...on the one hand, the studios are greedy schmucks out to screw everyone all around.
Remember that these "greedy schmucks" are the ones lobbying and influencing the law. You, I, the Slashdot community, we do not. But we are tax paying constituents. The only time we influence this is when we vote--and let's face it, it's not a voting issue.
When Sonny Bono and Walt Disney effectively controlled the government into changing these laws, they were done selfishly. Nowhere were we represented. To say that Senator Bono acted with only his constituents in mind is a joke.
So suddenly the double edged sword is coming back to cut one of the prime promoters today of these laws. Historically these term limits of enforceable copyright have only gotten longer. And their implications for the internet and digital media has been more than encumbering. I'm not saying these laws don't help the big companies and artists make more money. I'm only saying that it's getting to a ridiculous point. Time Warner/New Line Cinema might take it so hard from the Tolkien family that they realize their lost future profits 50 years from now is a small price to pay compared to all the material they could have in public domain to make movies and derivative works from.
Lastly, was anyone ever wondering why there was no Lord of the Rings movies officially for so long? It's because the Tolkein family was just looking for someone to get screwed by. They probably saw through all the other scams.
Hopefully this is a wake up call to those who have extended copyright for far too long. It will only start hurting themselves and actually inhibiting/endangering their profession.
Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser.
Just a note, I think Mozilla tries to shirk any idea of "company" or "corporation" from the open source development side of things. Instead, they are a non-profit foundation and recently created a separate taxable corporation with the intent of distribution and productizing Firefox & Thunderbird.
I think the word 'company' implies commercial interests and the developing part of Mozilla--the Foundation--does not have any commercial interests. While this may seem unimportant to you, I believe it to be a pretty important concept to clarify when you're talking about open source from a non-profit and open source from a company.
Your prediction need only look back on UI technologies like Flash to realize that there will certainly be some of an "artistic" nature that will be enabled by this new technology to make their page look like this. Don't get me wrong, I love !!! and their music. And I find the site amusing. Horrendously confusing (you'll notice you can interact with those things) but a common occurrence among bands to take Flash to a level it's not supposed to go.
And I welcome it. Seriously, I'd rather have this be a well formed completely open standard in CSS and allow the creative types a way to vent and put tattoo or gothic or whatever font all over their page. At least I won't need a plugin. At least it won't be in some weird.swf file. At least the browser will be able to show you something if you don't have the ability/desire to render it.
I'm not going to start using this until everything's ironed out and your average web surfer finds it not only acceptable but desirable. But I still am excited that CSS and HTML are meeting needs. With IE6 soon dead, they are liberated.
People will abuse the tools you give them. If you don't believe me, go visit the graveyard that is Geocities. Doesn't stop the rest of us from using the tools in the way they were meant to be used. You might have an argument about this exacerbating the issue with these latest tools but I've always been one to promote unbridled liberation on the web.
I was merely repeating the details from last week when this was announcedon Google's blog. I've never known them to lie about what they discuss on that blog so I take it on good faith that they plan on releasing a new GUI ontop of Linux with all of it being open source. They also put up a FAQ about it. The fact that they are planning to release it for ARM also indicates it will be aimed at netbooks. They flat out say that Android was never supposed to be for netbooks.
Because from what I imagine to be most likely, you know close to nothing about Bill Gates's thoughts, Microsoft internals, Google internals, etc. So I can only guess you have no idea what you are talking about and in typical pundit fashion, pull things out of your ass, that support your p.o.v.
No one but Bill Gates knows what Bill Gates is thinking. No one but employees of Microsoft know their internals. No one but employees of Google know their internals. So judging by your assumptions, no one could possibly fill those conditions to make a statement about Chrome OS or say what a business man must be thinking. Thanks for calling me a "typical pundit." I thought my statements were well informed and informed readers. Nice to know that I "have no idea what I am talking about" and am "pulling things out of my ass." I note that you provided no specific details of anything nor do you provide anything worth reading about the discussion at hand. If these are guesses, prove me wrong with facts.
I really hope I am totally wrong with my guesses,
You also save yourself from being a complete troll by offering me this trivial gem of "hope." How this was moderated insightful is beyond me.
and that you have some special insight. But if, then why did you not base your arguments on it by stating it?
So correct me if I'm wrong, and I will thank you for having learned something.
But if I am right, please just shut up.:)
Please, Hurricane78, do me a favor--go here and mark me as a Foe. Then go here and find the section called "People Modifier" and set Foes to be -6 so you never have to read my uninformed guesses. Really, it would be a huge favor to me not to have to read your responses to my comments.
He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web
That's easy. It's a good way to lure technically minded people into installing Silverlight. No sale here Gates, I'll wait until it's available by torrent.
For the technically literate, Moonlight is open source. You should try it out to view these. Word of warning, it uses some of the same protocols so if you're concerned about violating Microsoft's copyright, better to avoid it. They are listed under the community promise now but you never know. And if you're RMS, you're probably going to rip this post apart.
Ballmer and Gates also echoed the note Business Division President Stephen Elop sounded in an interview with CNET News last week--that Microsoft really doesn't know what Chrome OS will look like.
"Who knows what this thing is?" Ballmer said.
It's the Linux kernel with a new UI. Probably will have some other beefed up parts (security or graphics) along with better hardware support on select devices as they throw their weight around. Judging by the name, it will most likely have a windowing look a lot like the browser. Could be different but I'll bet they build it with real estate in mind like the Chrome browser for netbooks.
