Fibre to the home is cool, but totally unneeded for 99% of people. Chances are you already had a coax line into yoru house. Do you have any idea the theoretical bandwidth you can shove down a coax cable? It's in the Gbps. There are already existing ISPs that sell 30Mbps over coax.
The problem is all the spectrum is being hogged up with the analog cable channels. The cable companies are itching to get rid of these - once the price point is low enough on set top boxes so they can give them for free to anyone who needs them, you're going to see available bandwidth over coax explode.
The coax pipe is very thick. It is not as thick as a fibre pipe, but it is more than enough to be able to drive all the HD streams and internet porn you could ever want.
Having restricted-write access to binaries on a system is not to enhance secrity or protect you from keyloggers. It is to ensure ease of use fo rthe sysadmin, who doesn't haver to worry about what version of $FOOBARSOFT you are running.
Case in point? If you download *any* trojan app and runit in Linux, it can install a keylogger. All it has to do is add it to your ~/.bashrc, or ~/.xinitrc, or any number of other KDE or Gnome auto-start locations. Boom, you are exploited, and unless you fully audit your machine daily you'll never know it.
Having root-only writeable executables does *nothing* to protect you. I mean, where is your most important data ? in/usr/bin or in $HOME?
It's there to help sysadmins, not to protect users from their own stupidity.
The best way of producing compatible, accessible Ajax applications is to start with the bare HTML and make that work. Only then do you add the JavaScript, and you do it by enhancing the page, not replacing it. For instance, don't use <button onclick="...">, use a normal <input type="submit"> and hook into the form's submit event
Without knowing really your level of experience in designing dynamic AJAX-driven sites, I can say at least this coment in particular is complete bunk. For one, hooking into the 'onsubmit' form event is a recipie for disaster - the event behaves entirely unpredictably across different browsers. Some allow you to cancel it, some don't, others only in certain situations. This is a complete disaster when you're trying to use AJAX to reduce page loads, because normally you would want to submit the form fieldsw to the server for validation and display the error if they did nto validate - and cancel the form submission.
Anyone who has done AJAX in any reasonable amount knows, it is just too different a paradigm to integrate alongside an old HTML 4.0 compatable page in any resonable way. With AJAX, you usually want a totally different layout, and a totally different way to display information. Sure, you *can* make them work side by side, uising crazy CSS and javascript that basically re-dos the whole page based on the browser's capabilities. But why would you do that? The best way to do things, is to have two completely different sets of forms - one AJAX-ified, one not. The number of browsers that support AJAX is small enough that you can redirect them to the fancy site based on the User-Agent.
.. is if it is singnificantly cheaper than iTunes.
Forget all the DRM-this protected-content that bullshit. Consumers don't care about DRM. iTunes' huge success is proof of that - as long as they can do what they like with the music (listen, burn), they don't care about DRM.
The real barrier to entry for this format, is the same barrier that normal CD retailers are facing now - the price. If a CD is the same price, or more than iTunes downloads, consumers will choose iTunes. "Oh but the quality is inferior!!!" the tecnophile slashdot junkies scream. Guess what - normal people don't give a shit. They can't hear the difference on their factory car stereos blaring 50 Cent at 200 DB, rattling their cheap plastic doorjambs to bits. They can't hear the differene on their $20 wal-mart PC speakers. And they sure can't hear the difference on their iPod with the volume down low enough they can carry on a heated conversation with their pre-teen buddy bragging up the latest Jessica Simpson album.
People don't care about quality or DRM. They care about convenience and price. That is why iTunes has taken off so much - it is simple, it is convenient, and it is cheap. Much cheaper than CDs if you don't care about the whole album, but only the singles.
If Warner wants to get teenagers back into the store to buy music, they need to make the medium *cheaper* than iTunes, because driving to the mall to buy music is a huge pain in the ass waste of time in 2006 compared to buying online. Buying a CD in a B+M store should be about 25% *less* than buying online, not 25% *more*, because I had to drive all the way down there to get it.
Within a couple of days a M$ rep had called up us, and made available a patch for the issue.
