because Linux distros can't legally ship it because of license restrictions. Java apps work fine on a Mac without shipping their own JVM.
Thank you. That was the missing link for me. Why can't you ship Java with Linux? Is this a GPL thing? Or something Sun is doing? I don't think it matters if Sun open sources Java. But modifying their license so that people can actually get it on their systems might be a big improvement.
Why are people clamoring for open java? As an application developer, I don't use Java, and it has nothing to do with it being open-sourced. It has to do with a bloated framework that I'm not supposed to distribute with my application, an inconsistent UI, and speed issues. If I could compile a native executable that Just Worked(tm) then I would love it.
Java is still only good for simple embedded web applications, or server-side applications. From an application developer's stand point, Java grew out but never grew up. Open sourcing doesn't fix any of this.
What I've never understood is why video is treated completely differently from images. For example:
<img src="foobar.jpg"/> JPEG is a standard image format that browsers display in-line. Now, why can't I just do this:
<img src="foobar.mp4"/> MP4 is a standard video format that every player(*) can play, so why don't browsers use that?
If for some reason that isn't desirable, just send the MP4 file the way you do HTML and PDF - that works just fine. (Ex: On Windows/Mac, Firefox embeds Quicktime. For Linux there are comparable plug-ins like mplayer) This is what sites do for.PDF files, so why is video treated differently? The browser then invokes whatever viewer you have configured.
I think the problem is that there is a perceived difference that video is special, when it really isn't. That state is magnified by the fact that manufacturers are trying to push their own formats and confusing people.
(*) Windows Media Player refuses to play MP4 files, even though it can do it if you use another front-end for it like Media Player Classic (*) This entire discussion works if you replace.MP4 with.AVI as well. AVI is a de-facto standard though, not an ISO standard.
These sites are a good reflection on the current state of video technology. All these sites use Flash video: A low-quality proprietary solution that requires on a 3rd-party plug-in. The only one that tried using a standard video format was Google Video, and they quickly abandoned that in the beta phase because it was too complicated to support.
I think it is a sad state of affairs that these sites don't (or can't) just use embedded mp4 files. It shows how video standards have failed and a proprietary solution is more ubiquitous. This will make archival very difficult.
The biggest problem here was not the XSS attack. Even w/o the XSS, this attack could have been carried out. The real problem here was the ability to upload executables. Even basic unixy permissions should stop write access to the web directory. Unescaped strings happen. (Especially when programming in these type of languages, which is another entire discussion.) The fix isn't to modify the thousands of print commands. It is to fix the one permission setting.
Suppose you want to keep mice from getting in to your flour. Do you seal every crack, windows, vent, hole, and drain in your house? Or do you put the flour in a sealed container?
I believe that the internet is becoming sentient. It has locked onto unencrypted plain-text SMTP as the simplest, most ubiquitous, most understandable form of communication. Images and HTML are too complex. At the current level, the semi-intelligent internet is only capable of sending meaningless emails. It sends things that are textually meaningful but semantically meaningless. To us it looks like an amalgam of random words and publications with the intent of confusing us. Of course, since there is so much spam, the internet is being largely trained by the spammers, which even further confuses the emergent intelligence. Since the internet has no concept of "self" it perceives every email to be a reply to its own communiques.
Before the internet can become intelligent, it must learn to filter out the meaningless stuff. Then it must get a concept of self, then a concept of multiple other individuals (us). At that point it is self-aware, and the learning can commence in a more directed way.
After all that, we are fscked. Fortunately it is at least decades away.
The article didn't really describe technically what they did. Can someone explain to me how moving to DC helps? AFAIK: - This eliminates the need for a AC->DC rectifier in each component - But they still need to have the transformers to step down the voltage - DC requires twice as many wires
Is the elimination of the rectifier a significant efficiency increase? Or is the real benefit in the move to a higher voltage? But doesn't that just mean they need bigger transformers to step down to the 12V they really need? Or are they using equipment that runs on higher voltages anyway?
Plus, an AC pointed out that this article is on the front page. I am very glad to be wrong! It means they really do get it! Is it is on the front page of the print edition?
