Pretty much, yes. In their demo, the alleged transmitter was up on an 850' tower. Reporters had to take it on faith that the signals reported by the recievers were really coming from that transmitter and that there wasn't a bank of car batteries and a 100W linear amp up there.
Until someone from outside the company can hook meters up to the transmitter and verify that it is really the source of the signal and that it's really using as little power as they claim, the demo is worthless.
Tha OpenOffice development team is anything but small, and it's definitely not some loose collaboration of volunteers like some other OSS projects. Most of the current core developers are Sun employees and are paid for their work on OO.o. If things get messy it will be because Sun and Google have different goals, not because of corporate money-grubbing clashing with GNU/ideology.
It would only work if there were some way of keeping the old revisions available. As it is now, the copyright holder can withold older versions of a work from the market. Just try to find the original cut of Star Wars on DVD, or a copy of E.T. where the g-men have guns instead of radios for sale today...
There aren't enough people who care about the copyright cartels' antics to make a dent in their sales. I haven't bought any new RIAA-affiliated artist's CDs since 2001, haven't bought an MPAA movie on DVD in almost that long, and have been to see maybe three films in the theater in that time. Somehow that hasn't helped, and the ??AA members are still making record profits even without my money...
They're not lunatics, they're evil. There is a difference.
The record labels' present business model must be working well, because they're still making record profits even though everyone with an internet connection is downloading music illegally. Their methods may destroy the cultural commons, eviscerate the public domain, and undermine what little respect was left for the American legal system, but they are making a huge profit, and in business that's all that really matters.
One of the large problems holding back HDTV has been the lack of a videodisc format. This is a product HDTV owners are crying out for
You think the HDTV owners are crying now, wait until they find out that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will require an HDCP-compliant monitor. Most of them will have to buy yet another $3,000+ TV if they want to watch movies at better than 480p resolution!
Encyclopedias are not (and AFAICT never have been) the sort of reference for solid pure facts you want them to be. Go dig up an encyclopedia from the 1950s or 60s, and compare with one published in the last few years. There are a lot of differences in articles on squishy topics like history, sociology, etc. Encyclopedias don't publish controversial ideas (that would get them tossed out of elementary and middle-school libraries, their main customers). They pander to the prejudices of the time, whether that be glorifying war, gratuitous bashing of communism and soft-pedaling evolution or political correctness and multiculturalism. Consensus among the ignorant shapes the content of print encyclopedias too.
You have no idea what that print encyclopedia's fact-checking procedures are, whether their research department is a thousand PhD holders or one bored junior-college dropout, or if any of those names on the title page even represent real people. Yet you trust them because they spend lots of money printing real books, because librarians (who may not have opened an encyclopedia volume since high school) pay for them, and because their factual errors and political bickering among the staff aren't aired publicly on slashdot.
A bit on the hard drive isn't really a discrete physical block that's all magnetized one way. It's more of an area with fuzzy edges that's mostly magnetized the same way. A spot that had been a one then overwritten with a zero will have a slightly different magnetic field that a zero overwritten with another zro, or a zero overwritten with one, etc. With special equipment and a lot of time, data-recovery labs can recover the bits that have been overwritten (especially if the whole disk was wiped with something simple like all zeros). If you overwrite the data several times with random bits then zero it, it's much harder to seperate what had been meaningful data from the random garbage it's been overwritten with.
The point here isn't that Windows and MacOS are moving filesystems out of the kernel (they aren't) or that microkernel = bad. It's that WinFS and Spotlight aren't filesystems, they're just userspace tools that simulate a database-style filesystem (meaning they still use plain old NTFS or HFS+ on disk). Therefore, the existence of WinFS and Spotlight are not convincing arguments for adopting reiser4, since Linux developers could build a similar tool that works with ext3, reiser3, xfs, etc.
In the future, please try reading and comprehending the article before you leap into slashdot bashing...
Please, stop all the speculating on what features will and won't be in Vista, how many different versions there will be, whether or not OpenGL games will work, what the hardware requirements will be, etc. All these things have changed in the past, and they will all change again before a real finished release oozes out of Redmond in a year or two. All our speculating accomplishes is giving MS free advertising by keeping the idea of Vista in the IT world's mind.