I'm also guessing that you know a hell of a lot more about Chrome OS than many of Google's own employees as you've never been entirely stupid when it comes to keeping tabs on your enemies. So either you're letting your own personal ego get in the way of your business sense while underestimating Google or you are asking a rhetorical question to spread uncertainty of what Chrome OS could be. Either way it's pretty childish. I may not know exactly what Chrome OS is but I definitely know what Windows Vista is and I do not want.
Bell Canada executives revealed that the company "slows certain types of downloads [P2P] to as little as 1.5 to 3 per cent of their advertised speed during 9-1/2 hours of the day
Hey, that's fine by me. Force people to download when it won't affect other people. It's either that or pay a small fortune for a service with guaranteed bandwidth.
You do realize that by using P2P to get my Warcraft patches & Ubuntu ISOs that I am reducing the load normally incurred by going all the way to California for them, don't you?
Look up content distribution networks (CDN) and see how they helped reduce traffic on the internet. Now think about how P2P allows people to be 'kinder' to everyone who uses the internet. By shaping the traffic, you are telling me to go back to the old way when I would request 1 GB of data from across the country and everyone along the way would have to make room for my traffic.
A method was developed to better manage traffic in the big picture. Now ISPs are actually discouraging this technique! ISPs don't want quick efficient traffic on their lines (which is what occurs when you're down the street from me and we're sharing data for a large ISO) so they want to shift the load back out to the entire internet. "Stupid" does not begin to describe this.
The major Canadian Internet and phone service provider Rogers, meanwhile, compared 'person-to-person file-sharing to a car that parks in one lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging the roadways for everyone unless someone takes action.'
I'm not a customer of Rogers but I do know that Comcast and Cox cap you at your cable modem (and I'd bet Rogers does too)... so a better analogy might be:
'a car that parks in its own lane of a busy highway with a lane for every home at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves unless they take action.'
And the best analogy would be:
'a single person driving nonstop cars in their own personal lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves because they paid for the lane and they're going to fucking use it.'
If you can't support 5Mb/s don't advertise 5Mb/s! And don't sell people plans with that written on it if you can't support everyone doing it! Oh? You've discovered people will shell out a lot more money for better connections so you like to be able to advertise 5Mb/s? You don't say...
Zed, man, we gotta talk. Your site has changed since Slashdot last led me to it. Back then I thought it was black and had huge scrawled letters over the top of it that said "Zed's So Fucking Awesome!" So what happened to ZSFA? Also, now when I click that link you seemed to have replaced your badass rant against people with an apologetic explanation of your "parody" and you won't grant poermission to publish it? That's a shame I quoted the best part on the Slashdot story.
What happened to you, man? You used to be cool! Where's all the in your face swearing and abrasiveness? You used to be hardcore! Your 'music' is so alive with raw power but now your site is somehow more respectable.
And now in your latest rant you're complaining that by writing Mongrel you weren't given a consulting job? You weren't handed a company to destroy? Well, way to stick it to the man, my friend. You seem to enjoy bashing the hell out of developers trying to get a job done for not standing up and screaming "Zed's So Fucking Awesome" but now you are complaining that didn't win you a job.
You, are a great software developer. Much better than I in all probability. You are a complete and utter asshole in nearly every other respect (yes, even in your music) and it should come as no surprise that you cannot land a job on a team. I would not pay money for your projects since I don't use them but I will send you $20 to stay in a hole, write software and restrict yourself from communicating with the outside world. Really, the world would be a better place.
One: The title is a borderline lie. Yes, you can buy 12x 1TB drives for about a grand. But if I'm going to build an array and bench mark it and constantly compare it to buying a Core i7-975 Extreme, the drives alone don't do me any good! (And I love how you continually reiterate with statements like "The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget")
Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.
Three: Said controller is going to easily run you another grand. And I'm certain most controllers that accomplish what you're asking are pretty damned expensive and they will have a bigger impact than the drives on your results.
Four: You don't compare this hardware setup with any other setup. Build the "Uber RAID Array" you claim. Uber compared to what, precisely? How does a cheap Adaptac compare? Are you sure there's not a better controller for less money?
All you showed was that we increase our throughput and reduce our access times with RAID 0 & 5 compared to a single drive. So? Isn't that what's supposed to happen? Oh, and you split it across seven pages like Tom's Hardware loves to do. And I can't click print to read the article uninterrupted anymore without logging in. And those Kontera ads that pop up whenever I accidentally cross them with my mouse to click your next page links, god I love those with all my heart.
So feel free to correct me but we are left with a marketing advertisement for an Areca product that doesn't even exist and a notice that storage just keeps getting cheaper. Did I miss anything?
...there have been numerous articles written on the lameness of waste of bandwidth that twitter is and they get shot down as anti-pop babble. Yet a 15 year old kid writes a dismissive and somewhat rambling "analytical" report saying that twitter is lame and a waste of time and all of a sudden he's a genius with social insight in to media tools?
The issue you notice is simple. If anyone above the age of 20 wrote this report, he or she would be viewed as "old" or "not with it" and the report would be dismissed as sour grapes or get off my lawn or some such thing. Oh, but wait, we have a 15 year old telling us this? Shit, that's the demographic this is supposed to work on! Oh man, now we better listen. And suddenly, overnight, it's okay to doubt Twitter's power out loud. Amazing.
