Re install XP, do all the fricken updates, then re-install all the fricken software that got nuked in the process. And try not to nuke your linux partition. Then remember how to set up the networking so it will actually talk to linux and OS X. Oh yeah, 7.2 hours baby. When was the last time YOU re-installed XP from scratch? Pain, pain, pain. Then of course, if you had [k[racked software you'd have to go and find all the installers and [k]racks again. Good thing I don't.
I haven't had any baddies on XP either but that's because I basically don't let it do anything. It's behind a firewall, has no services running, I don't do email on it and if I browse, it's Firefox. Surprisingly I have not even had any infections from, um, 'downloads'. My solution to any problems in XP is to nuke the drive and reinstall. It turns out to be about 10x faster than scratching my head for 72 hours.
Yes, that's exactly how I use it too. But I must admit I hardly ever venture into Windows any more. Only to play games basically. Most of the time the PC is booted into Linux and I'm working on OS X. Going into Windows feels like driving into one of those neighborhoods where you get car-jacked at the stop-light.
1. You can't win 2. You can't break even 3. You can't get out of the game 4. No matter how hard you shake it, the last drop always rolls down your pant leg.
I'm saying that if you don't find abuses, it is bad news, because it almost certainly means that you are missing something.
I'm also saying, yes, that in any sufficient large and loosely controlled human organization, if there is scope for abuse, it will happen. Can you think of a counter-example?
Which is more likely?
a) in every instance, reported and unreported, of the use of PATRIOT act powers, even those where the person involved was forbidden from revealing the act had been invoked, all governmental agencies and operatives behaved precisely within the rubric of their powers under the act; or
Because no abuses are being found. That is a danger sign.
I was an investigative journalist ten years ago. I investigated a psychiatric hospital, where there were continual 'rumours' of patient abuse at the hands of staff. The management told me that there had been no complaints. What it turned out that mean was that there had been 600 complaints, but none of them had been upheld. The investigation consisted of the management asking patients and staff what happened. The staff denied the abuse and their word was taken as truth, because the inmates were mental patients and therefore could not be believed.
After my piece aired, there was a year-long public inquiry into conditions at the hospital and wholescale reform.
Whenever someone tells you 'there is no abuse', worry. If there is scope for abuse, it WILL happen.
Absolutely right. Micropayments is it. Not just the solution to free news but a plethora of other problems as well, probably including -- at least to a first approximation -- spam.
You know what worries me? The answer to micropayments will be PayPal. That's scary. But probably what will happen. We're certainly there for mini-payments right now ($2-$5 stuff).
Not true for.mac (iChat) traffic. It all gets routed through the AIM servers unless you want to transfer some kind of attachment, like a jpg, in which case it will open up a peer-to-peer connection and change the modality.
I don't know yet how this affects iChat traffic but I assume badly, as I can't imagine AOL would separate out the traffic.
You can bet everything you own that AOL archive every message that's routed through their system. Their new TOS means that when Government Agency X comes a-knockin' demanding all the messages User Y posted in the last three years, they can simply turn over the records without having to go through all that annoying stuff of warrants, sub-poenas and so on.
In fact, it doesn't even have to be Govt Agency X. It can be anyone. If they want to let them search the archive, they can.
Bear with me here... let's say that one of these dimwit companies gets sued and taken to the cleaners by some poor victim of ID theft... at that point they realize that there is a huge potential liability associated with retaining this kind of data... and decide against collecting it on an ad-hoc basis. I pity the poor bastards who have to be the test cases, but after a few iterations through the law-courts, it could turn out OK.
If you have a game like Unreal Tournament 2004, it is the physics processing that really kills your framerate, no matter how good your GPU. You can see this by simply swapping between the Deathmatch and Onslaught gametypes. The Onslaught world is filled with vehicles which run off the Karma physics engine, and they KILL your framerate, so that the game effectively becomes CPU-throttled, instead of GPU-throttled (which is what we are used to). A PPU is a genuinely brilliant idea, and relatively easy to implement. It will be interesting to see what the programming interface is... and whether the board runs an engine like Karma or something they've invented all for themselves. Prepare to be amazed, I think.
1. Launch DRM'd subscription-based music service. Nobody joins it but RIAA backs your model and you get lots of good music. 2. Wait for DRM to be cracked, in, ooh, three or four days. 3. Your subscriptions suddenly rocket 4. PROFIT!
Let me put it another way. The people who do make money from poetry do not tend to make it from book sales unless they are fortunate enough to be put on a school curriculum while they are still alive. Instead, they make it from readings, lectures, teaching, journalism and activities generated by their success in poetry.
