Come on people, we're talking about the MTV awards here, brought to us by MTV; the epitomy of modern pop and hype culture. We're talking about something hosted by a TV station aimed at 14 year old girls who faint at the sight of $current_hip_boyband and wish to be like $cheap_spicegirls_knock_off while flooding the rest of the market with artists like $random_teen_chick and $overhyped_guy_who_looks_gay.
I saw the release announcement for WASTE and went, "ho-hum" YAPPFSS - Yet Another Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing System, and promptly forgot about it in the next two seconds.
But, now that AOL is making a stink about it, I'm going to remember WASTE and will probably grab a copy of the source for posterity and to do my part of the "internet routes around censorship" bit.
I work with architects, and our lawyer says that the drawings our conisdered IP of our firm.
Hardly an unbiased source of opinion on the topic. Regardless of the validity of that opinion with respect to whatever special circumstances might be involved, the lawyer is probably contractually obligated to hold that belief, otherwise if they went to court over the issue at some point, the lawyer would probably run into ethical problems representing a position he didn't necessarily believe to be the correct one. (Lawyers and ethics, WTF?!!??? Strange but true - you just have to remember that 'business' ethics and human ethics have very little in common beyond those 6 letters.)
Almost anyone who is a technophile was weaned on stories of colonies on the moon and mars by the new millenium. NASA, for better or for worse, never fullfilled those dreams. But now that some of those technophiles are all grown up and have a billion and a half dollars, it only makes sense that they would start to use their new-found power to realize the dreams of their youth.
As a fellow dreamer, I can't think of a better outcome to the dotcom-dotbomb cycle than the kick-off of a vibrant commercial space industry. (Well, maybe the immediate cessation of world poverty and the industrial destruction of the environment. But the chances of that happening even with a couple of motivated dotcom dreamers at the helm, are probably close to nil. At least space doesn't have too much in the way of entrenched powers that prefer the status quo.)
Your point #1 is good, except obviously in most local terminals where it doesn't apply.
No, it applies to ALL tty terminals, even local xterm/eterm/etc. The only case where it doesn't apply is in a pure GUI evironment where the X server talks directly to the keyboard and generates keypress events that the application being controlled receives directlya s events and not as characters. Merely sending keypress events to an xterm window in which vi is running will not eliminate the race condition because the xterm will translate those keypresses into multi-character escape codes that it feeds the tty line discipline. Anything that uses the tty drivers (aka pty, aka ttyp, etc) is potentially subject to the problem.
For example - vim will always be vulnerable, gvim will not be.
1) Many terminals represent cursor and other non-ascii keys as multi-character sequences (usually escape-something-or-another) and the tty line discpline "guesses" that you typed a special key like a cursor key by measuring the time between receiving characters - the idea is that if they come quick enough, it must be a special key because no human can type that fast.
But, neither linux nor most other unices are real-time so sometimes random delays get inserted in the middle of the multi-char sequences and the system now thinks you typed seperate keys instead of just one. Ever hold down a cursor key for a long time only to have vi start going crazy and insert a bunch of weird line-noise like garbage into the text? You just had a timing anomaly like the above description.
2) Cursor keys are inefficient, you have to move your hand far away from the home position and back, often needing to actually glance at the keyboard in order to make sure your fingers get aligned and re-aligned correctly. Using H-J-K-L, like most other commands in vi, your fingers stay right there in the middle of the keys requiring no special extra thought on your part to align your fingers. This may seem trivial, but when you move a cursor around a couple of thousand times per day, it adds up real quick.
So, in summary, HJKL GOOD, Cursor Arrow Keys BAD. If you haven't learned HJKL yet, wean yourself of the arrow keys as soon as possible. It is one more step down the path of acheiving unix nirvana.
Now when I DO get a vorbis player, I'm going to have to spend about 300 hours re-ripping my entire collection.
Don't rip to vorbis, rip to FLAC and then never worry about having to re-rip to the format dejure again. Disk is cheap, go lossless for archival purposes and then whenever you need it in a lossy format, just use the FLAC version as your base source and convert on the fly. Makes it easy to support MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AARP, NCAA, etc.
Dude, I love 24, but it regularly has major weak momemnts that are in a league far and beyond the worst episodes of Buffy. Half the story lines with the daughter are crap, just a reason to get a pretty girl on screen. And besides, the ending for Buffy was 10x better than this season's finale for 24, talk about weak.
Damn! And I just used up my last mod points an hour ago.
Motherhood and apple-pie don't need the protection of civil rights laws, it is the people and ideas that are on the fringe, the ones that, for better or for worse, keep this country from total stagnation that need the protection. If you don't believe in civil rights for weirdos, then you don't really believe in civil rights.
