I'm assuming "they" refers to the government/police and "atty/client" refers to attorney-client privilege. I would make a guess they do so by claiming the phone conversation is not private (or at least private enough to be protected) but IANAL.
The co-op's lucky for the people there but still does not help the people without it.
See: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2000894&cid=35237276
Where the commenter claims the other internet providers prevented that (sounds like a perfectly reasonable business strategy to me, just not fair to the people and should be prevented as anticompetitive). I can kind of understand the whole 'public money vs private business is unfair' aspect to it, but they really should be required to actually compete at that stage or shut up about it, rather than leaving the people unserved.
The incumbents really are the problem with the whole thing. They continuously make promises for better infrastructure, take money to do that and then do nothing to little in actual improvements. Then they complain that they're over loaded.
I also have to ask how they measure whether or not someone can get broadband as it can be very complicated, even just in a small area of one city.
Well, that or the people who objected couldn't afford the gas to drive to the polling place and vote for the ban of the ban.
Oregon has a vote by mail system. As in they send you the ballot and you have a couple weeks I believe to fill it out and send it back to them by 1. putting a stamp on it and mailing it or 2. dropping it in a ballot collection box.
It makes it really simple to vote as you don't have to go find a polling place and you don't have to take off work/school/whatever on one specific day with everyone else.
Agency Pricing. Publisher sets price. That means they can't add an Apple tax.
I don't see why they will amended it considering it's targeted at eBook apps directly.
from Apple: "We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app"
Under the Agency Model for eBook pricing the publisher sets the price and the stores act as "agents" for the publisher selling at that price. They cannot sell lower or higher anymore (like wholesale books), but for the consumer all the agents (stores) each have the same price. The consumer doesn't have to pay more because of which store they buy from (ex: the Kindle/B&N/Borders/Sony books all cost the same so you can use your favorite store/reader rather than having accounts at all of them to get the best price).
The problem comes in by having Apple come in and want 30%. Apple is presumably part of the eBook sellers who do the Agency Model thing. That means that iBooks cost the same as Kindle books. Amazon being forced to hand over the 30% is them handing over their entire revenue (agency pricing I believe is 30%store/70%publisher). They can't raise the price to compensate because the prices are set by the publisher (raising the price wouldn't do much because it's % based anyways).
According to apple: "We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app" Which means that the whole thing of buying a book and syncing it to your Kindle app will no longer be the only way as it means they have to sell them inside the app too which will get Apple the 30%.
This means Kindle can't bypass the app store (Apple) using the web browser to make purchases any more. This means selling books on the iOS devices becomes unprofitable for them if they don't get any money from it and have to continue supporting the apps/bandwidth/servers/etc.
The whole thing just looks like Apple being even more greedy to me. They have a very popular app platform and are doing quite well. Pissing off the developers/stores of an entire industry is not a good thing for the consumer.
They didn't say cross platform native OS frameworks. They just said cross-platform multimedia frameworks. Take GStreamer for instance.
I do however like the idea of using the OS's native framework (as long as it works) just because Windows and Macs now come with most of the codecs you'll need. You can also install better ones (hardware decoding/etc) and have them run across the board rather than being limited to whatever is in the codec plugin you get for your browser. If I remember right it's how Opera handled h.264 video under Linux.
I don't think he was saying implement windows drivers on linux but rather implement a standard driver interface that does not change as rapidly (a few years between changes at least like XP/Vista/7) rather than what we have now.
Sovereign as "spaceship Cthulu"? For some reason that just hits me as the best description of it ever. I don't know why I didn't think of that before. Anyways.
I know what you mean though about the whole consequences not being exactly what you expect. I too didn't save the council, for the greater good. Losing ships to save some representatives or saving them for later in case there was another threat? I'd like to see the council members try to hold off space ships. I also lost crew members for doing 1 more quest. My main annoyance is the whole thing about getting there just in time. FTL travel using the ship itself wasn't instant from place to place but you manage to get there just in time to see some die but also in time to save some? Were millennia old AIs that inefficient that they hadn't developed faster ways to liquefy people or at least kill them immediately?
