I haven't seen such an atrocious pun in ages, and it's bilingual, and two words, and... and... too bad! You deserve some sort of award. But I can't think of anything appropriate... yet.
DVDs and the region codes got in without much complaaint. DVDs also don't allow skipping certain parts, like the FBI copyright warning, and some trailers and advertising. The public has accepted them.
DiVX failed. It was too blatantly a lousy consumer sell.
So the RIAA and MPAA have learned. They have a good chance of slipping in all the DRM crap they can pay for in Washington, DC. Once it's legally mandated, there won't be any alternatives.
For those who weren't around, Senator Biden lost a lot of face, and (IIRC) a shot at the Democratic presidential nomination, due to plagiarism. There was a joke at the time something like this:
Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Gary Hart are on a cruise ship which starts to sink.
"Save the women and children first!" shouts Mr. Reagan.
"Screw the women and children!" shouts Mr. Nixon.
"We got time for that?" asks Mr. Hart.
Then someone added Mr. Biden to the passenger list.
"We got time for that?" repeats Mr. Biden.
And this is the guy who wants to make DRM breaking a jailable offense. I wonder if it includes just plain plagiarism.
Well, at least one of 'em got it! I don't know about that underrated guy, he did or didn't, so call it 1.5 got it.
Insightful? They DIDN'T get it. Sheesh.
A lot of needless hand-wringing
on
Spy Fly
·
· Score: 2
Sure these could be (and probably will be) used by government to snoop on people. For the record, my uncle was investigated by the FBI for starting a union and foiling one of LBJs hare-brained schemes in the early 1960s; wire tapping, neighbors and friends asked a lot of questions, etc. So I have no love for those power hungry idiots.
But this tech will work both ways. I believe David Brin said it in Transparent Society. The problem isn't the spying itself so much as the onesidedness of it all, in that only the rich and powerful have been able to spy, and avoid being spied upon. Once these things are mass produced, they will get into civilian hands, and the rich and powerful will be more susceptible to them, not less. Similar to Diamand Age, also.
I'd say the tech will be as great an equalizer as the gun was -- all previous weapons required lots of personal time for training which only the rich and powerful could afford. Just as spying on my uncle took lots of manpower, previous weapons required lots of resources and commitment -- armor, the longbow, swords. The revolver in particular was a revolution in personal weaponry. These bugs will be just as revolutionary, and the rich and powerful won't be able to hide from them nearly as well.
.. uh, well, because, because, last time, when they bragged about something to their benefit, they were just lying, yeh, that's the ticket! Lying!
Keerist, why this lame acceptance as nonto ni verdad when everything else they say is a pack of lies?
For the record, I do my utmost to avoid M$ products, because (a) they are buggy as all get out, (b) they are like working with a straight-jacket (do it their way or no way), and (c) their business ethics suck major toad warts. But it's kind of annoying seeing all the bashing that goes on most of the time, then this where suddenly their word is gospel.
Biological and chemical weapons are also banned, yet we issue gas masks and antidotes.
But more to the point, all weapons and all machinery and in fact just about everything in the world has unintended side effects. Guarding against unintnded consequences of using them is not a crime, even if the thing in question is a crime. What is wrong with that?
Zillions of actions are illegal, yet we have courts and police and jails. There are also all sorts of regulations and laws against government malfeasance, yet there are also regulations designed to punish transgressors, even to help find transgressors.
There is zilch wrong with issuing protective goggles, any more than issuing helmets and flak jackets.
And in case you still don't get it, these new lasers are not illegal, since their intended purpose is not illegal. Only their side effect is illegal, but only if it is the main effect, not a side effect.
The main effect of any weapon is to kill enemry soldiers, not civilians. Yet a side effect is to kill civilians. Shall we now also ban civilian ambulances near a war zone, or make their use illegal when responding to an unintended side effect of a war weapon?
We call it a weapon for destroying hardware, but we are also embarking on sister program to create special protective goggles for our soldiers. Why on earth would we need those if the danger of blinding is so small?
So, let me get this straight, developing flak jackets, steel helmets, steel soled boots, even emergency medical kits, is really just a sinister hint that artillery, grenades, mortars, and even rifles might have (gasp!) side effects, and are therefore immoral?