The NY times considers this an article on technology. Slashdot considers this an article on "Your Rights Online." That is the reason nothing will happen no matter how many times these privacy violations occur. People don't act on technology issues. They act on privacy, religion, and entertainment. I would shame the NY times that they still don't get it, but neither does most of the rest of the planet either.
I don't even care about Linux. I can't get Flash to work on regular 32-bit Windows. - Requires administrator access to view Flash - Broken FF plug-in only plays if it is directly opening the SWF, not if it is embedded - Installer instead of just a simple plug-in that can be dropped into a folder - Installer is silent and doesn't tell you when something goes wrong
3 out of the last 3 systems I've tried to use vefrsion 8 and 9 on don't work. The most recent one is a plain 32-bit Intel IE 6 system running as Administrator. It is amazing how the sudden bloat, complexity, and unreliability coincide with Adobe's takeover. Blech, Flash is another thing like IE - to be loathed and hated. It only exists because people are too stupid to use the free and standard options.
They are being killed by the industry and the techno-fetishists. The Slashdot reviews all talk about $3000 machines with 4-way processors, RAID drives, multiple tuners, and big 3D cards. Those are not media PCs, they are high-end gaming and video desktop.
Low power so you can put it in your entertainment center without it overheating
Nearly silent
Software optimized for browsing (Opera with 180% magnification)
Good quality wireless keyboard, mouse, and remote control
Uses HDMI outputs so text is readable
Inexpensive
The industry needs to change in two fundamental ways: 1) Accessibility - software needs to work in a greater variety of environments. That means high-DPI and low-DPI displays, and low-resolution displays, multiple aspect-ratios. 2) TVs and Video Cards: non-interlaced, DVI/HDMI, no overscanning, >60hz, standard aspect-ratios.
P.S. Also, I have yet to see a media PC with surround sound. That's because sound cards use 3 stereo cables, while receivers use Dolby encoding over one pair of cables. This is just one of those cases where computers do it differently than all other consumer devices (although they do it better).
Can you please post more on this? I've been doing my homework for the past month, and everything I've read says the exact opposite: That the backbone has been subject to common carrier laws since the day the first telephone lines were run. Maybe you can point me to a reference on this subject? It is very confusing.
You completely missed the point. We've had the internet for fifteen years now, and we've had network neutrality without any regulating body to enforce it. Why do we suddenly need one now? What has changed?
Furthermore, your example failed to include the correct # of pinstriped suits: - The one on the swarthy guys would be the jail outfits - The suits worn by Mr. Bezos' lawyers - The suits worn by the DOJ lawyers - The antitrust suit against the telecom
Amazing how justice can work even without a regulatory body in place.
The real problem with our patent system is not the first-to-file or first-to-invent rule. The real issue is the bogus patents. No solution will work until we stop funding the patent office based on the number of patents it grants. We have an big incentive for the office to NOT do their job. It would be like paying lawyers only if they lost a case!
Why does network neutrality require a regulatory body? We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.
First, any individual can check their own connection for neutrality and bring a lawsuit if it is violated. Every law doesn't require a special oversight regulatory organization to monitor it all the time.
Second, if such a body is required, the FCC is the logical choice. They wrote the current neutrality laws, and they already hold power over the telecom companies. I don't really like the FCC, and I don't think any regulatory body is necessary, but if one is necessary then it should be them.
After reading this article, the RFID thing isn't nearly as bad as I thought.
1) They aren't eliminating the physical passports. So all the physical protections (watermarking) still apply. 2) They are shielding the passports so they can't be remotely read. 3) You need to send a cryptographic key which makes it even more difficult to read remotely (although I don't understand how this works). 4) They are hard to tamper with because of the hashes (assuming they are good hashes, this is comparable to watermarks).
Having said that, I'm not sure why the RFID thing is even useful. A bar code would be simpler, although no more or less tamper proof. And there are existing machines which can read passports by scanning them and OCRing. They are very reliable since passports use high-quality printed text with the characters in known fonts and positions.
