Oh really? And for just how many movies do they alter the timeline of events? Maybe the cable companies have the ability to edit for time, but I doubt they get to rearrange the movie because it alters the story. Imagine if we could just alter the timeline of history so that whenever there is a dispute, an international incident, a war, it was shown to be the other guy who started it? Altering the sequence of events is changing the truth.
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* Forge ID card * Find some way to have "your" details "corrected" in the national database * Who would possibly believe the real identity owner? *.. without DNA *.. which I'm sure will be the justification for taking that next.
Voting records are one thing - is an official voting for this provision or others in the same bill? What is more interested is who adds legislation such as this to the bills?
As for corruption being easier to root out, I doubt it. There are officials well known for supporting the RIAA/MPAA at every turn (e.g. our friend from Utah), and they really don't take too much heat for it. Then again, when the state of the country and government is as bad as it is copyright legislation is probably the last thing on peoples minds.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add one other point:
"offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property
Specifically relating to movies, what alternatives is a college to offer for zero-day releases, screeners, and so forth? I'd love to know what the MPAA has up its sleeve there..
Except that GPL authors are more often than not uninterested in making a buck from their projects, at least directly. They only ask that if your code benefits from theirs you agree contribute it back under a similar license.
Musicians want to eat, too, but FUCK THEM! If they want to make a buck then they should go out and tour or something.
And if GPL authors want to eat they should sell training and support. And they do.
BTW - I don't wholeheartedly disagree with your overall point, but the analogy is bad.
Hidden away in the lengthy bill are sections which tie college funding to "offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."
I haven't read the bill yet, but that sounds like an attempt to force colleges into hostile partnerships with MPAA/RIAA agencies/affiliates. If that is the case, then I urge the colleges to satisfy the requirement of "offering alternatives" by partnering exclusively with indie, creative-commons, and public domain distributors.
BTW - why in the world do colleges need to be involved in "offering alternatives" when there are dozens of well known websites already offering alternatives. iTunes anyone? Rhapsody? eMusic? If people aren't using these already what makes anyone thing that a college offering the same will suddenly be more successful? It is no business of a college, which people pay to attend, to be factoring into their cost model marketing and/or service costs of music/movie distribution.
How is this not wiretapping? You're intercepting and monitoring the exchange of information between two entities, possibly even "bugging" at least one of them if you're also introducing cookies or similar devices.
Can the phone company introduce something into their privacy policy that all communications may be tapped without the request of law enforcement and have that be legally sound because I didn't "opt-out"?
Furthermore, even if the subscriber had the opportunity to opt-out, did the second entity? No they didn't. Therefore the privacy of at least one party has been unquestionably violated.
I agree that MPEG4 can be easily multithreaded, but it is not threaded by entire GOPs, as the GP suggests, in any encoder that I know of for the reasons I gave. Frame-level and slice-level threading are the two common techniques. I do actually work on MPEG-4 codecs.
Actually, the MPEG stream resets itself every n frames or so (n is often a number like 8, but can vary depending on the video content).
That is not true for MPEG-4 unless you have specifically constrained the I/IDR interval to an extremely short interval, and doing so severely impacts the efficiency of the encoder because I-frames are extremely expensive compared to other types.
Keyframes are usually inserted when temporal prediction fails for some percentage of blocks, or using some RD evaluation based on the cost of encoding the frame. Therefore unless the encoder has reached the maximum key interval the I frame position requires that motion estimation is performed, and thus you can't know in advance where to start a new GOP.
In H.264 due to multiple references you would certainly have issues to contend with since long references might cross I-frame boundaries, which is why there is the distinction of "IDR" frames, and this would certainly not be possible threading at keyframe level.
Granted, for MPEG1&2 encoders threading at keyframes is a possibility, although still not one I'd personally favor.
A video decoder that I'm working with, for example, currently uses only as many threads as necessary for real-time playback. So for example if one core can do the job only one core is used. If the decoder looks like it might start falling behind more threads are given work to do. Ultimately, if your system is failing to keep up all cores will be fully leveraged.
