Wikipedia doesn't mention any right to make 'backups' of media. Neither does the US copyright office. In fact as wikipedia points out "if consumers can make a copy of a CD for their car, they can give MP3 files to everyone". Quoting a small part of something with attribution for critical purposes probably is fair use, BTW. Copying the whole work verbatim isn't.
Anyhow, if you feel some media infringes your rights, don't buy it.
What if your employer wants you to hand over reports in Word
He won't care if it's a.doc file or.rtf.
MS can take over the world for all I care, I just want to get this goddamn report done and go home. To hell with the DRMed-to-death Vista. Give me anything with Office in it and I'm happy.
Get your kid into the office, and she'll probably show you how to use Open Office on a LiveCD.
People haven't yet seen their collection wither and die when the next "one true format" takes over and Apple/MS brings out new players and new OSes that don't support the old format. (If you're lucky, you *may* be able to convert your collection, but this too only works if Apple *wants* you to be able to do that)
You mean that you won't be able to install WinAmp & PowerDVD or any mp3/DVD player applications on Windows 2010? I seriously doubt that will ever happen.
Of course, if you want higher quality movies / audio the new formats will be DRM'd, but for most people the convenience of the old formats and the fact that they have so much media them will outweigh that. And I think that new content will always get converted to unresticted formats and torrented. And even if it isn't, is it really such a shame that you need to buy or rent new movies with money, rather than watching them for free?
Food's cheap in Tokyo. You could probably survive for a couple of months on 20,000 yen. Hell, in Roppongi there's a noodle place that only charges a couple of hundred yen for a bowl. Two bowls a day should keep you alive. Course, a hotel will set you back that much a night.
Bill: No way! Remember, Steve, I used to write software
Total myth. bg knows what lines of code look like on a piece of paper, and that's pretty much it. He hasn't ever coded anything to functional completion.
I always liked this. The strange thing is that if you ask any geeks questions, and you aren't someone who can adversely affect their careers, you have a fair chance of getting the Fault Threshold effect.
I've seen it with lazy programmers all the time, it's just that lazy programmers get fired if they do this to customers, or at least moved to a dead end job with a basement desk. But if you're not a customer, or their boss, or a friend, this is pretty much the default. And I think that's the deep problem I have with non commercial software development, it's the fear of getting fired, or the desire to get promoted that keeps people honest as engineers, and helpful as tech support people. Otherwise, it's easy to think up an excuse and go back to doing whatever you do outside work.
Well said. I can see the whole Open Source thing fizzling out because people would rather deal with commercial operations, no matter how dubious their business practices elsewhere, because they acknowledge flaws in their products and work hard to fix them.
I've spent 10+ years working for commercial software companies, all embedded ones, and the one thing that's consistent is that if customers complain, people have to work hard until they stop complaining. Whereas any criticism of open source stuff leads to a torrent of abuse on Usenet, IRC and the other places that are laughably recommended as support forums. And it's the same on/. And absolutely nothing happens after that. Most of the time, it's actually cheaper to use the commercial alternative than to fix all the linux issues yourself, which is what it comes down to.
If I were actually betting money on something working for customers, I'd much rather use something commercial, especially as OSE, vxWorks, and the like are a lot skinnier in terms of resource usage than Linux.
> Just do like the other teenagers and troll Slashdot, pissing off the people who are older, > wiser, and actually know what the hell they're talking about.
That's not what it's meant for. Loads of Windows applications need to be able to connect to the outside world, so the firewall doesn't stop them. You probably needed to be admin to install them, so you're trusted to install stuff.
What it for is to stop a repeat of the Blaster worm, which attacked the SMB daemon inside Windows. If you have the firewall turned on, machines on the Internet can't send a buffer overflow exploit to these ports because the firewall blocks them, so a vulnerability is blocked. Given that XP has a bunch of daemons running by default, and given that someone will find an exploit for one of them every few months, it's actually a sizeable gain.
Interestingly enough, when Blaster hit (before SP2 and the firewall being on by default), I had to turn on the firewall to be able to get to windows.update.com to get the patch. Otherwise, Blaster was so endemic on the Internet this was impossible. I actually got spam from a recruitment company asking me how to stop his machine shutting down when he connected to the Internet, and I explained this to him and he was pretty grateful.