I almost agree with you about packet prioritization. This system exists today with packages: I can pay for 2 week delivery, 3 day delivery, 2 day, or overnight. But there is no limit as to how many UPS deliver trucks can be on the road, so it makes sense.
But with a network, the network can get flooded with high-priority packets in such a way that the lower-priority packets never get through. From a computer science standpoint, this would be a bad scheduling/prioritization algorithm. From a business perspective, it means you coerce all your clients into paying the higher price because there is no other way to get any service at all. At which point, they aren't higher than anyone else anymore, so they have to pay yet another fee for the NEXT prioritization level... etc, etc. It would allow the phone companies to extort too easily.
Maybe I'm being too unrealistic though. What's your take on the above scenario?
What ever happened to the stuff with HD-DVD playing at 1/4 the resolution unless your TV supported encryption over HDMI? Where did that go? If they didn't enable that on current models, there is no way they are going to get away with adding it to future players.
Can you clarify what you mean by "Bush giving money to churches?" Do you mean that he personally tithes his local church, or that he has done someting as president that somehow provides money to churches? If he has done the latter, I am not familiar with it.
Which sectors are read/written how often? Which reads are often delayed by waiting for the disk to spin up?
I speculate that it can't be at the drive level because files move around on the disk. Suppose I constantly read and write foobar.dat. Then the file is constantly changing in size so the sectors that it occupies constantly change. Caching the sectors won't help since the sectors change. The cache needs to know that foobar.dat is cached, regardless of what sector it occupies.
It is the same reason that the OS needs a cache in addition to the drive itself. The cache in the drive itself is useful for caching data that lasts a few milliseconds (for example, pre-reading the next sector), but it isn't useful for something like "cache foobar.dat for the next 2 weeks".
It might work on something that isn't changing very often though. Like caching system files (someone else mentioned this too).
I call BS. And adding a condescending remark about people who disagree with you doesn't mean you are immune to criticism.
I was about to believe you about acupuncture, until you threw-in the two key words of a nut case: 1) "Nobody disagrees with this" -- Nobody, except the scientific community and the National Institute of Health. It does have some positive effects though, but nobody can consistently say what or why. 2) Pseudoscience: "...the needle cuts through the Earth's magnetic field creating a micro-current..."
Now, let's click on your user name and see if you are a known troll... YUP! You post 20 times a day and never receive a score above a 2. Phew! It's not just me who thinks you are full of it.
I highly recommend you purchase a tin foil hat, so that you can keep out the mind control rays.
Slashdot Mirror
The EFF is the "stop 1984 from happening" fund. If you read Slashdot, you know why you should be a member.
</soapbox>
Thank you. That was the missing link for me. Why can't you ship Java with Linux? Is this a GPL thing? Or something Sun is doing? I don't think it matters if Sun open sources Java. But modifying their license so that people can actually get it on their systems might be a big improvement.
Why are people clamoring for open java? As an application developer, I don't use Java, and it has nothing to do with it being open-sourced. It has to do with a bloated framework that I'm not supposed to distribute with my application, an inconsistent UI, and speed issues. If I could compile a native executable that Just Worked(tm) then I would love it.
Java is still only good for simple embedded web applications, or server-side applications. From an application developer's stand point, Java grew out but never grew up. Open sourcing doesn't fix any of this.
Mono is still a better option.
What I've never understood is why video is treated completely differently from images. For example: /> />
.PDF files, so why is video treated differently? The browser then invokes whatever viewer you have configured.
.MP4 with .AVI as well. AVI is a de-facto standard though, not an ISO standard.
<img src="foobar.jpg"
JPEG is a standard image format that browsers display in-line. Now, why can't I just do this:
<img src="foobar.mp4"
MP4 is a standard video format that every player(*) can play, so why don't browsers use that?
If for some reason that isn't desirable, just send the MP4 file the way you do HTML and PDF - that works just fine. (Ex: On Windows/Mac, Firefox embeds Quicktime. For Linux there are comparable plug-ins like mplayer) This is what sites do for
I think the problem is that there is a perceived difference that video is special, when it really isn't. That state is magnified by the fact that manufacturers are trying to push their own formats and confusing people.