I know it's a game but I was a bit disappointed in it after the whole detailed universe they setup in the first one. They had such a nice codex in the first one and then they basically butchered a lot of stuff in the second. The heat-dissipation thing made sense, such as turning off non-essential ship systems (such as artificial gravity) in combat to allow the ship to fight longer without overheating. ME2 didn't seem to care and had people walking around like normal in combat. I know the whole clips thing was done for a gameplay "improvement" but it so did not make sense with the information from the first about no longer having to run out of ammo being such a good thing. The thing that really bugged me though was that I was disappointed in ME2's treatment of the universe they setup from the beginning. From ME1: "The cinematic version of explosive decompression is fiction; holed compartments either take enough damage that the occupants are killed instantly, or leak slowly enough that they are able to reach protective gear." Having replayed ME1 to completion right before ME2 came out in order to refresh myself on the universe, for them do that just annoyed me and somewhat soured the rest of the game for me unfortunately. Wow, bit off topic.
You mean all non-Open Source code right? A lot of Android is apparently under the Apache license. I do understand the want to have everything GPLed with everyone required to give back but I think just having an open source base system alone is an improvement from before.
Android does. It will display a list of things it needs to access, like device state/network access/ability to turn off autosuspend/etc. Ebook readers for example need to be able to prevent the screen from turning off. Messaging apps need network access. Etc. They are usually inflated from what you think the app should need though. Some are just insane with the permissions they want.
I think it's because of the number of downloads at a time.
You typically have only a handful of torrents running vs many files on the other networks.
One at a time downloading: you see nice fast speeds. Lots of files downloading: you see slow speeds all around even if you're going at the same total speed for all files as torrenting would.
That and the somewhat verifiedness you get from a torrent you get from a trusted source as opposed to searching in the other clients. The thing I don't get is why people assume that just because the search is there, it's the only thing that can be used. I would argue ed2k/magnet links and the like are easier than torrents in that they are just links rather than files. You click on the link, it downloads. Find a trustworthy indexing site (comparable to a bittorrent indexing site) and you've got a fairly reliable system that doesn't go away when the tracker does.
It's also not limited to the people who downloaded the exact same torrent as you but to everyone who is looking for a file with the same hash. Why did they use blocks instead of file hashes in bittorrent?
Torrents don't seem to last as long either. They start out fragmented and, rather than sharing everything they have, only a few are active at a time. It's worse for the general availability of files. Per torrent ratios I think mess things up: uploading to get a 1:1 on a file with 1000 seeds is not nearly as important as uploading anything on a file with 0.
The Merkle thing still seems to deal with blocks of a whole torrent instead of blocks of files that are in a torrent. Similarly with the other, it seems to be more focused on a new hashing method involving trackers knowing what pieces a user has in order to hand out peers that better meet user needs (as in giving a user a list of peers that have the pieces they need, as well as peers that need what the user has).
Neither one really solves the problem of swarms being divided simply because someone else made a torrent of the exact same file. Unless they're file based I don't really see how they would.
eMule collections are nice in that (the plaintext ones at least) are just: ed2k-link ed2k-link ed2k-link etc
I would say the advantage of eDonkey2000 (or eMule now) is the lack of ratios per file. You share large numbers of files and download large numbers. What gets uploaded is what's needed and requested by others, not necessarily a specific torrent you want to get a higher ratio on.
The no comments/fake filtering/requests/reseeds can be mostly solved the same way as Bittorrent has solved it, with a link site/forum community.
The other major advantage of ed2k is that there won't be two separate swarms for the same exact file like Bittorrent. Bittorrent really needs some kind of standardized hashing method per file, even if it's just added data in a torrent with the original Bittorrent hashing remaining intact. A problem I've seen a few times is where two separate (old/rare) torrents are of the same file but they both have no seeds, only partial availability, so neither one finishes even if together they would have the whole file.
I've actually had better luck with rare stuff on ed2k than Bittorrent because of that lack of (unnecessary) duplication.
eMule Collections (file with list of links) or Magnet Links (uri with hashes/filenames) are kind of my ideal, a hash based system for finding stuff not dependent on any site staying up.
