A watermark on an audio track is supposed to be inaudible to the human ear.
Compression algorithms are supposed to preserve only what is audible to the human ear.
Therefore, either re-encoding an audio track with a different codec will remove the watermark,
or the watermark is audible after all and reduces the quality of the track. Not so quick. Lossy compression usually removes phase information (50 percent of the information, and completely inaudible), and then it goes and removes frequencies and quantises frequencies. All these things are inaudible. There are other things that are inaudible and that don't get removed. One is the exact timing of music. Listen to a piano player. You can't hear the exact time when each string on the piano is hit, but lossy compression doesn't affect that timing. You can add as much noise as you like, you can remove frequencies, it will sound awful but the timing is still there. And that is one thing that can be used for watermarking: Slowing down and accelerating music very gently. That doesn't get removed by watermarking at all.
MS Word is capable of doing document layout. But it's a complete nightmare. Lines disappear and reappear; text boxes change size and shape for no apparent reason; fonts randomly switch from 10-pt sans to 12-pt serif because they feel like it; auto-numbering decides it knows better than you what numbers go where; and objects resize and replace themselves entirely according to their own rules (which are confidential and proprietary). That must be my worst objection against Microsoft Word: It is not deterministic. A word processor should keep track of the contents, which I edit, and should display it on the screen or on a printer. Identical content should be displayed or printed identical. If I delete a character, then reinsert it, the contents is the same as it was before, and should be displayed the same. It isn't. Not with word.
As a result, getting the output exactly the way you want it is very difficult. Keeping it exactly the way you want it is not difficult, it is impossible.
Well, that's all well and good but the kids probably still need to learn to use Office 2007 because, like it or not, that's what the Real World (TM) uses. Because the Real World uses Office 2007 other companies are copying that UI design and implementing it across their own pieces of software. Here is why this is utter bullshit: First, because the world is avoiding Office 2007 like the plague. It is an abomination. It is incompatible. It prevents people from doing what they should do with a word processor - writing.
Second, at the time these kids come out of school, the world will _not_ be using Office 2007. In ten years time, Microsoft will have lost the battle against open standards, and the world will be using either Open Office, or whatever Open Office compatible software Apple ships for free with MacOS X version 10.12.
Third, are you telling me that people can't use Office 2007 if they didn't learn how to use it at school? Is the user interface so horrid and counter-intuitive that some who was happy with AppleWorks 2.0 cannot use Office 2007? (Answer: Yes, it is.) Well, in that case Office 2007 should be avoided like the plague - which, as I said before, the real world does.
Fourth, you have a complete misunderstanding why kids at a school use a word processor. They don't use it to learn how to use a word processor, they use it to write papers and their homework. So the software that should be used should be as easy to learn as possible so that it doesn't interfere with the job at hand (no Office 2007 then), it should be future-proof so that teacher's handouts written today can be used in years to come (no Office 2007 then), and it should be compatible with what kids have at home, if possible (no Office 2007 then).
By pure coincidence, the code that I had to type in to login to slashdot was "hostage". You don't want your school and your kids to become hostages of Microsoft, do you?
In the interview, on paper without access to a computer, complete this C function without making any additional function calls (i.e. no strlen, no malloc).
char *reverse (char *buf) {/* Reverse the contents of the string buf. E.g. abcde becomes edcba. */ } And now the same thing, but assuming that the string contains UTF8:-)
Ahrem... just because the country barely has 9 million people doesn't mean they have little IP. The cool thing with Sweden is that it has IP where it matters and LOADS of it. People making that argument don't use their brains properly anyway. So they say Sweden, with a nine million population, doesn't have much in IP. So let's look at Alabama. That state doesn't have a huge population, say compared to Britain, France, or Germany, so they shouldn't care about IP. And Alaska. They don't have much IP. And Arizona. And so on, and so on, 50 states, each with not very much IP. I would bet that Californians download much more music from outside California than music made in California.
Well salesmen rarely do this. However, imagine a UPS driver delivering 40 different packages to various parts of a city. It would be quite useful to automatically determine the order of delivery ahead of time in such a way as to minimize time and distance. As indicated in other replies to this thread, good solutions are much easier to come by than perfect solutions. The difference between the two solutions is probably not great enough to justify the immense computation power required to churn out the perfect solution. The perfect solution would probably end up costing more since you have to figure in the cost of energy used to compute it. I'd suggest a variant, the "real-time travelling salesman problem": You have a computer in your car, and you enter all the destinations into your computer. Then it starts calculating, and as soon as it spits out the first destination, you go there. Once it gives you the second destination and you have reached the first one, you go to the second destination. The goal is to minimise the total time.
