This sort of thing isn't always on purpose. Some people think "open source" means they can use the code however they please. Programmers aren't always license experts. It seems so simple to us because we are around these terms on slashdot constantly, but there have been times where I made assumptions about close source code licenses that could have gotten me into the same trouble. The legal department doesn't review every single decision in an organization and its possible legal implications. It could have been a few guys that just didn't understand the GPL and it was missed because it wasn't the largest project in the company. Not defending them, but not everyone understands "open source" isn't the same as public domain.
There was a dot-bomb that did exactly this. The name slips me right now, but in high school me and my friends would spend all our forced library research time wasting these people's time. My favorite questions to ask were about refining gribble. It almost sounds like something real so they'd waste a lot of time looking for it. That's probably why they stopped the service. After reading about this service you know what the first thing I did was? I went to chacha.com and wasted about 10 minutes asking silly questions that sounded real.
As long as the internet allows retards like me to waste these people's time, these services will never last.
The article said google is already doing checksums and they aren't ideal. Creating fingerprints wouldn't be impossible. Very difficult - yes, but not impossible. We should also note that google employs some of the smartest and most creative people in the world.
Off the top of my head... I would throw out the whole notion of "checksums". They aren't really applicable because their purpose is to compare exactly. Even if doing key frames, all one would have to do is lighten/darken the video and the whole checksum changes. You'd need to create a "profile" for the video. Divide the frame into contiguous regions and get the area of contiguous region. Store those values as fields in the profile. Find the color in relation to other contiguous areas and give it a relative value (i.e. 8% darker than contiguous region #1). If everything is relative it would prevent simple lightening/darkening of the video. Compare and contrast this to frames before and after and compare multiple frames before and after to prevent frame skips. You want to completely rid the idea of checksumming and embrace the idea of relativity.
Create a similar audio profile except with frequency and amplitude and the key is to make sure everything is relative i.e. 440hz freq is 10% louder than 660hz etc, etc. Once you have many relative variables to compare and contrast to you can come up with a hit score for how similiar the two videos are and filter based on a reasonable score. This was just some schmuck at work thinking out loud, so imagine what someone wayyyyy smarter than me with a lot more time, paid a lot more could come up with...
I wish I could mod you because that was a great article. After reading that I think the only other document misinterpreted that much over time has been the bible...
Didn't Moore's Law just state that the amount of transistors on a chip will double every 24 months or something to that effect? I don't remember it directly stating anything about performance or power consumption. Both are effects of the number of transistors, but I'm pretty sure it never directly stated anything other than the number of transistors over time.
I think it's really hard as humans to comprehend things we have no ways of describing in English. Time is a dimension and I think we just can't comprehend the idea of time not existing or being able to manipulate it. It's possible time didn't exist before the big bang. But again, these words "before" and "after" have to do with time. The best we can do right now is describe things in mathematical models.
What the hell ever happened to the government serving its people? Wasn't that what this country was founded on? Isn't that the whole idea of a democracy? The US government has become this monster that seems to fight its people as hard as it can. It honestly saddens me to take a step back and say "Is this what America has really become?". We've become 18th century England. Everything our forefathers fought to establish for this country has been thrown away. Our government now is nothing more than a corporate powerhouse who's members use it as a way to become personally more powerful. Can they honestly believe illegally wiretapping their own people serves the peoples best interests and freedom? Maybe they need to visit a 5th grade Social Studies class because I really think they've lost their way.
You'd think one time in the conversation Dell would have mentioned that? From what it seems the poster wasn't informed of this because I'm sure he would have accepted that.
Apple has the advantage Microsoft does. They have the ability to bundle. Just bundle it with iTunes or any of their other windows software that's more popular. Make it the default browser at the time of install and I bet you a lot of people will leave it as their default browser. It's underhanded, but no less than anything Microsoft has ever done.
I just tried this and nothing comes up for ebay... Literally a blank ad pane. I tried other search terms thinking maybe I had some ad-blocking software, but nope. Am I the only one? Perhaps they are freezing the advertising until they get all this worked out?
I know everyone's going to start hating on you... but it's really true. The dirty little secret MS doesn't like to talk about in their TCO studies is that they usually rely on the fact Microsoft consultants make on average the least out of almost every consulting field. One study showed 30 dollars an hour! If you are paying your "experts" next to nothing how expert can they really be?
