It's not really Gmail's storage space that most people (myself included) find compelling about Gmail. Other free services like Spymac (http://www.spymac.net/) offer comparable storage amounts also.
Rather, it's the clean user interface, the automatic threading of messages, and the fast searching that most users (myself included) like.
Only if Yahoo, MS, SBC, et al. can replicate that part of the user experience, will Gmail have a viable competitor.
The main purspoe and advantage of hybrids are their significantly lower emission levels, on the order of 90% compared to normal gas cars. That's their primary design goal. Obviously, fuel efficency will be a side effect of it, but the primary design goal of both the Prius and Insight are in reducing the emission levels and making it "clean", not the fuel efficency per se.
Diesel cars with similar fuel effiecncy, but definitely not the cleaniness, have been around for ages.
I realize that the real answer may be classified, but I'm interested in informed speculation as well.
Is the monitoring with the cooperation of the ISPs who control the gateways/routers? Is it mandated that they have the monitoring taps? Or is it unknown to them (NSA are tapping into the signal unbeknownst to the ISPs)?
(I think this has a known answer.) Is is true that pretty much all intercontinental traffic goes through the USA? ARe there any routes eg, Europe to Asia, or other continents that are just direct routes not passing via the USA?
I was in China just a few weeks ago -- Xanga have not been blocked for some reason.
I know many China-based bloggers who use Xanga as a matter of fact. It's not the best blog solution out there, because of its simplistic interface and lack of customization, but it works!
Patriot missile -- really a "failure"
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
IIRC, the Patriot missile was never really designed or intended as an anti-missile missile, but a anti-aircraft (ie, a target much lower and slower) missile. It was only pressed into service killing Scuds because there was nothing better available.
So, wouldn't the Patriot missile failure be understandable due to it being used outside its original design? If the Patriot had been really intended and design as a missile killer, then yes, it should have a "failure" because it didn't live up to its original spec.
It'd say it's actually easier on the Xbox to achieve compatibility via software emu than other consoles, because Microsoft stipulates, as a condition to get a game certified by them, all Xbox games must access the hardware the DirectX APIs and XTL libs, rather than writing direct to hardware registers/ports.
The only area where I can see problems is that Xbox vertex and pixel shaders can be (and often are) compiled to nVidia's proprietary binary format (which represents a much more hardware-specific mapping than the standard DirectX hardware-agnostic binary token format). If this issue is solved, or nVidia turns a blind eye, there should be no major technical obstacles to software emulation. Legally, I think it may be OK, as the specifics of the nVidia shader format is not disclosed even in the Xbox SDK itself, so Microsoft could very well write a layer that just translates the nVidia format to whatever internal scheme ATI's silicon will use.
Other consoles, like PS2 allow much more low-level access, so compatibility via software emulation only is more of a pain.
Maybe in the USA, credit cards have near universal acceptance, but in many countries in Asia, particularly mainland China, most businesses other than the newest Western-style department stores, are still cash only. The situation is changing, but as of now, ATMs are the most secure way to avoid carrying large amounts of cash around.
I'm not sure if anyone has actually tried to quantify this, but I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that unfettered DRM-free copying of music and other media indirectly helped the growth of many sectors of hi-tech. Of course, probably no exec will admit to it in fear of invoking the wrath of the RIAA/MPAA, etc. but it's still probably true.
Think about broadband, CD/DVD-R/RW, large hard drives, solid-state digital music players, etc -- all cheap and ubitquitously avaiable today, due in large part to the demand caused by music swapping, and all having beneficial applications beyond copyright violations.
I think that had Napster, KaZaA, etc not been possible due to DRM, you would not have had this growth, and the state of the tech industry would have been not as well off because of it.
While it's logical for, say, Chinese companies to have a Chinese domain name and Chinese e-mail addresses, it may not be the best choice if the company wishes to expand oversea.
Unfortunate but true, if a company has a Chinese domain name, it would probably be only used within China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan (since it's unicode), and maybe South Korea. The company would be pretty much limited to the East Asia market.
However, I suppose the company could get both a Chinese domain and an English, or rather Pinyin, domain so they could make their Chinese, or maybe other Asian clients feel "closer" while also being able to reach clients outside of East Asia.
I also think that it'd be great to give people the option of having a native-language email address. It's not too hard to set up a romanized email alias for it. An SMTP "X-Roman-Address" header could even by added to outgoing messages in case a recipient can't read the default "From" line.