When there's a real "box with CDs in it sitting on the shelf at Best Buy" release, then it will be appropriate to comment. Until then, we're just feeding the hype monster.
The Killer App that I need to run, and can't be run on anything else. And what is that Killer App?
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video playback. Both will require the DRM infrastructure in Vista. Oh, and you'll need a monitor that does HDCP encryption (none presently on the market do) as well as a new computer with a beefy video card. Enjoy!
You don't seriously believe that Rockstar changed the game to placate Hillary Clinton, do you? She was giving them free publicity! Rockstar loved every minute of it, because controversy sells.
However, when Wal-Mart (whose political and social mores are just to the right of Attila the Hun) dropped GTA:SA for "objectionable content", Rockstar bent over backwards to please them. This re-release has nothing to do with showboating senators, and everything to do with getting the game back on the shelves at Wal-Mart.
No, it doesn't, at best it works sorta okay most of the time.
Any website where reloading the front page repeatedly gives you different layouts each time is fundamentally broken. Search for "slashdot" in bug reports at bugzilla.mozilla.org, and look at how many mozilla/firefox "bugs" are caused by slashdot's invalid HTML.
Nope, it's even older. Wikipedia doesn't give a date, but the guy who invented pulse jets died in 1905 so they must have been around well before WWII...
What does this window manager do that Mac OS X's doesn't?
It's free and runs on many different OSes and machine architectures, while OSX is limited to Apple's overpriced, closed hardware platform. Next question?
Don't hold your breath. The early adopters bought their hi-def equipment before Hollywood had a collective fit and started pushing for DRM to the screen on any signal over 480p. Older monitors that don't support HDMI will probably never be usable with HD content from the big entertainment corporations...
Apple *has* to respond, even if they don't want to. That's only true in trademark cases. Copyrights, NDAs, clickwrap license agreements, etc have no such restrictions on them.
Voyager is out of our solar system, but nowhere close to leaving the galaxy. To get a photo like the artists' renderings you would have to be farther from the milky way's core than the tips of it's arms are. So, since the milky way is about 100,000 lightyears across, a probe would need to be about 50,000 lightyears outside the galaxy's plane to see the whole thing clearly.
If we had space probes that could travel at the speed of light, it would take 50,000 years to get one to a spot where it could take a photo that looks like that rendering, and an equal amount of time for the image to come back. For Voyager 1 (the fastest man-made object in space) it would take 800 million years to get there. If the dinosaurs had launched Voyager, it would only be 10% of the way there now!
$200k is within so many people's reach for a house because banks will lend people money to buy one. It's a tangible asset they can take ownership of if the buyer stops making mortgage payments. Space flight isn't something that can be taken back and resold to pay off bad debt, it will be very hard to convince a bank to give you a loan for it.
There are many *many* more people who can qualify for a $200,000 mortgage than can afford to blow $200k in cash on a space vacation.
Why isn't there a sanity test required to hold public office?
Government would come to a crashing halt. Given all the media B.S., partisan bickering, back-stabbing, etc that goes on in government what sane person would want to hold a public office in the US?
I guarantee that as soon as it trashes a player you will lose that customer for life.
Nope. As you said, we're talking movies here, and nobody but a few slashdotters is willing to just live without them for the sake of making a point about digital rights. The loss of 10,000 Star Wars fans is chump change compared to what the MPAA have convinced themselves they are losing to casual copying.
People bought macrovision. They bought CSS. They bought music DRM in many forms. They'll buy self-destructive players, and chalk up the price of a new movie machine every few years as the cost of entertainment. If the only way to get new movies is to submit DNA samples, hand over the keys to your bank accounts, and agree to random anal probing, I think most people would do it.
If it was developed under a government grant, I disagree that it is his "personal intellectual property". If it was bought with the people's money, it is the people's code.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the demo mention in the summary fictional?
Pretty much, yes. In their demo, the alleged transmitter was up on an 850' tower. Reporters had to take it on faith that the signals reported by the recievers were really coming from that transmitter and that there wasn't a bank of car batteries and a 100W linear amp up there.