Maybe having seat belts, side impact beams, crush zones, airbags, and all the rest of that safety crap are just an indication that cars aren't designed well.
Submarine rescue vehicles, escape hatches, Momsen lungs, all that are just a clue that we shouldn't have submarines? Lifeboats mean we shouldn't have ships which actually go to sea.
Or, closer to home, parity and ECC are indications that memory might fail, and therefore... what? Goes along with ASSERT and argument checking in code, probably.
Yeh, just a bit sarcastic I guess, but this kind of nonsense thinking really galls me.
Even sent them the recommended $270 for a year. Almost immediately I got tons of letters practically demanding that I be more generous. I decided they were wasting my money and ignored them from then on. I also was a bit ticked when they supported sending that 17 (?) year old kid back to Russia with his parents after he'd lived here for some time and didn't want to go back, and would be an adult in just a year. But it was the obnoxious dunning letters that got my goat.
A first look at their website brings up some annoyances concerning what they claim to be improvements over make:
Configuration files are Python scripts--no new syntax to learn.
Unless you don't know Python. I never figured make syntax to be very difficult.
Support for C, C++, Fortran, Yacc and Lex.
I didn't realize this was an improvement over make, which is pretty language-agnostic. What about other languages? I usually assume listing specific elements means unlisted elements are NOT supported.
Support for parallel builds (-j).
That -j option look like they borrowed it from make.
Building from central repositories of source code and/or pre-built targets.
Not sure exactly what this means, but make understands RCS and SCCS, IIRC. Been a while since I used the feature.
All in all, a first glimpse which finds all this FUD in a list of alleged improvements doesn't impress me. Some of the other claims might be useful, but they don't have enough credibility left for me to want to investigate.
My little group (4 programmers) had been using CVS for years, and another group (10 programmers) installed ClearCase, and management decided our CVS group should convert. There were two CC admins; one wrote a piss poor install script. When it started deleting files it had no business even looking at, I aborted it, cleaned things up (*I* kept backups:-), told my boss, and he backed me up -- we stayed on CVS. The other CC admin was a joke, and twice (!) deleted the CC repository by mistake. Other times I don't know what he did, or if it was just CC taking a dive, but they were down all day getting it straightened out. Most of that group were envious that my group stayed on CVS.
I have never worked on huge projects, never more than a dozen programmers at most, and CVS has always been good enough. I will certainly switch to subversion, or maybe one of the others, because I like a lot of the improvements, but CC has always seemed like bloated overkill.
What the effing difference does it make -- if it was broadcast for free viewing, what the holy heck difference does it make how many people see it or how they see it?!?
Henry Ford set to release Model "A"
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Ford Motor Co. is set to release today a new car, the Model "A", based on the award winning and famously popular Model "T". The new Model "A" is backwards compatible with all previous 4 wheel gasoline powered Model "T" cars produced by Ford and its competitors, and can run on the same roads as them.
Don't start with messages like "test". Send things like AAAAA and see what actually comes out. Find the lowest char it accepts, probably space (somewhat useless), maybe bang, maybe digits. But figure out the lowest it accepts, and preferably as few bits as possible, such as @ 0x40. Reset it and send strings of this, see how they show. You do need to try lots of variations. Send zillions of AAAAA and see how many other chars show before it repeats.
You are short sighted if you can't see the harm in DRM. One of the fundamentals of a free citizenry is an informed citizenry. That's the point of freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Without them, the civil rights and anti-war movements would have gotten nowhere. With DRM, the ability to pass along knowledge is severaly limited. The powers that were would have drooled at the possibility of controlling info about civil rights and the Vietnam War. If you can't see the harm in DRM, then you are only insulting yourself.
You missed my point entirely about having all sorts of people pushing the case. Irritants like the Black Panthers certainly were cretins, but they also made sure the media paid attention. Who did the media pay more attention to in nightly news broadcasts -- the reasonable people working the halls of power, or the riots? Maybe you would understand it better as good cop bad cop -- people could safely ignore the halls working suits, but they couldn't ignore riots.
