I hate it when there's trouble with the PC and I have to use my phone for Skype. First of all, there's a latency of 1-4 seconds, but that's partly my fault for having an old Android phone. More importantly, I don't like to sit and hold my phone for tens of minutes to point the camera at myself (In fact, I've tried to stick the phone sideways into a roll of kitchen paper just to avoid this, but it wasn't a great success, as it fell over)
It's in the Arch Linux main repositories, I just checked
Don't know if I'm impressed or disappointed.. There's lots of other S/W in the user repositories that I would rather have in the main one before Steam. But great job, whoever did it
I thought Steam would be an Ubuntu-only thing, but I stand corrected, this is pretty good
Turns out that it crashes before the client even starts on my system, but my GPU driver is dodgy, so it's maybe not Steam's fault
Nah, I think what they really mean is that the market for 7200 laptop drives is gone. The middle customer, that wants good performance but decent capacity, is going to choose a hybrid drive 9 times out of 10 relative to a 7200 drive - it's significantly (and more importantly, noticeably) faster for the things that people notice (bootup, often-used programs), and the cost premium is negligible relative to 7200 drives.
I got one of the early hybrids, and it is much faster than the original 5400 drive that came with the laptop. I think that most of the speed is due it (the hybrid drive) running at 7200 RPM, not due to the 4 GB of cache it has. I access more than 4 GB of software regularly, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cache has actually started to wear out on this quite old drive. So the moral is that we need 7200 RPM hybrid drives, or bigger caches with write-back (though that's of course a reliability nightmare)
If they do it over then LAN (which they don't, but there's no reason why they shouldn't. maybe security limitations in the browser) they should get around 5 ms latency (ping). They don't need a round-trip, so it's half the ping time. If you can set TCP NODELAY with WebSockets, that should be achieveable with TCP. The problem is if there's a transmission error, you get retransmissions and delays. As each frame on the screen lasts for 16 ms at 60 Hz, the latency should be acceptable for most games
Actually, it just means less piracy, which in turn will mean more money for the entertainment industry to use to bring us great movies and music.
Even if I buy the second part of your argument, I'm not sure it's worth it. Torrrents are used for tonnes of legal things. Creative commons movies and linux distros for example. Torrents are a great alternative to ad-filled slow upload sites. If you have a multi-megabyte file that will be interesting to ten or more people, they're just the best option.
Granted, this story isn't about blocking the bittorrent protocol. The problem is, however, that many of the "pirate" sites run really nice public trackers that anyone can use. And these are blocked too. Torrents can work without trackers (sort of starting on the way to what the GP is talking about), but it all seems so unnecessary
From what I've seen, most people use wireless connections for their computers (even some desktops..ugh), tablets, etc. Best case scenario is that the games console is wired, if they are gamers. The max speed of wireless "n" gear is easily below gigabit, and the bandwidth is shared between all users. The fact that people don't *quite* need gigabit yet shouldn't put these ISPs off upgrading their services. Gigabit is maybe overkill for now, but in a couple of years it will be the standard at the high end. They should be working their asses off upgrading the hardware in residential areas to anticipate this. Speccing the home routers for at least 300Mbit of WAN I/O. Instead they are hoping that things will not improve. If all ISPs don't do anything, then it will indeed not improve. It's good that we have Google, which will do something, and will show the ISPs what happens if they don't all play retarded. I.e. all other ISPs will look like retards (sorry about the choice of words, but I can't think of a better way to say it)
A 7200 RPM drive can only do about 100 read or write operations per second at random locations. In the worst case, where you need to read 100 different files of size 4K scattered across the drive, you only get 400kB/s, which would fit over an USB1.0 connection. For reading long files (sequential reads), HDDs do less than 200 MB/s, but that's not as important for loading the OS and applications. SSDs are much better at random access (IOPS).