The news here is that it took the voice of an innocent to wake up business men looking for the next marketing scam to pull on young people. "MySpace didn't work for marketing, maybe this Twitter thing will work? Never mind that I think it's stupid, I don't want to out myself as technologically inept and reveal I don't even use e-mail. No, we must avoid our inadequacies instead of addressing them." That's basically what's at work, very much like The Emperor's New Clothes (see my post above).
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
The best part of this article is the tag "!newsfornerds".
Didn't have time to read the article but I think the best part is the image they selected; I like where The Eclipse Foundation has gone with its logo. Are those white snake-like things supposed to be languages flocking to the Eclipse logo? If so, very inclusive.
I know that may be a joke to you but call up Epson or submit a ticket explaining to them your situation. Who knows? Maybe they have a storeroom with old floppies lying around so you can get the original software back? I imagine those disks wore out all the time. Just ask them if they have any of the original software for that model lying around. That would be amazing support if they did.
They do host the manual that indicates you have a parallel port and a RS-232C serial port to play with and also something that looks like expansion slots designed for peripherals. Good luck and have fun!
Well, I've read a lot of Knuth's stuff and though I don't see quite eye to eye with him, I definitely agree with his views on this. The source of the idea of non-mathematical software seems to come from patent attorney Eugene Quinn:
I have been criticized quite a lot for statements I have made that computer software is not the same as math, and I simply cannot back away from that. Nevertheless, as I have read through comments provided to Groklaw I am not so sure that my critics and I are as far apart on this position as one would belief.
And yes, he goes so far as to cite E. W. Dijkstra's three claims:
So much for the care needed to keep the arguments manageable: we can summarize it by stating that in programming mathematical elegance is not a dispensable luxury, but a matter of life and death.
The programmer applies mathematical techniques in an environment with an unprecedented potential for complication; this circumstance makes him methodologically very, very conscious of the steps he takes, the notations he introduces etc.
Much more than the average mathematician he is explicitly concerned with the effectiveness of this argument, much more than the average mathematician he is consciously concerned with the mathematical elegance of his argument.
And he claims these statements do not invalidate his idea that non-mathematical software should be patentable! Knuth and probably 90% of software developers will argue that Quinn is either ignorant or insane.
And these are the people arguing the case and ensuring software patents stand. Worse yet, Eugene teaches the most popular patent bar review course in the US. Ignorance begets ignorance.
'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.'
Sounds familiar to the kind of logic that Donald Knuth employs when discussing software patents. He tried reaching out to the EU Patent Office in an effort to avoid making algorithms patentable--he feels this has been a mistake in America. He recently sent the EU Patent Office Commissioner a 1994 letter he had originally sent to the United States Patent Office about patenting software. His argument is simple: (1) math cannot be patented (2) all algorithms are math (3) all software is one or more algorithms and so follows that software cannot be patentable. The USPTO replied by defining non-mathematical software to be patentable while purely mathematical software is not. Knuth sums himself up nicely: 'Basically I remain convinced that the patent policy most fair and most suitable for the world will regard mathematical ideas (such as algorithms) to be not subject to proprietary patent rights. For example, it would be terrible if somebody were to have a patent on an integer, like say 1009, so that nobody would be able to use that number "with further technical effect" without paying for a license. Although many software patents have unfortunately already been granted in the past, I hope that this practice will not continue in future. If Europe leads the way in this, I expect many Americans would want to emigrate so that they could continue to innovate in peace.'
Maybe the right way to approach this was to claim that general purpose processors are only capable of executing extremely complex mathematical algorithms--which should not be patentable. Therefor the software that runs on general purpose processors should not be patentable.
Lets say they implement this sort of thing..
How will they ever know that they reduced the number of storms?
The number of storms on a yearly basis is anything but consistent.
This is true--you wouldn't know instantly that you stopped a storm for sure. But as the length of time goes up without a hurricane, your confidence level rises until you surpass some threshold which is the longest distance of time between hurricanes. I'm sure meteorologists would like to speculate that the conditions are right but a new factor is stopping these storms. You'll just never really know.
Now, there's a lot of things you don't know whether or not you're changing. Such as the natural cycle of hurricanes influencing unknown factors like wildlife or pressure systems in other areas or rainfall up the East Coast being reduced resulting in lower crop yields and dryer soil? What effect (if any) will pumping this warm water down and cool water up have on the wildlife or natural currents of the ocean? It's warm and cold bodies of air that create natural cycling of air, I assume the same is true for water. If water went still, it might be great for us but bad for wildlife. I think there's a lot of questions one could raise about this. I'm not arguing against it, I just hope this is taken into consideration.
I mean, this 'weather control' should be used sparingly and I hope they don't take this to the next level and use airships to diffuse hot/cold fronts so that we don't get thunderstorms so that my power isn't knocked out for a few hours while my roommate complains he can't watch the latest episode of True Blood right away. Preventing hurricanes is a neat idea and I hope this works, I just hope there's not hidden costs like the rest of Bill's products.:)
And I'm pretty certain most of those ended or resulted in customers bitching out the provider. Yet here we go again. Why? Well, that's simple: ad revenue.
