Posts by Mike Kamermans 131 publicly visible posts • joined 13 May 2006
The idea of this tablet is not that it "replaces paper", but that it "replaces a tablet". And when one uses a tablet (I use a 12"x9" intuos), your hand does not get in the way of the work you're doing, because the input and the result are on different surfaces.
Going "back" to having your hands getting in the way of your art is a legitimate problem. One of the downsides of paper, as well as short brush media like aquarel, is that your tools (hand and arm included) obstruct part of your work while you're working on it. This is not a problem, but it's a minor inconvenience that tablets did away with. Cintiqs reintroduce that minor inconvenience, and as such is something to consider if you've been using a tablet for a while, and are considering the move to a "draw on your monitor" device.
Problems aren't solved by treating the symptoms, they are solved by solving the problem.
A problem with a bad transceiver is not FIXED by a free case, or a refund, it's fixed by solving the transceiver. And that's not an Apple issue, that's an "any company that produces a product with a bad transceiver". Unless such a company solves the actual problem, anything else they do in mitigation is spending money on what isn't the correct solution.
So, is offering money (or money-substitute products) instead of a solution "pretty good for ANY company"? No. No it is not.
I'm not an expert on law, but I'm pretty good with causality. "We are considering our legal remedies" is not how things work. Suing someone doesn't remedy a problem like this, it just demonstrates skype's misunderstanding of what security means. If not O'Neal, then someone else, and as always, if it's someone who stands to gain from it, he or she won't be doing talks about it and publishing papers. They'll use it to make money from somewhere in Russia or China.
Actually, the tests run just fine in other browsers. Opera does spectacularly well on them, Firefox 3.6 does decent on them, Minefield a lot better, Chrome performs them quite nicely except for the Asteroids demo, which it runs abysmally.
And these are good things, they give the other browsers makers something to go "wait, why is IE better than we are at these?" at, which will further improve them as applications.
All I can say is "hurray". Even if it took ten years, having the default mom and pop browser on the world's default mom and pop OS finally support the features we're using on established websites as well as experimental "standards" compliant HTML5 websites means today is not a day for pointing at MS and going "took you bloody long enough".
Hurray. plain and simple.
"But the software is free. So it's unreasonable to demand the moon on a stick"
Punches to the face are also free. Just because it's free, doesn't mean people need to shut about when it's not right.
Mozilla is a real organisation with real programmers and real software requirements they have to really work on, because that's what many of the people who work on firefox get paid for. I know, it's shocking, people who actually get paid to create open source software. Just because it's free to the end user does not mean you can just muck about and do a halfassed job. Especially if your product is the result of many tens of millions of dollars worth of investment.
Those donations mozilla gets are not "no strings attached" donations.
I'm a bit confused by the " those exposed have their so-called mates to thank for any exposure" statement... why are people who search for email addresses to blame for search engines being able to index the email address?
Why is that email address retained in a publically accessible way by facebook in the first place?
Unless I fail at English, doesn't the part "$675m to $825m for the Sun restructuring, which "eliminates redundant costs resulting from the acquisition of Sun"" imply that Oracle is going to spend between $400 and $600 million, in order not to spend... how much? that same amount? marginally more? Some tea and a slice of fail cake with cream, please.
The Microsoft Canonical Display Driver is a driver used by desktop composition to blend GDI and DirectX drawing. One call performs the same operating in two different drawing modes, hence canonical. For a change, the word actually means what the word means, instead of refering to the product.
http://www.dspdesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=214303691
It's a nice code, certainly a lot better than VP7.x, currently used in Skype.
And anything that Google buys and then opens up (rather than buys, and ties into its ad revenue business model) is a good thing. Buy me more free things, faceless company run by people no one knows, consisting of people who have a completely different idealistic world view than I do. You can keep your locked and tied in technologies, but buy me more free things!
