A preview of the types of comments being received was just posted, with predictable results so far (i.e. an onslaught of anger and hate directed towards the GNOME devs)
Oddly, there wasn't so much fuss over Opera's compression service, which is opt-in for Opera Mobile and always on for Opera Mini.
The issue here is one of scale and reach. Opera didn't have as many users under their umbrella as Amazon does, nor did it have a massive database on their purchasing habits, just waiting to be cross referenced with their newly acquired browsing history.
The patentability of software is basically flawed and has no place in any knowledge driven economy, but unfortunately this is the reality we're saddled with for the time being.
Nevertheless, I'm getting pretty tired of companies using software patents as a tactical weapon against competition. If I could introduce a single new law, is that any given company's patent claims would have not be valid unless they were exercised at the earliest possible opportunity. No waiting for years until your competition starts threatening your bottom line before you unleash your army of lawyers. Either they would deplete their resources against every single target out there that may or may not be a threat later on, or they would forfeit any claims they might have.
Sure, there would be loopholes, and I can think of a few right now, but it would still be fun to watch.
It was, but now that you mention it, I wonder if any studies were ever conducted on meth as an aid to prime factoring. No? Well, how do they know, then?!
"We succeeded in breaking the encryption behind the hard drives"
Wait, what? All of the solutions I know of to encrypt hard drives at block or filesystem level are prety well implemented. You can't just brute force them. So either:
Someone at google left the password/phrase on a postit note next to the HDDs and/or it was '12345'
It wasn't 'encrypted' at all, but the Cyber Terror Response Center[1] thought it would sound awesome to say they broke it
The South Koreans are hiding the most advanced super computer in the world on some basement somewhere. Or some methematicians who can factor large primes in their sleep.
[1] What the hell is up with these bullshit terror-inspiring names anyway? It sounds like a bunch of kids getting together on the playground and trying to think of the most kick-ass name for their dodgeball team.
For the last couple of months I've been using Duck Duck Go with great results, and with much less spam than Google. Plus you get warm fuzzies from using it. Written in Perl on top of FreeBSD, respects your privacy and supports all manner of yummy syntax.
As much as I love the idea of an easy to use and ubiquitous VoIP application that I carry with me everywhere in my pocket -- insane 3G data rates and prorietary protocols notwhithstanding -- I have to question some of the permissions it's requesting.
Maybe this is due to me not fully understanding the Android permissions model, in which case I hope someone will clarify what these mean, but aren't these a little overreaching?
Read and write contact data - I assume this means the Skype app stores contact data in the phone's address book, but it also gives it access to all my other contact data (local or google contacts).
Coarse location - In my experience coarse location, when requested in heavily populated areas, is just as accurate as fine (GPS) location. Why does Skype need to know exactly where I'm standing in order to route my VoIP calls? The desktop application seems to do fine without it.
Act as an account authenticator, manage the accounts list, use the authentication credentials of an account - Does Skype use the Android accounts and sync framework, like a regular Google account does? And, like the contact data, I'm pretty sure this also means it has access to all the other Google account authentication credentials stored on the phone.
I'm pretty sure all of these permissions are requested for legitimate reasons, but from what I can understand it also means the Skype app has access to some pretty sensitive information, basically your whole Google account. Am I correct?
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any android device that's meant by the manufacturer to be tinkered with? No protected bootloaders, read only filesystems, or any other such shenanigans that are meant to make the task of installing custom ROMs as difficult as possible.
I know the Nexus One is supposed to be very easy to root, and thus developer friendly, but unfortunately it's not available everywhere.
Give out blank CDs. ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. He's already getting amazing free press over this, and there's more coming for certain. I was reading through the replys to just this article here on slashdot, and found more than a couple of readers vowing to by multiple copies of the release just to show support. Multiple copies. Of A Blank Disk.
You're making it sound like a scam, but the way I see it he's selling a 100 page book of David Lynch photography, which for fans of Mr. Lynch like myself is pretty damn cool. The fact that it comes with a blank CD-R is just a neat little afterthought.
Not being a big Danger Mouse fan, I downloaded the tracks nonetheless and I have to say they're pretty decent. They would have stood by themselves without marketing ploys or legal entanglements.
I ran into problems getting the NASA TV streams to work under Firefox in Linux. Here are the direct links if you're in the same boat or don't want to go through javascript infested pages. I only tested the Windows Media one.
Well you're proven wrong on one part anyway. I can find no mention of Cleese playing Gort anywhere except in the TFS above.
You're right, thank god. Him playing Gort seemed a bit too silly to be true. I already knew the rest of the info in the summary so I didn't read TFA and assumed it was some new info. My bad.