See, that's what I am tlaking about. If this was open source software, and you had contacted them with a security flaw like this, you'd have a patch within hours, not days.
Read up a bit. The specs of both formats say that all players must support VC-1 as well as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. If these particular movies use different codecs, it does nothing but re-enforce my point that they are comparing apples and oranges.
Actually, it's more like using the comparison of apples and oranges to decide which piece of land would be best to build a supermarket on.
The quality of the movies has nothing to do with the disc format!
I am not saying there are not differences in the format, I am saying that as far as a side-by-side review based on the movie quality, both are identical.
And that is exactly why this is not an HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray review, it is a "this player and disc vs. that player and disc" review.
Really, there is nothing to "review", at least consumer-wise, about HD-DVDvs. Blu-ray. The data formats on the discs are the exact same. Other than one of them having *potentially* higher quality due to more avaialab le space allowing higher bitrate (and we all know this is *never* going to happen, that space will be either full of fluff or wasted), there is no difference to the consumer other than adoption and price issues.
What is there to compare here? The format of the media storage is completely irrelevant to the quality of the movie. The movie is encoded in a binary, compressed codec. The combination of the codec, the compression level, the decoder in the player, and the quality of the components in the player - these are what determine the quality of the movie.
And since both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support the same codecs, it is almost totally dependant on the player. The disc format of the movie doesn't make any difference whatsoever.
What a stupid article. Why not write an article comparing a movie viewed in a white to a movie viewed in an black house? It would have about the same difference on image and sound quality.
This software could revolutionize buying real estate remotely. Imagine, an agent goes in with a cheap digicam and takes a bunch of shots of the house they're selling. They load them into this software which creates a 3D, navigable model of the house, which someone can browse via a browser plugin.
Sure, this has been around for a while with VRML, but it was complicated and costly for an agent to do. From the looks of this software you can use normal photos as a base. Anyone could create 3D tours with this.
I didn't say if you *lost* the criminal case you'd lose the civil case too... the burden of proof is higher in a criminal case, so if you win your criminal case you will probably win your civil case, but not vice-versa.
I know this sounds cliche, but it is true. With the gazillion FOR profit businesses out there, if municipal wifi made sense from a cost/benefit perspective anywhere on a wide scale, businesses would fall all over themselves to offer it.
Er... the city gives it away for free because they fund it via other means (taxes, etc). A busines would have to charge. Your whole idea falls apart right there - I am *not* going to pay $20 a month for something I may use two days out of 30. BUt if its free and there, hey, I will pop open my laptop while I am downtown.
Saying that municipal wireless is "not viable" is totally ignoring the fact that lots of cities *have* done this, and a fair number of them operate the ISP in a *break even or profit generating* state. Municipal Wi-Fi can cut down on costs enormously for the city, and selling the surplus bandwidth on the municipal fibre ring to companies is another way to generate revenue from the free service.
US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by "transponder immobil-izers" can't be driven without the proper keys - or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend.
I think these companies are seriously fooling themselves. It's not like every crook has to go through the trouble of cracing the system - only one does - they can then sell their crack to everyone else.
Who wants to bet that right now, as we speak, car thieves know more about these systems than the insurance company forensic investigators do?
I don't even know anything about them and I know how this could be done. These systems work like any other public key encryption, they rely on the fact that there is a **private key** in the car that no one knows about. One leak in the system, either in the plant, or in the chip in the car, or in a disgruntled employee at a dealership, and the system falls apart. Boom, it is now trivial to make fake RFID "keys" that respond with the right handshake to private keys sent from the car.
If you're going to start posting journal entrys without any links whatsoever on the front page, at least give us the ability to filter them out under the homepage options.
Seriously - first "Slashback", where they just re-post comments I already read, and now this?
Come on guys - nothing wrong with expanding on your formant, but some of this stuff is nothing more than fluff and we should have the option of removing it.
If you took the criminal case to court and won, you would be all but guarenteed to win your civil case, in which you can sue the department and/or arresting officer for damages for all of the above items.
You guys are both seriously missing some steps here.