So if the firewall had been enabled, most machines would have stayed up long enough to get the update, and it would have been far less serious. Incidentally, I worked at a big company back then, and blaster was endemic on their intranet too, carried in on laptops. They repackaged the microsoft fix in a way that destroyed machines, and as soon as I uninstalled it the machine crashed. So allowing any machines non firewalled access to the internet is a disaster if an buffer overflow exploit is found for any default enabled service.
The lossless codec has been reverse engineered. WMP uses ActiveX components to decode audio, so it's not that hard to add support for any audio format if you know how to write.ax dll. Other media players have their own codec formats, and in fact FFMPEG has support for ALAC, so you don't need to.
Eventually, we're going to move to processors that dynamically create MicroCores (TM), as they function. MicroCores will exist in another dimension such that they can endlessly multiply without taking up any space.
I know you're joking, but the strange thing is it's not completely impossible.
Careful, if you mention fuzzy, feelgood, newage concepts like that all the Mensa types will start to wizz around the room shrieking like sabotaged Daleks. Maybe some of them will explode too.
Libya's biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream.
GP's point, I imagine, had something to do with China having been around and doing A-OK in one form or another for the last three thousand years operating under entirely different assumptions, ideologies, and whatnot than the west.
That's taking cultural relativism to the point of nihilism.
And under the emperors China was poor and backward.
Even under the present government which is far better than either Mao or the Emperors millions of Chinese people leave the country every year and seek asylum elsewhere.
What make us so arrogant to think that because our stuff, like freedom of information, works so well for us, that it would for them or that they would even want it at all?
If you don't have freedom of expression and free elections, the government can murder millions of people and there's not much you can do about it (e.g. during the Great Leap Forward ). If you do have it, you've got a much better chance that gross violations of human rights, e.g. genocide or democide won't even be on the agenda.
As soon as I write this, I can imagine people reading this and coming up with a smartarse reply like 'Well our government doesn't care about human rights, what about gitmo'. Well, having a free society is not a panacea. When under threat, free societies can do some very nasty things to people outside them, e.g. Dresden. Or they can do much less nasty things to minorities inside them, e.g. internment of Japanese Americans, but the system will eventually stop that.
My point is that it's hard for a democratic society to do something as murderous as Mao managed. And that's something.
And it's not just avoiding mass murder, corruption is far easier for people in power if they can threaten or kill people who expose them. And corruption will eventually impoverish the vast majority of people who have essentially no power in an unfree society. In fact, from the Chinese expatriates I spoke to, corruption was the main reason for leaving.
So a imposing kitty by all means, but I do't think it could take me down.
Amazingly, Google is unable to find pictures of 56lb cats so that I can estimate their fighting skills, the closest is Katy, a 50lb Russian cat from here
It seems to me that the size of a cat doesn't increase it's combat effectivness. Indeed a hungry and fit 7kilo cat with quick claws and ninja ambush training would be more of a threat.
And is there no news-paper for the upper crust intellectual class (or classes) ? I've heard of folks who get their news-papers ironed for them - but I always thought that this was to make the all the picures of nude ladies look really smooth; thus inspiring the upper-class (or classes) to regenerate themselves. But perhaps I'm wrong about this.
The LPC bus is interesting. It's basically a software compatible ISA bus replacement with a completely different physical layer. Instead of the thirty something signals in ISA, you can get by with 5, and two wires connected to the PCI bus. The southbridge has an internal PCI to LPC bridge, and then you can run the 7 signals to Super IO, Bios and TPM modules that would otherwise have needed a subset of ISA.
Presumably the PCI->LPC bridge is set up so that hardwired ISA stuff like io ports 2f8, 2f8 etc get routed to the LPC bus, so it looks like a standard PC to software. Oddly enough, the OS probably uses ACPI to find legacy stuff anyway, so all this emulation is a bit obsolete.
Slashdot Mirror
What fair use rights would those be?
Wikipedia doesn't mention any right to make 'backups' of media. Neither does the US copyright office. In fact as wikipedia points out "if consumers can make a copy of a CD for their car, they can give MP3 files to everyone". Quoting a small part of something with attribution for critical purposes probably is fair use, BTW. Copying the whole work verbatim isn't.
Anyhow, if you feel some media infringes your rights, don't buy it.
The environment's like a box of chocolates, Ramsees. It's nice when it's there, but sooner or later it will be gone.
I thought it was Clinton that got the hummer.
What if your employer wants you to hand over reports in Word
.doc file or .rtf.