Apologies to Mr. Cleese, who according to the article and IMDB is rumored to be playing Prof. Barnhardt.
Although if you know the original you'll find this quote from the article quite troubling (emphasis mine):
John Cleese is an excellent choice too for a supporting role. I imagine he'll inject some timely humour into a movie that could come across as preachy if its serious message is overplayed.
...will Keanu become some type of extraterrestrial Al Gore and ruin the movie?
I'm voting for disaster. Let's take a look at some of the changes:
The original Klaatu - Played by Michael Rennie, a virtually unknown actor outside of the UK at the time, which gave him credibility as an alien when he stepped out of the spaceship.
He also had to be both menacing when delivering his warning/ultimatum, and compassionate as he goes among earth's people to learn more about them. Eventually he bonds with a little boy and his mother.
The new Klaatu - Keanu Reeves has received massive exposition, thus ensuring that people see Neo stepping out of the spaceship.
Also, he has the dramatic range of a cinder block.
The original theme - It dealt with timeless concepts such as our distrust for different cultures and our natural propensity toward aggression. Which is why it has endured to this day.
The people whom Klaatu represents aren't worried that we kill one another, their fear is that we extend our aggression as we step out into space.
The new theme - With the new environmental theme, apparently they are now terribly worried that we destroy the planet and thus ourselves. Or that we start littering space.
The original Gort - Silent, soulless, impersonal, ruthless and menacing.
The new Gort - John Cleese!
Also, I'm sure some of the original's somewhat Orwellian undertones of Klaatu's people creating a race of robots and giving them irrevocable power to control any and all acts of aggression will also be lost. As will his admission that their system, and their own society by extension, isn't perfect. Everything is black and white these days.
But hey, I'd love to be proven wrong since it's one of my favorite sci-fi movies, but somehow I'm skeptical.
The parent asked how can we be sure we're using the real OpenSSL? Simple, just use a distro that maintains a policy of minimal interference with upstream code. Slackware comes to mind, and not much else unfortunately.
Any distro that's liberal about patching upstream code is liable to suffer from security issues, as just exemplified by this story, and also to reduce the value of bug reports to the upstream projects, since they have to go through an extra triage to make sure the bug isn't specific to that distro.
Yes, it's not virtual memory, give me a little credit here:)
And like I said, it only happens after prolonged use, if I were to do a quick test with opening a bunch of tabs I wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Have you kept it open for a few hours straight and navigated through some content heavy sites?
I've been using Firefox 3 on Linux since beta4 and I've been keeping up with the nightly builds, and I'm a bit surprised after reading all of these articles about its new found memory efficiency. It's definitely not what I'm seeing. In fact, it's markedly worse on my set up than Firefox 2.
I've done everything I could think of to reduce its memory footprint and track down the problem. I've created a new profile, clean of extensions, modified certain about:config parameters such as "network.prefetch-next", "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" and "browser.cache.memory.capacity" (does this one even work in FF3?), nothing seems to help.
Eventually, after a few hours of heavy use, it's taking up 260+ MB with only one tab open, which is ridiculous.
Apart from memory issues though, it's an improvement all around. Especially the new bookmarking system and visual integration with the rest of the desktop.
For those living in the West who didn't realize that there's little sympathy for Tibet independence among ethnic Chinese in the PRC, this blog post on Global Voices will be a shocker. John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us... where have we heard this before? Reuters has a roundup on the Washington Post that begins: "a look at Chinese blogs reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed against Tibetans and the West." (...)
"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here, here, and here, specifically. Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding. Here is his challenge to all of us...
The above info, plus a great deal of other material well worth spending the time to read, was aggregated by boingboing's Xeni Jardin, who since this situation has erupted in Tibet has kept a close eye on the whole thing and provided some very good info like the above mentioned post.
I, for one, hope that MS is entirely successful in their (alas futile) search for the means to stop piracy.
If people actually have to buy Windows and Office for what MS is charging for them, maybe they'll stop for a second and finally realise what it means to enter into business with a monopoly: high prices and low quality.
There's no doubt in my mind, from the sample of people and businesses that I know, that they'd take a long hard look at Linux if they were unable to pirate MS products so easily.
Asked if they were concerned about a backlash from early adopters who supported the format from the beginning, one representative said: 'They knew what they were getting into.'"
What about people who buy profile 2.0 players, do they know what they are getting themselves into? I'd be a bit cautious of buying hardware whose specification is controlled by people who have already shown they're not averse to making obsolete players that were bought less than a year ago.