Actually, never mind the last paragraph (I would edit it if I could). I don't actually know how human hearing works, and the wikipedia article wasn't very accessible. Not really clear what is psychology and what is sensing, if such a distinction makes sense at all
The point of digitisation is really the first point where you can start to discuss loss. Before then, it is all up in the air, and you just hope they use good microphones and you could argue that this is where the "art" happens. The parameters of the digital to analogue conversion certainly impact the quality, and so does the mastering (which also is an art). The sound engineer needs to down-mix all the different instruments and voices into a stereo (or surround) mix, which is just a few continuous waveforms. There are good arguments that these streams can be represented perfectly within the limits of human *physiological* perception with 16 bits of digital resolution, at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. This requires the use of a high-quality low-pass filter, which again requires lots of computing power, but these are now readily available. (Personally, I would be more comfortable with 48kHz, just to have a bit more headroom). The samples can usually be compressed to less than half the size using lossless compression algorithms, such that the full data can be restored on playback.
Going beyond that we have to rely on the *psychology* of hearing (psychoacoustics). This is what MP3 and AAC do. An example is that if there is a loud sound at a given frequency, humans cannot perceive a second sound at a lower intensity at a similar frequency. MP3 can then discard this sound. First of all, this is not perfect. I could for example pick out the 320 kbps MP3 in a blind test from a number of lossless files, but then I had to sit there and "anally" listen to the minute details. This would not really affect my experience of the music, but if I'm going to buy something I want the best, so I want the lossless version. There is a difference. If you analyse the file with some software, you see that a large amount of information is lost.
I always feel like a bloody idiot when making the following argument, but there's also something that worries me about using my brain as a codec. My brain is the thing that experiences feelings and beauty when listening to music. Even if I can't tell the difference, I'm worried about what it does to my experience that it has to compensate for the missing information. Some of the listening experience is in the subconcious. Now, this *can* be tested, but it's an extremely difficult experiment, which requires you to play lossless and MP3 music to people, and somehow quantify their experience. It would be hard to prove that there was conclusively no difference. Brain scans are not that interesting, and it doesn't matter if one part of the brain is working harder when listening to MP3s (this was a story on slashdot a long time ago), as long as the difference is kept in the auditory subsystem, and that the rest of the experience is identical.
You can use Google search and maps approximately anonymously. They may aggregate the accesses using cookies and IP addresses, and they could learn a lot from that (i'll leave that to the imagination)
The problem with google is that they derive much of their value from the data you provide them. This seems to be intentional, as they make services like Google Now on Android, which provides unsolicited content-sensitive information, and searching the gmail inbox via the main google search. They need to get people used to the idea that google has tonnes of info about them. This is why they display "happy birthday" on the main google page. They need to redefine "creepy" to be able to collect more data. I don't know what drives google to want all that data. Maybe they have an evil (or good) masterplan. Maybe they have an extrapolation of how their ad revenue will improve with more targeting, or how it will suffer if they do nothing (this seems to be the trend).
A few months ago one could think about replacing google services with software running at the peers. A "cloud storage" service is really just a synchronisation service, which could be replicated by an extremely advanced P2P application. There's no economic incentive to build one, so nobody have done it. It may be that there is some synergy effect in having all the data, which can't be replicated by software at the end user device and open protocols. It certainly is easier to build.
So to answer the original poster; if you want google's services you have to let them collect data about you. It's necessary to provide the services. So they have the data, which you seem to be OK with, but you want to pay them to not do anything bad with it. What exactly are they doing now that you object to? I think nothing. So why pay if you get it for free. Google isn't selling your data, they are selling ads. The data never leave Google, they only push other companies ads based on what they think you want. Granted, it's annoying to see nothing but ads for HDMI cables 2 weeks after you bought such a cable, or to see ads for cheap phone contracts for *a frickin year* after you researched and bought the best contract, but ads are annoying anyway, deal with it. They have the information about you, which is what you should be worried about. (Maybe Google Apps for Your Domain is without ads, it certainly costs money. But don't think they won't track you)
What's this "(not just iTunes)" in the summary, do they sell lossless DRM-free music on iTunes? If so, that's amazing! We can't really whine about the music industry then, any geek on slashdot should be able to hack together some VM or Wine to run iTunes, possibly easier than ripping a CD.