Open Source has had the benfit of people debugging the code for free for quite a while now, it stands to reason people are starting to go "this is not our product, and no one is paying us to fix what we've discovered. we can either report it and hope someone fixes it (whenever they feel like it), or come up with POC code that exploits it, and if the company whose product is flawed wants to fix it, they can buy a license for the POC code"
Sound fair, to be honest. If you spend time to work out an exploit bug and the people whose program it is don't feel that's worth rewarding, charge them. No one's stopping Mozilla from forking over the same amount of money they charge for anyone else to get their hands on the exploit code. Just because it's open source doesn't mean everyone's an altruist through thick and thin - a little economic dip and anyone who can come up with a good way to generate cash will do so.
To borrow a phrase, the real wtf is that they're the first to figure out that if they sell licenses to exploit code, either the owning company can pay that license in order to stop the exploit, or their product gets blasted. Pretty effective business model really.
Instead of using double-entry book keeping, which we have been using en-masse since 15th century banking took off in Venice, which took off because it allowed us to make sure that funds went where they were supposed to, Ebay will happily pay someone based on the existence of a value in a cookie?
This case should be thrown out of court for "failure to actually use any kind of right to payment policy".
Seriously, how hard is it to hand client sites some server-side code that tells ebay which ads were rendered on their served pages, so that the ebay backend can verify an incoming referral link is legit. Add in a referral timeout and you're practically home. It doesn't really take a lot of effort to come up with something that doesn't rely on people not about where they've been on the internet.
"Can you imagine the Daily Wailing if they were NOT installed, and then a terrorist got on the plane?"
About a million billion brazillion pounds worth of savings that can be used to, in less than a month, completely rebuild whatever was destroyed (including the cost of the research required to make cloning of human beings a success, and reconstructing every person accidentallied in the event)?
I'd rather live at a high quality of living with some risk, than a particularly low quality of living with oh hey look the same amount of risk but at least some US company now has all my money.
Mostly @@Daniel Bennett, remember why you buy that RAM? It's there as secondary memory to the cpu's primary mem. You buy loads of it so that it can be filled up, as a way to not have to use the two or even three orders of magnitude slower tertiary memory (harddisk, flash drive, NAS, what have you).
A machine running slower because you have "less ram free" makes about as much sense as a company claiming they're going to have to cut cost because profit has gone down. You have that ram *so that it can be used*. Firefox (or any other browser or utility program you run along side your normal apps) taking up even something as ridiculous as 500mb of ram means you probably still have a good 3GB free for other applications.
Computing 101 time: you buy ram so that it can be used. Not so that it can sit there without being used. memory that's not in use isn't like racing stripes. It doesn't make your computer faster.
Just curious, how much longer will we be saying articles of the kind "funky title! A said ..., B said ..., over on forum X, C said ..., the end, we didn't bother embedding this information in a proper article because just quoting seventeen different other websites consitutes a post, right?"
It's not like we didn't know how to write articles with what people said they'd do, or without quoting, in the past...
Lots of "copyright violation" sentiments, but how does copyright law work in China? I personally had no idea of their laws on the issue, so I looked it up - http://www.chinaiprlaw.com/english/laws/laws10.htm was fairly useful.
Any competent lawyer will be able to point out that Google didn't violate Chinese national copyright laws, thanks to the text in section 4, article 22, point 8:
"Article 22 -- In the following cases, a work may be exploited without permission from, and without payment of remuneration to, the copyright owner, provided that the name of the author and the title of the work shall be mentioned and the other rights enjoyed by the copyright owner by virtue of this Law shall not be prejudiced:
"(8) reproduction of a work in its collections by a library, archive, memorial hall, museum, art gallery or any similar institution, for the purposes of the display, or preservation of a copy, of the work;"
Given googles archival purpose (regardless of their real intentions, that is the state intention), they're in the clear, and this is simple a problem of some people feeling treated unfairly. Sadly, the law doesn't cover fair, so: tough.
Of course, this sucks if you're a Chinese author, but there you have it - given China's copyright law, nothing unlawful actually occurred, and Google doesn't have to ask permission OR financially compensate anyone for what they've done. Not even after people cried foul.
" It recommended that France should rally other European nations to support its anti-piracy efforts."
I'm sorry, what anti-piracy efforts? Taxation isn't punishment, it's taxation. And in this case saying where the money goes means setting up an income dependency for those who most likely don't even want to earn money that way.
