algorithm". To be fair, the biggest instigator of this entire fiasco is probably his choice of using the commercial software's name in the article title. Going just by "Creating Shazam In Java", you might at first think he's attempting to completely re-create the software (for who knows what purpose). Of course, if you bother to read even the first few paragraphs it painfully clear that it's nothing of the sort. But because of this,
The code isn't published yet, but I was planning on releasing it under Apache License to the open source community soon. [...] Since I don't want to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov, with the possibility of a lawsuit, I'm not going to publish the code anymore...
If crap like this continues, independent software development in general (including a large chunk of FOSS) is doomed.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe he could point out that in-game grief has resulted in the deaths of real people? Everyone knows kdawson has (serious) editing flaws, but it doesn't require any "spin" to make this look like a terrible decision on Blizzard's part.
Many people were upset with regards to Real ID on the Starcraft 2 forums during the previous phase of the beta [1] [2]. Of course, most people are not happy with the general direction Blizzard is taking Battle.net -- automatic Facebook integration, Real ID, and now this. I should be able to play an online game without telling everybody who I am and where I live. The best part of this whole thing is that Blizzard has given absolutely no justification for this incredible erosion of privacy and anonymity. All they do is babble buzzwords about "social network integration".
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. For most people, the Internet is not one of those places.
I'm sure that 90% of those preregistrations are by domain name squatters.
Of course they are, which is to be expected since this whole exercise is nothing more than registrars grabbing at cash.
The sad part is all the uninformed idiots posting here who support the idea -- if even a fair number of Slashdot posters still don't understand why this is such a horrible idea then it's no wonder ICANN caved. On the one hand, they look good to the morons who have been pushing for this stupid idea for years, and on the other they were probably bribed with a huge amount money. Win win!
For those wondering why .xxx is a terrible idea that is completely doomed to fail (at all the "official" goals at least, it will certainly succeed as the gravy train it's designed to be), read RFC 3675: .sex Considered Dangerous. It has all the same arguments being presented here, plus more.
I'll put in a plug for my favorite extension here: TreeStyleTab.
Interesting, I might have to give that a try.
When I surf, inevitably one thing leads to another thing, which leads to a site which leads to six more things. So I middle-click almost every link, and it all gets organized into a hierarchical history.
I usually break into multiple Firefox windows when I start having multiple disparate browsing sessions take place. I'll have a window for personal stuff (mail, Slashdot), a window for all the documentation I've got open, and maybe a third window for miscellaneous things.
The other thing I've really liked using is Session Manager because it makes saving these sessions really easy. I have around a dozen saved sessions related to various research projects I've worked on. Need to remember all the pages I referenced when looking at options for authenticating Linux off Active Directory? Just load the session of 20 tabs into a new window. It also makes restoring crashed sessions and whatnot a lot more flexible.
My problem is that I kind of hate the Internet with NoScript.
You might take a look at YesScript (a JavaScript blacklisting plugin sans all the extra protection crud in NoScript). If you use it in conjunction with AdBlock+subscriptions you'll probably block quite a bit.
That said, I like NoScript in general because of just how much faster most sites are with their scripts disabled. It does get annoying though, as more and more sites are completely non-navigable without scripts enabled.
With 128-150 tabs open
No offense, but I think you're doing it wrong.
This, this, this, this, this. The terrible user interface responsiveness of Firefox is what kept me on IE for the longest time (and I only moved because of addons, not because Firefox itself is any better).
For a good test, open a Slashdot story with ~1000 comments and watch as the browser just stops dead in the water for 5-15 seconds while it renders the page. You can also try opening the browser when you have 10 or more tabs saved in your session. Again, the entire interface is useless while the pages are rendering. If the browser really is multithreaded in any meaningful fashion, then the rendering threads obviously have a priority higher than the UI, which seems like a bad thing.
I'd rather have this improved than move plugins into an external process. Since I started using NoScript I haven't had Firefox crash because of Flash. Ever. However, I still read Slashdot so I do deal with the lagging on a regular basis.
Geez, some serious failure there on my part. I misread two words and my entire post is crap. Teach me to post at 2am with 4 hours of sleep...
That said, there is still some congruency. Google indexes information that people make available copyrighted or not, but torrent trackers do the same thing. Going after trackers instead of the people uploading the copyrighted material is the same as going after Google for indexing something copyrighted. In both cases they are attacking the wrong party.
Google does not host material it indexes.
Material it indexes is offered publicly.
People who follow the search results ALSO get authorized copies.
Well, I don't know if all that really applies in this case (Google does own YouTube, for example), but what you describe there sounds an awful lot like torrents.
The Pirate Bay does not host matieral it tracks.
Material it tracks is offered publicly.
People who download the torrents ALSO get authorized copies.
Yep, pretty much the same. We've seen how well that defense has worked for torrent trackers -- how long until the **AA's starts taking search engines to court for helping people find copyrighted material? If anyone has the finances to pull Google/Yahoo/Microsoft into court it's the RIAA and MPAA. Talk about the death of meaningful search engines.
I think it's exellent that the app does not alter the *original files* as the default setting.
