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Earth to Guitar Hero:

You don't need Warner.

You got indie music.

Can't find any? Here's my short list.

You could have a contest. The winners get to have their music on Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Actually if you want a model for the US, Taiwan isn't too bad. They have national healthcare but it is far cheaper than the Euro model. In fact you pay far less taxes in Taiwan than you'd pay in the US, and you still won't lose your home if your kid gets sick.

http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2008/02/ian-williams-on-taiwans-health-care.html

The most amazing thing about Taiwan's health program is its affordability. Not only is it dirt cheap to see a doctor or dentist (~3USD), but taxes are also far lower than in the US. Back when I was working in the US, I only got to take home about 60% of my paycheck (after my employer paid half the SS). The medical insurance was terrible, too. Just seeing a dentist for a regular cleaning and checkup cost about 200USD after insurance.

Here, in Taiwan, the most I've had to pay in taxes is about 10%. That includes health insurance. It makes me wonder how the heck the US spends all the taxes it brings in

My main complaint with VirtualBox is how weak and confusing the Virtual Box snapshop manager is compared to VMWare. VMware is just light-years ahead here. VirtualBox completely fails if you need to do multiple "what-if" situations with installing software or do non-destructive reverts or branched snapshots.

Yeah, that statement struck me as odd too. So I googled "malcolm gladwell outliers number system".

http://ruckingfidiculous.blogspot.com/2009/01/outliers-by-malcolm-gladwell.html

For example, in Korean, eleven is literally translated to mean ten-one, twelve is ten-two, thirteen is ten-three, and etc. Moreover, twenty is two-ten, thirty is three-ten, and etc. Any non-Korean reader of an IQ of 80 or higher can probably figure out the Korean number system with the two examples I've presented. And there is the key: expectancy. Logic creates expectancy and understanding. In turn, Asian children become more comfortable with numbers and they can memorize numbers quicker and retain them longer.

So the argument is that there are no "-teen" and "-ty" to trip people up. I dunno. Doing arithmetic is more about internalizing Arabic numerals in a base-10 number system than anything else, so I can see the connection, but it's tenuous.

Pedagogical methods are more of a factor, I'd say. I never went to Kumon, but some other people I knew certainly did. Drills, drills, and more drills. Ugh. It works, though.

Okay, WTF? I've been wading through his deposition (I'm not finished yet) but this guy doesn't know what he's talking about!

If you want more laughs you can read his trial testimony in Capitol v. Thomas.

I just have to wonder how much more of this erosion of the U.S. the U.S. is willing to accept and permit? H1-Bs and lowering of wages,

US real total compensation per hour has doubled since 1970. Real hourly earnings aren't up much over that time, but that is because our additional compensation is going into 401k plans, health insurance, and more paid sick time. It is going there because tax policy makes it preferable for your employer to pay that compensation rather than paying you wages, having your wages taxed, and then you pay for them.

Note that real disposable income actually rose the last four months.

People constantly ask "so protectionism is the answer?" Right now, yes it is!

Protectionism is a false promise, it supports unsustainable and inefficient businesses at the expense of consumers. I work for a US company in an industry that earns 1/3 of its revenue (that's $10 billion dollars) in exports. So go ahead, put me out of a job!

Dr Jacobson is not stupid, I've met the man. I graduated with a degree in computer science from Iowa State University in December. I haven't taken a class from him, but again the man is not stupid. He's malicious. He's being paid. In fact I bet he even knows his testimony is full of shit. Again, he's being paid.

More than being paid, he has a major financial interest in the "Audible Magic" software which the RIAA is peddling for him. They go to LAN operators and say "Pay us $76,000 and the letters will stop".

In this case, the RIAA expert didn't even admit the possibility of likely things. For example, until I locked it down, neighbors on both sides of my place were stealing bandwidth off the wireless router where I rent. If they were downloading music, we'd be the ones hit, because it would be our router that would be showing up in ISP records / on Kazaa. (A similar example appeared in Dr. Kim's report. You did read the report, right?) The RIAA "expert" seemed to think that because the (non-timestamped) traceroute went to Thomas's computer, that it -always- went there. This isn't automatically the case. IP/MAC spoofing or other attacks (as appeared in Dr. Kim's report. You did read the report, right?) can easily obfuscate the issue. The RIAA's expert also said that the presence of MP3s showed that Thomas downloaded them from the internet, again, ignoring the extremely likely possibility that Thomas ripped them from CD (which, I will note is both extremely easy, and mentioned in Dr. Kim's report. You did read the report, right?). The problem with the RIAA expert is that he neglected to list other possibilities. Would he have needed to list the extremely unlikely ones? No. But he did need to address likely alternative explanations. And when you add his extremely bad analogies, and apparent lack of understanding of NAT (to be 'fair', he could actually understand NAT, but ignored it because it would weaken his report, but that's being a bad expert), his report deserved to be torn apart by Dr. Kim. (You did read the report, right?)