I'd love to support anti-piracy efforts, but then first come up with some, instead of with a tea party.
In a nutshell: quantum computing algorithms work with different operations from classical systems. In classical systems you can set a bit to either 1 or 0, and then you can perform gate logic with them. In quantum computing algorithms, you can do most gate operations except copy patterns (because all quantum gate operations must be reversible for reasons that have to do with a need for humans actually being able to understand the math that underpins the algorithms). In addition to the regular gate operations, there's also a set of operations that can "shift the balance" between the 0 and 1 state of a qubit so that it's, say, 50% 0 and 50% 1. then any further gate operation will actually operate on both those states. negating the qubit will make it 50% 1 and 50% 0 for instance. As long as you don't read the qubit befor your algorithm is done, this is great: it means you can apply one operation to a series of qubits and -if your algorithm is welldesigned, and extremeffs they are not easy to design- get out a qubit sequence that contains every possible correct answer, and none of the wrong answers.
The problem is you can only 'select' on of these answers, and you can't pick which one. once you measure the qubits, you get only one of the numbers, so as long as you only want "a right answer" rather than "a specific right answer" (for instance, factoring a number into its prime constituents) , or you designed your algorithm in such a way that the final qubit pattern is the only possible answer, job's done.
The real problem is that qubits are unreliable. Unlike classical bits, they tend to wobble about a bit and not always contain what you want them to contain, so quantum algorithms operate on the principle of "it's bloody unlikely that if I run it ten times and it gives the same answer ten times, that answer is wrong". Unlike a classical algorithm, you have to run a quantum algorithm quite a number of times before you can say that you're 99.999% confident the answer is correct. However, since the time required to run the algorithm can be an order of magnitude less than the classical approach, that's actually perfectly feasible.
If we had an actual quantum computing. Because so far, we don't. We just have books on the theory and math behind it, that shows that it will kick ass if we could ever build them, but the inability to copy (and thus duplicate) any bit pattern makes quantum algorithms hilarious complex. Hell, the most famous quantum algorithm (shor's algorithm) seems to have just been discovered mostly due to a stroke of luck (or, in engineering analogy, randomly hitting the keys and discovering you wrote a webbrowser)
"Load your own photos to create personal screensavers."
e-ink displays don't need screen savers...
What they don't say is whether the colour display can be turned off while reading. If it cannot, it's pretty much a shoe-in that a few months down the road they'll be serving up ads over it. It also has no stylus input, so forget about intuitively marking your books, we're apparently still stuck with the idiotic "write a note and attach to this page" construction instead of some quick jotting (we have the technology for instant response touch screens, why do we not use this?)
That also means it's not a notepad. Why is everyone making ereaders by starting with "what does the word reader imply" and then ignore everything else people do with a book-shaped paper medium.
so... what you're saying is that they're doing what a search engine is supposed to (ie, index the web in a way that makes that possible, which means doing it automatically), and that they are somehow responsible for "sending people to websites"? Methinkst thou hast the responsibilities reversed, sir.
A search engine shows you what it's indexed. If those sites were hosting malware during indexing, then, if you run a good search indexing system, you can detect that. if the sites don't host malware when a browser with the signature "googlebot" accesses it, then no such detection occurs (yeah, no matter how evil they are, google's bots do actually send a proper useragent string, and do respect robots.txt indexing instruction).
If you're an even better search engine, you ensure that people can find out which links that you've indexed contained malware at the time of indexing. Not "now", but "then". Getting around google's malware detection IF YOU INTENTIONALLY WANT TO, is really easy. That's why sites designed to lure you in so your machine can get cleaned up for all that it's worth is still there. However, sites that are unaware of the fact that they've been compromised are helped tremendously by an indexing system that detects malware, and can inform the webmasters of such sites where the threats may be hiding.
May way to learn a little more about how search indexing works, and how you can manipulate it, before you start calling kettles black. This approach is guaranteed to not work for intentional malware sites. Luckily, that's also not the goal in the slightest.