Here the software would have to take into account not only the driving time, but also the calculation time. It is pointless spending three days on finding an optimal route when you know a sub-optimal route that only takes 3 hours. You would probably try to find very quickly a "safe" first destination, that is a destination that won't make the best route from there on much longer, and that gives the computer a bit of time to find a good solution for the rest while you are driving.
So, if you've got a program that shits itself and brings down the system every once in a blue moon and you discover the reason for this during refactoring -- you just keep that bug right in there and bring down the system? Hardly. You are misunderstanding what refactoring does. Refactoring changes the appearance of code without changing what the code does. Sometimes, changing the appearance of code changes what was a hard to find bug to an obvious bug. Fixing the bug is not part of refactoring. Once the code is refactored, you can then look at the bugs and fix them. Very carefully. If a function doesn't do what it is supposed to do, how do you know things don't break if it does what it supposed to do?
The main problem I have with refactoring (both the book and the concept) is that it's way too easy to go overboard with it because it presents a Right Way of writing code. Sometimes methods need to be 20 lines, sometimes classes need to do more than one thing, sometimes inheritance just gets in the way. Fowler respects these ideas, but I've known people who read this book and take refactoring to its logical extreme, which results in overly fragmented code. That is misunderstanding what "refactoring" means. The whole book is about ways to change how your code looks without changing what the code does. It doesn't say when to do it, that has to be a judgement call. There are refactoring methods that do exactly the opposite of each other: Like extracting code into a separate function, or inlining a function call into your code. It would be idiotic to just apply all the methods in the book blindly, because you would extract, inline, extract, inline and so on forever. So overly fragmented code as a result is not taking refactoring to its logical extreme, it is stupidly applying refactoring to make code worse instead of improving it.
IANAL, but I don't believe you have to destroy your backup CDs when you sell the original. I could be wrong, but that is how I manage to bring the actual cost of a CD down to a reasonable level. You don't have to destroy all copies. You can either destroy them or give all of them to the buyer of the CD, saving him the effort of making backup copies. You just cannot keep them.
Most GPL proponents (here on Slashdot at least) are fond of claiming that the GPL is only necessary because copyright law exists and that without copyright law there'd be no need for the GPL. Not on the Slashdot that I have been reading, and not by people who understand the GPL.
What is correct is that without copyright law the GPL would be pointless. The GPL allows you to make copies of software with the permission of the copyright holder if you follow certain rules. Without copyright law, you wouldn't need that permission in the first place, so you would have no reason to distribute under the terms of the GPL at all. No, the GPL follows _exactly_ the spirit of copyright law: That software can be distributed according to the wishes of the copyright holder. The GPL uses an ingenious way to set these conditions in a way that benefits society as a whole, which is exactly what the intention of copyright law was all the time. Except that GPL achieves this goal, while copyright law often doesn't.
Maybe I'm not thinking this through completely, so forgive my youthful ignorance..... but since when did OPEN SOURCE software NEED copyright protection features? It is the other way around. A DRM implementation might find it useful to have code that implements AES, as an example, and there are open source implementations, so it would be useful to incorporate some well-tested AES code that is licensed under GPL into a DRM implementation.
That is perfectly legal to do, but it requires that the DRM implementation would be licensed under GPL, which means that anyone, including evil DRM crackers, would have access to the source code. If you can find a way to implement DRM in such a way that having the source code doesn't help the cracker, fine. If your DRM relies on keeping the source code secret, then you can't include GPL code.
I left the CD on the counter at the check out lane. The check out girl said "Don't forget your CD". I told her that I didn't need the CD that I already had downloaded it. I always thought the music industry could build a business around that. Instead of selling you shiny disks, leave all the distribution cost and effort to the customer and just sell the rights to have the music. They could have done the following:
1. Make a modified version of the iTunes software. That version will download music from all sources and mark it as "try out". It will also allow you to publish your music on the same terms. All this would be legal.
2. "Try out" music cannot be burnt on a CD or moved to an iPod. A splash screen appears when it is played. Removing the "try out" label without paying would be criminal.
3. You can buy the music easily, and the complete money goes to the rights holders (who distribute it in a fair way, or the rights holders might be the actual musicians). The music is then marked as properly owned by you.
4. This is combined with a rating system that lets you rate the sound quality of a recording and upgrade if you find a better version somewhere else.
