If someone steals your car today, you have a loss of the value of the car. If the police catch the guy the next week, and you get your car back, you now have a gain of the value of the car, and your actual damages should just be the costs of the inconvenience. Your bottom-line doesn't involve the value of the car at all. But the thief should be charged depending on the actual value of the car.
In the case of the companies, their bottom line may not have been affected much, but Mitnick still stole objects valued at many millions of dollars. He should not be liable for the value -- he should be liable for the loss.
The slashdot description wasn't written by anyone at slashdot. Notice the quotes; they are just repeating the story that someone has sent in. Don't blame slashdot for spin they haven't even created.
Officially, there's no private screenings. But if Oracle sends 10 of their interns down to wait in line at the box office hours before they start selling tickets, and each one buys the maximum 12, well that's a private screening. Of course, they could also just throw money at the exhibitor -- they don't care where they get the money as long as Lucas doesn't find out.
Egad -- this is very misleading! 128 kbps is a data rate. For a given length song, the size of the resulting file is a constant, plus/minus overhead. For your sample 7 minute 27 second song, 128 kbps encoding gives a resultant file size of 7152 Kbytes, which is basically the result you got.
Your fallacy is in concluding that two algorithms using the same bitrate sound the same. You can record a plain wav file at 128 kbps. It'll just be mono 8-bit, 16 Hz, and will sound crummy. You just can't use numbers to compare audio quality at the same bitrate. You have to do double-blind testing.
There is a possibility that the MS 128 kbps codec sounds better than MP3. Than it is a better algorithm. I agree that the "half-size" claim is almost surely false, but that does not mean that they don't have a better scheme.
From the story linked to in the "Kevin Mitnick to plead guilty" story that was on Slashdot a while ago:
"In April 1996, he pleaded guilty to possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices (cloned cellular telephone numbers), and for violating supervised release, and was sentenced to 22-months in federal prison."
First obvious point: There are no ad banners on NNTP, so how would Rob pay for the hardware? (And his food?) Also, switching to NNTP would kill the popularity of the site -- most internet users nowadays never deal with netnews. I know I rarely swim in those waters.
How about Chicago? Need to have something in the midwest. Also probably some southern city -- Atlanta or Orlando maybe. And how about Boston instead of DC -- nothing ever happens in DC!
"In April 1996, he pleaded guilty to possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices (cloned cellular telephone numbers), and for violating supervised release, and was sentenced to 22-months in federal prison. "
So while he *was* awaiting trial in prison, he would have been there anyway because of his own guilty admission. Dumbass.
While it does seem nuts, for some reason the keyword for that box is "brunching". So it's pretty clear that the boxes are sorted in keyword order, not label order. Weird tho.
"The retail version of SuSE 6.0 comes with enough software on the included five-CD set that even those of you with cable modems will feel lucky."
Since the kernel and GNU utilities are the same size no matter how much extra crap is thrown in, won't their percentage go down as bloat goes up? 300 Meg is ~9% of five CD's, while 45% of one CD (like Redhat). And I'm sure a lot of that "uncredited author" code that's #1 is the crap that SUSE throws in on the 4th or 5th CD's.
While I agree that GNU/Linux is a crappy name, I have real problems with this methodology of proving it.
You don't see a need and I don't see a need, but all those people who flame the posts that they are clearly not interested in (Katz comes to mind) have a need. At least I feel they have a need.
IBM has been around long enough that I think they've run out of acronyms! For example, WAS already stands for "warehouse administration system" and "work activity system". And that means it's one of the least used set of initials out there!
Rob has to be involved. They don't even have LINK to slashdot!!! All the links that look like they should be external just point to the redhat site. What a travesty.
Don't you think that redhat.com should show you the redhat news first? If I want news from slashdot, I'll go to slashdot. If I want to find out something about Red Hat, I don't want to wade through other site's news to find it.
Also, what's the deal with the slashdot links? Are they trying to insulate people from the "evil" comments threads? The page you get taken to when you click on a slashdot headline is like a neutered version of our beloved page. There is no way to get from the redhat page to the original story.
Rob, I hope you got some money out of this deal, because you've really sold your soul.
I actually had a boss once who raised concerns over this.shtml stuff on our web pages. She demanded to know why I couldn't change it to something with less chance to offend. This was at a large university where this kind of thing was not at all unusual. The end result was that we ALWAYS spelled out the acronym.
If you're a programmer for a large faceless corporation, see Office Space. It's so true that I laughed my ass off. Rushmore has it's moments, but it's not as much of a true comedy. Of course it's also going to be gone from the theaters in a week or two, so you might want to see it while you can.
If someone steals your car today, you have a loss of the value of the car. If the police catch the guy the next week, and you get your car back, you now have a gain of the value of the car, and your actual damages should just be the costs of the inconvenience. Your bottom-line doesn't involve the value of the car at all. But the thief should be charged depending on the actual value of the car.
In the case of the companies, their bottom line may not have been affected much, but Mitnick still stole objects valued at many millions of dollars. He should not be liable for the value -- he should be liable for the loss.