However, so long as only some cores are required the others are 100% available to other processes, including their cache (if it's independent). I'm not sure how power management is implemented but perhaps it's even possible for the unused cores to do power saving, leading to longer batter life for laptops/notebooks, etc.
the idea is to make maximal use of your available resources, right?
No, the idea is to make the best use of your resources. I'm not trying to say that load balancing is wrong. I'm just saying that processes that don't appear to be balanced are not necessarily poorly designed or operating incorrectly.
don't balance the workload evenly across processors
Why is balancing the load evenly important, as long as one thread is not bottlenecking the others? Loading a particular core or set of cores might even be beneficial depending on the cache implementation, especially when other applications are also contending for CPU time.
Sure, a nice even load distribution might be an indicator for good design, but it doesn't have to apply in every case. I don't think software should be designed so you can be pleased with the aesthetics of the charts in task manager.
Considering the current BlackBerry firmware comes with Google, ICQ, AIM and MSN clients built in, paying $30 for that functionality doesn't seem like a terribly good deal to me.
Except it is. Jivetalk has a nice UI, it brings all your IM protocols under one app so it's all consistent, it handles hundreds of contacts and it is light on your battery. You can easily leave it running all day without worry.
Also, I have the latest Blackberry OS update and it does not come with all of those clients built-in. It will list them on the app updater if you have previously installed them yourself though, just like it does with all third-party apps.
JiveTalk is easily the best $30 I've spent on my BlackBerry.
Sidenote: It's shameful that the networks can still get away with charging people, or even reducing their SMS credits, for receiving SMS messages.
When the power goes out, so does VIOP. Eventually a mobile also has to be charged, and murphy's law states the power will go out on the evening it's due to be charged.
I'm glad that you brought this up.
I own a mobile phone, and I pay about $50-$60 per month for it all-in, but excluding the data plan. A land line will cost $20-$30 depending on package deals. I could not fathom why anyone would need both, so I asked some friends. They all told me the same thing - that they wanted 911 service in case of emergencies.
Stop and think about that for a moment. These people are paying $240 - $360 every year just in case they want to call 911. You might think that for a couple of bucks extra each month mobile providers could arrange a better 911 hookup. Maybe it's not in their interests to, though, since some mobile providers are also the landline providers.
BTW, regarding power, I have a couple of UPS's in my home, which are small but will run a 300W desktop PC for a good 20 minutes. I'm sure one could charge a mobile phone for hours and hours. They cost me about $120 each. Seems better than 2-3x that every year.
You tend to get internet, phone, and TV services from a single provider. Unfortunately, phone services will go away as a revenue stream as people move to VOIP. I know plenty of people who have also canceled their tv service because they only watch a few shows and they prefer to get them online at their convenience. This means that providers loose the revenue attached to phone and tv services right off the bat. Then you have to consider how many big ISPs are also media industry giants and have a vested interest in ensuring you continue to consume media through premium channels and channels laden with advertising. They don't necessarily want you watching things over the net at your convenience. So we have ISPs fighting against P2P claiming "conjestion", while refusing to upgrade their backbone, killing their newsgroup services, and imposing bandwidth caps with costly per gigabyte charges for subscribers who exceed them.
Of course, the ISPs can't afford to lose even these "undesirable" users to a municipality, because as soon as they do they can no longer impose p2p throttling and bandwidth caps as a measure to slow people moving away from their established channels and services, and their content is harder to monetize. So IMHO they're going to fight to keep people locked into a service that they're also working feverishly to lock down to their benefit and the detriment of consumers.
Does MySpace actually take any action to verify any of the personal details entered during account creation? Most sites required account activation based upon your e-mail address, and that is all. They send an activation e-mail to verify an identity. I personally have never received snail mail or even a phone call from MySpace asking me to prove any of the identity information that I entered was accurate. If MySpace takes absolutely no action whatsoever to verify a persons actual identity for their hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users then this seems like extraordinarily selective enforcement of the TOS.