Yes people use AVG still. At least one classroom of my school's computer building has it installed on all the laptops. The only thing probably saving them is that it's 32-bit windows.
I'm glad they have finally done away with it. It wasn't that useful because it was always elevated.
That being said it does seem to have had an impact on some things.
Take Final Fantasy XIII for instance (copied from TVTropes):
Colour Coded For Your Inconvenience: The Palamecia's colored security codes in Chapter 9 don't make any sense. First an intruder alert causes Code Red, which later escalates to Code Green, and after the prisoners escape to Code Purple. Hope wonders aloud what the heck it all means, and then it's completely lampshaded when Colonel Nabaat starts having her epic Villainous Breakdown, shouting "This means we have a Code Blue! Or maybe Code Yellow. Or maybe Code Orange. If it was Code Orange that would mean...?" But then Primarch Dysley puts an end to it and remarks that "Desperate times demand flexibility: [beat] Code White!"
It's the automatic list of things to block that you like, isn't it? Opera has had a somewhat simple content blocker for a while now but you had to either ad things yourself or find a list online and add it to Epera.
I thought most places used 2010/10/20. Isn't that some kind of ISO standard? I try to use it everywhere I can due to its easy sorting.
Just looked it up actually it's ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD
PS: Why can't we all just switch to UTC and big-endian times with 24 hours in a day not 12am + 12pm? It would make maintaining computers so much easier and we wouldn't have to keep updating those timezone parts in various things. We could also finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.
IANAL but I was under the impression you needed a warrant rather than a subpeona to obtain DNA from a suspect directly but anything that they throw away has no expectation of privacy because it was thrown away.
From what I understand anyone could pick up your spit off the ground and test it (not just the police). I think the UK has some protections against obtaining DNA for testing purposes without consent but I'm pretty sure the US doesn't.
The match with the son is not really relevant after they find the father as a suspect and wouldn't be used as conclusive evidence because they would now have the DNA from the pizza and would not need to rely on a partial match for probable cause.
I don't know about handheld but MKV files work pretty well on my Western Digital TV thing. Plays back h264/aac, h264/vorbis/vobsub, mpeg2/ac3/vobsub, all of those in MKV containers.
Other set-top devices apparently have support for mkv files too (don't have any other set top boxes to test it on, the WDTV HD works too well for me to try anything else).
For most games on Xbox Live microsoft hosts the matchmaking servers and the friends thing as well. It means that you should be able to play the game online forever until microsoft shuts down the server.
I know of one non-EA exception which only shut down part of the online component to a mech game that needed a special controller (very niche), and it was for the original xbox.
EA forces online games to use their servers for matchmaking rather than the general ones. It means that at any time EA can stop providing them and you can no longer play those games online (such as all the ones with 20XX in the name) possibly forcing you to upgrade.
The players on consoles are the servers in that they host the actual gameplay related stuff like this person shoots here, this person jumps, etc. The status info (so and so is playing Game X) on the consoles is still handled by microsoft/sony/nintendo.
The whole part of EA being able to stop online play on old games is why I don't buy from them. I could understand taking off old games that were for the original xbox for example but nothing from the last couple years.
Microsoft is banning the consoles though, not the accounts. You can still use your account for example on xbox.com or on another console. Thus you still have the account that you subscribed to and paid for.
It creates a lock file when it has been opened by the first person. All others after it get a prompt asking if they wish to open in read-only mode or open it as writable. As long as the person who's using it closes it when they are done using it or everyone who opens after does so in read-only mode it should be fine. If you run into a problem with it always being locked you can divide the passwords into separate files per category to reduce the amount of conflicts. Unless you have a lot of accounts/passwords that you change frequently you really shouldn't need to open it in write mode that much.
The "not all IT people should have access to all passwords" could be solved by having a different database per task (ex: one for backup account passwords, one for web server passwords, etc).
You could also make a database per group and per user with just the things that group/user needs in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm assuming "they" refers to the government/police and "atty/client" refers to attorney-client privilege. I would make a guess they do so by claiming the phone conversation is not private (or at least private enough to be protected) but IANAL.