Your quote at the end really rings true. I have yet to meet an IIS admin whom understands the HTTP standards at all, let alone something as complex as debugging chunked encoding issues. If you can't telnet to port 80 and get usable output, you have no business being a web server administrator. However, the windows culture encourages quite the opposite. If you can't solve a problem with a wizard, does the problem actually exist?
When they use the word "tech" it's very generic. Mostly sales people are the first to go as they are the quickest/easiest to hire again if things pick up. Then probably entry level technicians such as Circuit City's Firedog employees. There's plenty of work out there for highly technical people such as engineers and quality programmers. That's really anywhere though. You want to be so valuable that it's cheaper to pay you to do nothing for months at a time than try and find a replacement when they do need you. Don't put yourself in a position to be replaced by a 16 year old for half the cost.
Let me let everyone in on a dirty little secret about 99% of police computer forensics experts... they are less skilled than most 9 year olds at recovering vital information. Many of them use bootable disks that just check the hard drive for IE's cached files and history, etc, etc. Simple stuff a child could do. These people aren't doing complex low level block analysis. They are doing the level of recovery parents do at the end of the night to see what websites their children went on. Does it surprise anyone then it's extremely easy to fool them? God forbid you use encryption, an OS they aren't familiar with, or hardware they've never seen. They'll never recover anything.
Dead? No. Annoying as shit and wastes a lot of my time? Hell yes.
But then again, so are computers in general, and cell phones, and almost any other modern communication technique that allows you to exchange information instantly. You as a person are expected to instantly reply to that information. That's like declaring the telephone dead 30 years after invention. It's really annoying sometimes, but no where near dead.
There's a youtube video out there (I really wish I could find it) and it has the IT manager for the project. I have to wonder a little bit about him because he was asked why they didn't go with the cell processor instead of Intel based processors. His answer was "The P4's have better floating point processing". I could understand a lot of reasons to go with the P4 because there are a lot of good x86 programmers out there and they could reuse a lot of code etc etc. Has anyone else seen this video?
Let me be the first to call bullshit. Adobe reader sucks, but old versions still run fine on XP, and Foxit reader reads pdf's super fast and is lightweight http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Besides that, I can think of at least 3 open source pdf readers off the top of my head. Same thing with quicktime. There are a lot of other players that can play quicktime files. A standard isn't an implementation, and when multiple good implementations exist, you can't put down the standard because one of them suck.
This is nothing new. I remember my first calculator didn't understand the order of operations. If you blindly trusted your answers you might find yourself crashing rockets if you weren't careful =P
"but the fact that the built-in make, vi, grep, etc. are still basically unmodified"
Who cares? Do they work?
I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make????
hah. I take it you don't actually spend a lot of time administering many different boxes. I hate doing anything with old Unix boxes, Solaris included. You don't realize how nice it is to be able to have something as simple as command history until you lose it. Or what about always being stuck in INS mode? Case insensitive searches with 'find'? Syntax highlighting with Vim? grep -r? A consistant filesystem? (cat/etc/route. Oops! Binary exe. Now your terminal is all fucked up). more? more?????? who the fuck still uses more? Tar without gzip and bzip2 support. I can't even tell you how incomplete the man pages are on Unixware.
I could go on all day. It's not that I can't handle a box without modern Gnu tools, it's that it takes me much longer to do a simple task. That's the whole reason most of these features were added in the first place. A programmer decided it takes longer than it needs to for a task and fixed it. Not just for pure feature bloat purposes.
While the comment doesn't have much to do with the original story, I agree. The educational book industry as it applies to schools is a giant scam. I think more kids might actually read the material for class if the book was good for something other than practice problems. I've had books that cover material in 800 pages that other books can cover in 100 (much more clearly too). Most of these books are a constant game of revisions and supplemental material, blocking the used book industry. The authors are "experts" on the subject, but almost always have trouble communicating their ideas clearly. They focus on the exceptions rather than the rules and present the information in the most complex but correct way possible.
In college I almost always ended up going on Amazon and finding the highest rated books on a subject to really understand concepts. Most of these books weren't written by the greatest in their field, but people who were just good at explaining things. Also, these books were generally 75% less than the required class materials. It's really sad the state of affairs the educational publishing industry is in right now. It's seems they are more concerned with packing in the most pages per book weight than they are actually teaching something.