To be clear: as I understand it the changes in profile 2.0 are at the hardware level, so no firmware upgrade will enable older players to be able to handle the features offered by profile 2.0 discs. The PS3 is presumably the exception since most operations it performs are software based thanks to having plenty of horse power to spare.
The skeptic in me can't help thinking that these "upgrades" will come at the rate of every couple of years or so to force people to buy new hardware.
Distribution of content (music in this case) over the internet, definitely has its advantages from the point of view of the consumer, such as no time wasted going to the store or waiting for goods to arrive, and also a myriad of advantages from the point of view of the content producer.
That being said, there are several tradeoffs that I, personally, am just not ready to make unless I'm forced to by the discontinuation of CDs or by a change in the distribution model. Here are the things we are losing as we move way from CDs:
Raw CD Audio - I can take the lossless raw cd audio and encode it into my pet format of choice with minimal loss of quality. If I start with a MP3 and assuming that's not my pet audio format, then the loss of quality if I use a lossy codec will be noticeable.
Used Market - I like how I can turn to the used CD market if I don't want to pay full price for an album, or if for some reason I have a problem giving the producer in question money. It'll be a cold day in hell when the EULAs that each distributor uses allows the resale of a downloaded audio file.
The Physical Product - A pet peeve of mine to be sure, but I like having the actual object. Not only are some pretty damn cool, they serve as a backup and look good on my CD tower.
I'm willing to overlook the last one if they tweak the distribution model to address the first two as they are the real deal breakers for me. Especially the absence of a used market.
I don't know how many people do the same thing as me, but I keep my entire music collection FLAC encoded. Not, however, because of sound quality, since lossless codecs sounds virtually the same as a good lossy one encoded at a high enough bitrate.
I do it to future proof my collection. At some point down the line everyone will move away from lossy codec X to lossy codec X2 which will provide higher compression (as in file size). Some time later lossy codec Y will be introduced which will offer further benefits over codec X2, and so on... Most DAP's will also adopt these codecs and possibly drop support for some of the earlier ones.
If someone had their music on X they would then have to re-encode their entire collection over the years like so: X -> X2 -> Y
By this point, after 3 re-encodes with lossy codecs from the original source (say, a CD) you *will* notice the difference. And at some point you'll have to re-rip your entire collection again. And when you have 10.000 tracks this can become a daunting task.
Or, you can avoid all this and just keep the collection on a lossless format, which can then be converted to any other lossy or lossless codec with a simple script or with programs such as transkode. I've been through the experience of ripping hundreds of CDs, I'm not in a hurry to do it again if I want to take advantage of newer codecs.
So for me, FLAC and other lossless codecs aren't about sound quality, they're about flexibility.
Yeah, they pulled the ads
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, it's crazy. Nintendo has indeed pulled all Wii ads in the UK.
We have been running the campaign all year round, but we want to take a responsible stance this Christmas and not fuel demand.
When was the last time a company decided to stop advertising a product because they were selling too much of it?
Probably a good move, there are already some pretty pissed off people out there as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised this wasn't linked from either the review of the comments so far, but the wonderful lads at Baen have the DRM-free ebook edition.
A preview of the types of comments being received was just posted, with predictable results so far (i.e. an onslaught of anger and hate directed towards the GNOME devs)
The issue here is one of scale and reach. Opera didn't have as many users under their umbrella as Amazon does, nor did it have a massive database on their purchasing habits, just waiting to be cross referenced with their newly acquired browsing history.
The patentability of software is basically flawed and has no place in any knowledge driven economy, but unfortunately this is the reality we're saddled with for the time being.
Nevertheless, I'm getting pretty tired of companies using software patents as a tactical weapon against competition. If I could introduce a single new law, is that any given company's patent claims would have not be valid unless they were exercised at the earliest possible opportunity. No waiting for years until your competition starts threatening your bottom line before you unleash your army of lawyers. Either they would deplete their resources against every single target out there that may or may not be a threat later on, or they would forfeit any claims they might have.
Sure, there would be loopholes, and I can think of a few right now, but it would still be fun to watch.
Where's that xkcd reference when you need it...
You're talking about rubber hose cryptanalysis, and here you go.
I'm curious to know if this was a typo or not.
It was, but now that you mention it, I wonder if any studies were ever conducted on meth as an aid to prime factoring. No? Well, how do they know, then?!
"We succeeded in breaking the encryption behind the hard drives"
Wait, what? All of the solutions I know of to encrypt hard drives at block or filesystem level are prety well implemented. You can't just brute force them. So either:
[1] What the hell is up with these bullshit terror-inspiring names anyway? It sounds like a bunch of kids getting together on the playground and trying to think of the most kick-ass name for their dodgeball team.