(just to clarify, I was referring to the comment "Because CDs aren't digital.(period)" in the summary. I think the submitter already adressed this, to prevent the "CDs are digital" posts, but not in the most effective way)
I was trying to work out whether that was sarcastic or not. I think it is, in response to the use of "digital" in the quote, because it would be a useless comment otherwise
This wouldn't make a huge difference. The "trackers" could set a unique ID cookie when you visited their domain, and when you visited other domains they wouldn't need to change that cookie. They alreadly got the information that you visited that page and stuck it in their database.
Similar form factor and specs to a Mac Book Pro.. and guess what.. similar price. Take that you Apple Apologists.. um.. err.. [Facepalm]
It's a better form factor (3:2 screen), worse specs, but a higher resolution, and 200 bucks (~13 %) cheaper. Not a clear winner, but it will be superior for some. I'd consider it if I could add RAM and swap the SSD, because of the nice aspect ratio and the lack of a huge corporate logo on it.
This will not work for the same reason that image-based captchas, riddles and maths questions do not work: There is only a small number of logo/slogan combinations. It is trivial to construct a database (1:1 mapping) of these.
The problem with captchas is to find a mapping which is easy for a computer to do one way, and difficult the other way. Initially, the ad-based captchas are a good idea, because it is impossible for a computer to derive the correct answer from the question. The problem is that computers are better at remembering things than humans, and they are more "patient"
It's weird, I've seen a reference to texinfo many times while using man, but I have never actually followed through. Texinfo was just the weird disclaimer on some man pages to me. I just did info grub now, and it's not that bad if you stick to page up / page down and searching, like with man. Maybe I'll start actually using the texinfo pages now...
Anyone weth any real awareness of security does now allow password-only SSH connections anyway. Key based auth and fail2ban is pretty much required these days.
I consider myself quite aware of security problems, but I do have a publicly* accessible box with two users which can log in with randomly generated passwords, one 8 characters and one with 10. I do always set AllowUsers, to prevent any surprises. The bots haven't even guessed my username yet, but a human could easily guess that. After that they would have to make about 60^8 = 168 trillion attempts to guess the p/w. That could happen locally on multiple GPUs, but it's not even worth computing how long it would take over a crappy DSL connection. And of course, sshd has some built-in delays too. Please let me know if there's something I'm missing. The only reason I got so defensive is that I'm a bit worried..
* The computer is only on IPv6, which for now reduces the number of bots, but I can't rely on that.
It's so annoying that TPB is blocked. There are now two movies on this page that I can't get. I figured out a trick some time ago, using "\n" to separate lines in the HTTP request, which is invalid HTTP. That's accepted by the Pirate Bay server and not blocked. printf "GET/user/SimonKlose/ HTTP/1.1\nHost: thepiratebay.se\n\n" |nc thepiratebay.se 80 | grep "magnet:"
Anyway, I'm not going to suggest that TPB make a text-friendly version, as this loophole will just be blocked too.
May i suggest donations by bitcoin? It's easier to donate - especially for smaller donations - and practically without fees.
Yeah, maybe I would have done it, just for the novelty of using my bitcoins for something. $ 10 is a bit much, though. So many projects deserving of donations, so little cash...
So many devices come with 802.11? and Bluetooth, it's not possible to control or police it. Some laptops have hardware switches for wireless, some have software swithches (thanks to airplane regulations), but many just leave it running. There's a lot of things which operate in the 2.4 GHz band, which the residents will not even think about, even if they are well-meaning and diligent. Thermostats, weather stations, cordless phones are some examples.
On the other hand, this place would be a haven for those people who are afraid that RF radiation can cause health problems.
I should correct myself: udev can actually be useful on a general level. People with multiple SATA adapters may have their drives showing up in a random order, and udev can help manage such things.My problem is that everything gets layered onto it and falls down when something goes wrong
Slashdot Mirror
Pass. Who uses a full PC to make calls?