I've really been saying this for years. It's like digging a hole then putting a piece of wood over it so you can cross the hole. Why not just never dig the hole in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
Pringles has been doing this for years. They are the original pop you can't stop
This sort of thing isn't always on purpose. Some people think "open source" means they can use the code however they please. Programmers aren't always license experts. It seems so simple to us because we are around these terms on slashdot constantly, but there have been times where I made assumptions about close source code licenses that could have gotten me into the same trouble. The legal department doesn't review every single decision in an organization and its possible legal implications. It could have been a few guys that just didn't understand the GPL and it was missed because it wasn't the largest project in the company. Not defending them, but not everyone understands "open source" isn't the same as public domain.
I was thinking Chode Compressor was a new internet joke I hadn't heard of yet so I googled it. Two hours after your comment google has already indexed it and you are the proud owner of the top link for chode compressor. Congrats sir!
There was a dot-bomb that did exactly this. The name slips me right now, but in high school me and my friends would spend all our forced library research time wasting these people's time. My favorite questions to ask were about refining gribble. It almost sounds like something real so they'd waste a lot of time looking for it. That's probably why they stopped the service. After reading about this service you know what the first thing I did was? I went to chacha.com and wasted about 10 minutes asking silly questions that sounded real.
As long as the internet allows retards like me to waste these people's time, these services will never last.
The article said google is already doing checksums and they aren't ideal. Creating fingerprints wouldn't be impossible. Very difficult - yes, but not impossible. We should also note that google employs some of the smartest and most creative people in the world.
Off the top of my head... I would throw out the whole notion of "checksums". They aren't really applicable because their purpose is to compare exactly. Even if doing key frames, all one would have to do is lighten/darken the video and the whole checksum changes. You'd need to create a "profile" for the video. Divide the frame into contiguous regions and get the area of contiguous region. Store those values as fields in the profile. Find the color in relation to other contiguous areas and give it a relative value (i.e. 8% darker than contiguous region #1). If everything is relative it would prevent simple lightening/darkening of the video. Compare and contrast this to frames before and after and compare multiple frames before and after to prevent frame skips. You want to completely rid the idea of checksumming and embrace the idea of relativity.
Create a similar audio profile except with frequency and amplitude and the key is to make sure everything is relative i.e. 440hz freq is 10% louder than 660hz etc, etc. Once you have many relative variables to compare and contrast to you can come up with a hit score for how similiar the two videos are and filter based on a reasonable score. This was just some schmuck at work thinking out loud, so imagine what someone wayyyyy smarter than me with a lot more time, paid a lot more could come up with...
I wish I could mod you because that was a great article. After reading that I think the only other document misinterpreted that much over time has been the bible...
Didn't Moore's Law just state that the amount of transistors on a chip will double every 24 months or something to that effect? I don't remember it directly stating anything about performance or power consumption. Both are effects of the number of transistors, but I'm pretty sure it never directly stated anything other than the number of transistors over time.
I think it's really hard as humans to comprehend things we have no ways of describing in English. Time is a dimension and I think we just can't comprehend the idea of time not existing or being able to manipulate it. It's possible time didn't exist before the big bang. But again, these words "before" and "after" have to do with time. The best we can do right now is describe things in mathematical models.
What the hell ever happened to the government serving its people? Wasn't that what this country was founded on? Isn't that the whole idea of a democracy? The US government has become this monster that seems to fight its people as hard as it can. It honestly saddens me to take a step back and say "Is this what America has really become?". We've become 18th century England. Everything our forefathers fought to establish for this country has been thrown away. Our government now is nothing more than a corporate powerhouse who's members use it as a way to become personally more powerful. Can they honestly believe illegally wiretapping their own people serves the peoples best interests and freedom? Maybe they need to visit a 5th grade Social Studies class because I really think they've lost their way.
*cough* PS3 *cough*
You'd think one time in the conversation Dell would have mentioned that? From what it seems the poster wasn't informed of this because I'm sure he would have accepted that.
Apple has the advantage Microsoft does. They have the ability to bundle. Just bundle it with iTunes or any of their other windows software that's more popular. Make it the default browser at the time of install and I bet you a lot of people will leave it as their default browser. It's underhanded, but no less than anything Microsoft has ever done.
I just tried this and nothing comes up for ebay... Literally a blank ad pane. I tried other search terms thinking maybe I had some ad-blocking software, but nope. Am I the only one? Perhaps they are freezing the advertising until they get all this worked out?