MySpace TOS also states:
This Agreement is accepted upon your use of the MySpace Website
Seemingly they want to hold you to an agreement that you didn't even necessarily agree to. If your server keeps sending me pages upon request I'd like to know how that is not authorized use? You can revoke that authorization only if I actually agree to your TOS, IMO.
BTW, does using a proxy or anonymizer count as impersonating another person or using a false identity? Is it a felony? What if a friend is logged into MySpace and I browse the site using their computer? Is that a felony? Is it two separate felonies because one of us broke the TOS by letting someone else use their account and the other used an account that wasn't theirs to browse a few pages? What if I type a funny message on their messenger? What if I enter accurate account information but mistype my address or phone number? That's also in breach of the TOS. Is that a felony?
MEDUSA involves a microwave auditory effect "loud" enough to cause discomfort or even incapacitation. Sadovnik says that normal audio safety limits do not apply since the sound does not enter through the eardrums.
Also from NewScientist, a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago who has also worked on the technique has commented that while feasible, attaining the necessary volume might involve power levels that could cause neural damage.
When Mozilla sends out a buggy update, which has happened twice to my memory, a) it doesn't cripple the entire system, and b) there's a new version the next day. This goes back to my personal definition of trust: I don't necessarily expect a software vendor to be perfect 100% of the time. That's unrealistic. But I expect mistakes to be infrequent, non-severe, and for them to correct them quickly so that I'm not inconvenienced too much.
OTOH when Microsoft sends out a buggy update you have to keep your fingers crossed for something to be available in a few weeks. I don't want to come across as anti-Microsoft, but realistically that's the difference between the two in my experience.
I leave the auto-update feature on in Firefox because I trust that when Mozilla pushes updates they are valuable to me in terms of security or features and that they've been well tested. This has generally held to be true.
On the other hand, on any system I administer I immediately disable automatic updates because Microsoft sometimes pushes patches that only partially address a problem, creating a false sense of security, and then later re-issue them, push things like updates to Windows Media DRM as critical updates (it's not critical to me, Microsoft!), and release updates that go on to cause problems with other software or system stability in general.
When I can trust Microsoft to apply only security updates to IE (or other components of my choosing), maybe I'll consider turning automatic updates back on. Maybe.
I fail to see what Grisoft ever thought LinkScanner would acheive above the scanners that are becoming common in competing products that simply intercept http and pop3 traffic as it comes over the network. To me it seemed unnecessary to actually fetch every single search result. It also would obviously interfere with web analytics, and is potentially a security risk to people using AVG, not in terms of desktop security, but in terms of your real-life personal security. For example, I recall a recent article where the FBI had arrested people merely for clicking links to a porn site they had set up. Are you really safe from such operations and the general tendency of Government agencies to monitor activity these days when your computer is in effect programmed to click links for you?
I don't see information at the links in the summary of what changes were actually made to AVG now. Does anyone have details?
Interestingly, this research could be used for other applications, such as improving automated help centers, where computers could be trained 'to recognize a range of different emotions, such as anger and nervousness.
This task should be quite easy. Frustration and anger are the only two emotions I tend to experience when I get through to an automated help center. It would be a better investment of time to evaluate how long I spend interfacing with the system, how many times I have to re-navigate the menu hierarchy, how many times I have to call back and start over, how many actual people I end up being directed to, how many times I have to restate the same information and how long I spend talking to someone before I solve my problem, if I ever do... but I'm not bitter..
Slashdot Mirror
Oh really? And for just how many movies do they alter the timeline of events? Maybe the cable companies have the ability to edit for time, but I doubt they get to rearrange the movie because it alters the story. Imagine if we could just alter the timeline of history so that whenever there is a dispute, an international incident, a war, it was shown to be the other guy who started it? Altering the sequence of events is changing the truth.
P.S. Hans shot first.
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* Forge ID card .. without DNA .. which I'm sure will be the justification for taking that next.