Until someone from outside the company can hook meters up to the transmitter and verify that it is really the source of the signal and that it's really using as little power as they claim, the demo is worthless.
Tha OpenOffice development team is anything but small, and it's definitely not some loose collaboration of volunteers like some other OSS projects. Most of the current core developers are Sun employees and are paid for their work on OO.o. If things get messy it will be because Sun and Google have different goals, not because of corporate money-grubbing clashing with GNU/ideology.
It would only work if there were some way of keeping the old revisions available. As it is now, the copyright holder can withold older versions of a work from the market. Just try to find the original cut of Star Wars on DVD, or a copy of E.T. where the g-men have guns instead of radios for sale today...
It's missing a "draw shape" feature.
No, it's not. It's missing an intuitive toolbox icon and menu items for the draw shapes feature it has.
Filters -> Render -> Gfig
There aren't enough people who care about the copyright cartels' antics to make a dent in their sales. I haven't bought any new RIAA-affiliated artist's CDs since 2001, haven't bought an MPAA movie on DVD in almost that long, and have been to see maybe three films in the theater in that time. Somehow that hasn't helped, and the ??AA members are still making record profits even without my money...
They're not lunatics, they're evil. There is a difference.
The record labels' present business model must be working well, because they're still making record profits even though everyone with an internet connection is downloading music illegally. Their methods may destroy the cultural commons, eviscerate the public domain, and undermine what little respect was left for the American legal system, but they are making a huge profit, and in business that's all that really matters.
One of the large problems holding back HDTV has been the lack of a videodisc format. This is a product HDTV owners are crying out for
You think the HDTV owners are crying now, wait until they find out that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will require an HDCP-compliant monitor. Most of them will have to buy yet another $3,000+ TV if they want to watch movies at better than 480p resolution!
Encyclopedias are not (and AFAICT never have been) the sort of reference for solid pure facts you want them to be. Go dig up an encyclopedia from the 1950s or 60s, and compare with one published in the last few years. There are a lot of differences in articles on squishy topics like history, sociology, etc. Encyclopedias don't publish controversial ideas (that would get them tossed out of elementary and middle-school libraries, their main customers). They pander to the prejudices of the time, whether that be glorifying war, gratuitous bashing of communism and soft-pedaling evolution or political correctness and multiculturalism. Consensus among the ignorant shapes the content of print encyclopedias too.
Thank you for proving the parent's point.
You have no idea what that print encyclopedia's fact-checking procedures are, whether their research department is a thousand PhD holders or one bored junior-college dropout, or if any of those names on the title page even represent real people. Yet you trust them because they spend lots of money printing real books, because librarians (who may not have opened an encyclopedia volume since high school) pay for them, and because their factual errors and political bickering among the staff aren't aired publicly on slashdot.
A bit on the hard drive isn't really a discrete physical block that's all magnetized one way. It's more of an area with fuzzy edges that's mostly magnetized the same way. A spot that had been a one then overwritten with a zero will have a slightly different magnetic field that a zero overwritten with another zro, or a zero overwritten with one, etc. With special equipment and a lot of time, data-recovery labs can recover the bits that have been overwritten (especially if the whole disk was wiped with something simple like all zeros). If you overwrite the data several times with random bits then zero it, it's much harder to seperate what had been meaningful data from the random garbage it's been overwritten with.
The point here isn't that Windows and MacOS are moving filesystems out of the kernel (they aren't) or that microkernel = bad. It's that WinFS and Spotlight aren't filesystems, they're just userspace tools that simulate a database-style filesystem (meaning they still use plain old NTFS or HFS+ on disk). Therefore, the existence of WinFS and Spotlight are not convincing arguments for adopting reiser4, since Linux developers could build a similar tool that works with ext3, reiser3, xfs, etc.
In the future, please try reading and comprehending the article before you leap into slashdot bashing...
Please, stop all the speculating on what features will and won't be in Vista, how many different versions there will be, whether or not OpenGL games will work, what the hardware requirements will be, etc. All these things have changed in the past, and they will all change again before a real finished release oozes out of Redmond in a year or two. All our speculating accomplishes is giving MS free advertising by keeping the idea of Vista in the IT world's mind.