This is really what I am trying to say about the music industry. For example, when I was actually recording albums we always as a band made more money from gigs than record sales. I think this is a better model for the music industry -- meaning the massive majority of artists who make almost or less-than nothing from their endeavors -- than DRMing us up the wazoo.
In this respect I think the music and motion picture businesses are both similar and different. It is quite possible to record a very slick sounding CD on your computer that can go head to head with a Celine Dion CD, if that's you bag.
It is not yet possible to go head to head with a $100m Hollywood movie from your bedroom. Therefore if you want to keep seeing $100m movies, you might want to support DRM for those kinds of movies. If you hate that kind of thing, you might not.
The kind of thing that totally drives piracy is when you can't get what you want when the technology should allow you to. Why do people pirate TV shows and movies? Because they cannot download them legally for a reasonable price, even though the technology is in place that would allow them to do that. This is exactly why Sony and the other major movie/music producers are actually feeding the monster. The more they put barbed wire DRM around their products, the more Joe Q Public shrugs and says "well, screw that, I'll download a DivX instead".
BTW, *lots* of money is made on poetry. If you don't believe it, go take a look at all the poetry books on your favorite bookstore's shelves. Books don't get published and/or carried in major bookstores unless there's a market for them--that is, paying customers.
You're just wrong. There are lots of books but the people who write and publish them are extremely lucky to break even. They tend to do it from love. Of course there are lots of anthologies of mostly-dead-poets, but they don't have to pay royalties on those. Go count the number of books by contemporary poets. If you think any of them are getting rich from poetry, you need your head examining.
Slashdot Mirror
Re install XP, do all the fricken updates, then re-install all the fricken software that got nuked in the process. And try not to nuke your linux partition. Then remember how to set up the networking so it will actually talk to linux and OS X. Oh yeah, 7.2 hours baby. When was the last time YOU re-installed XP from scratch? Pain, pain, pain. Then of course, if you had [k[racked software you'd have to go and find all the installers and [k]racks again. Good thing I don't.
Hey, I object to being called a 'pussy'. The rest of it is fine.
Awesome. But don't try it standing next to a big guy with a beard in a biker bar.
I haven't had any baddies on XP either but that's because I basically don't let it do anything. It's behind a firewall, has no services running, I don't do email on it and if I browse, it's Firefox. Surprisingly I have not even had any infections from, um, 'downloads'. My solution to any problems in XP is to nuke the drive and reinstall. It turns out to be about 10x faster than scratching my head for 72 hours.
Yes, that's exactly how I use it too. But I must admit I hardly ever venture into Windows any more. Only to play games basically. Most of the time the PC is booted into Linux and I'm working on OS X. Going into Windows feels like driving into one of those neighborhoods where you get car-jacked at the stop-light.
[shudder]
1. You can't win
2. You can't break even
3. You can't get out of the game
4. No matter how hard you shake it, the last drop always rolls down your pant leg.
Of course now I realize you weren't in favor of colorization but hey... my Karma was way too high anyways.
Color correcting, good.
Colorization of old movies, bad.
If you are so fucking ignorant that you don't know that composing and lighting for BW and color are utterly different, shame on you.
Nothing is more infuriating than finding an old movie you want to watch on DVD and then discovering that it's been FUCKING COLORIZED.
It's the equivalent of some dickwad like you 'improving' the Mona Lisa with a Crayola.
I think I speak for all of us who care about how movies should look when I say FUCK YOU IN THE ASS WITH A CHILI PEPPER, RETARD.
...and raise enought money to rebuild the smoking ruins of their server room.
I'm saying that if you don't find abuses, it is bad news, because it almost certainly means that you are missing something.
I'm also saying, yes, that in any sufficient large and loosely controlled human organization, if there is scope for abuse, it will happen. Can you think of a counter-example?
Which is more likely?
a) in every instance, reported and unreported, of the use of PATRIOT act powers, even those where the person involved was forbidden from revealing the act had been invoked, all governmental agencies and operatives behaved precisely within the rubric of their powers under the act; or
b) they missed something?
Because no abuses are being found. That is a danger sign.
I was an investigative journalist ten years ago. I investigated a psychiatric hospital, where there were continual 'rumours' of patient abuse at the hands of staff. The management told me that there had been no complaints. What it turned out that mean was that there had been 600 complaints, but none of them had been upheld. The investigation consisted of the management asking patients and staff what happened. The staff denied the abuse and their word was taken as truth, because the inmates were mental patients and therefore could not be believed.
