Everyone talks about filtering pr0n on the Internet, but what would happen if something else just as offending to many people were available?
What happens if someone leaves this on the screen
for everyone to see:
GOD DOES NOT EXIST
Or worse,
SANTA CLAUS DOES NOT EXIST
Think of the millions of little kids that would be scarred
for life by those shocking words! I think we
need to do something about that!
Sources indicate that the person or persons named in the suit are possibly employees of Apple and/or Apple's trusted third-party developers -- individuals who had access to Apple's trade secrets.
In other words, the people Apple is actually sueing signed contracts with Apple not to divulge
trade secrets. So there's the basis for the suit.
The rumor sites that posted the leaked pics and
info were threatened, but never sued, as far as
I know. I agree that Apple would have little
basis to sue web sites that had made no agreements
with Apple. So their threats were out of
line, but they haven't actually gone as far as sueing. Please post if I've missed something.
SurfWatch
is smarter than you think: web sites try to fool you with those deceptively innocent titles. But just rearrange the letters
and look what you get:
The final string is not random; it has information which can be extracted, so it can't be random.
No, both keys, viewed individually, are random: every bit in the keys has a 50% chance of being 0 and a 50% chance of being 1. If you have only one key, you have absolutely no information about the original data. A key stores information in how it is related to the other key. It's like a puzzle with three pieces (data, key #0, key #1): if you have only one piece, the others could be anything; but if you have any two pieces, then you can determine the other.
In fact, you can break data up into more than two keys. Here's how. Cool, no?
There's a fun encryption algorithm that lets you split up data into two parts. Each part is just random bits, but when put together, they reproduce the original data. Without both parts you have no information. Here's how it works. Let's say I have some information:
11101101
To encrypt it I choose a random binary string of the same length (key #0):
10010101
...and then I exclusive-or the data with the key to get key #1:
01111000
Both keys are just random bits. But if I have both of them, then I can exclusive-or them together to recover the original data. So would it be illegal for me to distribute one random string of bits, and someone else to distribute another random string of bits, that happen to produce DeCSS when xor'ed? I guess the MPAA would have to say that should be illegal...
You have to wonder why Cobalt bothers. As has been pointed out, NeXT, which Apple now owns, had a cube long before Cobalt did, and not only that, they even marketed it as a Cube. So Cobalt has to know they'll loose, so why would they even bother paying the legal fees for such a hopeless suit?
Maybe they're just looking for the press coverage -- it's their way of saying "Hey, we have a cube too!". In not too long we might see Cobalt suddenly decide to drop the suit once they've milked it for as much press coverage as they can get.
Whatever their motives, they're certainly not encouraging me to buy their products with frivolous lawsuits.
I had Dr. Touretzky for an interesting class last semester at CMU, Intoduction to Artificial Neural Networks. Like everyone else, he was told to remove DeCSS from his web page, but didn't. Check out his Gallery of CSS Descramblers -- it's quite interesting and informative about the legal and moral issues involved, besides being a good resource if you want to understand how the descrambling actually works. He's obviously put a lot of time and effort into this issue.
A stripped-down, cheap Cube would be excellent.
on
Apple Cube Confirmed
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· Score: 1
I really like the looks of this cube and also it's small size, since I need a physically small server for my college dorm room (currently I've got a lunchbox Sparc LX). The LX is getting a bit old, and Apple's Cube would be a perfect upgrade, except that it's a bit pricey. Would anyone else be in the market for a stripped-down cube -- no graphics, keyboard, mouse, modem, etc. -- that would be relatively cheap and perfect as a server-under-the-bed box? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard for Apple to offer such a model.
Apple's pretty much the only consumer PC manufacturer with cool skins, but there are quite a few past and present workstation manufacturers with cool cases. For example, there's SGI's colorful boxes, Sun's conservatively good-looking machines, and of course, the classic NeXT boxes which included Jobs' first cube computer. These are all on my list of old computers to buy for my future collection.:-) And I think Apple's new Cube is their best work of art yet.
Yes, Macintouch is quite a bit more reliable than MacOSRumors. They're primarily a Mac news and product announcement site rather than a rumors site which right away means their content is quite a bit different. Their site's updates are also regular and accurate, while MOSR's are irregular, usually inaccurate, and thin on content.
That said, there's nothing wrong woth MOSR... I read their site regularly just for fun; I wouldn't base important decisions on their news, though.
Following up on Apple's threats to get the rumors sites to remove news on their new products: the same thing has happened to the much more reliable Mac news site MacInTouch. They've posted Apple's letter and their response which is quite well written. MacInTouch was also reporting about a Cube system, which actually increases the chance that it's not a hoax since MacInTouch is much more accurate than other sites like MacOSRumors.
