If you're going to have a stupid, pointless, infinitely nested flame war with someone on slashdot, please click 'no score +1 bonus' when you post. No one else cares about pathetic bickering between you and another idiot, especially not if you can't keep it civil.
------- Additional Comment #14 From tor@acm.org 2001-07-31 10:47 -------
Here's a summary of the jpeg2000 situation that I wrote up, but never made it into bugzilla:
You might want to ask Tom Lane, head of the Independent JPEG Group, for his opinion.
It seems that adding jpeg2000 support would get us involved in a legal mess. If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents. From http://www.jpeg.org/CDs15444.htm:
Particular attention is drawn to the use within the standard of selected technology or algorithms which are claimed to be protected by national and/or international patents. In the case of technology submitted for consideration by JPEG for incorporation in Part 1 of the standard, the JPEG committee believes that the individual organisations concerned will make available licences to use this intellectual property, on a royalty- and fee-free basis, under specified conditions which may apply only to conforming implementations of the standard. These conditions are available on application to the organisations concerned, which are listed in an Annex to the document.
It is of course still possible that other organisations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementors are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area. The JPEG committee requests any organisations or individuals claiming (or being aware of claims) that any of the committee drafts available for download here infringes other intellectual property rights to provide information and/or evidence to substantiate their claim to the JPEG Convener in the first instance.
Moving on to more practical considerations, there is one open (sort of) C implementation of the jpeg2000 standard that I'm aware of, Jasper:
While I'm not a lawyer, the impression I get is that once ISO officially publishes part 5 of the jpeg200 standard we're free to use the library as we like.
Sorry, are you referring to an ATX case? I'm a little unclear.
Either way, I think selling a quad-proc G4 (G5? We'll see what happens when they come out) bundled with Final Cut Pro/Cinema Tools and equipped with the latest (3.2Gbps?) Firewire spec, sporting a 23" cinema display would be the way to go. It'd cost a few (ten) grand, but it'd be worth it.
Debian does changes to the code, applies patches to make it work (including bugfixes/security patches that are sent upstream but not yet included in that release), and ensures that everything follows the Debian packaging guidelines. Debian code is sometimes vastly different from regular code, and it needs to be tested. In the case of XFree, with the most complicated build system and source tree I've seen since... well, ever, fortunately, it takes a long time to make sure everything works.
Slackware, on the other hand, compiles XFree, tars it up, and puts it on the CD. It does not have to be maintained, patched, updated, or tested. This is ok, if that's what you want, but Debian does a lot of work and a lot of changes, and it can require a lot of testing.
This is why Debian is widely regarded as a quality distro. No releasing alpha software in stable releases, no jumping version numbers to look competetive, just code, quality code, quality distro. Slackware lets you worry about that on your own.
I don't think that the choice is between updating and stagnating. Look at OS X for example, or even the old OS8/9. Apple releases updates every now and then, fixes this, fixes that, updates code, adds features. Free updates that don't break things, and driver installs there are pretty easy, last I checked.
I think OS X has the best of both worlds because they started over. They have the flexibility (UNIX), but also the usability (MacOS 6-9).
You mean like, for example, someone making a self-extracting shell script installer with the driver contained therein?
I hate to burst your counter-culture bubble, but the only reasons we don't have download & double-click drivers like Windows does are 1) developers don't bother; 2) the Linux kernel changes almost daily, while Windows stagnates for 3-5 years at a time.
If you want to use Kernel 2.4.x until 2005, then people can put the effort into writing drivers, installers, and so on. Until then, or until kernel recompilation is easier, we'll have to live with insmod file.o or 'make && make install'
--Dan
One option springs to mind
on
Paper to XML?
·
· Score: 2
You could always... you know... sort the data by hand. I hear they used to do that back before everyone got lazy. Or, you could parse it with perl, but personally, I prefer the former.
1) Increase in number of users who are purchasing CDRs and using them to copy music. Ok, and why does this justify raising prices? Since the tariff applies to all CDRs, this means that more people are already paying, and they should be making proportionately more tariff money. How does one justify raising the cost of the product when more people are buying said product?
The logic is that instead of 45% of the CDs being bought by home users, 70% now are, and only 30% are for non-home use (i.e. data backups at work, etc.). It's not more in numbers, it's more percentage of the numbers.
As for the rest, the increase in 6 minutes of audio will allow between one and two average-length songs to fit on one CD (instead of ending up with 71 minutes and two 4 1/2 minute songs, you can fill the CD).