You would think just about anyone over the age of 15 who has some kind of affinity for technology would have seen at least one movie depicting the kinds of problems with Symantec's solution taken to its logical conclusion. For example:
"SKYNET became self-aware at 4:01 AM on August 4th, 1997 and at 4:12 it ordered a pre-emptive nuclear strike."
Easy - change your name to john ashcroft and then start hanging out at the local university mosques. Before you know, it you'll get your name on the list and as a bonus, the food at those student mosques tends to be pretty good too.
There needs to be a corollary to that rule - any new information exposed by the process of requesting a copy of information related to you can not be (legally) added to the database
Ok, a corollary to the corollary - Consent to legally add any newly exposed information can not be a prerequisite for, or in any way influence the process of, getting the requested information.
At the behest of the FBI (or maybe it is the secret service since counterfeiting is their purview) all color photocopiers in the USA embedded a watermark with a unique serial number identifying the copier used.
For some reason this fact is not well documented, but here is at least one reference(pdf) in an IBM report from 1998. See the section on tracking.
This can be a problem for cheap counterfeiters (well-equipped ones won't have a problem either acquiring a copier on the blackmarket or using a modified one) but it also can suck for whistleblowers making copies of documents. If the copier used can be identified it makes it that much easier for a vengeful company/government to identify the whistleblower and take "corrective action."
Re:why do you stupidly assume it's "us"
on
SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 1
Well, you forgot one more equally likely candidate - Microsoft. They don't have a monopoly on FUD or dirty-tricks *cough*dr-dos*cough* but I think they are just as likely as the other three groups listed (make of that what you will).
Either that or some nebbish of a middle-manager got a little over excited and made a new rule in order to justify his presence on the payroll. If this policy gets retracred or at least heavily watered down in the next couple of weeks, that'll mean one less nebbish on the payroll.
I poked around and did not find ready reference to H.264 licensing terms. I know MPEG4 is total snafu, but what are the H.264 terms? How about submarine patents, any ideas on the chances of some of those surfacing and dorking up the current terms?
Notice the story about the RIAA, Verizon and the DMCA a couple of notches down the front page from this one? The DMCA is way more than just circumventing copy-stoppen schemes.
Apparently Pim Fortuyn's politics were widely mischaracterized in most media after his asassination. You may find there was a lot more to like about the guy than most people outside of the Netherlends was led to believe.
Meanwhile, this whole WMD was so clearly a pretense to start with that I can't help but laugh as the administration squirms. But as a friend of mine said recently, we will find WMD in Iraq - even if we have to fly them in ourselves. Makes you wonder why they even bother to let it drag out for so long. Maybe there is still a modicum of honor in the current administration (still haven't finished reprogramming Powell, perhaps) that they can't quite get the gumption up to start planting the evidence. Either that or things are still too disorganized over there to pull it off without getting caught in the act.
Hatch officially retracted his move to enshrine the Pat-riot act. But you can bet that fucker is scheming for another chance at it.
Re:This is actually major news to some people
on
First HDTV Camcorder
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· Score: 4, Informative
Dish carries HBO-HD, SHO-HD, PPV-HD, CBS-HD, Discovery-HD and is working on more. DirectTV has a similar line-up, I think minus CBS but plus Cuban's HD-NET.
All the major networks have HD shows, ABC, CBS and NBC have nightly line ups that are practically all HD - the most common exceptions are the "reality" crap shows because they shoot so much footage that just gets wasted it is not yet worth the expensive for them to shoot in HD. Other than that, any show that is new in the last two years is almost certainly HD and plenty of older ones have moved up too - NYPD Blue is a great example of an old mainstay that has been modernized and made a lot more engrossing with HD, it is like a whole different show now. Miracles, which I think was canceled, was a new show that was just beautiful in HD.
The one exception is FOX - for some reason they won't show anything higher than DVD quality (widescreen 480p) some of their stuff looks damn impressive for such a low rez, particularly 24 and Fastlane, but some looks like crap (Malcolm is always out of focus and the framing is terrible). The cartoons like Simpsons, Futurama (RIP) and King of the Hill are still all 4:3 but digital and 480p makes them look incredible. They get more bandwidth than a DVD (19mbps vs 9mbps) which may explain why they look so vibrant.
My local cable system (Comcast) has started carrying HBO-HD and SHO-HD along with all the locals
Here's a site that has a decent, but not totally complete, list of each week's HD programming.