Good post. When I deposed Dr. Jacobson in the UMG v. Lindor case, he admitted that he had never considered any alternative explanations.

I read a few posts from George Riddick, III is an Ass! A couple of statements stood out, namely: his collection of bitmap clip art is vastly out-dated crap that no one in their right mind apart from the odd backwater church community or primary school would ever nowadays use. and George, you are not losing out because of piracy. You're losing out because no one wants to buy your rubbish drawings any more, get over it! and stop pestering everyone and wasting people's time with your petty and hate-fuelled quest.

Personally, I've always despised clip art. If even 10% of the clip art in the world were to disappear as a result of Riddick's efforts, I would do a little irish jig. However, it seems that the thesis to blogs like this is that Riddick is bitter at being a forgotten part of computing culture, and that he is predatory not just litigious; going after "weak and defenseless" people. Moreover, he's committing the cardinal sin in computer culture of holding on viciously to "out-dated" dead technologies and accomplishments which have no value in the modern world except as nostalgia. Since we live in a world of sub-$100 300 dpi+ color inkjet printers, WYSISYG desktop publishing, and vector graphics freeware/shareware; Riddick going after clip art users is maybe like Thom Henderson going after people for using ZIP... okay, maybe that's a stretch?

As you said, if he can prove his assertions, he's definitely within his rights. He isn't *obligated* to release his old work into public domain, and he shouldn't have his work forced into PD. And of course, he has a right to be a total dick in life (if he indeed is). He is however seeking huge damages from shallow pocket, ordinary people who have come to rely on clip art being, at the very least, 2 cent art pieces, if not public domain. Basically, his copyrights appear to be totally diluted. Just to be fair to him, another Slashdotter has pointed out that he worked with Riddick and Riddick was an honorable employer. If he is "evil", maybe it's cause of who he's going after. I am a little sympathetic to the guy, but personally, I'm for freeing up old technologies.

Additionally, there are counter accusations that some of Riddick's work which he claims infringement upon are actually trademark violations in themselves (national flags, UN emblem, depictions of the Sydney Opera House, etc.)

Ah! As it turns out, Riddick Geo III has infringed upon the copyrights of other people! The Sydney Opera House for one. Further down this blog there's a pic of Geo III himself so you'll know the demonic aspect that is the Riddick if you happen to see it coming at you through the dark and dangerous tubes in your neck of the big, bad ©'ed and ®'ed world.

Ah! As it turns out, Riddick Geo III has infringed upon the copyrights of other people! The Sydney Opera House for one. Further down this blog there's a pic of Geo III himself so you'll know the demonic aspect that is the Riddick if you happen to see it coming at you through the dark and dangerous tubes in your neck of the big, bad ©'ed and ®'ed world.

You are also missing this, without which the current drop would look a lot more like the crash in 29, possibly worse. Had the Federal Reserve not propped up all the failing banks they would all have most likely declared bankruptcy within a month. Where do you think the dow would be had that happened?

Here is a list of DJIA companies that would now likely be bankrupt had the government not interviened:BOA,Citigroup,GM,JPMorgan Chase

That is over 10% of the companies in the DJIA that would now be bankrupt, in the span of a few months.

The difference between now and 1929 is not the scale of the drop, but the magnitude of the governments intervention in the market.

Windows mostly uses counted (unicode) strings in kernel mode

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa380518(VS.85).aspx

The idea is that you only interact with these strings by calling run time library runctions RtlXxx rather than fiddling around with pointers. It's actually quite OK once you learn how it works.

Symbian is obsessed with string descriptors too, and it has far too many types of them. You also need to push them onto a clean up stack so they can be freed if your code "leaves", a sort of pseudo exception.

Even simple string handling ends up incomprehensible gibberish.

http://descriptors.blogspot.com/2005/05/20-how-do-i-use-heap-based-buffer.html

E.g.

_LIT(KFred, "Fred"); // Allocate a heap descriptor of max length 4
HBufC* heapBuf = KFred().AllocLC();

_LIT(KCyril, "Cyril");
TPtr ptr(heapBuf->Des()); // Modifiable TPtr over heapBuf data area
ptr = KCyril(); // This would panic because max length (4) is exceeded // Instead, we need to do a reallocation // Leave on cleanup stack in case the realloc fails and a leave occurs
heapBuf = heapBuf->ReAllocL(5); // Realloc succeeded, but heapBuf pointer may have changed // We must update the pointer stored on the cleanup stack
CleanupStack::Pop(); // Push it off // Push it back on again
CleanupStack::PushL(heapBuf);

Note this guy knows what he's doing, code from someone who doesn't is much worse than this. Good job he knows that he has to update the pointer on the cleanup stakc beacuse ReAllocL might have changed it.