Consider the American Revolution, 1775-1783. Certainly Adams and Franklin working the halls of power were necessary. So was Washington's army. So were the militia, who were considered despicable cowardly guerrilas by the British.
Sniping militia alone couldn't have won the independence. Neither could Franklin and Adams in Paris.
Ditto for suits in DC and Black Panthers. Neither alone could do it. Both together (and all degrees between) did.
Lots of complaints about unruly spectators, wise nodding of heads that spectators need to be polite, wear suits, work the system.
BULLSHIT.
It takes all kinds to get things done. Back in the 50s and 60s, the heyday of civil rights activism, the people who got things done ranged from Rose Parks (sp?) keeping her seat to Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr. rousing the rabble, black politicians working the system, ordinary marchers facing up to Lester Maddox and his ax. It took all of them to change the system.
How far do you think they would have gotten if they had all been polite and worn suits and worked the system? Hint: they didn't get anywhere until the more rambunctious ones drew people's attention to the crap going on.
How long do you think the Vietnam War would have gone on if it had not been for street protests?
The people in control would love to have opponents wasting time quietly working the system.
Sometimes you gotta shake the tree to get any fruit.
Maybe to a certain small class of people, "regular expression" means what you want it to mean. To 99.99% of the people who use the phrase, it means what the book describes, and those things have changed considerably.
Many precise mathematical or scientific terms have different meanings to laymen. What is a positive number? I'm sure I learned whether 0 is a positive number way back when, but right now it simply doesn't matter. Context is usually good enough, and when not, > and >= work wonders. Quantum leap as used by mere mortals has the meaning of incredible revolutionary exciting change, but scientifically, it means the smallest possible change.
No references, but it was pretty recent. Intel is considering adding Bluetooth or 811.* or something similar to every processor, because it's such a small cost, for a gain in ubiquity.
Slashdot Mirror
of it's kind
Apostrophe not needed for this possesive....
As for Is that descent back to earth, where else if not descent to the earth? You think this was done on Mars or somewhere?
I haven't seen such an atrocious pun in ages, and it's bilingual, and two words, and ... and ... too bad! You deserve some sort of award. But I can't think of anything appropriate... yet.
...just turn it on!
DVDs and the region codes got in without much complaaint. DVDs also don't allow skipping certain parts, like the FBI copyright warning, and some trailers and advertising. The public has accepted them.
DiVX failed. It was too blatantly a lousy consumer sell.
So the RIAA and MPAA have learned. They have a good chance of slipping in all the DRM crap they can pay for in Washington, DC. Once it's legally mandated, there won't be any alternatives.
For those who weren't around, Senator Biden lost a lot of face, and (IIRC) a shot at the Democratic presidential nomination, due to plagiarism. There was a joke at the time something like this:
Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Gary Hart are on a cruise ship which starts to sink.
"Save the women and children first!" shouts Mr. Reagan.
"Screw the women and children!" shouts Mr. Nixon.
"We got time for that?" asks Mr. Hart.
Then someone added Mr. Biden to the passenger list.
"We got time for that?" repeats Mr. Biden.
And this is the guy who wants to make DRM breaking a jailable offense. I wonder if it includes just plain plagiarism.
Moderation Totals: Insightful=2, Funny=1, Underrated=1, Total=4.
Well, at least one of 'em got it! I don't know about that underrated guy, he did or didn't, so call it 1.5 got it.
Insightful? They DIDN'T get it. Sheesh.
Sure these could be (and probably will be) used by government to snoop on people. For the record, my uncle was investigated by the FBI for starting a union and foiling one of LBJs hare-brained schemes in the early 1960s; wire tapping, neighbors and friends asked a lot of questions, etc. So I have no love for those power hungry idiots.
But this tech will work both ways. I believe David Brin said it in Transparent Society. The problem isn't the spying itself so much as the onesidedness of it all, in that only the rich and powerful have been able to spy, and avoid being spied upon. Once these things are mass produced, they will get into civilian hands, and the rich and powerful will be more susceptible to them, not less. Similar to Diamand Age, also.