After my piece aired, there was a year-long public inquiry into conditions at the hospital and wholescale reform.
Whenever someone tells you 'there is no abuse', worry. If there is scope for abuse, it WILL happen.
Absolutely right. Micropayments is it. Not just the solution to free news but a plethora of other problems as well, probably including -- at least to a first approximation -- spam.
You know what worries me? The answer to micropayments will be PayPal. That's scary. But probably what will happen. We're certainly there for mini-payments right now ($2-$5 stuff).
Holy slashdot effect, Batman!
Blam!
Not true for .mac (iChat) traffic. It all gets routed through the AIM servers unless you want to transfer some kind of attachment, like a jpg, in which case it will open up a peer-to-peer connection and change the modality.
I don't know yet how this affects iChat traffic but I assume badly, as I can't imagine AOL would separate out the traffic.
You're kidding, right?
You can bet everything you own that AOL archive every message that's routed through their system. Their new TOS means that when Government Agency X comes a-knockin' demanding all the messages User Y posted in the last three years, they can simply turn over the records without having to go through all that annoying stuff of warrants, sub-poenas and so on.
In fact, it doesn't even have to be Govt Agency X. It can be anyone. If they want to let them search the archive, they can.
that's another TOS I won't be signing.
.mac subscribers (like me) who use AIM for their old .mac names? Not very well, I think.
.mac subscribers? Does the iChat stuff still get routed throught AIM??
How does this affect former
What about current
Bear with me here... let's say that one of these dimwit companies gets sued and taken to the cleaners by some poor victim of ID theft... at that point they realize that there is a huge potential liability associated with retaining this kind of data... and decide against collecting it on an ad-hoc basis. I pity the poor bastards who have to be the test cases, but after a few iterations through the law-courts, it could turn out OK.
If you have a game like Unreal Tournament 2004, it is the physics processing that really kills your framerate, no matter how good your GPU. You can see this by simply swapping between the Deathmatch and Onslaught gametypes. The Onslaught world is filled with vehicles which run off the Karma physics engine, and they KILL your framerate, so that the game effectively becomes CPU-throttled, instead of GPU-throttled (which is what we are used to). A PPU is a genuinely brilliant idea, and relatively easy to implement. It will be interesting to see what the programming interface is... and whether the board runs an engine like Karma or something they've invented all for themselves. Prepare to be amazed, I think.
1. Launch DRM'd subscription-based music service. Nobody joins it but RIAA backs your model and you get lots of good music.
2. Wait for DRM to be cracked, in, ooh, three or four days.
3. Your subscriptions suddenly rocket
4. PROFIT!
... a faint trace of Brownian motion disturbs the surface of a tea-cup a billion trillion light years away.
If I was interested in asbestos and couldn't be bothered to set up an aggregator it'd be somewhat useful.
If he makes money from it, fine.
Is it just me or have I heard *every single* \. story before it's posted here?
Maybe someone could wake me up when the next piece of actual news is posted.
google for: 150000mph/c in percent
you get:
(150 000 mph) / the speed of light = 0.022367474 percent
(it's only a matter of time before we see the following in undergraduate mathethematical derivations:
'by google, e ** (i * pi) = -1'
etc)
Let me put it another way. The people who do make money from poetry do not tend to make it from book sales unless they are fortunate enough to be put on a school curriculum while they are still alive. Instead, they make it from readings, lectures, teaching, journalism and activities generated by their success in poetry.
This is really what I am trying to say about the music industry. For example, when I was actually recording albums we always as a band made more money from gigs than record sales. I think this is a better model for the music industry -- meaning the massive majority of artists who make almost or less-than nothing from their endeavors -- than DRMing us up the wazoo.
In this respect I think the music and motion picture businesses are both similar and different. It is quite possible to record a very slick sounding CD on your computer that can go head to head with a Celine Dion CD, if that's you bag.
It is not yet possible to go head to head with a $100m Hollywood movie from your bedroom. Therefore if you want to keep seeing $100m movies, you might want to support DRM for those kinds of movies. If you hate that kind of thing, you might not.
The kind of thing that totally drives piracy is when you can't get what you want when the technology should allow you to. Why do people pirate TV shows and movies? Because they cannot download them legally for a reasonable price, even though the technology is in place that would allow them to do that. This is exactly why Sony and the other major movie/music producers are actually feeding the monster. The more they put barbed wire DRM around their products, the more Joe Q Public shrugs and says "well, screw that, I'll download a DivX instead".
... shan't miss him.
Check out his on-air confrontation with Howard Stern from a couple of months ago... riveting stuff.