Unlike some who suggest it's a space race just for propoganda value, the Chinese space program has been quite methodical and they've taken their time. They were originally going to launch in 1999 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the PRC, but wisely decided not to.
I would much rather see slow but steady progress for the Chinese, both in their engineering and operations, than hurried, rushed decisions that seemed to be a part of NASA culture and contributed to accidents like Challenger and Columbia and have now resulted in the US program at a standstill.
Valenti says a new program developed by Caltech researchers allows a movie file to be downloaded in five seconds
Did I miss something here? Is this some quantum leap in information theory/signal compression? Or maybe Caltech was doing some tests in their labs on a gigabit Ethernet connection, and Valenti thought that it meant that any home user could achieve such download times as well?
I'm having the exact same thing happen to my own domain at the moment. Read about my situation here.
In my case, the spams seem to come from all over, from several continents. I'm guessing that those machines got owned through some backdoor or exploit, and they are simultaneously sending those spams. I wonder how all of them are simultaneously using my domain in the "from" header. Is there some central control server for these infected hosts that tell them "use this domain in your forged mails"?
The article makes a good point about "obscure" (I'm guessing they mean from the perspective of a American teen/young adult) works being shared, and I for one, would like to see more of that, whether via P2P or IRC or HTTP, or any other protocol.
The media seems to be focusing on, and the RIAA seems to be only going after those who share the mass-market crap like Britney, Eminem, etc. I for one, am more interested in Asian pop, anime, classical recordings, game soundtracks, indie stuff, (indie) Christian music, etc. that are simply unavailable for sale in the US, whether you want to pay for it or not.
The Internet provides a unique medium to distribute works such as the aforementioned categories, whose owners can't/don't want to bother marketing in the US because the demand is so small in absolute numbers. In the absence of official marketing, it allows a building of a fan following for non mass-market type works, possibly paving the way in several years for more organized marketing efforts. Witness the growth of anime from underground fansubs to small marketers in the US, to recent feature theatrical releases (eg, Spirited Away). Without the initial underground sharing, you wouldn't have the word-of-mouth hype.
FYI, most sectors of China's economy are now largely capitalist and market-driven, in the wake of economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping instituted in the late 1970s.
Perhaps you meant to say "Multiparty Democracy" vs. "Communist" government.
Since 3-D graphics essentially is comprised manupulating vectors very quickly, the Graphics processors found not only in the PS2, but the latest PC graphics cards are now essentially very fast stream-based vector processors, and can be readily harnessed for general-purpose scientific computation other than graphics: particle, cloth, fluid simulations. The GPU replaces the CPU for computation, and texture or other video memory, with its much higher bandwidth and lower latency than system ram, is used as a backing store for data.
A lot of the GDC and SIGGRAPH 2003 papers focus not on graphics directly, but on scientific computations using the CPU. It's very cool, and if nVidia and ATI the like ever want to expand into a new market, they should build cards with multiple GPUs each, and sell them to the scientific community, or to non-realtime CG places like Pixar to accelerate their offline rendering.
Norton has a little program called CrashGuard for Windows which supposedly can detect crashes, and somehow "recover" the program, at least enough so you can do a "Save As..." of what you're working on. Does anyone know how it works technically?
Perhaps by somehow taking "snapshots" of program state in memory, and then "rolling back" when a crash is detected? (It's the only way I can think of without having application-specific knowledge about internal data structures, etc.)
Reading the SecurityFocus article and the PDF affidavit, one wonders why did DirecTV have to print out in hard copy documents to give to the law firm when they would have just been OCRed again back into digital form. Why not just give encrypted files on CD-ROM directly to the law firm?
Insert dumb lawyer joke here...
Piracy sometimes HELPS economic development
on
RIAA vs The Economy
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a frequent traveller to various countries in Asia for both business and personal trips, and I frequently encounter vendors of pirated movies, music, and software, and partook in buying their wares (warez?). Now, if one wanted to take a moral absolute, all of us should really be branded as hypocrites... But is piracy totally evil, without justification? Just like Communism, for example, a lot of people in the West seem to have a one-sided, black and white viewpoint of something which is a complicated issue.
As an example, look at many countries in East Asia -- piracy, for all its evils, helps build a base of demand for your products and fuels the sales of hardware, without which your stuff is useless anyhow.