The efficiency of the system is basically irrelevant. The energy being used is already wasted energey, ambient heat from the air. The system could be 0.01% efficient and it would still be a huge boon to the environment, assuming you could harness enough enegergy from it to use.
Heat the liquid to 65 degrees, heat it to 70 degrees, even higher for more efficiency, who cares. The important thing is that because the boiling and condensation points are so close (and low), you can derrive useful work from the thing with low ambient temperatures. Note that temperature != heat input. It may take a lot of heat input to heat this substance to that 65 or 70 degrees, but because that is the ambient temperature that will be the equilibrium point.
At least around here, the systems are really crappy. In order to discourage shoplifting (or soemthing... havent really figured out the real purpose yet since it is so braindead to get around if you wanted to anyway), every item you scan has to be **weighed** by the checkout before you can scan the next item. This results in a horrible sequence of scan, put item in bag on weight sensor, wait 1-2 seconds for it to register, scan next item.
If you have even just 5-10 items this makes the time going through the checkout take about twice as long as it should.
Don't even get me started on the abnormally sized items that don't fit on the sensor, where you have to wait for the cashier supervisor to come muck with the machine....
I really don't know what these systems are trying to prevent. If you wanted to steal something then why would you scan it? If you scanned it then you already paid for it, who gives a f*ck if it's in a bag on the sensor? Are they trying to keep people from sneaking stuff into the bags or some crap? What's to stop you from just grabbing a bag and shoving stuff in there?
It's really retarded and a huge waste of time IMO.
Why do you make any assumption that the liquid needs to be heated anywhere near 80 degrees? I see nothing saying that at all on the company website.
If the boiling point of the liquid is 58f then you only need to heat it to a range of 65f and condense it at around 52f. Thats 284.26 to 291.48. Quite a difference.
However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.
Wow how revolutionary.
Oh, hang on a second while I untar this archive....
I recall a friend who was riding in a car the driver of which was (unfortunately for him) drunk. The car was stopped by the police, who then wanted to search everyone's belongings because they were college kids and the cops suspected them of carrying weed. A cop said to my friend something like: "I'm going to look in your purse now." Possibly he put an "OK?" at the end, but it was phrased in a very statement-kind of way, no real appearance of being a question. So, being young and naive, she naturally took this as a command or random statement and passively allowed the search (thus making it quite legal). But it was actually, technically, legally, a request and she had every right to reply "why, no, officer, that won't do at all -- I do not consent to my purse being searched."
That's easy to say in the theoretical, when you're safely tucked behind your computer keyboard.
But in REAL LIFE, said cop would have had every ability to take her downtown and detain her up to 24 hours, *without a warrant*. Not everyone likes the idea of spending overnight in lockup.
This is the real problem - the fact that the cops can threaten you with that without any kind of warrant. I understand that the cops sometimes need time to finish searching a dangerous offenders hosue or whatever (with warrant), but being able to hold someone who did nothing wrong, with no evidence, for 24 hours is not how things should work.
The way it *should* work is, if the cops have a search warrant or other pending warrants against you, *then* they can hold you 24 hours. If they have none, they can hold you maybe up to 3hrs while they pursue one.
Maybe if those were the fules you wouldn't have so many people consenting to unwarranted searches - because the threat of "OK then le's go downtown and talk abotu it" doesn't mean as much when you know you will be out of there in 3 hrs max.
If you have an SLR and are taking pictures of moving objects, like planes or cars, you're going to be using the multiple capute modes to be taking 5-10 pictures with every button press, and snapping that button like mad as the object flys by.
If you're memory card can't keep up with the camera writing the data, you won't be able to take very many rapid-fire pictures before the buffer fills up. You could miss the best shot because of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Fibre to the home is cool, but totally unneeded for 99% of people. Chances are you already had a coax line into yoru house. Do you have any idea the theoretical bandwidth you can shove down a coax cable? It's in the Gbps. There are already existing ISPs that sell 30Mbps over coax.
The problem is all the spectrum is being hogged up with the analog cable channels. The cable companies are itching to get rid of these - once the price point is low enough on set top boxes so they can give them for free to anyone who needs them, you're going to see available bandwidth over coax explode.