For the last couple of months I've been using Duck Duck Go with great results, and with much less spam than Google. Plus you get warm fuzzies from using it. Written in Perl on top of FreeBSD, respects your privacy and supports all manner of yummy syntax.
Couple that with zero click info such as:
define sfumato 12 usd in eur 12 cm in inches
I find myself not missing Google in the slightest when it comes to search.
As much as I love the idea of an easy to use and ubiquitous VoIP application that I carry with me everywhere in my pocket -- insane 3G data rates and prorietary protocols notwhithstanding -- I have to question some of the permissions it's requesting.
Maybe this is due to me not fully understanding the Android permissions model, in which case I hope someone will clarify what these mean, but aren't these a little overreaching?
Read and write contact data - I assume this means the Skype app stores contact data in the phone's address book, but it also gives it access to all my other contact data (local or google contacts).
Coarse location - In my experience coarse location, when requested in heavily populated areas, is just as accurate as fine (GPS) location. Why does Skype need to know exactly where I'm standing in order to route my VoIP calls? The desktop application seems to do fine without it.
Act as an account authenticator, manage the accounts list, use the authentication credentials of an account - Does Skype use the Android accounts and sync framework, like a regular Google account does? And, like the contact data, I'm pretty sure this also means it has access to all the other Google account authentication credentials stored on the phone.
I'm pretty sure all of these permissions are requested for legitimate reasons, but from what I can understand it also means the Skype app has access to some pretty sensitive information, basically your whole Google account. Am I correct?
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any android device that's meant by the manufacturer to be tinkered with? No protected bootloaders, read only filesystems, or any other such shenanigans that are meant to make the task of installing custom ROMs as difficult as possible.
I know the Nexus One is supposed to be very easy to root, and thus developer friendly, but unfortunately it's not available everywhere.
For the record, the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 already boots in 5 seconds using a SSD.
Give out blank CDs. ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. He's already getting amazing free press over this, and there's more coming for certain. I was reading through the replys to just this article here on slashdot, and found more than a couple of readers vowing to by multiple copies of the release just to show support. Multiple copies. Of A Blank Disk.
You're making it sound like a scam, but the way I see it he's selling a 100 page book of David Lynch photography, which for fans of Mr. Lynch like myself is pretty damn cool. The fact that it comes with a blank CD-R is just a neat little afterthought.
Not being a big Danger Mouse fan, I downloaded the tracks nonetheless and I have to say they're pretty decent. They would have stood by themselves without marketing ploys or legal entanglements.
I ran into problems getting the NASA TV streams to work under Firefox in Linux. Here are the direct links if you're in the same boat or don't want to go through javascript infested pages. I only tested the Windows Media one.
Windows Media
Real Media
Quicktime
You're right, thank god. Him playing Gort seemed a bit too silly to be true. I already knew the rest of the info in the summary so I didn't read TFA and assumed it was some new info. My bad.
Apologies to Mr. Cleese, who according to the article and IMDB is rumored to be playing Prof. Barnhardt.
Although if you know the original you'll find this quote from the article quite troubling (emphasis mine):
I'm voting for disaster. Let's take a look at some of the changes:
The original Klaatu - Played by Michael Rennie, a virtually unknown actor outside of the UK at the time, which gave him credibility as an alien when he stepped out of the spaceship.
He also had to be both menacing when delivering his warning/ultimatum, and compassionate as he goes among earth's people to learn more about them. Eventually he bonds with a little boy and his mother.
The new Klaatu - Keanu Reeves has received massive exposition, thus ensuring that people see Neo stepping out of the spaceship.
Also, he has the dramatic range of a cinder block.
The original theme - It dealt with timeless concepts such as our distrust for different cultures and our natural propensity toward aggression. Which is why it has endured to this day.
The people whom Klaatu represents aren't worried that we kill one another, their fear is that we extend our aggression as we step out into space.
The new theme - With the new environmental theme, apparently they are now terribly worried that we destroy the planet and thus ourselves. Or that we start littering space.
The original Gort - Silent, soulless, impersonal, ruthless and menacing.
The new Gort - John Cleese!
Also, I'm sure some of the original's somewhat Orwellian undertones of Klaatu's people creating a race of robots and giving them irrevocable power to control any and all acts of aggression will also be lost. As will his admission that their system, and their own society by extension, isn't perfect. Everything is black and white these days.
But hey, I'd love to be proven wrong since it's one of my favorite sci-fi movies, but somehow I'm skeptical.
Agreed.