What do I mean? There needs to be a established base of music listeners/movie viewers/software users and owners of hardware, like CD players, etc first. Without evil piracy, sales of PCs/CD/DVD players in Asia would have been much less than what it is now, and most people would not have heard of most Western software movies or music, if they had not been ubiquitously available.
So, in developing countries like China, piracy, by fueling a demand that would not have otherwise been there, and ensuring a base of owners with appropriate hardware, lays the foundation for a consumer base. Then, as economic conditions improve, companies move in there, leverage those customers and sell legit products while adding value (better manufacturing quality, etc.) at locally-affordable prices (this is a key point -- no one in any part of the world will pay the equivalent of a week's salary for a CD, for example). Look at places like Japan and Korea that are considered "developed" now. Of course, there's still some piracy in those places -- you can't eradicate it completely, but because you have these people now clamoring for music/movies/software, you now have a thriving music industry and market, both for local artists and for foreign corporations. As a country moves from developing to developed, so will piracy gradually decrease, if companies first build off the existing base of consumers which have been created by pirated material, and market to them (through the selling points of higher quality, etc.) rather than alienating or antagonizing them.
And of course, many times, piracy is the only option, if a company doesn't release their product there. One corollary and positive effect of it has been movie studios, for instance, releasing movies nearly simultaneously worldwide, whereas in the past, in Asia, one would often have to wait for months for a release, if it was to be released at all. In being a stimulus to create buzz and hype -- and ultimately, demand for more -- in countries where the American media juggernaut hasn't reached yet, piracy has been wonderfully successful in this regard.
Essentially, the blunt, hard, truth in much of the developing world is this: without piracy, you would not have had that base of potential consumers to begin with. It's a win/win situation, for the people, for the hardware makers, and ultimately (while it may take time) for the software and content makers as well. Sadly, the myopic vision of most of the corporations fail to grasp this fact.
In California, and most if not all other states, certain professions who come in contact with children are required by law to report suspected child abuse, which porn would certainly qualify as. These professions include the obvious (doctors, police, teachers, etc.) and not so obvious (photo processors).
Why shouldn't a computer support person have similar protection under the law, especially in this day and age, where so much of the porn is in digital form?
Yes, it's actually quite math-heavy -- the obvious linear algebra, and geometry for the graphics part. And since a 3-D world wouldn't be very interesting without things that move about and obey the laws of physics, add calculus, differential equations, and numerical analysis to the mix.
There's lots of math to challenge any math lover -- it's just a different kind than that used in encryption. If you hate math, you won't be a good graphics programmer.
My Warcraft III EULA (and I'm sure others -- that was just a random selection from my game collection) explicitly states that I have the right to make one backup copy.
Well, guess what -- that disc is copy protected. So, in order to excercise my authorized right under the EULA, I have to defeat the copy protection...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really Gmail's storage space that most people (myself included) find compelling about Gmail. Other free services like Spymac (http://www.spymac.net/) offer comparable storage amounts also.
Rather, it's the clean user interface, the automatic threading of messages, and the fast searching that most users (myself included) like.
Only if Yahoo, MS, SBC, et al. can replicate that part of the user experience, will Gmail have a viable competitor.
I took this photo at E3 -- hope this helps.
Diesel cars with similar fuel effiecncy, but definitely not the cleaniness, have been around for ages.
I realize that the real answer may be classified, but I'm interested in informed speculation as well.
Is the monitoring with the cooperation of the ISPs who control the gateways/routers? Is it mandated that they have the monitoring taps? Or is it unknown to them (NSA are tapping into the signal unbeknownst to the ISPs)?
(I think this has a known answer.) Is is true that pretty much all intercontinental traffic goes through the USA? ARe there any routes eg, Europe to Asia, or other continents that are just direct routes not passing via the USA?
I was in China just a few weeks ago -- Xanga have not been blocked for some reason.
I know many China-based bloggers who use Xanga as a matter of fact. It's not the best blog solution out there, because of its simplistic interface and lack of customization, but it works!
IIRC, the Patriot missile was never really designed or intended as an anti-missile missile, but a anti-aircraft (ie, a target much lower and slower) missile. It was only pressed into service killing Scuds because there was nothing better available.
So, wouldn't the Patriot missile failure be understandable due to it being used outside its original design? If the Patriot had been really intended and design as a missile killer, then yes, it should have a "failure" because it didn't live up to its original spec.
