Terminally Incoherent

It appears that Hollywood managed to strike a deal with hardware makers. They will now be required to down-convert analog output for all the next-gen media such as BluRay.

[A]nalog signal must be “down-converted” from the full 1920×1080 lines of resolution the players are capable of outputting to 960×540 lines—a resolution closer to standard DVDs than to high-def. Standard DVDs are typically encoded at 720 horizontal by 480 vertical lines of resolution.

This is done to curb “piracy”? How exactly do they think it will work? This will only disadvantage the honest, law abiding consumer. Besides, even the average Joe will at one point ask himself - should I buy or download?

He can buy an expensive, DRM’d, locked down, next-gen media which will only play in DVD quality on his analog TV. On the other hand he can download a DVD quality analog rip of the same video, that is not only free but can be easily format-shifted and backed up. Which one is the more attractive choice?

If the low-quality copy is far superior to the original in more than one way, you know something is not right with the copyright protection scheme. But that’s just my opinion.

Thanks to a great tip from consistencies.net. Thanks dude!

The problem is that KDE does not like ubuntu’s no-root policy. I don’t like it either, and I feel retarded without a fully fledged root account on the system - so I guess we are in agreement. I always enable it. KDE has allot of user-context sensitive features (for example a button “log in as admin to access this panel” popping up if you run as user in kcontrol) it heavily relies on kdesu. If you have no root account this becomes an issue

It seems that over zealous Kubuntu developers removed (or failed to add) the following line to the kdeglobals config file:


[super-user-command]
super-user-command=su


If you append that to your kdeglobals you will be up and running in no time. You can do this locally just for your user account by modifying the ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals but it’s probably a better idea to just go ahead and fix it for every user by appending to /usr/share/kubuntu-default-settings/kde-profile/default/share/config/k deglobals

It worked for me

Personally I think that the Firefox link ping concept is one of the stupidest things I have seen in browser development lately. Who is going to use it? Let’s face it - it is very unlikely that equivalent feature will end up in IE and Opera. Most dev’s can’t be even bothered to make sure that their page even renders correctly in FF. Why would they bother adding ping links when they will already have tracking implemented using redirects?

Here are my concerns:

Privacy: this will make tracking easier than before - I don’t like people collecting data about me. At least when I get redirected, I know something funky is going on.

Will the ping use my proxy? If I’m using tor, are my pingbacks going through tor network?

Security: From what I understand, the spec allows multiple space separated URI’s to be used with the ping attribute. This can get really nasty, really fast. What happens if I specify “example.com” 500 or more times in my ping attribute and post it at a high traffic site? Can you say DDOS?

I would just love to see my server go up in flames just because some idiot posted a pingerized™ link on slashdot and I’m getting barraged by FF pings. All of them would come from individual IP’s too. How fun!

Also, what happens on the client side if hitting a single link will cue up few thousand pings? Wouldn’t that crash FF or make it unresponsive?

Compliance: This is not a w3c spec. This extension was drafted by whatwg.org. Most browsers don’t even bother to comply with half of the w3c stuff - is anyone else going to implement this?

What if Microsoft decides to implement proprietary “ping” extension in IE7 that will work completely differently than whatwg specs?

Even if the privacy and security issues are addressed, this will still be useless unless MS jumps at the bandwagon…

Today I visited the newly opened University Hall for the first time. Holly crap, that building is huge. The entrance hallway is so big, you almost feel agrophobic walking around in there. Crazy stuff! The only thing I could think of when I was standing at the front door was “what a huge waste of space”. You could really put two rows of classrooms on each side of that hallway, and still have plenty of walking space. What were they thinking?

Livia suggested that we should get an indoor swimming pool installed there Seriously, we could fit that whole puny Panzer pool in that hallway. You can literally get lost in that building and walk around for minutes before you actually see another human being. It is seriously scary.

How much money did they spend on that building? Does this mean that they will admit more students next semester? I seriously doubt that they will have every single classroom filled out with students… And if they let more people in, where are they going to park?

And who decided to mark this building as UN? What the hell does UN stand for? Was UH taken already or something? Way to go msu - great way to confuse the crap out of people.

Sigh… It’s not like I’ll ever have classes in “UN” though. CS dept is still bound to the old crappy Richardson.

MPAA Report a Pirate Site Source

This is possibly the funniest thing I have seen in a while. Please look closely at the attached screenshot. This is the source I have grabbed from the web form MPAA set up to allow people to report “pirate” sites. Please look at the code snipped very closely and then look at the webpage. You will notice something very interesting.

Did you spot it yet? If you haven’t let me spell it our for you. If you look at the source again, you will see the following comment:


/***********************************************************/
/** this script is free for any use, but please include **/
/** a link to i-code.co.uk in any redistribution **/
/** Author : Stephen Griffin, www.i-code.co.uk **/
/**********************************************************/

Now check the page out again. Oops… MPAA web developers forgot to post a link to i-code.co.uk. I think this might violate the license of that script and in fact make them “pirates” themselves? MPAA has “pirated” the code to use it on their “report a pirate” site! Too funny!

All jokes aside, we should really stop saying “piracy” altogether. It is a dirty propaganda word, and by using it we just play into MPAA’s and RIAA’s silly little mind game.