Finally, with the right equipment, depending on your situation -- surprisingly cheap equipment, you can "tivo" HD easier than regular tv because it is already an MPEG bitstream, no encoding required, just pull it out of the are and drop it to disk. At 19mbps, you get about 8GB per hour. I watch all my HD timeshifted and commercial-free, it is totally the way to go.
Re:This is actually major news to some people
on
First HDTV Camcorder
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As at least one other poster has pointed out - most people probably don't want to see high-def porn. Those cameras see everything - tv news anchors hate high-def because standard make-up just makes them look like crap when you can see individual pores on their faces. Most of the girls in porn are skanky enough to begin with. Now either they are going to have to start breeding genegineered porn actors (participators? fuckers?) with perfect skin, hair and other physical characteristics or a lot of their audience are just going to get turned off, not on by watching that stuff. Its bad enough when you can see their boob-job scars through crappy makeup on today's standard-def porn...
Meanwhile, on the technical side, the reviews I have seen of this camera indicate that it lacks a couple of important features, even in the pro model. The first is a reduced color gamut due to being a single-chip ccd, instead of a 3-chip (RGB) system. Many consumer level standard-def cameras are single-chip and that is part of the reason you can immediately pick out something recorded on a cam-corder versus real film. Apparently, as single chippers go, the JVC is pretty good, but there are plenty of 3-chip standard-def cameras available today in the same price range that should provide significantly better color range.
Also, related to that is a lack of flexible white balance. The report I've seen says that there are two white-point settings and that's it. Even cheapo consumer cameras have automatic white-balance and some of the prosumer ones have manual white-balance too. So, unless you happen to be shooting under ideal conditions, you could end up with your colors looking a little weird (anyone up for green porn chicks? - I kill myself with the puns today). You can fix white-balance in post, but that's generally a pain in the ass.
I don't have the specifics in front of me to quote from, and if I did, I'd probably be NDA'd but - a certain recent PA-RISC cpu underwent a respin that enhanced its pre-fetch logic to automagically prefetch the first cache-line of the following page on access of the last cache-line of the current page. I was told that this simple algorithm was mostly responsible for a ~10% increase in SpecFP (don't remember which revision) from one version to the next.
Not a direct answer, but perhaps a lantern on the path.
So, does an Operton have 64-bit or 128-bit cacheline size?
Slashdot Mirror
Come on people, we're talking about the MTV awards here, brought to us by MTV; the epitomy of modern pop and hype culture. We're talking about something hosted by a TV station aimed at 14 year old girls who faint at the sight of $current_hip_boyband and wish to be like $cheap_spicegirls_knock_off while flooding the rest of the market with artists like $random_teen_chick and $overhyped_guy_who_looks_gay.
Bring back Aeon Flux!
I saw the release announcement for WASTE and went, "ho-hum" YAPPFSS - Yet Another Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing System, and promptly forgot about it in the next two seconds.
But, now that AOL is making a stink about it, I'm going to remember WASTE and will probably grab a copy of the source for posterity and to do my part of the "internet routes around censorship" bit.
I work with architects, and our lawyer says that the drawings our conisdered IP of our firm.
Hardly an unbiased source of opinion on the topic. Regardless of the validity of that opinion with respect to whatever special circumstances might be involved, the lawyer is probably contractually obligated to hold that belief, otherwise if they went to court over the issue at some point, the lawyer would probably run into ethical problems representing a position he didn't necessarily believe to be the correct one. (Lawyers and ethics, WTF?!!??? Strange but true - you just have to remember that 'business' ethics and human ethics have very little in common beyond those 6 letters.)
Almost anyone who is a technophile was weaned on stories of colonies on the moon and mars by the new millenium. NASA, for better or for worse, never fullfilled those dreams. But now that some of those technophiles are all grown up and have a billion and a half dollars, it only makes sense that they would start to use their new-found power to realize the dreams of their youth.
As a fellow dreamer, I can't think of a better outcome to the dotcom-dotbomb cycle than the kick-off of a vibrant commercial space industry. (Well, maybe the immediate cessation of world poverty and the industrial destruction of the environment. But the chances of that happening even with a couple of motivated dotcom dreamers at the helm, are probably close to nil. At least space doesn't have too much in the way of entrenched powers that prefer the status quo.)
Your point #1 is good, except obviously in most local terminals where it doesn't apply.
No, it applies to ALL tty terminals, even local xterm/eterm/etc. The only case where it doesn't apply is in a pure GUI evironment where the X server talks directly to the keyboard and generates keypress events that the application being controlled receives directlya s events and not as characters. Merely sending keypress events to an xterm window in which vi is running will not eliminate the race condition because the xterm will translate those keypresses into multi-character escape codes that it feeds the tty line discipline. Anything that uses the tty drivers (aka pty, aka ttyp, etc) is potentially subject to the problem.