The only area where I can see problems is that Xbox vertex and pixel shaders can be (and often are) compiled to nVidia's proprietary binary format (which represents a much more hardware-specific mapping than the standard DirectX hardware-agnostic binary token format). If this issue is solved, or nVidia turns a blind eye, there should be no major technical obstacles to software emulation. Legally, I think it may be OK, as the specifics of the nVidia shader format is not disclosed even in the Xbox SDK itself, so Microsoft could very well write a layer that just translates the nVidia format to whatever internal scheme ATI's silicon will use.
Other consoles, like PS2 allow much more low-level access, so compatibility via software emulation only is more of a pain.
Maybe in the USA, credit cards have near universal acceptance, but in many countries in Asia, particularly mainland China, most businesses other than the newest Western-style department stores, are still cash only. The situation is changing, but as of now, ATMs are the most secure way to avoid carrying large amounts of cash around.
I'm not sure if anyone has actually tried to quantify this, but I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that unfettered DRM-free copying of music and other media indirectly helped the growth of many sectors of hi-tech. Of course, probably no exec will admit to it in fear of invoking the wrath of the RIAA/MPAA, etc. but it's still probably true.
Think about broadband, CD/DVD-R/RW, large hard drives, solid-state digital music players, etc -- all cheap and ubitquitously avaiable today, due in large part to the demand caused by music swapping, and all having beneficial applications beyond copyright violations.
I think that had Napster, KaZaA, etc not been possible due to DRM, you would not have had this growth, and the state of the tech industry would have been not as well off because of it.
While it's logical for, say, Chinese companies to have a Chinese domain name and Chinese e-mail addresses, it may not be the best choice if the company wishes to expand oversea.
Unfortunate but true, if a company has a Chinese domain name, it would probably be only used within China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan (since it's unicode), and maybe South Korea. The company would be pretty much limited to the East Asia market.
However, I suppose the company could get both a Chinese domain and an English, or rather Pinyin, domain so they could make their Chinese, or maybe other Asian clients feel "closer" while also being able to reach clients outside of East Asia.
I also think that it'd be great to give people the option of having a native-language email address. It's not too hard to set up a romanized email alias for it. An SMTP "X-Roman-Address" header could even by added to outgoing messages in case a recipient can't read the default "From" line.
Still, this just emphasizes the need to block all unnecessary ports or services, which was apparently not done in this case.
I'm amazed that those ATMs were connected to the Internet, without apparently even a firewall to block all but necessary ports.
Unlike some who suggest it's a space race just for propoganda value, the Chinese space program has been quite methodical and they've taken their time. They were originally going to launch in 1999 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the PRC, but wisely decided not to.
I would much rather see slow but steady progress for the Chinese, both in their engineering and operations, than hurried, rushed decisions that seemed to be a part of NASA culture and contributed to accidents like Challenger and Columbia and have now resulted in the US program at a standstill.
Valenti says a new program developed by Caltech researchers allows a movie file to be downloaded in five seconds
Did I miss something here? Is this some quantum leap in information theory/signal compression? Or maybe Caltech was doing some tests in their labs on a gigabit Ethernet connection, and Valenti thought that it meant that any home user could achieve such download times as well?
In my case, the spams seem to come from all over, from several continents. I'm guessing that those machines got owned through some backdoor or exploit, and they are simultaneously sending those spams. I wonder how all of them are simultaneously using my domain in the "from" header. Is there some central control server for these infected hosts that tell them "use this domain in your forged mails"?
The media seems to be focusing on, and the RIAA seems to be only going after those who share the mass-market crap like Britney, Eminem, etc. I for one, am more interested in Asian pop, anime, classical recordings, game soundtracks, indie stuff, (indie) Christian music, etc. that are simply unavailable for sale in the US, whether you want to pay for it or not.
The Internet provides a unique medium to distribute works such as the aforementioned categories, whose owners can't/don't want to bother marketing in the US because the demand is so small in absolute numbers. In the absence of official marketing, it allows a building of a fan following for non mass-market type works, possibly paving the way in several years for more organized marketing efforts. Witness the growth of anime from underground fansubs to small marketers in the US, to recent feature theatrical releases (eg, Spirited Away). Without the initial underground sharing, you wouldn't have the word-of-mouth hype.
The Russians, IIRC, were working on a GPS alternative as well, called GLONASS. What's the status of that.