Tonight's Penn and Teller Episode is supposed to tackle video game violence tonight if you're interested. Apparently Jack Thompson is supposed to make an appearance. I cannot wait for them to talk to that crackpot.
Anyone know of any court cases involving Japanese sex games?
I know they get pretty obscene..
There's been a lot of talk and grandstanding for banning games like "RapeLay" but I don't think there's been a court case or decree. It's pretty difficult to get a hold of through a major outlet though. And I think Japan's version of the ESRB is passing new standards preventing the publishing of games like this. No court cases on US soil regarding this title to my knowledge. From what I've read, it seems to be the most explosively controversial title out there right now.
Declaration of Independence. Three inalienable rights. It shocks the hell out of me that people don't understand everyone's entitled to these. If what I'm doing doesn't deprive other people of these three rights, I should be able to do it. Yes, that's a libertarian viewpoint but it's in the Declaration of Independence. If I want to play Left 4 Dead in my home, what do you care? It's not depriving you of any of these three things and I enjoy it. Should I start saying that you sitting at home all night reading The Holy Bible is bothering me? Because it's about the same damn thing with Lazarus and the whipping and the lashing and the begetting and the Mary Magdalene and the apocalypse... See how stupid this argument is? It's a waste of time. It has been this way with books and movies and it will be that way with video games. Get over it and move on to target things worth your time censoring and prosecuting like child pornography.
I found this assessment to be adequate when looking at Microsoft as a marketing company that makes the operating system. But what about Bing and Natal? These have been two very important developments to different worlds following the departure of Gates. I read an article from ITPro UK that I think did a better job describing change (or lack thereof) and there's certainly others with their own 1-year-on take.
Personally, it's the small things that Microsoft has done differently that I see as real change. The recent ECMA standardization and community promise surrounding CLI and C# for one. While not perfect, it's an important step. Supporting more community standards (albeit questionable) in IE8 has also been a tremendous step in my mind. I'm not embracing IE8 yet out of sheer caution but these are certainly progressive moves however small. Has Ballmer toned down his wild intensity now that he heads Microsoft and is the unquestionable leader? I don't think so in the operating system world but maybe in smaller subsections of software development. The pricing and marketing strategies they've used for their OS have been just as questionable and (in the case of the OLPC) as ridiculous as ever.
I hate to say it as I thought it was the end of the world when Ballmer took over Microsoft and that everything was going to grind to a halt around them but things don't look so bad. Honestly, I'm more concerned with other companies buying up everyone and everything around them in their quest to own a full stack of software or dominate one cash cow field--Google included. Two or three years ago, had I rubbed--to have everything in the world that was made by them blink out of existence. Now, I'd probably have better things to spend that wish on. I hate to sound like an apologist because I still despise a lot of their marketing tactics and things they do. But I'm glad they're starting to show some improvement and at least a little bit of innovation. I think things had really stagnated under Gates and though Ballmer looked like the big bad wolf, he's obviously taking more risks now that he's in charge.
These sort of images are pretty familiar to me and I must admit I was never skeptical of research showing that you could classify brain patterns based on the object they were looking at or how they were feeling. I had thought this had gone so far as to be used to classify terrorists and used in trials (which is quite unnerving)! Well, it saddens me to say this but in a field where we normally take two steps forward today, we are taking one giant step back. The brain is such a complex thing to study concerning biology, chemistry, electromagnetic physics, psychiatry and psychology. The line where the physical sciences stop and the psychological science starts is so blurred and confusing, it's a shame that one of the few tools used to determine the hows and whys of it is being called into question. I think a lot of us hoped there was some hard scientific way to unravel this mystery of cognizance and conscience. After reading the article, it's a good thing this happened but a shame for quite a bit of research out there that must now be re-examined.
Re:So it plays back media
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is that it?
These days, if all you do is one thing, no matter how well you do it, you're always only going to be known for that one thing.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
What in the hell are you talking about? I hope your attitude is not commonplace. I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform (Win XP, Linux) for me that allows me to record streams and shoutcasts of any nature to any codec with any number of parameters... and a decent GUI interface so far. In VLC, I can open any WMV or AVI file without any fear of some messed up virus destroying my WinXP machine.
You know it's funny. You make media playback sound so trivial. Yet the number of solutions out there prove that nobody has perfected it. VLC has impressed me time and time again. I worship it for its simplicity. Have you even used said software? Or are you just bitter about something?
It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?
The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations. - Robert S. McNamara
Slightly offtopic but in high school I read a few books by Robert S McNamara who died yesterday. It's too bad he didn't get to see this agreement between old enemies. He was Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968. Although I did not agree with a lot of his views he shaped a lot of the nuclear buildup during the cold war. I believe he was responsible for abandoning Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear war. He was first tasked by Kennedy of explaining nuclear fallout. McNamara favored non-nuclear power and one of the books I read "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" shed a lot of light on the Vietnam war for me.
If you haven't seen Erol Morris' "The Fog of War" you should.
Rest in peace Robert Strange McNamara. You revealed to me the horrors that leadership must face during war.
Slashdot Mirror
...on the one hand, the studios are greedy schmucks out to screw everyone all around.
Remember that these "greedy schmucks" are the ones lobbying and influencing the law. You, I, the Slashdot community, we do not. But we are tax paying constituents. The only time we influence this is when we vote--and let's face it, it's not a voting issue.