I would think several years floating through space on the way to Titan would kill off any life hanging on to the spacecraft. Titan is cold, but space is really, really cold. Plus, I'm sure NASA builds their spacecraft in very sterile environments.
Many people have talked about why Apple's OS is good, but I'd like to emphasize that there are many reasons that Apple's hardware is better. You don't have to use it to run Mac OS! Six months ago I was ready to buy a new computer (the Sparc 5 was getting a bit slow), and I carefully weighed the options. Here are some of the many reasons I chose to buy a G4:
Linux/PPC runs quite well on Macs and is my primary OS.
I've got a dual-boot setup so I can run Mac OS when I need to run certain applications such as Finale that don't run on Linux/PPC.
Not only that, but using the excellent open-source product Mac On Linux, I can boot Mac OS from within Linux.
I'll be able to run Mac OS X when it is available. I might switch to OS X as my primary OS since it may offer advantages over Linux and will definitely offer advantages over Mac OS 9.
The hardware is very fast, a pleasure to take apart, and it looks great. All of which are important to me.
So even though it costs a little more (although not too much more for me since I got a student discount), for me, Mac hardware was clearly the way to go.
Java is definitely still a maturing language and I think it has a lot of potential. One thing I'd like Java to be is more of a functional language, like Lisp or ML.
The Academy says the ruling will let filmmakers know its first priority is, and always will be, theatrical exhibition -- not home-based outlets like TV, cable or the Web.
...although they are rather stuck-up about it.
But I suspect that purpose may have to change. As technology gets better, home-based outlets may approach the quality of a theater, and thus theaters would become less important. TV certainly took business away from theaters, and I expect large widescreen digital TVs will take more away, as will Direct Digital Telepathic Media Streams.:-) Eventually, when most of the market is in the home rather than the theater, the Academy might be more receptive to movies debuted elsewhere. Who knows how long that will take, though.
Not quite -- I'd imagine it would be very hard to port the Carbon API set -- but here's something close. The API that Apple wants developers to write new OS X apps in, Cocoa, is based on the old NeXT API's which were availble on Windows NT and (I think) Solaris, and possibly some other OSs (not Linux). It's unclear whether Apple will take advantage of this cross-platform capability; they certainly haven't said anything about it, but there have been rumors.
It would be interesting to see a history of the boxes (and net connections) that have been used to serve Slashdot over the years, and when each was swapped out. Does such a thing exist?
P.S. I'm definitely noticing a nice speed improvement... good work guys!:-)
Importing QuickTime into iMovie
on
iMovie For Free
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· Score: 1
As noted in other comments, iMovie only imports movies in DV format. And you can only get movies in DV format if you have a FireWire device, or if you have QuickTime Pro, which costs $30 from Apple. Why do you need QuickTime Pro? Because that allows you to export QuickTime movies in various formats, functionality which Apple removed from recent versions of the free QuickTime Player.
But wait! There's another way, as noted on Macintouch. You can get an old version of the QuickTime player -- QuickTime 2.5 -- and convert QuickTime -> DV with that! Apple no longer distributes QT 2.5, but you should be able to find a copy floating around online (a quick search on Google turned up the goods for me), or you might have an old copy of QT on and old system CD or something.
After doing the conversion, just put the DV file in the Media folder of your iMovie project, and you're all set!
Slashdot Mirror
Or worse,
Think of the millions of little kids that would be scarred for life by those shocking words! I think we need to do something about that!
Hold on a minute, I don't remember Apple sueing any web sites! According to MacCentral,
Sources indicate that the person or persons named in the suit are possibly employees of Apple and/or Apple's trusted third-party developers -- individuals who had access to Apple's trade secrets.
In other words, the people Apple is actually sueing signed contracts with Apple not to divulge trade secrets. So there's the basis for the suit. The rumor sites that posted the leaked pics and info were threatened, but never sued, as far as I know. I agree that Apple would have little basis to sue web sites that had made no agreements with Apple. So their threats were out of line, but they haven't actually gone as far as sueing. Please post if I've missed something.
Poxy Coat => A COX TYPO
Dog Grooming => I'D GO GOG NORM (or DIG GOGO NORM)
Wate rbeds Online => A BED EEL ISN'T WORN
Diamond Limo => I LAID NOMDOM (or MAIM ODD LOIN)
How can you blame them?
No, both keys, viewed individually, are random: every bit in the keys has a 50% chance of being 0 and a 50% chance of being 1. If you have only one key, you have absolutely no information about the original data. A key stores information in how it is related to the other key. It's like a puzzle with three pieces (data, key #0, key #1): if you have only one piece, the others could be anything; but if you have any two pieces, then you can determine the other.
In fact, you can break data up into more than two keys. Here's how. Cool, no?
Maybe they're just looking for the press coverage -- it's their way of saying "Hey, we have a cube too!". In not too long we might see Cobalt suddenly decide to drop the suit once they've milked it for as much press coverage as they can get.