* Find some way to have "your" details "corrected" in the national database
* Who would possibly believe the real identity owner?
*
*
Voting records are one thing - is an official voting for this provision or others in the same bill? What is more interested is who adds legislation such as this to the bills?
As for corruption being easier to root out, I doubt it. There are officials well known for supporting the RIAA/MPAA at every turn (e.g. our friend from Utah), and they really don't take too much heat for it. Then again, when the state of the country and government is as bad as it is copyright legislation is probably the last thing on peoples minds.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add one other point:
"offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property
Specifically relating to movies, what alternatives is a college to offer for zero-day releases, screeners, and so forth? I'd love to know what the MPAA has up its sleeve there..
Except that GPL authors are more often than not uninterested in making a buck from their projects, at least directly. They only ask that if your code benefits from theirs you agree contribute it back under a similar license.
Musicians want to eat, too, but FUCK THEM! If they want to make a buck then they should go out and tour or something.
And if GPL authors want to eat they should sell training and support. And they do.
BTW - I don't wholeheartedly disagree with your overall point, but the analogy is bad.
Hidden away in the lengthy bill are sections which tie college funding to "offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."
I haven't read the bill yet, but that sounds like an attempt to force colleges into hostile partnerships with MPAA/RIAA agencies/affiliates. If that is the case, then I urge the colleges to satisfy the requirement of "offering alternatives" by partnering exclusively with indie, creative-commons, and public domain distributors.
BTW - why in the world do colleges need to be involved in "offering alternatives" when there are dozens of well known websites already offering alternatives. iTunes anyone? Rhapsody? eMusic? If people aren't using these already what makes anyone thing that a college offering the same will suddenly be more successful? It is no business of a college, which people pay to attend, to be factoring into their cost model marketing and/or service costs of music/movie distribution.
Opt-out?
How is this not wiretapping? You're intercepting and monitoring the exchange of information between two entities, possibly even "bugging" at least one of them if you're also introducing cookies or similar devices.
Can the phone company introduce something into their privacy policy that all communications may be tapped without the request of law enforcement and have that be legally sound because I didn't "opt-out"?
Furthermore, even if the subscriber had the opportunity to opt-out, did the second entity? No they didn't. Therefore the privacy of at least one party has been unquestionably violated.
Opt-out... WTF?
'The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences,'
Then this case is insignificant. It has always been this way.
media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis, told the BBC.
Maybe the summary should link to the BBC article.
I agree that MPEG4 can be easily multithreaded, but it is not threaded by entire GOPs, as the GP suggests, in any encoder that I know of for the reasons I gave. Frame-level and slice-level threading are the two common techniques. I do actually work on MPEG-4 codecs.
What an absolutely ridiculous question.
What an absolutely ridiculous answer. Go read my other post:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=623707&cid=24311347
Thanks.
Actually, the MPEG stream resets itself every n frames or so (n is often a number like 8, but can vary depending on the video content).
That is not true for MPEG-4 unless you have specifically constrained the I/IDR interval to an extremely short interval, and doing so severely impacts the efficiency of the encoder because I-frames are extremely expensive compared to other types.
Keyframes are usually inserted when temporal prediction fails for some percentage of blocks, or using some RD evaluation based on the cost of encoding the frame. Therefore unless the encoder has reached the maximum key interval the I frame position requires that motion estimation is performed, and thus you can't know in advance where to start a new GOP.
In H.264 due to multiple references you would certainly have issues to contend with since long references might cross I-frame boundaries, which is why there is the distinction of "IDR" frames, and this would certainly not be possible threading at keyframe level.
Granted, for MPEG1&2 encoders threading at keyframes is a possibility, although still not one I'd personally favor.
It's still possible to load all cores 100%.
A video decoder that I'm working with, for example, currently uses only as many threads as necessary for real-time playback. So for example if one core can do the job only one core is used. If the decoder looks like it might start falling behind more threads are given work to do. Ultimately, if your system is failing to keep up all cores will be fully leveraged.