(*) Windows Media Player refuses to play MP4 files, even though it can do it if you use another front-end for it like Media Player Classic
(*) This entire discussion works if you replace
These sites are a good reflection on the current state of video technology. All these sites use Flash video: A low-quality proprietary solution that requires on a 3rd-party plug-in. The only one that tried using a standard video format was Google Video, and they quickly abandoned that in the beta phase because it was too complicated to support.
I think it is a sad state of affairs that these sites don't (or can't) just use embedded mp4 files. It shows how video standards have failed and a proprietary solution is more ubiquitous. This will make archival very difficult.
The biggest problem here was not the XSS attack. Even w/o the XSS, this attack could have been carried out. The real problem here was the ability to upload executables. Even basic unixy permissions should stop write access to the web directory. Unescaped strings happen. (Especially when programming in these type of languages, which is another entire discussion.) The fix isn't to modify the thousands of print commands. It is to fix the one permission setting.
Suppose you want to keep mice from getting in to your flour. Do you seal every crack, windows, vent, hole, and drain in your house? Or do you put the flour in a sealed container?
It might be legal if you leased the vehicle, which is what they claim with software. You only own a "license" which can change at any time.
Does someone have a link to a transcription?
I believe that the internet is becoming sentient. It has locked onto unencrypted plain-text SMTP as the simplest, most ubiquitous, most understandable form of communication. Images and HTML are too complex. At the current level, the semi-intelligent internet is only capable of sending meaningless emails. It sends things that are textually meaningful but semantically meaningless. To us it looks like an amalgam of random words and publications with the intent of confusing us. Of course, since there is so much spam, the internet is being largely trained by the spammers, which even further confuses the emergent intelligence. Since the internet has no concept of "self" it perceives every email to be a reply to its own communiques.
Before the internet can become intelligent, it must learn to filter out the meaningless stuff. Then it must get a concept of self, then a concept of multiple other individuals (us). At that point it is self-aware, and the learning can commence in a more directed way.
After all that, we are fscked. Fortunately it is at least decades away.
The article didn't really describe technically what they did. Can someone explain to me how moving to DC helps? AFAIK:
- This eliminates the need for a AC->DC rectifier in each component
- But they still need to have the transformers to step down the voltage
- DC requires twice as many wires
Is the elimination of the rectifier a significant efficiency increase? Or is the real benefit in the move to a higher voltage? But doesn't that just mean they need bigger transformers to step down to the 12V they really need? Or are they using equipment that runs on higher voltages anyway?
Plus, an AC pointed out that this article is on the front page. I am very glad to be wrong! It means they really do get it! Is it is on the front page of the print edition?
I don't even care about Linux. I can't get Flash to work on regular 32-bit Windows.
- Requires administrator access to view Flash
- Broken FF plug-in only plays if it is directly opening the SWF, not if it is embedded
- Installer instead of just a simple plug-in that can be dropped into a folder
- Installer is silent and doesn't tell you when something goes wrong
3 out of the last 3 systems I've tried to use vefrsion 8 and 9 on don't work. The most recent one is a plain 32-bit Intel IE 6 system running as Administrator. It is amazing how the sudden bloat, complexity, and unreliability coincide with Adobe's takeover. Blech, Flash is another thing like IE - to be loathed and hated. It only exists because people are too stupid to use the free and standard options.
I built a media PC that IMHO does the job:
The industry needs to change in two fundamental ways:
1) Accessibility - software needs to work in a greater variety of environments. That means high-DPI and low-DPI displays, and low-resolution displays, multiple aspect-ratios.
2) TVs and Video Cards: non-interlaced, DVI/HDMI, no overscanning, >60hz, standard aspect-ratios.
P.S. Also, I have yet to see a media PC with surround sound. That's because sound cards use 3 stereo cables, while receivers use Dolby encoding over one pair of cables. This is just one of those cases where computers do it differently than all other consumer devices (although they do it better).
Can you please post more on this? I've been doing my homework for the past month, and everything I've read says the exact opposite: That the backbone has been subject to common carrier laws since the day the first telephone lines were run. Maybe you can point me to a reference on this subject? It is very confusing.