The co-op's lucky for the people there but still does not help the people without it.
See:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2000894&cid=35237276
Where the commenter claims the other internet providers prevented that (sounds like a perfectly reasonable business strategy to me, just not fair to the people and should be prevented as anticompetitive). I can kind of understand the whole 'public money vs private business is unfair' aspect to it, but they really should be required to actually compete at that stage or shut up about it, rather than leaving the people unserved.
The incumbents really are the problem with the whole thing. They continuously make promises for better infrastructure, take money to do that and then do nothing to little in actual improvements. Then they complain that they're over loaded.
I also have to ask how they measure whether or not someone can get broadband as it can be very complicated, even just in a small area of one city.
Well, that or the people who objected couldn't afford the gas to drive to the polling place and vote for the ban of the ban.
Oregon has a vote by mail system. As in they send you the ballot and you have a couple weeks I believe to fill it out and send it back to them by 1. putting a stamp on it and mailing it or 2. dropping it in a ballot collection box.
It makes it really simple to vote as you don't have to go find a polling place and you don't have to take off work/school/whatever on one specific day with everyone else.
Agency pricing means publisher sets price so they would both be the same.
Agency Pricing.
Publisher sets price. That means they can't add an Apple tax.
I don't see why they will amended it considering it's targeted at eBook apps directly.
from Apple:
"We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app"
Under the Agency Model for eBook pricing the publisher sets the price and the stores act as "agents" for the publisher selling at that price. They cannot sell lower or higher anymore (like wholesale books), but for the consumer all the agents (stores) each have the same price. The consumer doesn't have to pay more because of which store they buy from (ex: the Kindle/B&N/Borders/Sony books all cost the same so you can use your favorite store/reader rather than having accounts at all of them to get the best price).
The problem comes in by having Apple come in and want 30%. Apple is presumably part of the eBook sellers who do the Agency Model thing. That means that iBooks cost the same as Kindle books. Amazon being forced to hand over the 30% is them handing over their entire revenue (agency pricing I believe is 30%store/70%publisher). They can't raise the price to compensate because the prices are set by the publisher (raising the price wouldn't do much because it's % based anyways).
According to apple:
"We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app"
Which means that the whole thing of buying a book and syncing it to your Kindle app will no longer be the only way as it means they have to sell them inside the app too which will get Apple the 30%.
This means Kindle can't bypass the app store (Apple) using the web browser to make purchases any more. This means selling books on the iOS devices becomes unprofitable for them if they don't get any money from it and have to continue supporting the apps/bandwidth/servers/etc.
The whole thing just looks like Apple being even more greedy to me. They have a very popular app platform and are doing quite well. Pissing off the developers/stores of an entire industry is not a good thing for the consumer.
They didn't say cross platform native OS frameworks. They just said cross-platform multimedia frameworks. Take GStreamer for instance.
I do however like the idea of using the OS's native framework (as long as it works) just because Windows and Macs now come with most of the codecs you'll need. You can also install better ones (hardware decoding/etc) and have them run across the board rather than being limited to whatever is in the codec plugin you get for your browser. If I remember right it's how Opera handled h.264 video under Linux.
I don't think he was saying implement windows drivers on linux but rather implement a standard driver interface that does not change as rapidly (a few years between changes at least like XP/Vista/7) rather than what we have now.
Sovereign as "spaceship Cthulu"? For some reason that just hits me as the best description of it ever. I don't know why I didn't think of that before. Anyways.
I know what you mean though about the whole consequences not being exactly what you expect. I too didn't save the council, for the greater good. Losing ships to save some representatives or saving them for later in case there was another threat? I'd like to see the council members try to hold off space ships. I also lost crew members for doing 1 more quest. My main annoyance is the whole thing about getting there just in time. FTL travel using the ship itself wasn't instant from place to place but you manage to get there just in time to see some die but also in time to save some? Were millennia old AIs that inefficient that they hadn't developed faster ways to liquefy people or at least kill them immediately?