I hate it when there's trouble with the PC and I have to use my phone for Skype. First of all, there's a latency of 1-4 seconds, but that's partly my fault for having an old Android phone. More importantly, I don't like to sit and hold my phone for tens of minutes to point the camera at myself (In fact, I've tried to stick the phone sideways into a roll of kitchen paper just to avoid this, but it wasn't a great success, as it fell over)
It's in the Arch Linux main repositories, I just checked
Don't know if I'm impressed or disappointed.. There's lots of other S/W in the user repositories that I would rather have in the main one before Steam. But great job, whoever did it
I thought Steam would be an Ubuntu-only thing, but I stand corrected, this is pretty good
Turns out that it crashes before the client even starts on my system, but my GPU driver is dodgy, so it's maybe not Steam's fault
Nah, I think what they really mean is that the market for 7200 laptop drives is gone. The middle customer, that wants good performance but decent capacity, is going to choose a hybrid drive 9 times out of 10 relative to a 7200 drive - it's significantly (and more importantly, noticeably) faster for the things that people notice (bootup, often-used programs), and the cost premium is negligible relative to 7200 drives.
I got one of the early hybrids, and it is much faster than the original 5400 drive that came with the laptop. I think that most of the speed is due it (the hybrid drive) running at 7200 RPM, not due to the 4 GB of cache it has. I access more than 4 GB of software regularly, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cache has actually started to wear out on this quite old drive. So the moral is that we need 7200 RPM hybrid drives, or bigger caches with write-back (though that's of course a reliability nightmare)
If they do it over then LAN (which they don't, but there's no reason why they shouldn't. maybe security limitations in the browser) they should get around 5 ms latency (ping). They don't need a round-trip, so it's half the ping time. If you can set TCP NODELAY with WebSockets, that should be achieveable with TCP. The problem is if there's a transmission error, you get retransmissions and delays. As each frame on the screen lasts for 16 ms at 60 Hz, the latency should be acceptable for most games
You should try my new HTML5-enabled cloud storage site. Unlimited cheap space, really fast uploads :)
Actually, it just means less piracy, which in turn will mean more money for the entertainment industry to use to bring us great movies and music.
Even if I buy the second part of your argument, I'm not sure it's worth it. Torrrents are used for tonnes of legal things. Creative commons movies and linux distros for example. Torrents are a great alternative to ad-filled slow upload sites. If you have a multi-megabyte file that will be interesting to ten or more people, they're just the best option.
Granted, this story isn't about blocking the bittorrent protocol. The problem is, however, that many of the "pirate" sites run really nice public trackers that anyone can use. And these are blocked too. Torrents can work without trackers (sort of starting on the way to what the GP is talking about), but it all seems so unnecessary
From what I've seen, most people use wireless connections for their computers (even some desktops..ugh), tablets, etc. Best case scenario is that the games console is wired, if they are gamers. The max speed of wireless "n" gear is easily below gigabit, and the bandwidth is shared between all users. The fact that people don't *quite* need gigabit yet shouldn't put these ISPs off upgrading their services. Gigabit is maybe overkill for now, but in a couple of years it will be the standard at the high end. They should be working their asses off upgrading the hardware in residential areas to anticipate this. Speccing the home routers for at least 300Mbit of WAN I/O. Instead they are hoping that things will not improve. If all ISPs don't do anything, then it will indeed not improve. It's good that we have Google, which will do something, and will show the ISPs what happens if they don't all play retarded. I.e. all other ISPs will look like retards (sorry about the choice of words, but I can't think of a better way to say it)
A 7200 RPM drive can only do about 100 read or write operations per second at random locations. In the worst case, where you need to read 100 different files of size 4K scattered across the drive, you only get 400kB/s, which would fit over an USB1.0 connection. For reading long files (sequential reads), HDDs do less than 200 MB/s, but that's not as important for loading the OS and applications. SSDs are much better at random access (IOPS).
Hardware encryption offers superior security to software encryption.
What, so AES magically becomes more secure if it's implemented on an embedded processor instead of an x86 processor? Where do I sign up?