He won't care if it's a
MS can take over the world for all I care, I just want to get this goddamn report done and go home. To hell with the DRMed-to-death Vista. Give me anything with Office in it and I'm happy.
Get your kid into the office, and she'll probably show you how to use Open Office on a LiveCD.
People haven't yet seen their collection wither and die when the next "one true format" takes over and Apple/MS brings out new players and new OSes that don't support the old format. (If you're lucky, you *may* be able to convert your collection, but this too only works if Apple *wants* you to be able to do that)
You mean that you won't be able to install WinAmp & PowerDVD or any mp3/DVD player applications on Windows 2010? I seriously doubt that will ever happen.
Of course, if you want higher quality movies / audio the new formats will be DRM'd, but for most people the convenience of the old formats and the fact that they have so much media them will outweigh that. And I think that new content will always get converted to unresticted formats and torrented. And even if it isn't, is it really such a shame that you need to buy or rent new movies with money, rather than watching them for free?
Food's cheap in Tokyo. You could probably survive for a couple of months on 20,000 yen. Hell, in Roppongi there's a noodle place that only charges a couple of hundred yen for a bowl. Two bowls a day should keep you alive. Course, a hotel will set you back that much a night.
I think he might be making the observation that Ballmer is 'OMG!1 teh same as HITLER!!!11'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC
I always liked this. The strange thing is that if you ask any geeks questions, and you aren't someone who can adversely affect their careers, you have a fair chance of getting the Fault Threshold effect.
I've seen it with lazy programmers all the time, it's just that lazy programmers get fired if they do this to customers, or at least moved to a dead end job with a basement desk. But if you're not a customer, or their boss, or a friend, this is pretty much the default. And I think that's the deep problem I have with non commercial software development, it's the fear of getting fired, or the desire to get promoted that keeps people honest as engineers, and helpful as tech support people. Otherwise, it's easy to think up an excuse and go back to doing whatever you do outside work.
Well said. I can see the whole Open Source thing fizzling out because people would rather deal with commercial operations, no matter how dubious their business practices elsewhere, because they acknowledge flaws in their products and work hard to fix them.
/. And absolutely nothing happens after that. Most of the time, it's actually cheaper to use the commercial alternative than to fix all the linux issues yourself, which is what it comes down to.
I've spent 10+ years working for commercial software companies, all embedded ones, and the one thing that's consistent is that if customers complain, people have to work hard until they stop complaining. Whereas any criticism of open source stuff leads to a torrent of abuse on Usenet, IRC and the other places that are laughably recommended as support forums. And it's the same on
If I were actually betting money on something working for customers, I'd much rather use something commercial, especially as OSE, vxWorks, and the like are a lot skinnier in terms of resource usage than Linux.
> Just do like the other teenagers and troll Slashdot, pissing off the people who are older,
> wiser, and actually know what the hell they're talking about.
That's the kind of thing Hitler would say.
That's not what it's meant for. Loads of Windows applications need to be able to connect to the outside world, so the firewall doesn't stop them. You probably needed to be admin to install them, so you're trusted to install stuff.
What it for is to stop a repeat of the Blaster worm, which attacked the SMB daemon inside Windows. If you have the firewall turned on, machines on the Internet can't send a buffer overflow exploit to these ports because the firewall blocks them, so a vulnerability is blocked. Given that XP has a bunch of daemons running by default, and given that someone will find an exploit for one of them every few months, it's actually a sizeable gain.
Interestingly enough, when Blaster hit (before SP2 and the firewall being on by default), I had to turn on the firewall to be able to get to windows.update.com to get the patch. Otherwise, Blaster was so endemic on the Internet this was impossible. I actually got spam from a recruitment company asking me how to stop his machine shutting down when he connected to the Internet, and I explained this to him and he was pretty grateful.
So if the firewall had been enabled, most machines would have stayed up long enough to get the update, and it would have been far less serious. Incidentally, I worked at a big company back then, and blaster was endemic on their intranet too, carried in on laptops. They repackaged the microsoft fix in a way that destroyed machines, and as soon as I uninstalled it the machine crashed. So allowing any machines non firewalled access to the internet is a disaster if an buffer overflow exploit is found for any default enabled service.
Audiophiles don't rip CDs. They buy the LP gold masters and a pressing plant.