The coax pipe is very thick. It is not as thick as a fibre pipe, but it is more than enough to be able to drive all the HD streams and internet porn you could ever want.
I am sure lots of research funding will get approved for this - the politicians will be all over this one.
Having restricted-write access to binaries on a system is not to enhance secrity or protect you from keyloggers. It is to ensure ease of use fo rthe sysadmin, who doesn't haver to worry about what version of $FOOBARSOFT you are running.
/usr/bin or in $HOME?
Case in point? If you download *any* trojan app and runit in Linux, it can install a keylogger. All it has to do is add it to your ~/.bashrc, or ~/.xinitrc, or any number of other KDE or Gnome auto-start locations. Boom, you are exploited, and unless you fully audit your machine daily you'll never know it.
Having root-only writeable executables does *nothing* to protect you. I mean, where is your most important data ? in
It's there to help sysadmins, not to protect users from their own stupidity.
The best way of producing compatible, accessible Ajax applications is to start with the bare HTML and make that work. Only then do you add the JavaScript, and you do it by enhancing the page, not replacing it. For instance, don't use <button onclick="...">, use a normal <input type="submit"> and hook into the form's submit event
Without knowing really your level of experience in designing dynamic AJAX-driven sites, I can say at least this coment in particular is complete bunk. For one, hooking into the 'onsubmit' form event is a recipie for disaster - the event behaves entirely unpredictably across different browsers. Some allow you to cancel it, some don't, others only in certain situations. This is a complete disaster when you're trying to use AJAX to reduce page loads, because normally you would want to submit the form fieldsw to the server for validation and display the error if they did nto validate - and cancel the form submission.
Anyone who has done AJAX in any reasonable amount knows, it is just too different a paradigm to integrate alongside an old HTML 4.0 compatable page in any resonable way. With AJAX, you usually want a totally different layout, and a totally different way to display information. Sure, you *can* make them work side by side, uising crazy CSS and javascript that basically re-dos the whole page based on the browser's capabilities. But why would you do that? The best way to do things, is to have two completely different sets of forms - one AJAX-ified, one not. The number of browsers that support AJAX is small enough that you can redirect them to the fancy site based on the User-Agent.
Unlike IE, you don't have to be an administrator to install or update Firefox. Just unzip into any directory you want and it will run happilly,
And it will auto-update happily too as long as you can write to the Firefox install directory..
.. is if it is singnificantly cheaper than iTunes.
Forget all the DRM-this protected-content that bullshit. Consumers don't care about DRM. iTunes' huge success is proof of that - as long as they can do what they like with the music (listen, burn), they don't care about DRM.
The real barrier to entry for this format, is the same barrier that normal CD retailers are facing now - the price. If a CD is the same price, or more than iTunes downloads, consumers will choose iTunes. "Oh but the quality is inferior!!!" the tecnophile slashdot junkies scream. Guess what - normal people don't give a shit. They can't hear the difference on their factory car stereos blaring 50 Cent at 200 DB, rattling their cheap plastic doorjambs to bits. They can't hear the differene on their $20 wal-mart PC speakers. And they sure can't hear the difference on their iPod with the volume down low enough they can carry on a heated conversation with their pre-teen buddy bragging up the latest Jessica Simpson album.
People don't care about quality or DRM. They care about convenience and price. That is why iTunes has taken off so much - it is simple, it is convenient, and it is cheap. Much cheaper than CDs if you don't care about the whole album, but only the singles.
If Warner wants to get teenagers back into the store to buy music, they need to make the medium *cheaper* than iTunes, because driving to the mall to buy music is a huge pain in the ass waste of time in 2006 compared to buying online. Buying a CD in a B+M store should be about 25% *less* than buying online, not 25% *more*, because I had to drive all the way down there to get it.
Within a couple of days a M$ rep had called up us, and made available a patch for the issue.
See, that's what I am tlaking about. If this was open source software, and you had contacted them with a security flaw like this, you'd have a patch within hours, not days.