When Sonny Bono and Walt Disney effectively controlled the government into changing these laws, they were done selfishly. Nowhere were we represented. To say that Senator Bono acted with only his constituents in mind is a joke.
So suddenly the double edged sword is coming back to cut one of the prime promoters today of these laws. Historically these term limits of enforceable copyright have only gotten longer. And their implications for the internet and digital media has been more than encumbering. I'm not saying these laws don't help the big companies and artists make more money. I'm only saying that it's getting to a ridiculous point. Time Warner/New Line Cinema might take it so hard from the Tolkien family that they realize their lost future profits 50 years from now is a small price to pay compared to all the material they could have in public domain to make movies and derivative works from.
Lastly, was anyone ever wondering why there was no Lord of the Rings movies officially for so long? It's because the Tolkein family was just looking for someone to get screwed by. They probably saw through all the other scams.
Hopefully this is a wake up call to those who have extended copyright for far too long. It will only start hurting themselves and actually inhibiting/endangering their profession.
Mozilla has confirmed the first security vulnerability in Firefox 3.5, saying that the bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser.
Just a note, I think Mozilla tries to shirk any idea of "company" or "corporation" from the open source development side of things. Instead, they are a non-profit foundation and recently created a separate taxable corporation with the intent of distribution and productizing Firefox & Thunderbird.
I think the word 'company' implies commercial interests and the developing part of Mozilla--the Foundation--does not have any commercial interests. While this may seem unimportant to you, I believe it to be a pretty important concept to clarify when you're talking about open source from a non-profit and open source from a company.
I can easily see this getting abused.
Your prediction need only look back on UI technologies like Flash to realize that there will certainly be some of an "artistic" nature that will be enabled by this new technology to make their page look like this. Don't get me wrong, I love !!! and their music. And I find the site amusing. Horrendously confusing (you'll notice you can interact with those things) but a common occurrence among bands to take Flash to a level it's not supposed to go.
.swf file. At least the browser will be able to show you something if you don't have the ability/desire to render it.
And I welcome it. Seriously, I'd rather have this be a well formed completely open standard in CSS and allow the creative types a way to vent and put tattoo or gothic or whatever font all over their page. At least I won't need a plugin. At least it won't be in some weird
I'm not going to start using this until everything's ironed out and your average web surfer finds it not only acceptable but desirable. But I still am excited that CSS and HTML are meeting needs. With IE6 soon dead, they are liberated.
People will abuse the tools you give them. If you don't believe me, go visit the graveyard that is Geocities. Doesn't stop the rest of us from using the tools in the way they were meant to be used. You might have an argument about this exacerbating the issue with these latest tools but I've always been one to promote unbridled liberation on the web.
...how did you come up with all this conclusions?
I was merely repeating the details from last week when this was announced on Google's blog. I've never known them to lie about what they discuss on that blog so I take it on good faith that they plan on releasing a new GUI ontop of Linux with all of it being open source. They also put up a FAQ about it. The fact that they are planning to release it for ARM also indicates it will be aimed at netbooks. They flat out say that Android was never supposed to be for netbooks.
Because from what I imagine to be most likely, you know close to nothing about Bill Gates's thoughts, Microsoft internals, Google internals, etc. So I can only guess you have no idea what you are talking about and in typical pundit fashion, pull things out of your ass, that support your p.o.v.
No one but Bill Gates knows what Bill Gates is thinking. No one but employees of Microsoft know their internals. No one but employees of Google know their internals. So judging by your assumptions, no one could possibly fill those conditions to make a statement about Chrome OS or say what a business man must be thinking. Thanks for calling me a "typical pundit." I thought my statements were well informed and informed readers. Nice to know that I "have no idea what I am talking about" and am "pulling things out of my ass." I note that you provided no specific details of anything nor do you provide anything worth reading about the discussion at hand. If these are guesses, prove me wrong with facts.
I really hope I am totally wrong with my guesses,
You also save yourself from being a complete troll by offering me this trivial gem of "hope." How this was moderated insightful is beyond me.
and that you have some special insight. But if, then why did you not base your arguments on it by stating it? So correct me if I'm wrong, and I will thank you for having learned something.
:)
But if I am right, please just shut up.
Please, Hurricane78, do me a favor--go here and mark me as a Foe. Then go here and find the section called "People Modifier" and set Foes to be -6 so you never have to read my uninformed guesses. Really, it would be a huge favor to me not to have to read your responses to my comments.
He goes into why he spent his own money to make a series of classic physics lectures available free on the Web
That's easy. It's a good way to lure technically minded people into installing Silverlight. No sale here Gates, I'll wait until it's available by torrent.
For the technically literate, Moonlight is open source. You should try it out to view these. Word of warning, it uses some of the same protocols so if you're concerned about violating Microsoft's copyright, better to avoid it. They are listed under the community promise now but you never know. And if you're RMS, you're probably going to rip this post apart.
Ballmer and Gates also echoed the note Business Division President Stephen Elop sounded in an interview with CNET News last week--that Microsoft really doesn't know what Chrome OS will look like.
"Who knows what this thing is?" Ballmer said.
It's the Linux kernel with a new UI. Probably will have some other beefed up parts (security or graphics) along with better hardware support on select devices as they throw their weight around. Judging by the name, it will most likely have a windowing look a lot like the browser. Could be different but I'll bet they build it with real estate in mind like the Chrome browser for netbooks.