How many people do you really think want transformations like rotations only applied as metadata in some unknown database someplace? When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image. If she uses Windows' interface to print the photo or emails it to a friend, it is the rotated image she cares about.
Not only that, but if you are backing up your photos to an external source like a good user, imagine the frustration when years of transformations, edits, tags, etc are all lost when you recover from a failed hard drive using your backup. You did everything right, but because you didn't include some hidden little .dat file buried in your profile as part of the backup you lost hundreds of hours of work.
Modifications to the files should be applied to the files. Metadata should be stored in the files. To do either otherwise is asking for problems.
Words are just words, they have as much or as little meaning as the person saying them wishes to express.
That said, having somebody say "how's it going?" as you quickly walk past them does annoy me. Why bother saying something like that if you're never going to hear an answer? I usually will just nod or say hello instead of asking an obviously empty question like that.
Security is NOT about patching holes, a system must be designed from the ground up to be secure. Doze and it's predecessors were NEVER designed this way.
Is that why Ubuntu 8.04 prompts me to install some hundred or more security updates after installing it? No software is perfect and anyone who thinks that the only secure system is on that is "designed from the ground up to be secure" either A) has never worked on a large software project and/or B) doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.
What is so fundamentally more secure from a design perspective about the Linux kernel compared with the WinNT kernel? How about a distribution like Ubuntu compared with Windows XP/Vista/7? Since one was "designed from the ground up to be secure" I sure hope you can point out a few design choices specifically.
Since all software (even the Linux kernel and its ilk) have security holes, the ability and speed at which you discover the exploits and issue fixes for them is at least as important as the initial design and coding of the program. It's naive and obtuse to think any complex system will be perfect from the get-go.
What?
The lies about WMD
What in the world does alleged lying have to do with empathy? Poor performance of the intelligence community hardly seems relevant, but at least you're making your bias clear from the get go I suppose.
the lies about drugs
Which lies? That they often unhealthy (both legal and illegal ones), that they're unnecessary and even counter-productive to live a happy and productive life? Or some other lies?
people telling you that is perfectly normal to own a gun
What is abnormal about owning a gun? Of course, if you're hopped up on drugs you probably shouldn't own a weapon.
that it is normal to shoot at someone just for trespassing/burglary
I see, maybe we should punish them with love instead? Breaking into someone's home is akin to invading another country. All bets are off when it comes to protecting family and property. If you come into my home with violent intent, just how much violence is too much? Baseball bat? Knife? Gun? Should I just ask you to leave nicely and hand over my wallet if you won't?
That is cool to join the army and fuck up another sorry son of a bitch that you had absolutely no conflict with
That's kind of the definition of war. How many Nazis did WWII soldiers have personal conflicts with?
The people who are selfish are the people that drive the ferrari's around at wallstreet
Being wealthy and choosing how you want to spend your wealth is selfish?
They are being held up as icons by a complete generation
People on Wall Street are about as far from an "icon" for young people as is possible.
No I am not surprised. Just very worried.
No reason to be, I doubt humans are less empathetic in general now than ever before, only that people are more honest about it now. I imagine this might be from a certain amount of the GIFT extending from online communities into real-world interactions. We've gone from interacting only with a small local community to dealing with thousands/millions of people online plus our local community. It's harder to feel empathy with so many anonymous people communicating only with text so it isn't too surprising that some apathetic feelings creep in.
When you're actually dealing with somebody sitting in front of you, face-to-face, I think most people would exhibit a higher level of empathy.
It's a method that is bound to gain enormous complexity - as it has - as the definition of "income" is stretched and mutilated by the government.
Actually it seems like the idea of income taxes is incredibly straightforward. Any "income" (easily definable as any wealth you receive) is taxable at a certain rate.
Complexity comes from tax deductions and tax breaks, not the taxes themselves. The sheer number of tax deductions and various rules you can use to reduce your taxable income is crazy. If you drive a blue car on Tuesdays and Fridays but never on Wednesday and you have at least 4 children (but not more than 7) then you're eligible to get a $500 deduction for the Nancy Drew Blue Family Living Credit.
I agree that the system could be simpler, but for many people with simple incomes, it already is pretty dang simple (single 1040, maybe a 1099-INT for bank interest). It's when you have a large income and/or from many sources that it gets complex, and again, almost entirely due to tax breaks and reductions.
Really? Here is a quote from that blog
Yes, the original blog entry he wrote was written before he'd seen the movie and was just based on what he had read about it. He also posted a later entry after he'd seen the movie saying that he still stands by his first blog post and that everything was still accurate.
Those who have watched the movie "Who killed the Electric Car" know that industry and politics will conspire to do what's profitable, not what's good policy.
That might be true, but it's also the case that they understate the technical limitations keeping pure electric vehicles off the road. Some of these (batteries, fuel cells, motors) are only just now reaching into the realm of practicality.
A good response to Who Killed the Electric Car is a blog entry from a few years ago, Who Ignored the Facts About the Electric Car.
Both sides make good points, but this is hardly a case of the Evil Oil Conspiracy covering up the 100 MPG carburetor.
No need to be rude about it though.
Meh, just a case of failed written communication as the last bit was a joke. I suppose I should have put a :) or something in there.
Have an extra smile for your trouble: :)