Read up a bit. The specs of both formats say that all players must support VC-1 as well as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. If these particular movies use different codecs, it does nothing but re-enforce my point that they are comparing apples and oranges.
Actually, it's more like using the comparison of apples and oranges to decide which piece of land would be best to build a supermarket on.
The quality of the movies has nothing to do with the disc format!
... is they live in a dream world.
I wonder when the last time was that any company got Microsoft to fix *any* bug they found in a released version of software?
It seems like even giants of industry can't get them to fix holes any faster than peons.
I am not saying there are not differences in the format, I am saying that as far as a side-by-side review based on the movie quality, both are identical.
And that is exactly why this is not an HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray review, it is a "this player and disc vs. that player and disc" review.
Really, there is nothing to "review", at least consumer-wise, about HD-DVDvs. Blu-ray. The data formats on the discs are the exact same. Other than one of them having *potentially* higher quality due to more avaialab le space allowing higher bitrate (and we all know this is *never* going to happen, that space will be either full of fluff or wasted), there is no difference to the consumer other than adoption and price issues.
This article is only talking about the last 5 years. They're skipping the first, oh, 40 or so years of video games.
Waste of time and bandwidth. My bets are lots of games from the 80's and 90's would blow most of these titles away in sales.
What is there to compare here? The format of the media storage is completely irrelevant to the quality of the movie. The movie is encoded in a binary, compressed codec. The combination of the codec, the compression level, the decoder in the player, and the quality of the components in the player - these are what determine the quality of the movie.
And since both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support the same codecs, it is almost totally dependant on the player. The disc format of the movie doesn't make any difference whatsoever.
What a stupid article. Why not write an article comparing a movie viewed in a white to a movie viewed in an black house? It would have about the same difference on image and sound quality.
This software could revolutionize buying real estate remotely. Imagine, an agent goes in with a cheap digicam and takes a bunch of shots of the house they're selling. They load them into this software which creates a 3D, navigable model of the house, which someone can browse via a browser plugin.
Sure, this has been around for a while with VRML, but it was complicated and costly for an agent to do. From the looks of this software you can use normal photos as a base. Anyone could create 3D tours with this.
I didn't say if you *lost* the criminal case you'd lose the civil case too... the burden of proof is higher in a criminal case, so if you win your criminal case you will probably win your civil case, but not vice-versa.
I know this sounds cliche, but it is true. With the gazillion FOR profit businesses out there, if municipal wifi made sense from a cost/benefit perspective anywhere on a wide scale, businesses would fall all over themselves to offer it.
Er... the city gives it away for free because they fund it via other means (taxes, etc). A busines would have to charge. Your whole idea falls apart right there - I am *not* going to pay $20 a month for something I may use two days out of 30. BUt if its free and there, hey, I will pop open my laptop while I am downtown.
Saying that municipal wireless is "not viable" is totally ignoring the fact that lots of cities *have* done this, and a fair number of them operate the ISP in a *break even or profit generating* state. Municipal Wi-Fi can cut down on costs enormously for the city, and selling the surplus bandwidth on the municipal fibre ring to companies is another way to generate revenue from the free service.
I happen to live in one of these cities.
US carmakers and auto-mobile insurers are unshakably certain that vehicles protected by "transponder immobil-izers" can't be driven without the proper keys - or, at least, that circumventing those transponder systems takes more sweat and money than most auto thieves are willing to expend.
I think these companies are seriously fooling themselves. It's not like every crook has to go through the trouble of cracing the system - only one does - they can then sell their crack to everyone else.
Who wants to bet that right now, as we speak, car thieves know more about these systems than the insurance company forensic investigators do?
I don't even know anything about them and I know how this could be done. These systems work like any other public key encryption, they rely on the fact that there is a **private key** in the car that no one knows about. One leak in the system, either in the plant, or in the chip in the car, or in a disgruntled employee at a dealership, and the system falls apart. Boom, it is now trivial to make fake RFID "keys" that respond with the right handshake to private keys sent from the car.
If you're going to start posting journal entrys without any links whatsoever on the front page, at least give us the ability to filter them out under the homepage options.