Actually, never mind the last paragraph (I would edit it if I could). I don't actually know how human hearing works, and the wikipedia article wasn't very accessible. Not really clear what is psychology and what is sensing, if such a distinction makes sense at all
The point of digitisation is really the first point where you can start to discuss loss. Before then, it is all up in the air, and you just hope they use good microphones and you could argue that this is where the "art" happens. The parameters of the digital to analogue conversion certainly impact the quality, and so does the mastering (which also is an art). The sound engineer needs to down-mix all the different instruments and voices into a stereo (or surround) mix, which is just a few continuous waveforms. There are good arguments that these streams can be represented perfectly within the limits of human *physiological* perception with 16 bits of digital resolution, at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. This requires the use of a high-quality low-pass filter, which again requires lots of computing power, but these are now readily available. (Personally, I would be more comfortable with 48kHz, just to have a bit more headroom). The samples can usually be compressed to less than half the size using lossless compression algorithms, such that the full data can be restored on playback.
Going beyond that we have to rely on the *psychology* of hearing (psychoacoustics). This is what MP3 and AAC do. An example is that if there is a loud sound at a given frequency, humans cannot perceive a second sound at a lower intensity at a similar frequency. MP3 can then discard this sound. First of all, this is not perfect. I could for example pick out the 320 kbps MP3 in a blind test from a number of lossless files, but then I had to sit there and "anally" listen to the minute details. This would not really affect my experience of the music, but if I'm going to buy something I want the best, so I want the lossless version. There is a difference. If you analyse the file with some software, you see that a large amount of information is lost.
I always feel like a bloody idiot when making the following argument, but there's also something that worries me about using my brain as a codec. My brain is the thing that experiences feelings and beauty when listening to music. Even if I can't tell the difference, I'm worried about what it does to my experience that it has to compensate for the missing information. Some of the listening experience is in the subconcious. Now, this *can* be tested, but it's an extremely difficult experiment, which requires you to play lossless and MP3 music to people, and somehow quantify their experience. It would be hard to prove that there was conclusively no difference. Brain scans are not that interesting, and it doesn't matter if one part of the brain is working harder when listening to MP3s (this was a story on slashdot a long time ago), as long as the difference is kept in the auditory subsystem, and that the rest of the experience is identical.
You can use Google search and maps approximately anonymously. They may aggregate the accesses using cookies and IP addresses, and they could learn a lot from that (i'll leave that to the imagination)
The problem with google is that they derive much of their value from the data you provide them. This seems to be intentional, as they make services like Google Now on Android, which provides unsolicited content-sensitive information, and searching the gmail inbox via the main google search. They need to get people used to the idea that google has tonnes of info about them. This is why they display "happy birthday" on the main google page. They need to redefine "creepy" to be able to collect more data. I don't know what drives google to want all that data. Maybe they have an evil (or good) masterplan. Maybe they have an extrapolation of how their ad revenue will improve with more targeting, or how it will suffer if they do nothing (this seems to be the trend).
A few months ago one could think about replacing google services with software running at the peers. A "cloud storage" service is really just a synchronisation service, which could be replicated by an extremely advanced P2P application. There's no economic incentive to build one, so nobody have done it. It may be that there is some synergy effect in having all the data, which can't be replicated by software at the end user device and open protocols. It certainly is easier to build.
So to answer the original poster; if you want google's services you have to let them collect data about you. It's necessary to provide the services. So they have the data, which you seem to be OK with, but you want to pay them to not do anything bad with it. What exactly are they doing now that you object to? I think nothing. So why pay if you get it for free. Google isn't selling your data, they are selling ads. The data never leave Google, they only push other companies ads based on what they think you want. Granted, it's annoying to see nothing but ads for HDMI cables 2 weeks after you bought such a cable, or to see ads for cheap phone contracts for *a frickin year* after you researched and bought the best contract, but ads are annoying anyway, deal with it. They have the information about you, which is what you should be worried about. (Maybe Google Apps for Your Domain is without ads, it certainly costs money. But don't think they won't track you)
What's this "(not just iTunes)" in the summary, do they sell lossless DRM-free music on iTunes? If so, that's amazing! We can't really whine about the music industry then, any geek on slashdot should be able to hack together some VM or Wine to run iTunes, possibly easier than ripping a CD.