I'd say the tech will be as great an equalizer as the gun was -- all previous weapons required lots of personal time for training which only the rich and powerful could afford. Just as spying on my uncle took lots of manpower, previous weapons required lots of resources and commitment -- armor, the longbow, swords. The revolver in particular was a revolution in personal weaponry. These bugs will be just as revolutionary, and the rich and powerful won't be able to hide from them nearly as well.
.. uh, well, because, because, last time, when they bragged about something to their benefit, they were just lying, yeh, that's the ticket! Lying!
Keerist, why this lame acceptance as nonto ni verdad when everything else they say is a pack of lies?
For the record, I do my utmost to avoid M$ products, because (a) they are buggy as all get out, (b) they are like working with a straight-jacket (do it their way or no way), and (c) their business ethics suck major toad warts. But it's kind of annoying seeing all the bashing that goes on most of the time, then this where suddenly their word is gospel.
Biological and chemical weapons are also banned, yet we issue gas masks and antidotes.
But more to the point, all weapons and all machinery and in fact just about everything in the world has unintended side effects. Guarding against unintnded consequences of using them is not a crime, even if the thing in question is a crime. What is wrong with that?
Zillions of actions are illegal, yet we have courts and police and jails. There are also all sorts of regulations and laws against government malfeasance, yet there are also regulations designed to punish transgressors, even to help find transgressors.
There is zilch wrong with issuing protective goggles, any more than issuing helmets and flak jackets.
And in case you still don't get it, these new lasers are not illegal, since their intended purpose is not illegal. Only their side effect is illegal, but only if it is the main effect, not a side effect.
The main effect of any weapon is to kill enemry soldiers, not civilians. Yet a side effect is to kill civilians. Shall we now also ban civilian ambulances near a war zone, or make their use illegal when responding to an unintended side effect of a war weapon?
We call it a weapon for destroying hardware, but we are also embarking on sister program to create special protective goggles for our soldiers. Why on earth would we need those if the danger of blinding is so small?
... what? Goes along with ASSERT and argument checking in code, probably.
So, let me get this straight, developing flak jackets, steel helmets, steel soled boots, even emergency medical kits, is really just a sinister hint that artillery, grenades, mortars, and even rifles might have (gasp!) side effects, and are therefore immoral?
Maybe having seat belts, side impact beams, crush zones, airbags, and all the rest of that safety crap are just an indication that cars aren't designed well.
Submarine rescue vehicles, escape hatches, Momsen lungs, all that are just a clue that we shouldn't have submarines? Lifeboats mean we shouldn't have ships which actually go to sea.
Or, closer to home, parity and ECC are indications that memory might fail, and therefore
Yeh, just a bit sarcastic I guess, but this kind of nonsense thinking really galls me.
Here. Also being considered for the AC-130 gunship. Explanation of aiming problems, one turret or two, etc. Much more detail.
Even sent them the recommended $270 for a year. Almost immediately I got tons of letters practically demanding that I be more generous. I decided they were wasting my money and ignored them from then on. I also was a bit ticked when they supported sending that 17 (?) year old kid back to Russia with his parents after he'd lived here for some time and didn't want to go back, and would be an adult in just a year. But it was the obnoxious dunning letters that got my goat.
If you knew my name, you'd bounce it right back at me :-)
You've got a name like Ischo and you complain that Ogg Vorbis sounds stupid and embarrassing?!?
Considering how long it takes the legal system to do anything...
A first look at their website brings up some annoyances concerning what they claim to be improvements over make:
Configuration files are Python scripts--no new syntax to learn.
Unless you don't know Python. I never figured make syntax to be very difficult.
Support for C, C++, Fortran, Yacc and Lex.
I didn't realize this was an improvement over make, which is pretty language-agnostic. What about other languages? I usually assume listing specific elements means unlisted elements are NOT supported.
Support for parallel builds (-j).
That -j option look like they borrowed it from make.
Building from central repositories of source code and/or pre-built targets.
Not sure exactly what this means, but make understands RCS and SCCS, IIRC. Been a while since I used the feature.
All in all, a first glimpse which finds all this FUD in a list of alleged improvements doesn't impress me. Some of the other claims might be useful, but they don't have enough credibility left for me to want to investigate.