The last one makes no sense though. Perhaps it's the logic that people aren't buying CDs for whole albums, and therefore they shouldn't be discounted for making crappy copies of whole albums. Who knows.
While I realize this is an anecdote, you're actually right on the money.
The tariff only applies to CD-R/RW discs, Audio CD-Rs, iPods, etc. that are imported for resale.
It is entirely legal for you to import your own whatever in order to avoid paying the taxes; however, you cannot legally re-sell them without paying the tariff. Customs cannot and will not charge the tariff if you drive an SUV full of CDs, iPods, and flash cards across the border, if it's all for your own use. They may charge you GST on it (this is what makes hiding it illegal), but you won't have to pay the tariffs.
Your grammar, punctuation (no comma here) and spelling make me cry.
Your grammar, punctuation, and lack of comma after 'punctuation' make me sigh. Text should be written the way it is meant to be spoken, and people (at least, every person I've ever met) will say 'grammar *pause* punctuation *pause* and spelling', as opposed to 'grammar *pause* punctuation and spelling'.
The old grammatical rules used to be as you suggest. They were updated in the last decade and a half to reflect the realities of speech.
Look on the bright side. Now, instead of early-adopters getting shafted by lowering prices, they're getting the bonus. $100 off an iMac, instead of, say, $100 on? That's $200 I'm glad to pocket.
It's just too bad that this will hinder adoption, because this really is a great computer, even without all the awesome bells/whistles. This is what computing should be. Well... Maybe not exactly, but it's cute.
The Wheel Mouse Optical is a pretty basic optical wheel mouse. Real 3D Artists/Photoshop Gurus/Gamers would want a Logitech Dual Optical, which does two snaps to ensure much better accuracy (on a bad surface, the mouse cursor can suddenly jump around as the mouse wrongly recalculates where it is.
Plus, no more paying Microsoft, which is always a bonus in my book, however good their hardware might be.
Odd, I never heard the "perfect circles" theory. Any moron who watches the skies can tell you that the planets don't.
The explanation given for this was that the planets and suns orbit around... well, nothing, but they move in circles, and those circles themselves move around the earth. Pretty stupid theory, but it worked enough for people to say 'oh, ok, well that's alright then'.
I really don't give a damn whether Microsoft signed in blood on a contract written by Mephistopheles himself, their player works with a minimum of hassle or nags.
Amen to that. I had an old fujitsu hard drive, and I started playing with hdparm one day. Basically I turned on every possible option, including the ones marked in the man page as 'this will probably cause extreme filesystem corruption' and 'what are you, on crack? get the hell away from here!', and it worked great. Performance was simply excellent.
Overzealous, I recommended these options to friends, who all locked up when they tried them (pinging out from IRC, etc), but I was undaunted. When my old HD started to give up the ghost, I got a new (well, new to me, this was 6 months ago) 2 gig WD for the box, and turned all the options on. Hours later, the entire filesystem was corrupted. After the whole system nosedived, I spent more than two hours hitting 'y' in fsck before I decided 'screw it' and reformatted. Fortunately, it was a clean install anyway.
Moral of the story: test out your psychotic options before you put any important data on the drive. Other moral: say what you like about fujitsu, but their drives support more hdparm options than any other I've seen, and they don't break when you use them.
In Canada, almost every product is subject to a 15% HST tax.
Not to nitpick, but this is entirely inaccurate. Very few provinces have harmonized their sales taxes with the GST (producing the HST to which you refer). Most provinces have not done this, and thus you pay 7% GST, and whatever provincial tax is (in Alberta for example, it is 0%; in BC, 7.5%).
I stand by with what I said earlier: Properly coded pages render just as perfect in Opera 6.01 as they do in Mozilla 0.9.9 and IE 6. Anyone, claiming the opposite, is a lying sack of shit. I know, since I use Opera every day and often compare its performance to other browsers.
http://cdslash.net/index2.php - this page does not render properly in Opera. Maybe you need to get down off your zealotry horse and get a clue? Incidentally, the page is 100% validated XHTML Strict 1.0 and the css (http://cdslash.net/cdslash.css) is validated too. There are some warnings about not having a colour with my background colour specification, but those will be fixed when I get more time to work on the site.
If you're interested in seeing what I see, check this out:
http://cdslash.net/temp/browsers/opera.png - This is what Opera thinks the page should look like. It totally ignores the width: attribute of the navbar. This isn't even something fancy, like layers, or DHTML, this is setting the width of a table cell. Tell me now that Opera renders things perfect. http://cdslash.net/temp/browsers/mozilla.png - For reference, this is what Mozilla renders it as, which, coincidentally enough, is exactly what it's supposed to look like. Weird how that works, isn't it? IE looks exactly the same too, in case you were wondering.