The parent asked how can we be sure we're using the real OpenSSL? Simple, just use a distro that maintains a policy of minimal interference with upstream code. Slackware comes to mind, and not much else unfortunately.
Any distro that's liberal about patching upstream code is liable to suffer from security issues, as just exemplified by this story, and also to reduce the value of bug reports to the upstream projects, since they have to go through an extra triage to make sure the bug isn't specific to that distro.
The site is still perfectly functional and showing the strips using plain old .GIFs... *if* you use NoScript.
Allow JavaScript to run and the whole thing blows up in your face and splatters flash everywhere.
Yes, it's not virtual memory, give me a little credit here :)
And like I said, it only happens after prolonged use, if I were to do a quick test with opening a bunch of tabs I wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary. Have you kept it open for a few hours straight and navigated through some content heavy sites?
I've been using Firefox 3 on Linux since beta4 and I've been keeping up with the nightly builds, and I'm a bit surprised after reading all of these articles about its new found memory efficiency. It's definitely not what I'm seeing. In fact, it's markedly worse on my set up than Firefox 2.
I've done everything I could think of to reduce its memory footprint and track down the problem. I've created a new profile, clean of extensions, modified certain about:config parameters such as "network.prefetch-next", "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" and "browser.cache.memory.capacity" (does this one even work in FF3?), nothing seems to help.
Eventually, after a few hours of heavy use, it's taking up 260+ MB with only one tab open, which is ridiculous.
Apart from memory issues though, it's an improvement all around. Especially the new bookmarking system and visual integration with the rest of the desktop.
Someone already did:
The above info, plus a great deal of other material well worth spending the time to read, was aggregated by boingboing's Xeni Jardin, who since this situation has erupted in Tibet has kept a close eye on the whole thing and provided some very good info like the above mentioned post.
I, for one, hope that MS is entirely successful in their (alas futile) search for the means to stop piracy.
If people actually have to buy Windows and Office for what MS is charging for them, maybe they'll stop for a second and finally realise what it means to enter into business with a monopoly: high prices and low quality.
There's no doubt in my mind, from the sample of people and businesses that I know, that they'd take a long hard look at Linux if they were unable to pirate MS products so easily.
What about people who buy profile 2.0 players, do they know what they are getting themselves into? I'd be a bit cautious of buying hardware whose specification is controlled by people who have already shown they're not averse to making obsolete players that were bought less than a year ago.
To be clear: as I understand it the changes in profile 2.0 are at the hardware level, so no firmware upgrade will enable older players to be able to handle the features offered by profile 2.0 discs. The PS3 is presumably the exception since most operations it performs are software based thanks to having plenty of horse power to spare.
The skeptic in me can't help thinking that these "upgrades" will come at the rate of every couple of years or so to force people to buy new hardware.
Distribution of content (music in this case) over the internet, definitely has its advantages from the point of view of the consumer, such as no time wasted going to the store or waiting for goods to arrive, and also a myriad of advantages from the point of view of the content producer.
That being said, there are several tradeoffs that I, personally, am just not ready to make unless I'm forced to by the discontinuation of CDs or by a change in the distribution model. Here are the things we are losing as we move way from CDs:
I'm willing to overlook the last one if they tweak the distribution model to address the first two as they are the real deal breakers for me. Especially the absence of a used market.
I don't know how many people do the same thing as me, but I keep my entire music collection FLAC encoded. Not, however, because of sound quality, since lossless codecs sounds virtually the same as a good lossy one encoded at a high enough bitrate.
I do it to future proof my collection. At some point down the line everyone will move away from lossy codec X to lossy codec X2 which will provide higher compression (as in file size). Some time later lossy codec Y will be introduced which will offer further benefits over codec X2, and so on... Most DAP's will also adopt these codecs and possibly drop support for some of the earlier ones.
If someone had their music on X they would then have to re-encode their entire collection over the years like so: X -> X2 -> Y
By this point, after 3 re-encodes with lossy codecs from the original source (say, a CD) you *will* notice the difference. And at some point you'll have to re-rip your entire collection again. And when you have 10.000 tracks this can become a daunting task.
Or, you can avoid all this and just keep the collection on a lossless format, which can then be converted to any other lossy or lossless codec with a simple script or with programs such as transkode. I've been through the experience of ripping hundreds of CDs, I'm not in a hurry to do it again if I want to take advantage of newer codecs.
So for me, FLAC and other lossless codecs aren't about sound quality, they're about flexibility.
Yeah, it's crazy. Nintendo has indeed pulled all Wii ads in the UK.
When was the last time a company decided to stop advertising a product because they were selling too much of it?
Probably a good move, there are already some pretty pissed off people out there as it is.