The only thing that is problematic is how music should be handled that cannot be identified.
In this whole discussion, both here on Slashdot and in the comments to the original article, nobody notices that "intellectual property" is just too abstract a concept for many people.
People will usually agree that if A produces something, then it is wrong to take it away with paying. And if A produces something, and B buys it, then it is wrong to take it away from B. But if, as mentioned in a comment to the original article, a nine year old makes a copy of a CD as a present for his grandfather, then this child sees _himself_ as the producer of the CD, just the same as he would see himself as the producer of a painted picture, or a pair of hand knitted socks.
I think people are quite willing to pay money to whom they see subconsciously as the "producer". So people pay for pay TV, they play for CDs or music from the iTunes store, they pay for watching movies. DRM is generally disliked because it stops me from "producing" music that my computer is quite capable of producing. But they find it quite Ok to do the "producing" themselves. It's the same as with people willingly paying lots of money in a restaurant, but on the other hand they wouldn't have the slightest bit of bad conscience trying to reproduce some especially good food from a restaurant in their own kitchen.
Intellectual property is just too abstract for most people.
The worst part about this all is that there are usually just about as many vulnerabilities affecting Apple's platform as there are vulnerabilities affecting Microsoft's platform for any period of time. I invite you to review a few pages and look at the volume by date range. On the other hand, when you compare the number of Macs that have actually fallen victim to any vulnerabilities with the number of PCs, then the Macs are outnumbered more than one to a million.
I worked on a PC Repair Bench in a small town in WY. Someone brought their PC in for a cleanup and in the process of going through temp files and looking for common places that malware lurks(in this case a limewire download folder), I found a few kiddie porn videos. I immediately went to my boss and showed him what I had found. We then called the police, who sent a cop over to investigate. The officer viewed the files and they then confiscated the PC. Long story short, the whole case was thrown out because they didn't have a warrant to search the computer. They asked me if I would testify(because I don't need a warrant to search the computer) and I told them that I would, but it never got to that point. The case was thrown out, and that customer never did business with us again. And taken from another post:
Once the officer arrived he took my statement and called in for a warrant to search the PC. Within 20 min.s he got a call back confirming a warrant had been issued to search the pc. The officer attached a write blocker to the drive and checked out some of the files in question. Suspicions were confirmed and the officer took the pc in custody as evidence, and had other officers sent to pick up the suspect. Looks like _your_ policeman was too impatient and messed it up.
You are correct, which is why it is a good thing there are also very harsh laws to punish scumbags who molest children. The other poster is talking about possessing pictures of the crime. If someone didn't pay for child pr0n pictures, but found them lying in a gutter somewhere and kept them, would she be somehow helping to molest a child? If you were the child, how would you think about someone wanking over pictures of you being abused?
Unless you sign something that says they can paw through your computer files at will, then no they don't have a right to go looking through your computer. The fact is: Evidence against you cannot be used against you in court, if the police infringed on your rights to find the evidence. Now you need to read this carefully: First, it must be _the police_ who infringed. If an employee of PCWorld breaches your privacy, and calls the police, and the police gets a proper search warrant, then you lost. Second, it must be _your_ rights that are violated. If the police search _my_ house without a search warrant and find evidence against _you_, they can use it.
Assuming that the police got a search warrant, they will get a conviction. Now judges usually want to go extra safe, that's why the judge said that there was no expectation of privacy (which is a bit dubious in my opinion). Fact is that even if the man's privacy was breached, it wasn't breached by the police. So he can sue the computer shop for breach of privacy; but being convicted of a crime that you committed does not count as "damages", so this wouldn't go very far.
So now corporations will determine what independent press is able to say or shut them down? Corporations are now and have always been able to take someone to court who publishes - like in this case - their trade secrets.
I wonder if he's "pleased" in the sense that he has a "big fat Apple check" to "deposit." Maybe in an alternative universe, but not in the one where Steve Jobs runs Apple.
...is printers that refuse to print a document when the level of one color of ink is low even if the document being printed doesn't use that color at all. I have an Epson that I like pretty much. It has individual cartridges for each color of ink but if, say, the cyan cartridge is empty, I can't print even if the page is nothing but black text. There's no real reason for it, it's strictly a software (or firmware) limitation put in by the manufacturer. When that happened to me, I asked around at work and some colleagues dads printer had just broken down, so I gave my Epson printer to him. Didn't want any money for it. The printer was replaced with the cheapest Samsung Laserprinter I could find for £50. Came with a half empty cartridge, good for 1500 pages and lasted two years. Refilled with toner for £15 which is supposed to last for 3000 pages. Never needed any cleaning of the cartridge, never needed any service, never failed to print a page on the very first attempt without any flaws.