Anyway, maybe you should 'often compare its performance to other browsers' without deciding your results beforehand. Maybe you'd get better results that way.
Dos, if I'm advised by a police officer or lawyer that it's legal to do something, then I have a defence in court.
Either way, until they let me pay for what songs I want, or stop forcing manufactured bands down my throat, I'm going to stick with the very few groups I like and whose CDs I DO buy. BNL, the Hip, Amanda Marshall, and several independant groups get my money, but the American manufacturers sure won't.
Funny, it seems like most people who posted to this story that commented disagree. THere are several comments about Opera not working, and, just in case you were wondering, I -have- used Opera, and it renders pages horribly. It doesn't even fail gracefully. Don't bother telling me what the docs say it supports, it breaks when it does.
As for the rest of your post, it sounds like you could use some prozak or something. So very very hostile. If you can't make your point without swearing, perhaps you shouldn't post; if me saying your browser gets you this worked up, perhaps you shuold get some help.
Well, first, since it's entirely legal to trade songs (a guy I know at London Drugs said a police officer was in one day, wanted a CD burner to burn his MP3s; salesmen pretended he didn't hear, but the officer said there was nothing against it), this is really only paying for something you can already do. Go, pirate, have fun. It's legal. Even if it weren't, you're paying for it anyway, so you may as well. I know I do.
That being said, I do oppose the cost-per-gig levy on MP3 players. They're not used to pirate, they're used to play. May as well levy tape machines and CD burners too.
Second, if you do oppose it, don't harass your premier. First, unless you're in his constituency, you'd be better off talking to your MLA. Second, this is federal, not provincial, so your MLA will tell you to write your MP.
Just write your MP in the first place, it'll save you time.
Opera will be a good browser when it supports all the latest HTML/XHTML standards and CSS. Until my (100% properly coded and W3C validated) websites render as perfectly in Opera as they do in Mozilla and IE, Opera can't really be classified as 'the best browser out there.' It can't even do rendering, which is the entire point of a browser. Maybe they should give up on the goodies and make a working rendering engine first.
I dislike opera for many many reasons, but those are all personal taste. This one isn't. Besides, why should I pay for a browser when dozens of people want me to use theirs for free? That doesn't make sense from ANY point of view, Open Source, Free Software, or capitalist.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to have a stupid, pointless, infinitely nested flame war with someone on slashdot, please click 'no score +1 bonus' when you post. No one else cares about pathetic bickering between you and another idiot, especially not if you can't keep it civil.
Sheesh.
--Dan
As much of a joke as that was meant to be, this system already -is- a cluster. Of RS/6000s, no less.
--Dan
Here's a summary of the jpeg2000 situation that I wrote up, but never made it into bugzilla:
Sorry, are you referring to an ATX case? I'm a little unclear.
Either way, I think selling a quad-proc G4 (G5? We'll see what happens when they come out) bundled with Final Cut Pro/Cinema Tools and equipped with the latest (3.2Gbps?) Firewire spec, sporting a 23" cinema display would be the way to go. It'd cost a few (ten) grand, but it'd be worth it.
--Dan
Maybe he's referring to filming 'CowboyNeal does Connecticut'.
--Dan
Debian does changes to the code, applies patches to make it work (including bugfixes/security patches that are sent upstream but not yet included in that release), and ensures that everything follows the Debian packaging guidelines. Debian code is sometimes vastly different from regular code, and it needs to be tested. In the case of XFree, with the most complicated build system and source tree I've seen since... well, ever, fortunately, it takes a long time to make sure everything works.
Slackware, on the other hand, compiles XFree, tars it up, and puts it on the CD. It does not have to be maintained, patched, updated, or tested. This is ok, if that's what you want, but Debian does a lot of work and a lot of changes, and it can require a lot of testing.
This is why Debian is widely regarded as a quality distro. No releasing alpha software in stable releases, no jumping version numbers to look competetive, just code, quality code, quality distro. Slackware lets you worry about that on your own.
--Dan
I don't think that the choice is between updating and stagnating. Look at OS X for example, or even the old OS8/9. Apple releases updates every now and then, fixes this, fixes that, updates code, adds features. Free updates that don't break things, and driver installs there are pretty easy, last I checked.
I think OS X has the best of both worlds because they started over. They have the flexibility (UNIX), but also the usability (MacOS 6-9).