I'm also guessing that you know a hell of a lot more about Chrome OS than many of Google's own employees as you've never been entirely stupid when it comes to keeping tabs on your enemies. So either you're letting your own personal ego get in the way of your business sense while underestimating Google or you are asking a rhetorical question to spread uncertainty of what Chrome OS could be. Either way it's pretty childish. I may not know exactly what Chrome OS is but I definitely know what Windows Vista is and I do not want.
Bell Canada executives revealed that the company "slows certain types of downloads [P2P] to as little as 1.5 to 3 per cent of their advertised speed during 9-1/2 hours of the day
Hey, that's fine by me. Force people to download when it won't affect other people. It's either that or pay a small fortune for a service with guaranteed bandwidth.
You do realize that by using P2P to get my Warcraft patches & Ubuntu ISOs that I am reducing the load normally incurred by going all the way to California for them, don't you?
Look up content distribution networks (CDN) and see how they helped reduce traffic on the internet. Now think about how P2P allows people to be 'kinder' to everyone who uses the internet. By shaping the traffic, you are telling me to go back to the old way when I would request 1 GB of data from across the country and everyone along the way would have to make room for my traffic.
A method was developed to better manage traffic in the big picture. Now ISPs are actually discouraging this technique! ISPs don't want quick efficient traffic on their lines (which is what occurs when you're down the street from me and we're sharing data for a large ISO) so they want to shift the load back out to the entire internet. "Stupid" does not begin to describe this.
The major Canadian Internet and phone service provider Rogers, meanwhile, compared 'person-to-person file-sharing to a car that parks in one lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging the roadways for everyone unless someone takes action.'
I'm not a customer of Rogers but I do know that Comcast and Cox cap you at your cable modem (and I'd bet Rogers does too) ... so a better analogy might be:
'a car that parks in its own lane of a busy highway with a lane for every home at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves unless they take action.'
And the best analogy would be:
'a single person driving nonstop cars in their own personal lane of a busy highway at all times of the day or night, clogging that lane for themselves because they paid for the lane and they're going to fucking use it.'
If you can't support 5Mb/s don't advertise 5Mb/s! And don't sell people plans with that written on it if you can't support everyone doing it! Oh? You've discovered people will shell out a lot more money for better connections so you like to be able to advertise 5Mb/s? You don't say ...
Zed, man, we gotta talk. Your site has changed since Slashdot last led me to it. Back then I thought it was black and had huge scrawled letters over the top of it that said "Zed's So Fucking Awesome!" So what happened to ZSFA? Also, now when I click that link you seemed to have replaced your badass rant against people with an apologetic explanation of your "parody" and you won't grant poermission to publish it? That's a shame I quoted the best part on the Slashdot story.
What happened to you, man? You used to be cool! Where's all the in your face swearing and abrasiveness? You used to be hardcore! Your 'music' is so alive with raw power but now your site is somehow more respectable.
And now in your latest rant you're complaining that by writing Mongrel you weren't given a consulting job? You weren't handed a company to destroy? Well, way to stick it to the man, my friend. You seem to enjoy bashing the hell out of developers trying to get a job done for not standing up and screaming "Zed's So Fucking Awesome" but now you are complaining that didn't win you a job.
You, are a great software developer. Much better than I in all probability. You are a complete and utter asshole in nearly every other respect (yes, even in your music) and it should come as no surprise that you cannot land a job on a team. I would not pay money for your projects since I don't use them but I will send you $20 to stay in a hole, write software and restrict yourself from communicating with the outside world. Really, the world would be a better place.
One: The title is a borderline lie. Yes, you can buy 12x 1TB drives for about a grand. But if I'm going to build an array and bench mark it and constantly compare it to buying a Core i7-975 Extreme, the drives alone don't do me any good! (And I love how you continually reiterate with statements like "The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget")
Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.
Three: Said controller is going to easily run you another grand. And I'm certain most controllers that accomplish what you're asking are pretty damned expensive and they will have a bigger impact than the drives on your results.
Four: You don't compare this hardware setup with any other setup. Build the "Uber RAID Array" you claim. Uber compared to what, precisely? How does a cheap Adaptac compare? Are you sure there's not a better controller for less money?
All you showed was that we increase our throughput and reduce our access times with RAID 0 & 5 compared to a single drive. So? Isn't that what's supposed to happen? Oh, and you split it across seven pages like Tom's Hardware loves to do. And I can't click print to read the article uninterrupted anymore without logging in. And those Kontera ads that pop up whenever I accidentally cross them with my mouse to click your next page links, god I love those with all my heart.
So feel free to correct me but we are left with a marketing advertisement for an Areca product that doesn't even exist and a notice that storage just keeps getting cheaper. Did I miss anything?
...there have been numerous articles written on the lameness of waste of bandwidth that twitter is and they get shot down as anti-pop babble. Yet a 15 year old kid writes a dismissive and somewhat rambling "analytical" report saying that twitter is lame and a waste of time and all of a sudden he's a genius with social insight in to media tools?
The issue you notice is simple. If anyone above the age of 20 wrote this report, he or she would be viewed as "old" or "not with it" and the report would be dismissed as sour grapes or get off my lawn or some such thing. Oh, but wait, we have a 15 year old telling us this? Shit, that's the demographic this is supposed to work on! Oh man, now we better listen. And suddenly, overnight, it's okay to doubt Twitter's power out loud. Amazing.