Does it come with a virtual sound card this time round? If not, the choice between Hyper-V and VMware is still one made mainly on "VMware can do more, why would I go with less for free, if I can have more for a minor fee that I can easily afford anyway?".
At the moment, VMware is simply faster than Sun's VirtualBox, and has more device capabilities than Hyper-V. Although that said, the moment Hyper-V offers the same device capabilities, VMware shall most likely be abandoned. Because after all, why pay for a product when the just-as-good comepetition is free.
The moment it looks like kartel practices have been used to deny a competing company a right that would otherwise be extended anyone else, or when business practices are not documented and can only be backed up by subjective, rather than objectively verifiable arguments.
It's called running a company. You don't retain the right to say fuck you, you suddenly have the obligation to show that you're treating everyone the way your company policies say they should be treated, and that those policies are not in violation of local, federal, and international law.
You would tell the government to fuck off, because you're just a person. Apple can't tell it to fuck off, because apple is a participant of the US domestic economy, which means they have to obey the law, and have to answer any and all questions asked in regards to possible violation of trade laws. There's a price to getting to play in the big kid's playground. If you don't want to play, stay a person. If you do want to play, read the rulebook and then make sure you don't slip up by making it too obvious you're not following the rules. Apple slipped up, the FCC asked questions.
As a general educator, the "free market" is about how producers and consumers reach an agreement on pricing for products and services. A supplier is free to charge what they like, and a consumer is free to find a different supplier if the pricing is unacceptable. It's a term used to indicate market-driving pricing. This scheme means that the government cannot step in and say "you know, this iphone app is too expensive, lower the price". However, the free market is not a legal no man's land: free market operates WITHIN the domestic and international laws, so the government *can* step in and say "you know, it's interesting how you're allowing people to make these applications, but you reject the one made by a competitor, even though there's nothing in your policies that say competitors aren't allowed to make applications. care to explain that, because that sounds very much like illegal business practices."
Opera does not allow right-click interception, so you can't make any RIA for that otherwise brilliant piece of browser, since you can't make context menus pop up. Older versions of Opera allowed users to manually turn this feature back on, but modern versions don't even let you do that. "Opera knows best, intercepting the right mouse click is terrible, terrible javascript"... so... no, Opera will not be supported until Opera supports the internet again.
Makes sense to me.
And Chrome's still not actually done. It turns over version numbers so fast it's better to say "web apps work if you have ccs2.1+, and javascript 1.2+"... although that might still be lying to the public =)
"Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert blogged that Sony had not enabled hardware virtualization due to "very little if any requests until recently."
should instead be
"Senior manager for product marketing Xavier Lauwaert blogged that Sony had taken the time and effort, and spent money towards ensuring that hardware virtualization was disabled for these chips due to "very little if any desire to give customers more than Sony says they should want."
details, details. Turning off a chip feature via the BIOS is not "not doing more for the customer", but "doing more to give the customer less".
"Besides, wasn't this attempted about eight, ten years ago?"
Yes, when people expected very different things from browsers, google maps didn't exist, people didn't play flash games for hours on end, and "having a computer" was in general a completely different thing from what it is today.
What was your point?
3D google maps using OpenGL? Yes please. Google Earth without an installer? Again, yes please. Proper 3d games that don't rely on flash? Again, yes please. If it ends up, like the "what the hell do we need that for??" canvas element, as part of a new specification, then it doesn't really become an obscure pluing, it just becomes something that a few people try to figure out how to effectively use at first, then one person, or site, does something amazing with it (to wit, the xmlhttprequest object had been around quite a while before someone went "hey, maybe I can use it for dynamic data loading" and the rest is history named AJAX) and the entire world will get with it.
Just because you don't see the use for it, doesn't mean other people can't enrich your world with it when /they/ do.
The intention was to have the specification be format agnostic *unless* all parties agreed on a single, freely implementable, high quality codec.
A consensus could not be reached, and so the specification will be kept to "work" as it does for images right now, meaning that it's up to the manufacturers to add in all-possible-format detection. If your browsers understands that a movie uses [your favourite codec here], and can use the decoder for it, all is well. If it cannot, or doesn't even understand the format definition, then the same happens as when you try to open an image that your browser doesn't understand in current browser: a nice empty or "do not understand!" box on the page.