However, so long as only some cores are required the others are 100% available to other processes, including their cache (if it's independent). I'm not sure how power management is implemented but perhaps it's even possible for the unused cores to do power saving, leading to longer batter life for laptops/notebooks, etc.
the idea is to make maximal use of your available resources, right?
No, the idea is to make the best use of your resources. I'm not trying to say that load balancing is wrong. I'm just saying that processes that don't appear to be balanced are not necessarily poorly designed or operating incorrectly.
don't balance the workload evenly across processors
Why is balancing the load evenly important, as long as one thread is not bottlenecking the others? Loading a particular core or set of cores might even be beneficial depending on the cache implementation, especially when other applications are also contending for CPU time.
Sure, a nice even load distribution might be an indicator for good design, but it doesn't have to apply in every case. I don't think software should be designed so you can be pleased with the aesthetics of the charts in task manager.
Uhhhhh..... you DO realize that bicyclists exhale CO2, right?
Damn those cyclists! I say we have the EPA go after everyone who exhales CO2..
Considering the current BlackBerry firmware comes with Google, ICQ, AIM and MSN clients built in, paying $30 for that functionality doesn't seem like a terribly good deal to me.
Except it is. Jivetalk has a nice UI, it brings all your IM protocols under one app so it's all consistent, it handles hundreds of contacts and it is light on your battery. You can easily leave it running all day without worry.
Also, I have the latest Blackberry OS update and it does not come with all of those clients built-in. It will list them on the app updater if you have previously installed them yourself though, just like it does with all third-party apps.
JiveTalk is easily the best $30 I've spent on my BlackBerry.
Sidenote: It's shameful that the networks can still get away with charging people, or even reducing their SMS credits, for receiving SMS messages.
When the power goes out, so does VIOP. Eventually a mobile also has to be charged, and murphy's law states the power will go out on the evening it's due to be charged.
I'm glad that you brought this up.
I own a mobile phone, and I pay about $50-$60 per month for it all-in, but excluding the data plan. A land line will cost $20-$30 depending on package deals. I could not fathom why anyone would need both, so I asked some friends. They all told me the same thing - that they wanted 911 service in case of emergencies.
Stop and think about that for a moment. These people are paying $240 - $360 every year just in case they want to call 911. You might think that for a couple of bucks extra each month mobile providers could arrange a better 911 hookup. Maybe it's not in their interests to, though, since some mobile providers are also the landline providers.
BTW, regarding power, I have a couple of UPS's in my home, which are small but will run a 300W desktop PC for a good 20 minutes. I'm sure one could charge a mobile phone for hours and hours. They cost me about $120 each. Seems better than 2-3x that every year.
Here is the problem I see with ISPs in general.
You tend to get internet, phone, and TV services from a single provider. Unfortunately, phone services will go away as a revenue stream as people move to VOIP. I know plenty of people who have also canceled their tv service because they only watch a few shows and they prefer to get them online at their convenience. This means that providers loose the revenue attached to phone and tv services right off the bat. Then you have to consider how many big ISPs are also media industry giants and have a vested interest in ensuring you continue to consume media through premium channels and channels laden with advertising. They don't necessarily want you watching things over the net at your convenience. So we have ISPs fighting against P2P claiming "conjestion", while refusing to upgrade their backbone, killing their newsgroup services, and imposing bandwidth caps with costly per gigabyte charges for subscribers who exceed them.
Of course, the ISPs can't afford to lose even these "undesirable" users to a municipality, because as soon as they do they can no longer impose p2p throttling and bandwidth caps as a measure to slow people moving away from their established channels and services, and their content is harder to monetize. So IMHO they're going to fight to keep people locked into a service that they're also working feverishly to lock down to their benefit and the detriment of consumers.
But that's just my $0.02 ..
Agree.