I know it's a game but I was a bit disappointed in it after the whole detailed universe they setup in the first one. They had such a nice codex in the first one and then they basically butchered a lot of stuff in the second. The heat-dissipation thing made sense, such as turning off non-essential ship systems (such as artificial gravity) in combat to allow the ship to fight longer without overheating. ME2 didn't seem to care and had people walking around like normal in combat. I know the whole clips thing was done for a gameplay "improvement" but it so did not make sense with the information from the first about no longer having to run out of ammo being such a good thing. The thing that really bugged me though was that I was disappointed in ME2's treatment of the universe they setup from the beginning. From ME1: "The cinematic version of explosive decompression is fiction; holed compartments either take enough damage that the occupants are killed instantly, or leak slowly enough that they are able to reach protective gear." Having replayed ME1 to completion right before ME2 came out in order to refresh myself on the universe, for them do that just annoyed me and somewhat soured the rest of the game for me unfortunately. Wow, bit off topic.
You mean all non-Open Source code right? A lot of Android is apparently under the Apache license. I do understand the want to have everything GPLed with everyone required to give back but I think just having an open source base system alone is an improvement from before.
I don't know about GoogleTV but my Android based media player has an option in the browser settings for using a desktop user agent.
Android does. It will display a list of things it needs to access, like device state/network access/ability to turn off autosuspend/etc. Ebook readers for example need to be able to prevent the screen from turning off. Messaging apps need network access. Etc. They are usually inflated from what you think the app should need though. Some are just insane with the permissions they want.
I think it's because of the number of downloads at a time.
You typically have only a handful of torrents running vs many files on the other networks.
One at a time downloading: you see nice fast speeds. Lots of files downloading: you see slow speeds all around even if you're going at the same total speed for all files as torrenting would.
That and the somewhat verifiedness you get from a torrent you get from a trusted source as opposed to searching in the other clients. The thing I don't get is why people assume that just because the search is there, it's the only thing that can be used. I would argue ed2k/magnet links and the like are easier than torrents in that they are just links rather than files. You click on the link, it downloads. Find a trustworthy indexing site (comparable to a bittorrent indexing site) and you've got a fairly reliable system that doesn't go away when the tracker does.
It's also not limited to the people who downloaded the exact same torrent as you but to everyone who is looking for a file with the same hash. Why did they use blocks instead of file hashes in bittorrent?
Torrents don't seem to last as long either. They start out fragmented and, rather than sharing everything they have, only a few are active at a time. It's worse for the general availability of files. Per torrent ratios I think mess things up: uploading to get a 1:1 on a file with 1000 seeds is not nearly as important as uploading anything on a file with 0.
The Merkle thing still seems to deal with blocks of a whole torrent instead of blocks of files that are in a torrent. Similarly with the other, it seems to be more focused on a new hashing method involving trackers knowing what pieces a user has in order to hand out peers that better meet user needs (as in giving a user a list of peers that have the pieces they need, as well as peers that need what the user has).
Neither one really solves the problem of swarms being divided simply because someone else made a torrent of the exact same file. Unless they're file based I don't really see how they would.
eMule collections are nice in that (the plaintext ones at least) are just:
ed2k-link
ed2k-link
ed2k-link
etc
I would say the advantage of eDonkey2000 (or eMule now) is the lack of ratios per file. You share large numbers of files and download large numbers. What gets uploaded is what's needed and requested by others, not necessarily a specific torrent you want to get a higher ratio on.
The no comments/fake filtering/requests/reseeds can be mostly solved the same way as Bittorrent has solved it, with a link site/forum community.
The other major advantage of ed2k is that there won't be two separate swarms for the same exact file like Bittorrent. Bittorrent really needs some kind of standardized hashing method per file, even if it's just added data in a torrent with the original Bittorrent hashing remaining intact. A problem I've seen a few times is where two separate (old/rare) torrents are of the same file but they both have no seeds, only partial availability, so neither one finishes even if together they would have the whole file.
I've actually had better luck with rare stuff on ed2k than Bittorrent because of that lack of (unnecessary) duplication.
eMule Collections (file with list of links) or Magnet Links (uri with hashes/filenames) are kind of my ideal, a hash based system for finding stuff not dependent on any site staying up.