Two words: "ATM key". These things are typically stuck in the wall with simple triangular/square slotting keys. They may set you back as much as 5 pounds. If you can find an ATM that isn't CCTV-ed (I'm looking at you, all of eastern Europe) then messing with one is just a matter of walking over to one at 3 in the morning.
Getting into an ATM is quite a lot easier than breaking into your own house.
Citing the Discovery article:
"The screen is so easy to assemble, said Thomas, that he that is working with a Boston area science teacher to produce a version cheap enough, safe enough and simple enough for middle and high school students to build in chemistry class."
I am going to completely and utterly ignore all the "ohnoz, volts instead of watts!" people and instead be amazed at display technology that school children will be able to make as a not-even-science-project. Trivialisation? Please, yes, as soon as humanly possible, I want reflective full spectrum colour displays to be something anyone can whip up over a couple of hours instead of having to trust the big tech players to make what they think we will buy by making it just far away enough from what we actually want =(
Plastic Logic's been vapourware until this very day, passing their own deadlines and dripfeeding the media actual information without rehashing old claims.
Until it's out, which might simply be never, I'm still going to wait for the iliad to get a little cheaper. The kindle's too much of a lock-in product, but cheap, the iliad an all purpose digital reader with touch screen and full OS access, but for 699 euro.
In the choice between a kindle and an iliad at the moment, I'm going with the laptop I already have and a printer. 700 euro buys me a lot of ink and paper.
Two images of which one has the correct orientation: 50% chance a spambot will guess correctly every time. A captcha with randomly pitched characters of text, 100/n% chance a spambot will guess correctly.
How is relying on a task that humans can do going to improve things when the odds of getting round it is statistically fixed at 50% because of the task choice?
@index argumenters: Google - and other search engines - indexes websites in general, including whatever links are on those websites. Thepiratebay (and mininova, etc. etc.) do not "index" torrent files by going out and finding them, they specifically ask users to submit them, and then in the case of really audacious sites, offer those files through their own tracker system.
I love downloading stuff through torrents, but I also love using my brain - if you run a website dedicated to categorised user-submitted ilelgal content and offer a tracker service to enable people to find your way into the cloud of seeders for a particular file, then yes, you're very obviously quite specifically oriented towards bringing people illegal material. You're not an "index" for external content, you're a user-based content provider, geared specifically towards offering world+dog illegal material. It''s really not a complicated argument to make.
Personally, I hope torrent trackers stay available, because they offer neatly categorised content that would otherwise cost me an arm and a leg, but you're deluding yourself if you validate using them by pretending they're just "google for torrents".
And @Lee JAckson, no: downloading copyrighted material is not stealing. It's an activity that can, but not always does - that said, in the vast majority of cases does - lead to immaterial damages. Copyright infringement of this nature is tantamount to exactly what it says on the tin: copyright infringment.
Don't go and equate it to a crime that's defined by taking posession of something by taking it away from the original holder. You woldn't steal a car, because you´re removing someone´s posession. If you had a machine that could instead scan that car and make a perfect duplicate, without paying the manufacturers that contributed to putting that car on the road, then hell yes, everyone would be cloning those ferrari 335s and pagani zonda's.
You wouldn't steal [fill in real thing here], but you sure as hell would copy it for free if you could, because that's what we like, and that´s what we see in these cases. Any amount of money for a product compared to free will only lead to people paying money if they think the product´s worth it, or the creators deserve it. Welcome to psychology 101.
Not all literature is 100 pages, and you don't need to run off 10,000 copies to significantly get in someone's way.
The illegal reprinting of material was a very real problem right up to the moment airtravel became affordable for the masses - works would make it from one country to another, get reprinted by someone who "thought it worth doing", and the original author typically wouldn't find out until much, much later.
The difference being of course that the original author didn't pull their article and hope that magically removed the illegal copies too.
Good job WoTC, the digital copies are on P2P networks now, pulling the legal versions from stores is the best way to make sure they spread as quickly as possible.
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