Does MySpace actually take any action to verify any of the personal details entered during account creation? Most sites required account activation based upon your e-mail address, and that is all. They send an activation e-mail to verify an identity. I personally have never received snail mail or even a phone call from MySpace asking me to prove any of the identity information that I entered was accurate. If MySpace takes absolutely no action whatsoever to verify a persons actual identity for their hundreds of thousands (millions?) of users then this seems like extraordinarily selective enforcement of the TOS.
MySpace TOS also states:
This Agreement is accepted upon your use of the MySpace Website
Seemingly they want to hold you to an agreement that you didn't even necessarily agree to. If your server keeps sending me pages upon request I'd like to know how that is not authorized use? You can revoke that authorization only if I actually agree to your TOS, IMO.
BTW, does using a proxy or anonymizer count as impersonating another person or using a false identity? Is it a felony? What if a friend is logged into MySpace and I browse the site using their computer? Is that a felony? Is it two separate felonies because one of us broke the TOS by letting someone else use their account and the other used an account that wasn't theirs to browse a few pages? What if I type a funny message on their messenger? What if I enter accurate account information but mistype my address or phone number? That's also in breach of the TOS. Is that a felony?
She is one of 650 students who receive an Apple Inc laptop each day
I wish I could receive an Apple Inc laptop each day! Sounds profitable ;)
It's more scary than cool.
The article at NewScientist says:
MEDUSA involves a microwave auditory effect "loud" enough to cause discomfort or even incapacitation. Sadovnik says that normal audio safety limits do not apply since the sound does not enter through the eardrums.
Also from NewScientist, a member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago who has also worked on the technique has commented that while feasible, attaining the necessary volume might involve power levels that could cause neural damage.
When Mozilla sends out a buggy update, which has happened twice to my memory, a) it doesn't cripple the entire system, and b) there's a new version the next day. This goes back to my personal definition of trust: I don't necessarily expect a software vendor to be perfect 100% of the time. That's unrealistic. But I expect mistakes to be infrequent, non-severe, and for them to correct them quickly so that I'm not inconvenienced too much.
OTOH when Microsoft sends out a buggy update you have to keep your fingers crossed for something to be available in a few weeks. I don't want to come across as anti-Microsoft, but realistically that's the difference between the two in my experience.
I leave the auto-update feature on in Firefox because I trust that when Mozilla pushes updates they are valuable to me in terms of security or features and that they've been well tested. This has generally held to be true.
On the other hand, on any system I administer I immediately disable automatic updates because Microsoft sometimes pushes patches that only partially address a problem, creating a false sense of security, and then later re-issue them, push things like updates to Windows Media DRM as critical updates (it's not critical to me, Microsoft!), and release updates that go on to cause problems with other software or system stability in general.
When I can trust Microsoft to apply only security updates to IE (or other components of my choosing), maybe I'll consider turning automatic updates back on. Maybe.
I fail to see what Grisoft ever thought LinkScanner would acheive above the scanners that are becoming common in competing products that simply intercept http and pop3 traffic as it comes over the network. To me it seemed unnecessary to actually fetch every single search result. It also would obviously interfere with web analytics, and is potentially a security risk to people using AVG, not in terms of desktop security, but in terms of your real-life personal security. For example, I recall a recent article where the FBI had arrested people merely for clicking links to a porn site they had set up. Are you really safe from such operations and the general tendency of Government agencies to monitor activity these days when your computer is in effect programmed to click links for you?
I don't see information at the links in the summary of what changes were actually made to AVG now. Does anyone have details?
Interestingly, this research could be used for other applications, such as improving automated help centers, where computers could be trained 'to recognize a range of different emotions, such as anger and nervousness.
This task should be quite easy. Frustration and anger are the only two emotions I tend to experience when I get through to an automated help center. It would be a better investment of time to evaluate how long I spend interfacing with the system, how many times I have to re-navigate the menu hierarchy, how many times I have to call back and start over, how many actual people I end up being directed to, how many times I have to restate the same information and how long I spend talking to someone before I solve my problem, if I ever do. .. but I'm not bitter..