The news here is that it took the voice of an innocent to wake up business men looking for the next marketing scam to pull on young people. "MySpace didn't work for marketing, maybe this Twitter thing will work? Never mind that I think it's stupid, I don't want to out myself as technologically inept and reveal I don't even use e-mail. No, we must avoid our inadequacies instead of addressing them." That's basically what's at work, very much like The Emperor's New Clothes (see my post above).
The schoolboy poured scorn on Twitter, claiming that teenagers "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless".
Sounds familiar:
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, "Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor's new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!" in short, no one would allow that he could not see these much-admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office. Certainly, none of the Emperor's various suits, had ever made so great an impression, as these invisible ones.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
The best part of this article is the tag "!newsfornerds".
Didn't have time to read the article but I think the best part is the image they selected; I like where The Eclipse Foundation has gone with its logo. Are those white snake-like things supposed to be languages flocking to the Eclipse logo? If so, very inclusive.
I know that may be a joke to you but call up Epson or submit a ticket explaining to them your situation. Who knows? Maybe they have a storeroom with old floppies lying around so you can get the original software back? I imagine those disks wore out all the time. Just ask them if they have any of the original software for that model lying around. That would be amazing support if they did.
They do host the manual that indicates you have a parallel port and a RS-232C serial port to play with and also something that looks like expansion slots designed for peripherals. Good luck and have fun!
What is "non-mathematical software"?
Well, I've read a lot of Knuth's stuff and though I don't see quite eye to eye with him, I definitely agree with his views on this. The source of the idea of non-mathematical software seems to come from patent attorney Eugene Quinn:
I have been criticized quite a lot for statements I have made that computer software is not the same as math, and I simply cannot back away from that. Nevertheless, as I have read through comments provided to Groklaw I am not so sure that my critics and I are as far apart on this position as one would belief.
And yes, he goes so far as to cite E. W. Dijkstra's three claims:
And he claims these statements do not invalidate his idea that non-mathematical software should be patentable! Knuth and probably 90% of software developers will argue that Quinn is either ignorant or insane.
And these are the people arguing the case and ensuring software patents stand. Worse yet, Eugene teaches the most popular patent bar review course in the US. Ignorance begets ignorance.
'claims reciting the use of general purpose processors or computers do not satisfy the [Bilski] test.'
Sounds familiar to the kind of logic that Donald Knuth employs when discussing software patents. He tried reaching out to the EU Patent Office in an effort to avoid making algorithms patentable--he feels this has been a mistake in America. He recently sent the EU Patent Office Commissioner a 1994 letter he had originally sent to the United States Patent Office about patenting software. His argument is simple: (1) math cannot be patented (2) all algorithms are math (3) all software is one or more algorithms and so follows that software cannot be patentable. The USPTO replied by defining non-mathematical software to be patentable while purely mathematical software is not. Knuth sums himself up nicely: 'Basically I remain convinced that the patent policy most fair and most suitable for the world will regard mathematical ideas (such as algorithms) to be not subject to proprietary patent rights. For example, it would be terrible if somebody were to have a patent on an integer, like say 1009, so that nobody would be able to use that number "with further technical effect" without paying for a license. Although many software patents have unfortunately already been granted in the past, I hope that this practice will not continue in future. If Europe leads the way in this, I expect many Americans would want to emigrate so that they could continue to innovate in peace.'
Maybe the right way to approach this was to claim that general purpose processors are only capable of executing extremely complex mathematical algorithms--which should not be patentable. Therefor the software that runs on general purpose processors should not be patentable.
Lets say they implement this sort of thing.. How will they ever know that they reduced the number of storms? The number of storms on a yearly basis is anything but consistent.
This is true--you wouldn't know instantly that you stopped a storm for sure. But as the length of time goes up without a hurricane, your confidence level rises until you surpass some threshold which is the longest distance of time between hurricanes. I'm sure meteorologists would like to speculate that the conditions are right but a new factor is stopping these storms. You'll just never really know.
:)
Now, there's a lot of things you don't know whether or not you're changing. Such as the natural cycle of hurricanes influencing unknown factors like wildlife or pressure systems in other areas or rainfall up the East Coast being reduced resulting in lower crop yields and dryer soil? What effect (if any) will pumping this warm water down and cool water up have on the wildlife or natural currents of the ocean? It's warm and cold bodies of air that create natural cycling of air, I assume the same is true for water. If water went still, it might be great for us but bad for wildlife. I think there's a lot of questions one could raise about this. I'm not arguing against it, I just hope this is taken into consideration.
I mean, this 'weather control' should be used sparingly and I hope they don't take this to the next level and use airships to diffuse hot/cold fronts so that we don't get thunderstorms so that my power isn't knocked out for a few hours while my roommate complains he can't watch the latest episode of True Blood right away. Preventing hurricanes is a neat idea and I hope this works, I just hope there's not hidden costs like the rest of Bill's products.
Some may remember when VeriSign tried this back in 2003, where it also failed.
Oh yeah, way back in the day. But let us not forget Earthlink's attempt at this or Canadian Rogers Cable or Charter or NJ Cabelvision or ... I'm sure you could find no end to this stream of providers offering their customers something the customers simply do not want.