Just ask Canon about the failure of their Wifi printers - you could not buy them at *any* retail store (or even Dell, which carried the rest of Canon's lineup) because the printer did not enable the retailer to sell the $30 USB cables. My daughter needed a USB cable. I found one in the local supermarket for £4. Since I needed a USB hub, I bought a four port USB hub at the same time for £5; the hub included a USB cable. And recently I bought a 2.5" USB SATA case for £13.50. That included a case, an eSATA card (I assume) to put into a computer, and a USB cable. I don't even want to think about what I would have paid at Dixons or PCWorld.
Parallel sorting is *hard*. Very hard. The problem is not that anyone can design a sort algorithm that runs in several threads, but that the data is a single lump. If you have 2 cores sorting a list, that list effectively has to be in 2 places at the same time (ie each core's cache). That makes the sorting very slow as the system spends more time moving data from core to core than it spends actually sorting. Let processor 1 sort the first half of the data. Let processor 2 sort the second half of the data. When both are finished, merge the two sorted arrays. If sorting an array is done using a O (n log n) method then this should be about twice as fast.
A few governments will know where this code is used at in vista sp1 (microsoft does allow select country's to view the source). Not only do we have to worry about the US government using a backdoor we have to worry about anyone who has there hands on the source using it as well.
If you had read, and possibly understood, the previous article about this, then you would know that
1. Nobody knows for sure that a backdoor exists. The backdoor _could_ have been created at the time the constants in the algorithm were defined. If it didn't happen back then, then no backdoor exists and no backdoor can be created anymore.
2. The source code doesn't give any information whether the backdoor exists, and if it exists, how it works.
3. If the backdoor exists, then it seems most likely that the US government has it, and nobody else.
It's all a little dubious if you ask me. I always knew it was possible to fiddle with the stream, but I didn't think anyone would bother because it could possibly break a lot of pages that are held together with fragile HTML-fu. This is not just a bit dubious, it is plain and simple copyright infringement on a massive scale.
The owner of the web site is creating a data stream, which will 99.99% of the time be copyrighted. Even if the web site owner doesn't own the copyright or has permission to use some copyrighted work, it is still copyrighted by someone else. Modifying the page creates a new derived work. If you create a derived work without permission of the copyright owner, you commit copyright infringement.
FYI yes its patented but its under a 'free for all' licence.
Anyone can use it for any purpose for free (both beer and freedom). Who knows if there are any other patents lurking? We know from the MP3 history: Yes, everyone knew there were tons of patents, but you could buy a license for all the patents for quiet a reasonable fee, which for example Microsoft did. Then suddenly someone comes up with a claim for a patent that is not covered by that pool and sues Microsoft for billions.
Same thing could happen with Ogg as well. Make it part of the HTML5 standard, convince Apple, Nokia and Microsoft to use it, and four years from now when every browser in the world supports it, someone comes out with a patent claim and sues everyone. It doesn't happen right now because trying to enforce a patent on Ogg won't make you any money.
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As a result, getting the output exactly the way you want it is very difficult. Keeping it exactly the way you want it is not difficult, it is impossible.
Second, at the time these kids come out of school, the world will _not_ be using Office 2007. In ten years time, Microsoft will have lost the battle against open standards, and the world will be using either Open Office, or whatever Open Office compatible software Apple ships for free with MacOS X version 10.12.
Third, are you telling me that people can't use Office 2007 if they didn't learn how to use it at school? Is the user interface so horrid and counter-intuitive that some who was happy with AppleWorks 2.0 cannot use Office 2007? (Answer: Yes, it is.) Well, in that case Office 2007 should be avoided like the plague - which, as I said before, the real world does.
Fourth, you have a complete misunderstanding why kids at a school use a word processor. They don't use it to learn how to use a word processor, they use it to write papers and their homework. So the software that should be used should be as easy to learn as possible so that it doesn't interfere with the job at hand (no Office 2007 then), it should be future-proof so that teacher's handouts written today can be used in years to come (no Office 2007 then), and it should be compatible with what kids have at home, if possible (no Office 2007 then).