My little group (4 programmers) had been using CVS for years, and another group (10 programmers) installed ClearCase, and management decided our CVS group should convert. There were two CC admins; one wrote a piss poor install script. When it started deleting files it had no business even looking at, I aborted it, cleaned things up (*I* kept backups :-), told my boss, and he backed me up -- we stayed on CVS. The other CC admin was a joke, and twice (!) deleted the CC repository by mistake. Other times I don't know what he did, or if it was just CC taking a dive, but they were down all day getting it straightened out. Most of that group were envious that my group stayed on CVS.
I have never worked on huge projects, never more than a dozen programmers at most, and CVS has always been good enough. I will certainly switch to subversion, or maybe one of the others, because I like a lot of the improvements, but CC has always seemed like bloated overkill.
What the effing difference does it make -- if it was broadcast for free viewing, what the holy heck difference does it make how many people see it or how they see it?!?
Ford Motor Co. is set to release today a new car, the Model "A", based on the award winning and famously popular Model "T". The new Model "A" is backwards compatible with all previous 4 wheel gasoline powered Model "T" cars produced by Ford and its competitors, and can run on the same roads as them.
Don't start with messages like "test". Send things like AAAAA and see what actually comes out. Find the lowest char it accepts, probably space (somewhat useless), maybe bang, maybe digits. But figure out the lowest it accepts, and preferably as few bits as possible, such as @ 0x40. Reset it and send strings of this, see how they show. You do need to try lots of variations. Send zillions of AAAAA and see how many other chars show before it repeats.
No, always have a stop bit. The highest on bit is the stop bit, and not played. This allows up to 7 bits of useful bits.
You are short sighted if you can't see the harm in DRM. One of the fundamentals of a free citizenry is an informed citizenry. That's the point of freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Without them, the civil rights and anti-war movements would have gotten nowhere. With DRM, the ability to pass along knowledge is severaly limited. The powers that were would have drooled at the possibility of controlling info about civil rights and the Vietnam War. If you can't see the harm in DRM, then you are only insulting yourself.
You missed my point entirely about having all sorts of people pushing the case. Irritants like the Black Panthers certainly were cretins, but they also made sure the media paid attention. Who did the media pay more attention to in nightly news broadcasts -- the reasonable people working the halls of power, or the riots? Maybe you would understand it better as good cop bad cop -- people could safely ignore the halls working suits, but they couldn't ignore riots.
Consider the American Revolution, 1775-1783. Certainly Adams and Franklin working the halls of power were necessary. So was Washington's army. So were the militia, who were considered despicable cowardly guerrilas by the British.
Sniping militia alone couldn't have won the independence. Neither could Franklin and Adams in Paris.
Ditto for suits in DC and Black Panthers. Neither alone could do it. Both together (and all degrees between) did.
It takes all kinds.
Lots of complaints about unruly spectators, wise nodding of heads that spectators need to be polite, wear suits, work the system.
BULLSHIT.
It takes all kinds to get things done. Back in the 50s and 60s, the heyday of civil rights activism, the people who got things done ranged from Rose Parks (sp?) keeping her seat to Black Panthers. Martin Luther King Jr. rousing the rabble, black politicians working the system, ordinary marchers facing up to Lester Maddox and his ax. It took all of them to change the system.
How far do you think they would have gotten if they had all been polite and worn suits and worked the system? Hint: they didn't get anywhere until the more rambunctious ones drew people's attention to the crap going on.
How long do you think the Vietnam War would have gone on if it had not been for street protests?
The people in control would love to have opponents wasting time quietly working the system.
Sometimes you gotta shake the tree to get any fruit.
Maybe to a certain small class of people, "regular expression" means what you want it to mean. To 99.99% of the people who use the phrase, it means what the book describes, and those things have changed considerably.
Many precise mathematical or scientific terms have different meanings to laymen. What is a positive number? I'm sure I learned whether 0 is a positive number way back when, but right now it simply doesn't matter. Context is usually good enough, and when not, > and >= work wonders. Quantum leap as used by mere mortals has the meaning of incredible revolutionary exciting change, but scientifically, it means the smallest possible change.
So foo to you.
No references, but it was pretty recent. Intel is considering adding Bluetooth or 811.* or something similar to every processor, because it's such a small cost, for a gain in ubiquity.