Seriously - first "Slashback", where they just re-post comments I already read, and now this?
Come on guys - nothing wrong with expanding on your formant, but some of this stuff is nothing more than fluff and we should have the option of removing it.
If you took the criminal case to court and won, you would be all but guarenteed to win your civil case, in which you can sue the department and/or arresting officer for damages for all of the above items.
You guys are both seriously missing some steps here.
The efficiency of the system is basically irrelevant. The energy being used is already wasted energey, ambient heat from the air. The system could be 0.01% efficient and it would still be a huge boon to the environment, assuming you could harness enough enegergy from it to use.
Heat the liquid to 65 degrees, heat it to 70 degrees, even higher for more efficiency, who cares. The important thing is that because the boiling and condensation points are so close (and low), you can derrive useful work from the thing with low ambient temperatures. Note that temperature != heat input. It may take a lot of heat input to heat this substance to that 65 or 70 degrees, but because that is the ambient temperature that will be the equilibrium point.
At least around here, the systems are really crappy. In order to discourage shoplifting (or soemthing... havent really figured out the real purpose yet since it is so braindead to get around if you wanted to anyway), every item you scan has to be **weighed** by the checkout before you can scan the next item. This results in a horrible sequence of scan, put item in bag on weight sensor, wait 1-2 seconds for it to register, scan next item.
If you have even just 5-10 items this makes the time going through the checkout take about twice as long as it should.
Don't even get me started on the abnormally sized items that don't fit on the sensor, where you have to wait for the cashier supervisor to come muck with the machine....
I really don't know what these systems are trying to prevent. If you wanted to steal something then why would you scan it? If you scanned it then you already paid for it, who gives a f*ck if it's in a bag on the sensor? Are they trying to keep people from sneaking stuff into the bags or some crap? What's to stop you from just grabbing a bag and shoving stuff in there?
It's really retarded and a huge waste of time IMO.
Why do you make any assumption that the liquid needs to be heated anywhere near 80 degrees? I see nothing saying that at all on the company website.
If the boiling point of the liquid is 58f then you only need to heat it to a range of 65f and condense it at around 52f. Thats 284.26 to 291.48. Quite a difference.
However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.
Wow how revolutionary.
Oh, hang on a second while I untar this archive....
I recall a friend who was riding in a car the driver of which was (unfortunately for him) drunk. The car was stopped by the police, who then wanted to search everyone's belongings because they were college kids and the cops suspected them of carrying weed. A cop said to my friend something like: "I'm going to look in your purse now." Possibly he put an "OK?" at the end, but it was phrased in a very statement-kind of way, no real appearance of being a question. So, being young and naive, she naturally took this as a command or random statement and passively allowed the search (thus making it quite legal). But it was actually, technically, legally, a request and she had every right to reply "why, no, officer, that won't do at all -- I do not consent to my purse being searched."
That's easy to say in the theoretical, when you're safely tucked behind your computer keyboard.
But in REAL LIFE, said cop would have had every ability to take her downtown and detain her up to 24 hours, *without a warrant*. Not everyone likes the idea of spending overnight in lockup.
This is the real problem - the fact that the cops can threaten you with that without any kind of warrant. I understand that the cops sometimes need time to finish searching a dangerous offenders hosue or whatever (with warrant), but being able to hold someone who did nothing wrong, with no evidence, for 24 hours is not how things should work.
The way it *should* work is, if the cops have a search warrant or other pending warrants against you, *then* they can hold you 24 hours. If they have none, they can hold you maybe up to 3hrs while they pursue one.
Maybe if those were the fules you wouldn't have so many people consenting to unwarranted searches - because the threat of "OK then le's go downtown and talk abotu it" doesn't mean as much when you know you will be out of there in 3 hrs max.
If you have an SLR and are taking pictures of moving objects, like planes or cars, you're going to be using the multiple capute modes to be taking 5-10 pictures with every button press, and snapping that button like mad as the object flys by.
If you're memory card can't keep up with the camera writing the data, you won't be able to take very many rapid-fire pictures before the buffer fills up. You could miss the best shot because of that.