--Dan
You mean like, for example, someone making a self-extracting shell script installer with the driver contained therein?
I hate to burst your counter-culture bubble, but the only reasons we don't have download & double-click drivers like Windows does are 1) developers don't bother; 2) the Linux kernel changes almost daily, while Windows stagnates for 3-5 years at a time.
If you want to use Kernel 2.4.x until 2005, then people can put the effort into writing drivers, installers, and so on. Until then, or until kernel recompilation is easier, we'll have to live with insmod file.o or 'make && make install'
--Dan
You could always... you know... sort the data by hand. I hear they used to do that back before everyone got lazy. Or, you could parse it with perl, but personally, I prefer the former.
--Dan
1) Increase in number of users who are purchasing CDRs and using them to copy music.
Ok, and why does this justify raising prices? Since the tariff applies to all CDRs, this means that more people are already paying, and they should be making proportionately more tariff money. How does one justify raising the cost of the product when more people are buying said product?
The logic is that instead of 45% of the CDs being bought by home users, 70% now are, and only 30% are for non-home use (i.e. data backups at work, etc.). It's not more in numbers, it's more percentage of the numbers.
As for the rest, the increase in 6 minutes of audio will allow between one and two average-length songs to fit on one CD (instead of ending up with 71 minutes and two 4 1/2 minute songs, you can fill the CD).
The last one makes no sense though. Perhaps it's the logic that people aren't buying CDs for whole albums, and therefore they shouldn't be discounted for making crappy copies of whole albums. Who knows.
--Dan
While I realize this is an anecdote, you're actually right on the money.
The tariff only applies to CD-R/RW discs, Audio CD-Rs, iPods, etc. that are imported for resale.
It is entirely legal for you to import your own whatever in order to avoid paying the taxes; however, you cannot legally re-sell them without paying the tariff. Customs cannot and will not charge the tariff if you drive an SUV full of CDs, iPods, and flash cards across the border, if it's all for your own use. They may charge you GST on it (this is what makes hiding it illegal), but you won't have to pay the tariffs.
--Dan
Your grammar, punctuation (no comma here) and spelling make me cry.
Your grammar, punctuation, and lack of comma after 'punctuation' make me sigh. Text should be written the way it is meant to be spoken, and people (at least, every person I've ever met) will say 'grammar *pause* punctuation *pause* and spelling', as opposed to 'grammar *pause* punctuation and spelling'.
The old grammatical rules used to be as you suggest. They were updated in the last decade and a half to reflect the realities of speech.
--Dan
Look on the bright side. Now, instead of early-adopters getting shafted by lowering prices, they're getting the bonus. $100 off an iMac, instead of, say, $100 on? That's $200 I'm glad to pocket.
It's just too bad that this will hinder adoption, because this really is a great computer, even without all the awesome bells/whistles. This is what computing should be. Well... Maybe not exactly, but it's cute.
--Dan
The Wheel Mouse Optical is a pretty basic optical wheel mouse. Real 3D Artists/Photoshop Gurus/Gamers would want a Logitech Dual Optical, which does two snaps to ensure much better accuracy (on a bad surface, the mouse cursor can suddenly jump around as the mouse wrongly recalculates where it is.
Plus, no more paying Microsoft, which is always a bonus in my book, however good their hardware might be.
--Dan
Odd, I never heard the "perfect circles" theory. Any moron who watches the skies can tell you that the planets don't.
The explanation given for this was that the planets and suns orbit around... well, nothing, but they move in circles, and those circles themselves move around the earth. Pretty stupid theory, but it worked enough for people to say 'oh, ok, well that's alright then'.
--Dan
'Unexpected incosistancies were found in the filesystem. Run e2fsck again without the -y or -a flags'
:>
Or something. I was running e2fsck manually.
Thanks for the tip either way though.
--Dan
I really don't give a damn whether Microsoft signed in blood on a contract written by Mephistopheles himself, their player works with a minimum of hassle or nags.
Or privacy.
Amen to that. I had an old fujitsu hard drive, and I started playing with hdparm one day. Basically I turned on every possible option, including the ones marked in the man page as 'this will probably cause extreme filesystem corruption' and 'what are you, on crack? get the hell away from here!', and it worked great. Performance was simply excellent.
Overzealous, I recommended these options to friends, who all locked up when they tried them (pinging out from IRC, etc), but I was undaunted. When my old HD started to give up the ghost, I got a new (well, new to me, this was 6 months ago) 2 gig WD for the box, and turned all the options on. Hours later, the entire filesystem was corrupted. After the whole system nosedived, I spent more than two hours hitting 'y' in fsck before I decided 'screw it' and reformatted. Fortunately, it was a clean install anyway.