Whatever their motives, they're certainly not encouraging me to buy their products with frivolous lawsuits.
According to Mac OS Rumors, they will be "600MHz+ G4e processors". But no one really knows...
- A subnotebook with a G3 at up to 700 MHz and a 14.1" 1024x768 LCD, available March/April 2001
- A PowerBook G4 with a 600 MHz+ G4e, 15.3" 1280x1024 LCD, available January 2001
See their article for more specifics.I had Dr. Touretzky for an interesting class last semester at CMU, Intoduction to Artificial Neural Networks. Like everyone else, he was told to remove DeCSS from his web page, but didn't. Check out his Gallery of CSS Descramblers -- it's quite interesting and informative about the legal and moral issues involved, besides being a good resource if you want to understand how the descrambling actually works. He's obviously put a lot of time and effort into this issue.
I really like the looks of this cube and also it's small size, since I need a physically small server for my college dorm room (currently I've got a lunchbox Sparc LX). The LX is getting a bit old, and Apple's Cube would be a perfect upgrade, except that it's a bit pricey. Would anyone else be in the market for a stripped-down cube -- no graphics, keyboard, mouse, modem, etc. -- that would be relatively cheap and perfect as a server-under-the-bed box? It seems like it wouldn't be that hard for Apple to offer such a model.
Apple's pretty much the only consumer PC manufacturer with cool skins, but there are quite a few past and present workstation manufacturers with cool cases. For example, there's SGI's colorful boxes, Sun's conservatively good-looking machines, and of course, the classic NeXT boxes which included Jobs' first cube computer. These are all on my list of old computers to buy for my future collection. :-) And I think Apple's new Cube is their best work of art yet.
That said, there's nothing wrong woth MOSR... I read their site regularly just for fun; I wouldn't base important decisions on their news, though.
Following up on Apple's threats to get the rumors sites to remove news on their new products: the same thing has happened to the much more reliable Mac news site MacInTouch. They've posted Apple's letter and their response which is quite well written. MacInTouch was also reporting about a Cube system, which actually increases the chance that it's not a hoax since MacInTouch is much more accurate than other sites like MacOSRumors.
I would think several years floating through space on the way to Titan would kill off any life hanging on to the spacecraft. Titan is cold, but space is really, really cold. Plus, I'm sure NASA builds their spacecraft in very sterile environments.
So even though it costs a little more (although not too much more for me since I got a student discount), for me, Mac hardware was clearly the way to go.
I agree with most of what has been said here -- yes, you can get around needing templates by using inheritance, and yes, it's often ugly and/or inconvenient. But not only are there already some generic Java compilers, Sun has also proposed the official addition of generics to Java.
Java is definitely still a maturing language and I think it has a lot of potential. One thing I'd like Java to be is more of a functional language, like Lisp or ML.
Dot.Station... so that would be pronounced "dot dot station"?
How can a language be language-independent?
OS independence does sound good though. I bet it'll run on each and every OS supported by Microsoft!
The Academy says the ruling will let filmmakers know its first priority is, and always will be, theatrical exhibition -- not home-based outlets like TV, cable or the Web.
But I suspect that purpose may have to change. As technology gets better, home-based outlets may approach the quality of a theater, and thus theaters would become less important. TV certainly took business away from theaters, and I expect large widescreen digital TVs will take more away, as will Direct Digital Telepathic Media Streams. :-) Eventually, when most of the market is in the home rather than the theater, the Academy might be more receptive to movies debuted elsewhere. Who knows how long that will take, though.
Not quite -- I'd imagine it would be very hard to port the Carbon API set -- but here's something close. The API that Apple wants developers to write new OS X apps in, Cocoa, is based on the old NeXT API's which were availble on Windows NT and (I think) Solaris, and possibly some other OSs (not Linux). It's unclear whether Apple will take advantage of this cross-platform capability; they certainly haven't said anything about it, but there have been rumors.
P.S. I'm definitely noticing a nice speed improvement... good work guys! :-)
I'm not sure about LinuxPPC, but mkLinux does support SMP, apparently very well, on the old MP Power Macs, which included:
But wait! There's another way, as noted on Macintouch. You can get an old version of the QuickTime player -- QuickTime 2.5 -- and convert QuickTime -> DV with that! Apple no longer distributes QT 2.5, but you should be able to find a copy floating around online (a quick search on Google turned up the goods for me), or you might have an old copy of QT on and old system CD or something.
After doing the conversion, just put the DV file in the Media folder of your iMovie project, and you're all set!
Intel inside? Do you think it runs Linux?
Here's a link to Project Gutenberg. It's an excellent site. They've got lots of Shakespeare, for instance (his complete works, I would guess!). Also check out their note on what books you will find in Project Gutenberg.