When there's a real "box with CDs in it sitting on the shelf at Best Buy" release, then it will be appropriate to comment. Until then, we're just feeding the hype monster.
The Killer App that I need to run, and can't be run on anything else. And what is that Killer App?
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video playback. Both will require the DRM infrastructure in Vista. Oh, and you'll need a monitor that does HDCP encryption (none presently on the market do) as well as a new computer with a beefy video card. Enjoy!
You don't seriously believe that Rockstar changed the game to placate Hillary Clinton, do you? She was giving them free publicity! Rockstar loved every minute of it, because controversy sells.
However, when Wal-Mart (whose political and social mores are just to the right of Attila the Hun) dropped GTA:SA for "objectionable content", Rockstar bent over backwards to please them. This re-release has nothing to do with showboating senators, and everything to do with getting the game back on the shelves at Wal-Mart.
Slashdot works and it works well.
No, it doesn't, at best it works sorta okay most of the time.
Any website where reloading the front page repeatedly gives you different layouts each time is fundamentally broken. Search for "slashdot" in bug reports at bugzilla.mozilla.org, and look at how many mozilla/firefox "bugs" are caused by slashdot's invalid HTML.
Nope, it's even older. Wikipedia doesn't give a date, but the guy who invented pulse jets died in 1905 so they must have been around well before WWII...
What does this window manager do that Mac OS X's doesn't?
It's free and runs on many different OSes and machine architectures, while OSX is limited to Apple's overpriced, closed hardware platform. Next question?
Don't hold your breath. The early adopters bought their hi-def equipment before Hollywood had a collective fit and started pushing for DRM to the screen on any signal over 480p. Older monitors that don't support HDMI will probably never be usable with HD content from the big entertainment corporations...
Apple *has* to respond, even if they don't want to.
That's only true in trademark cases. Copyrights, NDAs, clickwrap license agreements, etc have no such restrictions on them.
Voyager is out of our solar system, but nowhere close to leaving the galaxy. To get a photo like the artists' renderings you would have to be farther from the milky way's core than the tips of it's arms are. So, since the milky way is about 100,000 lightyears across, a probe would need to be about 50,000 lightyears outside the galaxy's plane to see the whole thing clearly.
If we had space probes that could travel at the speed of light, it would take 50,000 years to get one to a spot where it could take a photo that looks like that rendering, and an equal amount of time for the image to come back. For Voyager 1 (the fastest man-made object in space) it would take 800 million years to get there. If the dinosaurs had launched Voyager, it would only be 10% of the way there now!
$200k is within so many people's reach for a house because banks will lend people money to buy one. It's a tangible asset they can take ownership of if the buyer stops making mortgage payments. Space flight isn't something that can be taken back and resold to pay off bad debt, it will be very hard to convince a bank to give you a loan for it.
There are many *many* more people who can qualify for a $200,000 mortgage than can afford to blow $200k in cash on a space vacation.
Why isn't there a sanity test required to hold public office?
Government would come to a crashing halt. Given all the media B.S., partisan bickering, back-stabbing, etc that goes on in government what sane person would want to hold a public office in the US?
I guarantee that as soon as it trashes a player you will lose that customer for life.
Nope. As you said, we're talking movies here, and nobody but a few slashdotters is willing to just live without them for the sake of making a point about digital rights. The loss of 10,000 Star Wars fans is chump change compared to what the MPAA have convinced themselves they are losing to casual copying.
People bought macrovision. They bought CSS. They bought music DRM in many forms. They'll buy self-destructive players, and chalk up the price of a new movie machine every few years as the cost of entertainment. If the only way to get new movies is to submit DNA samples, hand over the keys to your bank accounts, and agree to random anal probing, I think most people would do it.
If it was developed under a government grant, I disagree that it is his "personal intellectual property". If it was bought with the people's money, it is the people's code.
Then how will you get your TV?
/.ers do now.
Over the internet, from people in countries with sane copyright law, same as a lot of