(just to clarify, I was referring to the comment "Because CDs aren't digital.(period)" in the summary. I think the submitter already adressed this, to prevent the "CDs are digital" posts, but not in the most effective way)
I was trying to work out whether that was sarcastic or not. I think it is, in response to the use of "digital" in the quote, because it would be a useless comment otherwise
This wouldn't make a huge difference. The "trackers" could set a unique ID cookie when you visited their domain, and when you visited other domains they wouldn't need to change that cookie. They alreadly got the information that you visited that page and stuck it in their database.
Similar form factor and specs to a Mac Book Pro .. and guess what .. similar price. Take that you Apple Apologists .. um .. err .. [Facepalm]
It's a better form factor (3:2 screen), worse specs, but a higher resolution, and 200 bucks (~13 %) cheaper. Not a clear winner, but it will be superior for some. I'd consider it if I could add RAM and swap the SSD, because of the nice aspect ratio and the lack of a huge corporate logo on it.
This will not work for the same reason that image-based captchas, riddles and maths questions do not work: There is only a small number of logo/slogan combinations. It is trivial to construct a database (1:1 mapping) of these.
The problem with captchas is to find a mapping which is easy for a computer to do one way, and difficult the other way. Initially, the ad-based captchas are a good idea, because it is impossible for a computer to derive the correct answer from the question. The problem is that computers are better at remembering things than humans, and they are more "patient"
It's weird, I've seen a reference to texinfo many times while using man, but I have never actually followed through. Texinfo was just the weird disclaimer on some man pages to me. I just did info grub now, and it's not that bad if you stick to page up / page down and searching, like with man. Maybe I'll start actually using the texinfo pages now...
Anyone weth any real awareness of security does now allow password-only SSH connections anyway. Key based auth and fail2ban is pretty much required these days.
I consider myself quite aware of security problems, but I do have a publicly* accessible box with two users which can log in with randomly generated passwords, one 8 characters and one with 10. I do always set AllowUsers, to prevent any surprises. The bots haven't even guessed my username yet, but a human could easily guess that. After that they would have to make about 60^8 = 168 trillion attempts to guess the p/w. That could happen locally on multiple GPUs, but it's not even worth computing how long it would take over a crappy DSL connection. And of course, sshd has some built-in delays too. Please let me know if there's something I'm missing. The only reason I got so defensive is that I'm a bit worried..
* The computer is only on IPv6, which for now reduces the number of bots, but I can't rely on that.
It's so annoying that TPB is blocked. There are now two movies on this page that I can't get. I figured out a trick some time ago, using "\n" to separate lines in the HTTP request, which is invalid HTTP. That's accepted by the Pirate Bay server and not blocked. /user/SimonKlose/ HTTP/1.1\nHost: thepiratebay.se\n\n" |nc thepiratebay.se 80 | grep "magnet:"
printf "GET
Anyway, I'm not going to suggest that TPB make a text-friendly version, as this loophole will just be blocked too.
Damn, didn't read the whole thread, I thought it was about TPB movie. Sorry. Anyway, Amateur Monster Movie looks cool
May i suggest donations by bitcoin? It's easier to donate - especially for smaller donations - and practically without fees.
Yeah, maybe I would have done it, just for the novelty of using my bitcoins for something. $ 10 is a bit much, though. So many projects deserving of donations, so little cash...
So many devices come with 802.11? and Bluetooth, it's not possible to control or police it. Some laptops have hardware switches for wireless, some have software swithches (thanks to airplane regulations), but many just leave it running. There's a lot of things which operate in the 2.4 GHz band, which the residents will not even think about, even if they are well-meaning and diligent. Thermostats, weather stations, cordless phones are some examples.
On the other hand, this place would be a haven for those people who are afraid that RF radiation can cause health problems.
I should correct myself: udev can actually be useful on a general level. People with multiple SATA adapters may have their drives showing up in a random order, and udev can help manage such things.My problem is that everything gets layered onto it and falls down when something goes wrong