Moral of the story: test out your psychotic options before you put any important data on the drive. Other moral: say what you like about fujitsu, but their drives support more hdparm options than any other I've seen, and they don't break when you use them.
--Dan
No, it is not entirely legal to trade songs. Just because a police office was breaking copyright law doesn't mean that it's legal.
I just fond this post on this discussion. It may be of interest. Sorry I couldn't have included it in my original post.
--Dan
In Canada, almost every product is subject to a 15% HST tax.
Not to nitpick, but this is entirely inaccurate. Very few provinces have harmonized their sales taxes with the GST (producing the HST to which you refer). Most provinces have not done this, and thus you pay 7% GST, and whatever provincial tax is (in Alberta for example, it is 0%; in BC, 7.5%).
--Dan
I stand by with what I said earlier: Properly coded pages render just as perfect in Opera 6.01 as they do in Mozilla 0.9.9 and IE 6. Anyone, claiming the opposite, is a lying sack of shit. I know, since I use Opera every day and often compare its performance to other browsers.
http://cdslash.net/index2.php - this page does not render properly in Opera. Maybe you need to get down off your zealotry horse and get a clue? Incidentally, the page is 100% validated XHTML Strict 1.0 and the css (http://cdslash.net/cdslash.css) is validated too. There are some warnings about not having a colour with my background colour specification, but those will be fixed when I get more time to work on the site.
If you're interested in seeing what I see, check this out:
http://cdslash.net/temp/browsers/opera.png - This is what Opera thinks the page should look like. It totally ignores the width: attribute of the navbar. This isn't even something fancy, like layers, or DHTML, this is setting the width of a table cell. Tell me now that Opera renders things perfect.
http://cdslash.net/temp/browsers/mozilla.png - For reference, this is what Mozilla renders it as, which, coincidentally enough, is exactly what it's supposed to look like. Weird how that works, isn't it? IE looks exactly the same too, in case you were wondering.
Anyway, maybe you should 'often compare its performance to other browsers' without deciding your results beforehand. Maybe you'd get better results that way.
--Dan
Uno, if I'm paying for it anyway, I'll do it.
Dos, if I'm advised by a police officer or lawyer that it's legal to do something, then I have a defence in court.
Either way, until they let me pay for what songs I want, or stop forcing manufactured bands down my throat, I'm going to stick with the very few groups I like and whose CDs I DO buy. BNL, the Hip, Amanda Marshall, and several independant groups get my money, but the American manufacturers sure won't.
--Dan
Funny, it seems like most people who posted to this story that commented disagree. THere are several comments about Opera not working, and, just in case you were wondering, I -have- used Opera, and it renders pages horribly. It doesn't even fail gracefully. Don't bother telling me what the docs say it supports, it breaks when it does.
As for the rest of your post, it sounds like you could use some prozak or something. So very very hostile. If you can't make your point without swearing, perhaps you shouldn't post; if me saying your browser gets you this worked up, perhaps you shuold get some help.
--Dan
Well, first, since it's entirely legal to trade songs (a guy I know at London Drugs said a police officer was in one day, wanted a CD burner to burn his MP3s; salesmen pretended he didn't hear, but the officer said there was nothing against it), this is really only paying for something you can already do. Go, pirate, have fun. It's legal. Even if it weren't, you're paying for it anyway, so you may as well. I know I do.
That being said, I do oppose the cost-per-gig levy on MP3 players. They're not used to pirate, they're used to play. May as well levy tape machines and CD burners too.
Second, if you do oppose it, don't harass your premier. First, unless you're in his constituency, you'd be better off talking to your MLA. Second, this is federal, not provincial, so your MLA will tell you to write your MP.
Just write your MP in the first place, it'll save you time.
--Dan
Opera will be a good browser when it supports all the latest HTML/XHTML standards and CSS. Until my (100% properly coded and W3C validated) websites render as perfectly in Opera as they do in Mozilla and IE, Opera can't really be classified as 'the best browser out there.' It can't even do rendering, which is the entire point of a browser. Maybe they should give up on the goodies and make a working rendering engine first.
I dislike opera for many many reasons, but those are all personal taste. This one isn't. Besides, why should I pay for a browser when dozens of people want me to use theirs for free? That doesn't make sense from ANY point of view, Open Source, Free Software, or capitalist.
--Dan