Perhaps you meant to say "Multiparty Democracy" vs. "Communist" government.
A lot of the GDC and SIGGRAPH 2003 papers focus not on graphics directly, but on scientific computations using the CPU. It's very cool, and if nVidia and ATI the like ever want to expand into a new market, they should build cards with multiple GPUs each, and sell them to the scientific community, or to non-realtime CG places like Pixar to accelerate their offline rendering.
This page has a good summary of the current research going on to make GPUs do stuff other than graphics. http://wwwx.cs.unc.edu/~harrism/gpgpu/index.shtml
Norton has a little program called CrashGuard for Windows which supposedly can detect crashes, and somehow "recover" the program, at least enough so you can do a "Save As..." of what you're working on. Does anyone know how it works technically?
Perhaps by somehow taking "snapshots" of program state in memory, and then "rolling back" when a crash is detected? (It's the only way I can think of without having application-specific knowledge about internal data structures, etc.)
Reading the SecurityFocus article and the PDF affidavit, one wonders why did DirecTV have to print out in hard copy documents to give to the law firm when they would have just been OCRed again back into digital form. Why not just give encrypted files on CD-ROM directly to the law firm?
Insert dumb lawyer joke here...
I'm a frequent traveller to various countries in Asia for both business and personal trips, and I frequently encounter vendors of pirated movies, music, and software, and partook in buying their wares (warez?). Now, if one wanted to take a moral absolute, all of us should really be branded as hypocrites... But is piracy totally evil, without justification? Just like Communism, for example, a lot of people in the West seem to have a one-sided, black and white viewpoint of something which is a complicated issue.
As an example, look at many countries in East Asia -- piracy, for all its evils, helps build a base of demand for your products and fuels the sales of hardware, without which your stuff is useless anyhow.
What do I mean? There needs to be a established base of music listeners/movie viewers/software users and owners of hardware, like CD players, etc first. Without evil piracy, sales of PCs/CD/DVD players in Asia would have been much less than what it is now, and most people would not have heard of most Western software movies or music, if they had not been ubiquitously available.
So, in developing countries like China, piracy, by fueling a demand that would not have otherwise been there, and ensuring a base of owners with appropriate hardware, lays the foundation for a consumer base. Then, as economic conditions improve, companies move in there, leverage those customers and sell legit products while adding value (better manufacturing quality, etc.) at locally-affordable prices (this is a key point -- no one in any part of the world will pay the equivalent of a week's salary for a CD, for example). Look at places like Japan and Korea that are considered "developed" now. Of course, there's still some piracy in those places -- you can't eradicate it completely, but because you have these people now clamoring for music/movies/software, you now have a thriving music industry and market, both for local artists and for foreign corporations. As a country moves from developing to developed, so will piracy gradually decrease, if companies first build off the existing base of consumers which have been created by pirated material, and market to them (through the selling points of higher quality, etc.) rather than alienating or antagonizing them.
And of course, many times, piracy is the only option, if a company doesn't release their product there. One corollary and positive effect of it has been movie studios, for instance, releasing movies nearly simultaneously worldwide, whereas in the past, in Asia, one would often have to wait for months for a release, if it was to be released at all. In being a stimulus to create buzz and hype -- and ultimately, demand for more -- in countries where the American media juggernaut hasn't reached yet, piracy has been wonderfully successful in this regard.
Essentially, the blunt, hard, truth in much of the developing world is this: without piracy, you would not have had that base of potential consumers to begin with. It's a win/win situation, for the people, for the hardware makers, and ultimately (while it may take time) for the software and content makers as well. Sadly, the myopic vision of most of the corporations fail to grasp this fact.
Why shouldn't a computer support person have similar protection under the law, especially in this day and age, where so much of the porn is in digital form?
Yes, it's actually quite math-heavy -- the obvious linear algebra, and geometry for the graphics part. And since a 3-D world wouldn't be very interesting without things that move about and obey the laws of physics, add calculus, differential equations, and numerical analysis to the mix.
There's lots of math to challenge any math lover -- it's just a different kind than that used in encryption. If you hate math, you won't be a good graphics programmer.
My Warcraft III EULA (and I'm sure others -- that was just a random selection from my game collection) explicitly states that I have the right to make one backup copy.
Well, guess what -- that disc is copy protected. So, in order to excercise my authorized right under the EULA, I have to defeat the copy protection...