By pure coincidence, the code that I had to type in to login to slashdot was "hostage". You don't want your school and your kids to become hostages of Microsoft, do you?
char *reverse (char *buf) {
} And now the same thing, but assuming that the string contains UTF8
Here the software would have to take into account not only the driving time, but also the calculation time. It is pointless spending three days on finding an optimal route when you know a sub-optimal route that only takes 3 hours. You would probably try to find very quickly a "safe" first destination, that is a destination that won't make the best route from there on much longer, and that gives the computer a bit of time to find a good solution for the rest while you are driving.
That is perfectly legal to do, but it requires that the DRM implementation would be licensed under GPL, which means that anyone, including evil DRM crackers, would have access to the source code. If you can find a way to implement DRM in such a way that having the source code doesn't help the cracker, fine. If your DRM relies on keeping the source code secret, then you can't include GPL code.
1. Make a modified version of the iTunes software. That version will download music from all sources and mark it as "try out". It will also allow you to publish your music on the same terms. All this would be legal.
2. "Try out" music cannot be burnt on a CD or moved to an iPod. A splash screen appears when it is played. Removing the "try out" label without paying would be criminal.
3. You can buy the music easily, and the complete money goes to the rights holders (who distribute it in a fair way, or the rights holders might be the actual musicians). The music is then marked as properly owned by you.
4. This is combined with a rating system that lets you rate the sound quality of a recording and upgrade if you find a better version somewhere else.
The only thing that is problematic is how music should be handled that cannot be identified.
In this whole discussion, both here on Slashdot and in the comments to the original article, nobody notices that "intellectual property" is just too abstract a concept for many people.
People will usually agree that if A produces something, then it is wrong to take it away with paying. And if A produces something, and B buys it, then it is wrong to take it away from B. But if, as mentioned in a comment to the original article, a nine year old makes a copy of a CD as a present for his grandfather, then this child sees _himself_ as the producer of the CD, just the same as he would see himself as the producer of a painted picture, or a pair of hand knitted socks.
I think people are quite willing to pay money to whom they see subconsciously as the "producer". So people pay for pay TV, they play for CDs or music from the iTunes store, they pay for watching movies. DRM is generally disliked because it stops me from "producing" music that my computer is quite capable of producing. But they find it quite Ok to do the "producing" themselves. It's the same as with people willingly paying lots of money in a restaurant, but on the other hand they wouldn't have the slightest bit of bad conscience trying to reproduce some especially good food from a restaurant in their own kitchen.
Intellectual property is just too abstract for most people.
Assuming that the police got a search warrant, they will get a conviction. Now judges usually want to go extra safe, that's why the judge said that there was no expectation of privacy (which is a bit dubious in my opinion). Fact is that even if the man's privacy was breached, it wasn't breached by the police. So he can sue the computer shop for breach of privacy; but being convicted of a crime that you committed does not count as "damages", so this wouldn't go very far.
...is printers that refuse to print a document when the level of one color of ink is low even if the document being printed doesn't use that color at all. I have an Epson that I like pretty much. It has individual cartridges for each color of ink but if, say, the cyan cartridge is empty, I can't print even if the page is nothing but black text. There's no real reason for it, it's strictly a software (or firmware) limitation put in by the manufacturer. When that happened to me, I asked around at work and some colleagues dads printer had just broken down, so I gave my Epson printer to him. Didn't want any money for it. The printer was replaced with the cheapest Samsung Laserprinter I could find for £50. Came with a half empty cartridge, good for 1500 pages and lasted two years. Refilled with toner for £15 which is supposed to last for 3000 pages. Never needed any cleaning of the cartridge, never needed any service, never failed to print a page on the very first attempt without any flaws.1. Nobody knows for sure that a backdoor exists. The backdoor _could_ have been created at the time the constants in the algorithm were defined. If it didn't happen back then, then no backdoor exists and no backdoor can be created anymore.
2. The source code doesn't give any information whether the backdoor exists, and if it exists, how it works. 3. If the backdoor exists, then it seems most likely that the US government has it, and nobody else.
The owner of the web site is creating a data stream, which will 99.99% of the time be copyrighted. Even if the web site owner doesn't own the copyright or has permission to use some copyrighted work, it is still copyrighted by someone else. Modifying the page creates a new derived work. If you create a derived work without permission of the copyright owner, you commit copyright infringement.
Same thing could happen with Ogg as well. Make it part of the HTML5 standard, convince Apple, Nokia and Microsoft to use it, and four years from now when every browser in the world supports it, someone comes out with a patent claim and sues everyone. It doesn't happen right now because trying to enforce a patent on Ogg won't make you any money.