I know everyone's going to start hating on you... but it's really true. The dirty little secret MS doesn't like to talk about in their TCO studies is that they usually rely on the fact Microsoft consultants make on average the least out of almost every consulting field. One study showed 30 dollars an hour! If you are paying your "experts" next to nothing how expert can they really be?
Your quote at the end really rings true. I have yet to meet an IIS admin whom understands the HTTP standards at all, let alone something as complex as debugging chunked encoding issues. If you can't telnet to port 80 and get usable output, you have no business being a web server administrator. However, the windows culture encourages quite the opposite. If you can't solve a problem with a wizard, does the problem actually exist?
When they use the word "tech" it's very generic. Mostly sales people are the first to go as they are the quickest/easiest to hire again if things pick up. Then probably entry level technicians such as Circuit City's Firedog employees. There's plenty of work out there for highly technical people such as engineers and quality programmers. That's really anywhere though. You want to be so valuable that it's cheaper to pay you to do nothing for months at a time than try and find a replacement when they do need you. Don't put yourself in a position to be replaced by a 16 year old for half the cost.
Let me let everyone in on a dirty little secret about 99% of police computer forensics experts... they are less skilled than most 9 year olds at recovering vital information. Many of them use bootable disks that just check the hard drive for IE's cached files and history, etc, etc. Simple stuff a child could do. These people aren't doing complex low level block analysis. They are doing the level of recovery parents do at the end of the night to see what websites their children went on. Does it surprise anyone then it's extremely easy to fool them? God forbid you use encryption, an OS they aren't familiar with, or hardware they've never seen. They'll never recover anything.
Dead? No. Annoying as shit and wastes a lot of my time? Hell yes.
But then again, so are computers in general, and cell phones, and almost any other modern communication technique that allows you to exchange information instantly. You as a person are expected to instantly reply to that information. That's like declaring the telephone dead 30 years after invention. It's really annoying sometimes, but no where near dead.
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16570 2&cid=13822614
There's a youtube video out there (I really wish I could find it) and it has the IT manager for the project. I have to wonder a little bit about him because he was asked why they didn't go with the cell processor instead of Intel based processors. His answer was "The P4's have better floating point processing". I could understand a lot of reasons to go with the P4 because there are a lot of good x86 programmers out there and they could reuse a lot of code etc etc. Has anyone else seen this video?
Let me be the first to call bullshit. Adobe reader sucks, but old versions still run fine on XP, and Foxit reader reads pdf's super fast and is lightweight http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Besides that, I can think of at least 3 open source pdf readers off the top of my head. Same thing with quicktime. There are a lot of other players that can play quicktime files. A standard isn't an implementation, and when multiple good implementations exist, you can't put down the standard because one of them suck.
This is nothing new. I remember my first calculator didn't understand the order of operations. If you blindly trusted your answers you might find yourself crashing rockets if you weren't careful =P
Maybe...
Who cares? Do they work?
I expect vi to be the same from platform to platform. grep as well. Make????
hah. I take it you don't actually spend a lot of time administering many different boxes. I hate doing anything with old Unix boxes, Solaris included. You don't realize how nice it is to be able to have something as simple as command history until you lose it. Or what about always being stuck in INS mode? Case insensitive searches with 'find'? Syntax highlighting with Vim? grep -r? A consistant filesystem? (cat
I could go on all day. It's not that I can't handle a box without modern Gnu tools, it's that it takes me much longer to do a simple task. That's the whole reason most of these features were added in the first place. A programmer decided it takes longer than it needs to for a task and fixed it. Not just for pure feature bloat purposes.
While the comment doesn't have much to do with the original story, I agree. The educational book industry as it applies to schools is a giant scam. I think more kids might actually read the material for class if the book was good for something other than practice problems. I've had books that cover material in 800 pages that other books can cover in 100 (much more clearly too). Most of these books are a constant game of revisions and supplemental material, blocking the used book industry. The authors are "experts" on the subject, but almost always have trouble communicating their ideas clearly. They focus on the exceptions rather than the rules and present the information in the most complex but correct way possible.
In college I almost always ended up going on Amazon and finding the highest rated books on a subject to really understand concepts. Most of these books weren't written by the greatest in their field, but people who were just good at explaining things. Also, these books were generally 75% less than the required class materials. It's really sad the state of affairs the educational publishing industry is in right now. It's seems they are more concerned with packing in the most pages per book weight than they are actually teaching something.
I've really been saying this for years. It's like digging a hole then putting a piece of wood over it so you can cross the hole. Why not just never dig the hole in the first place?