And I'm pretty certain most of those ended or resulted in customers bitching out the provider. Yet here we go again. Why? Well, that's simple: ad revenue.
Tonight's Penn and Teller Episode is supposed to tackle video game violence tonight if you're interested. Apparently Jack Thompson is supposed to make an appearance. I cannot wait for them to talk to that crackpot.
Anyone know of any court cases involving Japanese sex games? I know they get pretty obscene..
There's been a lot of talk and grandstanding for banning games like "RapeLay" but I don't think there's been a court case or decree. It's pretty difficult to get a hold of through a major outlet though. And I think Japan's version of the ESRB is passing new standards preventing the publishing of games like this. No court cases on US soil regarding this title to my knowledge. From what I've read, it seems to be the most explosively controversial title out there right now.
Declaration of Independence. Three inalienable rights. It shocks the hell out of me that people don't understand everyone's entitled to these. If what I'm doing doesn't deprive other people of these three rights, I should be able to do it. Yes, that's a libertarian viewpoint but it's in the Declaration of Independence. If I want to play Left 4 Dead in my home, what do you care? It's not depriving you of any of these three things and I enjoy it. Should I start saying that you sitting at home all night reading The Holy Bible is bothering me? Because it's about the same damn thing with Lazarus and the whipping and the lashing and the begetting and the Mary Magdalene and the apocalypse ... See how stupid this argument is? It's a waste of time. It has been this way with books and movies and it will be that way with video games. Get over it and move on to target things worth your time censoring and prosecuting like child pornography.
I found this assessment to be adequate when looking at Microsoft as a marketing company that makes the operating system. But what about Bing and Natal? These have been two very important developments to different worlds following the departure of Gates. I read an article from ITPro UK that I think did a better job describing change (or lack thereof) and there's certainly others with their own 1-year-on take.
Personally, it's the small things that Microsoft has done differently that I see as real change. The recent ECMA standardization and community promise surrounding CLI and C# for one. While not perfect, it's an important step. Supporting more community standards (albeit questionable) in IE8 has also been a tremendous step in my mind. I'm not embracing IE8 yet out of sheer caution but these are certainly progressive moves however small. Has Ballmer toned down his wild intensity now that he heads Microsoft and is the unquestionable leader? I don't think so in the operating system world but maybe in smaller subsections of software development. The pricing and marketing strategies they've used for their OS have been just as questionable and (in the case of the OLPC) as ridiculous as ever.
I hate to say it as I thought it was the end of the world when Ballmer took over Microsoft and that everything was going to grind to a halt around them but things don't look so bad. Honestly, I'm more concerned with other companies buying up everyone and everything around them in their quest to own a full stack of software or dominate one cash cow field--Google included. Two or three years ago, had I rubbed--to have everything in the world that was made by them blink out of existence. Now, I'd probably have better things to spend that wish on. I hate to sound like an apologist because I still despise a lot of their marketing tactics and things they do. But I'm glad they're starting to show some improvement and at least a little bit of innovation. I think things had really stagnated under Gates and though Ballmer looked like the big bad wolf, he's obviously taking more risks now that he's in charge.
These sort of images are pretty familiar to me and I must admit I was never skeptical of research showing that you could classify brain patterns based on the object they were looking at or how they were feeling. I had thought this had gone so far as to be used to classify terrorists and used in trials (which is quite unnerving)! Well, it saddens me to say this but in a field where we normally take two steps forward today, we are taking one giant step back. The brain is such a complex thing to study concerning biology, chemistry, electromagnetic physics, psychiatry and psychology. The line where the physical sciences stop and the psychological science starts is so blurred and confusing, it's a shame that one of the few tools used to determine the hows and whys of it is being called into question. I think a lot of us hoped there was some hard scientific way to unravel this mystery of cognizance and conscience. After reading the article, it's a good thing this happened but a shame for quite a bit of research out there that must now be re-examined.
Is that it?
These days, if all you do is one thing, no matter how well you do it, you're always only going to be known for that one thing.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
What in the hell are you talking about? I hope your attitude is not commonplace. I am not afraid to stand up for VLC for I've never found something that has worked so flawlessly crossplatform (Win XP, Linux) for me that allows me to record streams and shoutcasts of any nature to any codec with any number of parameters ... and a decent GUI interface so far. In VLC, I can open any WMV or AVI file without any fear of some messed up virus destroying my WinXP machine.
You know it's funny. You make media playback sound so trivial. Yet the number of solutions out there prove that nobody has perfected it. VLC has impressed me time and time again. I worship it for its simplicity. Have you even used said software? Or are you just bitter about something?
It plays every freaking codec under the sun with dead simplicity! That's such a herculean task, what more could you ask from it!?
The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations. - Robert S. McNamara
Slightly offtopic but in high school I read a few books by Robert S McNamara who died yesterday. It's too bad he didn't get to see this agreement between old enemies. He was Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968. Although I did not agree with a lot of his views he shaped a lot of the nuclear buildup during the cold war. I believe he was responsible for abandoning Eisenhower's policy of massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear war. He was first tasked by Kennedy of explaining nuclear fallout. McNamara favored non-nuclear power and one of the books I read "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" shed a lot of light on the Vietnam war for me.
If you haven't seen Erol Morris' "The Fog of War" you should.
Rest in peace Robert Strange McNamara. You revealed to me the horrors that leadership must face during war.