The lossless codec has been reverse engineered. WMP uses ActiveX components to decode audio, so it's not that hard to add support for any audio format if you know how to write .ax dll. Other media players have their own codec formats, and in fact FFMPEG has support for ALAC, so you don't need to.
I'll be here all week. Tip your waitress....
Why is she a cow?
Eventually, we're going to move to processors that dynamically create MicroCores (TM), as they function. MicroCores will exist in another dimension such that they can endlessly multiply without taking up any space.
I know you're joking, but the strange thing is it's not completely impossible.
It sounds like David Deutsch's interpretation of quantum computation.
Careful, if you mention fuzzy, feelgood, newage concepts like that all the Mensa types will start to wizz around the room shrieking like sabotaged Daleks. Maybe some of them will explode too.
I read that the biological weapons programs he gave up were laughable anyway, e.g.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,
GP's point, I imagine, had something to do with China having been around and doing A-OK in one form or another for the last three thousand years operating under entirely different
assumptions, ideologies, and whatnot than the west.
That's taking cultural relativism to the point of nihilism.
China hasn't been doing A-OK. Mao's policies killed tens of millions of people.
And under the emperors China was poor and backward.
Even under the present government which is far better than either Mao or the Emperors millions of Chinese people leave the country every year and seek asylum elsewhere.
What make us so arrogant to think that because our stuff, like freedom of information, works so well for us, that it would for them or that they would even want it at all?
If you don't have freedom of expression and free elections, the government can murder millions of people and there's not much you can do about it (e.g. during the Great Leap Forward ). If you do have it, you've got a much better chance that gross violations of human rights, e.g. genocide or democide won't even be on the agenda.
As soon as I write this, I can imagine people reading this and coming up with a smartarse reply like 'Well our government doesn't care about human rights, what about gitmo'. Well, having a free society is not a panacea. When under threat, free societies can do some very nasty things to people outside them, e.g. Dresden. Or they can do much less nasty things to minorities inside them, e.g. internment of Japanese Americans, but the system will eventually stop that.
My point is that it's hard for a democratic society to do something as murderous as Mao managed. And that's something.
And it's not just avoiding mass murder, corruption is far easier for people in power if they can threaten or kill people who expose them. And corruption will eventually impoverish the vast majority of people who have essentially no power in an unfree society. In fact, from the Chinese expatriates I spoke to, corruption was the main reason for leaving.
How convenient. I never thought Ted Ts'o would stoop that low.
Now you see why Hans was always talking about conspiracies.
A 5 ton elephant could take on a 800lb Gorilla I'm sure. But what about a 300lb cat?
g ly-ginormous-fat-cats/
Consider. I way 150lbs, so an equivalent feline would weigh 150lbs * ( 300 / 800 ) = 56lbs that's 25kilos
About half the size of this cat here.
So a imposing kitty by all means, but I do't think it could take me down.
Amazingly, Google is unable to find pictures of 56lb cats so that I can estimate their fighting skills, the closest is Katy, a 50lb Russian cat from here
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/05/08/top-15-amazin
It seems to me that the size of a cat doesn't increase it's combat effectivness. Indeed a hungry and fit 7kilo cat with quick claws and ninja ambush training would be more of a threat.
Too bad he'll get atomic wedgied for saying it.
And is there no news-paper for the upper crust intellectual class (or classes) ? I've heard of folks who get their news-papers ironed for them - but I always thought that this was to make the all the picures of nude ladies look really smooth; thus inspiring the upper-class (or classes) to regenerate themselves. But perhaps I'm wrong about this.
Ahh, an American, and one clearly well versed in gritty British documentaries.
I'm surprised you don't know that the paper for intellectual class is The Guardian.
Yeah.
Anyone who posts inflammatory stuff on the internet should be sent to prison, and I hope they get GANG RAPED.
The LPC bus is interesting. It's basically a software compatible ISA bus replacement with a completely different physical layer. Instead of the thirty something signals in ISA, you can get by with 5, and two wires connected to the PCI bus. The southbridge has an internal PCI to LPC bridge, and then you can run the 7 signals to Super IO, Bios and TPM modules that would otherwise have needed a subset of ISA.
Presumably the PCI->LPC bridge is set up so that hardwired ISA stuff like io ports 2f8, 2f8 etc get routed to the LPC bus, so it looks like a standard PC to software. Oddly enough, the OS probably uses ACPI to find legacy stuff anyway, so all this emulation is a bit obsolete.