For example - vim will always be vulnerable, gvim will not be.
No, cursor keys are bad for two reasons:
1) Many terminals represent cursor and other non-ascii keys as multi-character sequences (usually escape-something-or-another) and the tty line discpline "guesses" that you typed a special key like a cursor key by measuring the time between receiving characters - the idea is that if they come quick enough, it must be a special key because no human can type that fast.
But, neither linux nor most other unices are real-time so sometimes random delays get inserted in the middle of the multi-char sequences and the system now thinks you typed seperate keys instead of just one. Ever hold down a cursor key for a long time only to have vi start going crazy and insert a bunch of weird line-noise like garbage into the text? You just had a timing anomaly like the above description.
2) Cursor keys are inefficient, you have to move your hand far away from the home position and back, often needing to actually glance at the keyboard in order to make sure your fingers get aligned and re-aligned correctly. Using H-J-K-L, like most other commands in vi, your fingers stay right there in the middle of the keys requiring no special extra thought on your part to align your fingers. This may seem trivial, but when you move a cursor around a couple of thousand times per day, it adds up real quick.
So, in summary, HJKL GOOD, Cursor Arrow Keys BAD. If you haven't learned HJKL yet, wean yourself of the arrow keys as soon as possible. It is one more step down the path of acheiving unix nirvana.
-- Your friendly unix bodhisattva
Now when I DO get a vorbis player, I'm going to have to spend about 300 hours re-ripping my entire collection.
Don't rip to vorbis, rip to FLAC and then never worry about having to re-rip to the format dejure again. Disk is cheap, go lossless for archival purposes and then whenever you need it in a lossy format, just use the FLAC version as your base source and convert on the fly. Makes it easy to support MP3, Vorbis, AAC, AARP, NCAA, etc.
Dude, I love 24, but it regularly has major weak momemnts that are in a league far and beyond the worst episodes of Buffy. Half the story lines with the daughter are crap, just a reason to get a pretty girl on screen. And besides, the ending for Buffy was 10x better than this season's finale for 24, talk about weak.
Damn! And I just used up my last mod points an hour ago.
Motherhood and apple-pie don't need the protection of civil rights laws, it is the people and ideas that are on the fringe, the ones that, for better or for worse, keep this country from total stagnation that need the protection. If you don't believe in civil rights for weirdos, then you don't really believe in civil rights.
You would think just about anyone over the age of 15 who has some kind of affinity for technology would have seen at least one movie depicting the kinds of problems with Symantec's solution taken to its logical conclusion. For example:
"SKYNET became self-aware at 4:01 AM on August 4th, 1997 and at 4:12 it ordered a pre-emptive nuclear strike."
Easy - change your name to john ashcroft and then start hanging out at the local university mosques. Before you know, it you'll get your name on the list and as a bonus, the food at those student mosques tends to be pretty good too.
state senator, that's usually on the order of being the mayor of mayberry.
There needs to be a corollary to that rule - any new information exposed by the process of requesting a copy of information related to you can not be (legally) added to the database
Ok, a corollary to the corollary - Consent to legally add any newly exposed information can not be a prerequisite for, or in any way influence the process of, getting the requested information.
At the behest of the FBI (or maybe it is the secret service since counterfeiting is their purview) all color photocopiers in the USA embedded a watermark with a unique serial number identifying the copier used.
For some reason this fact is not well documented, but here is at least one reference(pdf) in an IBM report from 1998. See the section on tracking.
This can be a problem for cheap counterfeiters (well-equipped ones won't have a problem either acquiring a copier on the blackmarket or using a modified one) but it also can suck for whistleblowers making copies of documents. If the copier used can be identified it makes it that much easier for a vengeful company/government to identify the whistleblower and take "corrective action."
Well, you forgot one more equally likely candidate - Microsoft. They don't have a monopoly on FUD or dirty-tricks *cough*dr-dos*cough* but I think they are just as likely as the other three groups listed (make of that what you will).
Either that or some nebbish of a middle-manager got a little over excited and made a new rule in order to justify his presence on the payroll. If this policy gets retracred or at least heavily watered down in the next couple of weeks, that'll mean one less nebbish on the payroll.
I poked around and did not find ready reference to H.264 licensing terms. I know MPEG4 is total snafu, but what are the H.264 terms? How about submarine patents, any ideas on the chances of some of those surfacing and dorking up the current terms?
Notice the story about the RIAA, Verizon and the DMCA a couple of notches down the front page from this one? The DMCA is way more than just circumventing copy-stoppen schemes.