Yes people use AVG still. At least one classroom of my school's computer building has it installed on all the laptops. The only thing probably saving them is that it's 32-bit windows.
That being said it does seem to have had an impact on some things.
Take Final Fantasy XIII for instance (copied from TVTropes):
Colour Coded For Your Inconvenience: The Palamecia's colored security codes in Chapter 9 don't make any sense. First an intruder alert causes Code Red, which later escalates to Code Green, and after the prisoners escape to Code Purple. Hope wonders aloud what the heck it all means, and then it's completely lampshaded when Colonel Nabaat starts having her epic Villainous Breakdown, shouting "This means we have a Code Blue! Or maybe Code Yellow. Or maybe Code Orange. If it was Code Orange that would mean...?" But then Primarch Dysley puts an end to it and remarks that "Desperate times demand flexibility: [beat] Code White!"
By Adblock you mean Adblock Plus right?
It's the automatic list of things to block that you like, isn't it?
Opera has had a somewhat simple content blocker for a while now but you had to either ad things yourself or find a list online and add it to Epera.
I thought most places used 2010/10/20. Isn't that some kind of ISO standard? I try to use it everywhere I can due to its easy sorting.
Just looked it up actually it's ISO 8601
YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD
PS: Why can't we all just switch to UTC and big-endian times with 24 hours in a day not 12am + 12pm? It would make maintaining computers so much easier and we wouldn't have to keep updating those timezone parts in various things. We could also finally kill off Daylight Saving Time.
IANAL but I was under the impression you needed a warrant rather than a subpeona to obtain DNA from a suspect directly but anything that they throw away has no expectation of privacy because it was thrown away.
From what I understand anyone could pick up your spit off the ground and test it (not just the police). I think the UK has some protections against obtaining DNA for testing purposes without consent but I'm pretty sure the US doesn't.
The match with the son is not really relevant after they find the father as a suspect and wouldn't be used as conclusive evidence because they would now have the DNA from the pizza and would not need to rely on a partial match for probable cause.
I guess for all those 10.4 guys getting dumped by the Moz there is always Opera. It still works on 10.4, right?
http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/793/
Apparently Opera still works on OS X Panther (10.3) as well as 10.4.
I don't know about handheld but MKV files work pretty well on my Western Digital TV thing. Plays back h264/aac, h264/vorbis/vobsub, mpeg2/ac3/vobsub, all of those in MKV containers.
Other set-top devices apparently have support for mkv files too (don't have any other set top boxes to test it on, the WDTV HD works too well for me to try anything else).
For most games on Xbox Live microsoft hosts the matchmaking servers and the friends thing as well. It means that you should be able to play the game online forever until microsoft shuts down the server.
I know of one non-EA exception which only shut down part of the online component to a mech game that needed a special controller (very niche), and it was for the original xbox.
EA forces online games to use their servers for matchmaking rather than the general ones. It means that at any time EA can stop providing them and you can no longer play those games online (such as all the ones with 20XX in the name) possibly forcing you to upgrade.
The players on consoles are the servers in that they host the actual gameplay related stuff like this person shoots here, this person jumps, etc. The status info (so and so is playing Game X) on the consoles is still handled by microsoft/sony/nintendo.
The whole part of EA being able to stop online play on old games is why I don't buy from them. I could understand taking off old games that were for the original xbox for example but nothing from the last couple years.
Microsoft is banning the consoles though, not the accounts. You can still use your account for example on xbox.com or on another console. Thus you still have the account that you subscribed to and paid for.
It creates a lock file when it has been opened by the first person. All others after it get a prompt asking if they wish to open in read-only mode or open it as writable. As long as the person who's using it closes it when they are done using it or everyone who opens after does so in read-only mode it should be fine. If you run into a problem with it always being locked you can divide the passwords into separate files per category to reduce the amount of conflicts. Unless you have a lot of accounts/passwords that you change frequently you really shouldn't need to open it in write mode that much.
The "not all IT people should have access to all passwords" could be solved by having a different database per task (ex: one for backup account passwords, one for web server passwords, etc).
You could also make a database per group and per user with just the things that group/user needs in it.