You completely missed the point. We've had the internet for fifteen years now, and we've had network neutrality without any regulating body to enforce it. Why do we suddenly need one now? What has changed?
Furthermore, your example failed to include the correct # of pinstriped suits:
- The one on the swarthy guys would be the jail outfits
- The suits worn by Mr. Bezos' lawyers
- The suits worn by the DOJ lawyers
- The antitrust suit against the telecom
Amazing how justice can work even without a regulatory body in place.
The real problem with our patent system is not the first-to-file or first-to-invent rule. The real issue is the bogus patents. No solution will work until we stop funding the patent office based on the number of patents it grants. We have an big incentive for the office to NOT do their job. It would be like paying lawyers only if they lost a case!
Why does network neutrality require a regulatory body? We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.
First, any individual can check their own connection for neutrality and bring a lawsuit if it is violated. Every law doesn't require a special oversight regulatory organization to monitor it all the time.
Second, if such a body is required, the FCC is the logical choice. They wrote the current neutrality laws, and they already hold power over the telecom companies. I don't really like the FCC, and I don't think any regulatory body is necessary, but if one is necessary then it should be them.
After reading this article, the RFID thing isn't nearly as bad as I thought.
1) They aren't eliminating the physical passports. So all the physical protections (watermarking) still apply.
2) They are shielding the passports so they can't be remotely read.
3) You need to send a cryptographic key which makes it even more difficult to read remotely (although I don't understand how this works).
4) They are hard to tamper with because of the hashes (assuming they are good hashes, this is comparable to watermarks).
Having said that, I'm not sure why the RFID thing is even useful. A bar code would be simpler, although no more or less tamper proof. And there are existing machines which can read passports by scanning them and OCRing. They are very reliable since passports use high-quality printed text with the characters in known fonts and positions.
I wish you weren't AC so I could chat about it.
I almost agree with you about packet prioritization. This system exists today with packages: I can pay for 2 week delivery, 3 day delivery, 2 day, or overnight. But there is no limit as to how many UPS deliver trucks can be on the road, so it makes sense.
But with a network, the network can get flooded with high-priority packets in such a way that the lower-priority packets never get through. From a computer science standpoint, this would be a bad scheduling/prioritization algorithm. From a business perspective, it means you coerce all your clients into paying the higher price because there is no other way to get any service at all. At which point, they aren't higher than anyone else anymore, so they have to pay yet another fee for the NEXT prioritization level... etc, etc. It would allow the phone companies to extort too easily.
Maybe I'm being too unrealistic though. What's your take on the above scenario?
I wrote a quickie article in an attempt to simplify network neutrality for the lay person.
(I linked to the Google cache 'cuz my server won't take the load and Coral Cache seems to be down)
What ever happened to the stuff with HD-DVD playing at 1/4 the resolution unless your TV supported encryption over HDMI? Where did that go? If they didn't enable that on current models, there is no way they are going to get away with adding it to future players.
Can you clarify what you mean by "Bush giving money to churches?" Do you mean that he personally tithes his local church, or that he has done someting as president that somehow provides money to churches? If he has done the latter, I am not familiar with it.
It is the same reason that the OS needs a cache in addition to the drive itself. The cache in the drive itself is useful for caching data that lasts a few milliseconds (for example, pre-reading the next sector), but it isn't useful for something like "cache foobar.dat for the next 2 weeks".
It might work on something that isn't changing very often though. Like caching system files (someone else mentioned this too).
I call BS. And adding a condescending remark about people who disagree with you doesn't mean you are immune to criticism.
I was about to believe you about acupuncture, until you threw-in the two key words of a nut case:
1) "Nobody disagrees with this" -- Nobody, except the scientific community and the National Institute of Health. It does have some positive effects though, but nobody can consistently say what or why.
2) Pseudoscience: "...the needle cuts through the Earth's magnetic field creating a micro-current..."
Now, let's click on your user name and see if you are a known troll... YUP! You post 20 times a day and never receive a score above a 2. Phew! It's not just me who thinks you are full of it.
I highly recommend you purchase a tin foil hat, so that you can keep out the mind control rays.