Apparently Pim Fortuyn's politics were widely mischaracterized in most media after his asassination. You may find there was a lot more to like about the guy than most people outside of the Netherlends was led to believe.
Meanwhile, this whole WMD was so clearly a pretense to start with that I can't help but laugh as the administration squirms. But as a friend of mine said recently, we will find WMD in Iraq - even if we have to fly them in ourselves. Makes you wonder why they even bother to let it drag out for so long. Maybe there is still a modicum of honor in the current administration (still haven't finished reprogramming Powell, perhaps) that they can't quite get the gumption up to start planting the evidence. Either that or things are still too disorganized over there to pull it off without getting caught in the act.
Hatch officially retracted his move to enshrine the Pat-riot act. But you can bet that fucker is scheming for another chance at it.
Dish carries HBO-HD, SHO-HD, PPV-HD, CBS-HD, Discovery-HD and is working on more. DirectTV has a similar line-up, I think minus CBS but plus Cuban's HD-NET.
All the major networks have HD shows, ABC, CBS and NBC have nightly line ups that are practically all HD - the most common exceptions are the "reality" crap shows because they shoot so much footage that just gets wasted it is not yet worth the expensive for them to shoot in HD. Other than that, any show that is new in the last two years is almost certainly HD and plenty of older ones have moved up too - NYPD Blue is a great example of an old mainstay that has been modernized and made a lot more engrossing with HD, it is like a whole different show now. Miracles, which I think was canceled, was a new show that was just beautiful in HD.
The one exception is FOX - for some reason they won't show anything higher than DVD quality (widescreen 480p) some of their stuff looks damn impressive for such a low rez, particularly 24 and Fastlane, but some looks like crap (Malcolm is always out of focus and the framing is terrible). The cartoons like Simpsons, Futurama (RIP) and King of the Hill are still all 4:3 but digital and 480p makes them look incredible. They get more bandwidth than a DVD (19mbps vs 9mbps) which may explain why they look so vibrant.
My local cable system (Comcast) has started carrying HBO-HD and SHO-HD along with all the locals
Here's a site that has a decent, but not totally complete, list of each week's HD programming.
HDTVGalaxy
Finally, with the right equipment, depending on your situation -- surprisingly cheap equipment, you can "tivo" HD easier than regular tv because it is already an MPEG bitstream, no encoding required, just pull it out of the are and drop it to disk. At 19mbps, you get about 8GB per hour. I watch all my HD timeshifted and commercial-free, it is totally the way to go.
As at least one other poster has pointed out - most people probably don't want to see high-def porn. Those cameras see everything - tv news anchors hate high-def because standard make-up just makes them look like crap when you can see individual pores on their faces. Most of the girls in porn are skanky enough to begin with. Now either they are going to have to start breeding genegineered porn actors (participators? fuckers?) with perfect skin, hair and other physical characteristics or a lot of their audience are just going to get turned off, not on by watching that stuff. Its bad enough when you can see their boob-job scars through crappy makeup on today's standard-def porn...
Meanwhile, on the technical side, the reviews I have seen of this camera indicate that it lacks a couple of important features, even in the pro model. The first is a reduced color gamut due to being a single-chip ccd, instead of a 3-chip (RGB) system. Many consumer level standard-def cameras are single-chip and that is part of the reason you can immediately pick out something recorded on a cam-corder versus real film. Apparently, as single chippers go, the JVC is pretty good, but there are plenty of 3-chip standard-def cameras available today in the same price range that should provide significantly better color range.
Also, related to that is a lack of flexible white balance. The report I've seen says that there are two white-point settings and that's it. Even cheapo consumer cameras have automatic white-balance and some of the prosumer ones have manual white-balance too. So, unless you happen to be shooting under ideal conditions, you could end up with your colors looking a little weird (anyone up for green porn chicks? - I kill myself with the puns today). You can fix white-balance in post, but that's generally a pain in the ass.
I'll buy that for a dollar. Mod parent up for kicking "micro-evolution" balonigsts in the ass.
I don't have the specifics in front of me to quote from, and if I did, I'd probably be NDA'd but - a certain recent PA-RISC cpu underwent a respin that enhanced its pre-fetch logic to automagically prefetch the first cache-line of the following page on access of the last cache-line of the current page. I was told that this simple algorithm was mostly responsible for a ~10% increase in SpecFP (don't remember which revision) from one version to the next.
Not a direct answer, but perhaps a lantern on the path.
So, does an Operton have 64-bit or 128-bit cacheline size?
I couldn't agree more, except for the fact that in america, the masses are in power.
I'm sorry, you made a spelling error. That should read, "In America, the asses are in power."