The slashdot description wasn't written by anyone at slashdot. Notice the quotes; they are just repeating the story that someone has sent in. Don't blame slashdot for spin they haven't even created.
Officially, there's no private screenings. But if Oracle sends 10 of their interns down to wait in line at the box office hours before they start selling tickets, and each one buys the maximum 12, well that's a private screening. Of course, they could also just throw money at the exhibitor -- they don't care where they get the money as long as Lucas doesn't find out.
The page with the mp3 has the whole list -- just don't scroll down.
Here's the link.
Just right click on the above, and save as...
Check it out: http://www3.vw.com/vwworld/music.htm
FYI: the commercial with everything in time to the music uses "Jung at Heart" by Master Cylinder.
Egad -- this is very misleading! 128 kbps is a data rate. For a given length song, the size of the resulting file is a constant, plus/minus overhead. For your sample 7 minute 27 second song, 128 kbps encoding gives a resultant file size of 7152 Kbytes, which is basically the result you got.
Your fallacy is in concluding that two algorithms using the same bitrate sound the same. You can record a plain wav file at 128 kbps. It'll just be mono 8-bit, 16 Hz, and will sound crummy. You just can't use numbers to compare audio quality at the same bitrate. You have to do double-blind testing.
There is a possibility that the MS 128 kbps codec sounds better than MP3. Than it is a better algorithm. I agree that the "half-size" claim is almost surely false, but that does not mean that they don't have a better scheme.
Here's a pretty good description: http://ddi.digital.net/~gandalf/meow.txt
If you've read this before, you might want to just look at the Changelog. It has the full text of the new items. Keep up the good work, esr!
From the story linked to in the "Kevin Mitnick to plead guilty" story that was on Slashdot a while ago:
"In April 1996, he pleaded guilty to possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices (cloned cellular telephone numbers), and for violating supervised release, and was sentenced to 22-months in federal prison."
First obvious point: There are no ad banners on NNTP, so how would Rob pay for the hardware? (And his food?) Also, switching to NNTP would kill the popularity of the site -- most internet users nowadays never deal with netnews. I know I rarely swim in those waters.
How about Chicago? Need to have something in the midwest. Also probably some southern city -- Atlanta or Orlando maybe. And how about Boston instead of DC -- nothing ever happens in DC!
What about this quote:
"In April 1996, he pleaded guilty to possession of 15 or more unauthorized access devices (cloned cellular telephone numbers), and for violating supervised release, and was sentenced to 22-months in federal prison. "
So while he *was* awaiting trial in prison, he would have been there anyway because of his own guilty admission. Dumbass.
While it does seem nuts, for some reason the keyword for that box is "brunching". So it's pretty clear that the boxes are sorted in keyword order, not label order. Weird tho.
There is a box for metacrawler now. Check it out.
According to the review from ArsTechnica:
"The retail version of SuSE 6.0 comes with enough software on the included five-CD set that even those of you with cable modems will feel lucky."
Since the kernel and GNU utilities are the same size no matter how much extra crap is thrown in, won't their percentage go down as bloat goes up? 300 Meg is ~9% of five CD's, while 45% of one CD (like Redhat). And I'm sure a lot of that "uncredited author" code that's #1 is the crap that SUSE throws in on the 4th or 5th CD's.
While I agree that GNU/Linux is a crappy name, I have real problems with this methodology of proving it.
You don't see a need and I don't see a need, but all those people who flame the posts that they are clearly not interested in (Katz comes to mind) have a need. At least I feel they have a need.
IBM has been around long enough that I think they've run out of acronyms! For example, WAS already stands for "warehouse administration system" and "work activity system". And that means it's one of the least used set of initials out there!
Rob has to be involved. They don't even have LINK to slashdot!!! All the links that look like they should be external just point to the redhat site. What a travesty.
Don't you think that redhat.com should show you the redhat news first? If I want news from slashdot, I'll go to slashdot. If I want to find out something about Red Hat, I don't want to wade through other site's news to find it.
Also, what's the deal with the slashdot links? Are they trying to insulate people from the "evil" comments threads? The page you get taken to when you click on a slashdot headline is like a neutered version of our beloved page. There is no way to get from the redhat page to the original story.
Rob, I hope you got some money out of this deal, because you've really sold your soul.
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Hey, they let me run OS/2! Win95 was not required. Besides how can you run Linux when it is standard at the company to keep Notes open all the time?
I actually had a boss once who raised concerns over this .shtml stuff on our web pages. She demanded to know why I couldn't change it to something with less chance to offend. This was at a large university where this kind of thing was not at all unusual. The end result was that we ALWAYS spelled out the acronym.
If you're a programmer for a large faceless corporation, see Office Space. It's so true that I laughed my ass off. Rushmore has it's moments, but it's not as much of a true comedy. Of course it's also going to be gone from the theaters in a week or two, so you might want to see it while you can.
This link has more information than you would ever want to know.