If you use a sane class for references that could possibly be null (like Option (aka Maybe in haskell) then your compiler will *force* you to handle the null case.

This is where null went wrong, at least in statically typed languages: it's a hole in the type system that errors fall through into your program. When coding in Java, I make an explicit point to never return null from a method; if I have a situation where no reasonable return value might exist, I use the Option class from functionaljava.org and thus force the client to handle the possibility of the method not returning sensible data. Since Option obeys the monad laws, it's easy to chain together multiple things that might fail (with the bind or flatMap operations.)

A very large and rapidly growing network of Riddick victims are organizing and sharing information. A large compilation of his threats and extortion tactics, which he tries to keep secret, are being assembled. You can find some here.

And New Labour (the UK Government - still...) have the brass balls to tell us that we're not living in a police state.

Jack Straw (senior idiot MP). "Talk of a police state is daft".

Tom Harris (idiot MP). "Our liberties are safe with Labour".

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister considers introducing a special law to deal with one (very unpopular) retired banker with a huge pension that was approved by his Government. How democratic.

As a UK subject I cannot wait to vote these fuckwits out.

didn't they fire all you guys? how do you remember which site you're trolling on?

First, I suggest you read and think deeply about Moens Nogood's essay "So Few Really Need Uptime".

Key quote:

===Typically, it takes 8-9 months to truly test and stabilise a RAC system. As I've said somewhere else, some people elect to spend all of those nine months before going production whereas others split it so that some of the time is spent before and, indeed, some of it after going production.

But that's not all: Even when the system has been stabilised and runs fine, it will a couple of times a year or more often go down and create problems that you never saw before.

It's then time to call in external experts, but instead of just fixing the current cause of your IT crisis, I'd like to suggest that you instead consider the situation as one where you need to spend a good deal of resources in stabilising your system again - until the next IT crisis shows up.

Your system will never be truly stable when it's complex. The amount of effort and money you'll need to spend on humans being able to react to problems, running the system day-to-day, and - very important - keep them on their toes by having realistic (terribly expensive) test systems, courses, drills on realistic gear, networks of people who can help right now, and so forth... is huge.

The ironic thing is this: If you decide that you can live with downtime, and therefor with a much less complex system - your uptime will increase. Of course. ===

And that corresponds pretty well to my experience: the more effort people make to duplicate hardware and build redundant failover environments the more failures and downtime they experience. Consider as well the concept of ETOPS and why the 777 has only two engines.

sPh

Wasn't there one story where the family of an executive officer of the RIAA was accused of this and he pushed the company to let them off with a warning?

I guess this is the story you're thinking about: "Warner CEO Admits His Kids Stole Music".

The summary:

• "Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman admitted that he was fairly certain that one or more of his children had downloaded music illegally, but despite this direct admission of guilt, no lawsuits are pending. Surprised? Bronfman insists that, after a stern talking-to, his children have suffered the full consequences of their actions. 'I explained to them what I believe is right, that the principle is that stealing music is stealing music. Frankly, right is right and wrong is wrong, particularly when a parent is talking to a child. A bright line around moral responsibility is very important. I can assure you they no longer do that.' I wonder if all of the people currently being sued/extorted can now just claim that they 'no longer do that.'"

There is an interesting link on Solar Thermal power at the bottom of the article. I think it is worth reading in relation to photovoltaic power options.

Solar Thermal

Blog Post on the articles.

The somewhat inaccurately called "Y2k bug" that he is referring was a very specific bug, and has been discussed on slashdot before. Climate change skeptics were making a big thing about some tiny correcting to Nasa's tempatures. The changes effected the temperature curve for the US a tiny but, but was nearly completely negligible for the world. Here is is an article, and a blog entry about it.

Finally, a post on the member companies being responsible for RIAA's actions. You Sir, are a good independent, objective thinker. I'd say RIAA, being a trade group, is nothing more than a tool controlled by the member companies. Therefore, our emotions should not be directed at RIAA itself, but instead, should be at the individual companies. Skimming through Mr Beckerman's blog, I don't see "RIAA vs Joe", but rather "Company vs Joe". What do you think? P/S: I suspect some Web trolls can't even remember the names of the big 4. They simply like to pick a single entity - RIAA - to cast the blame on.

Don't blame them, I'm equally to blame. The real culprits are 4 large record companies (SONY BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros Records, Vivendi/Universal, and EMI) along with 20 or so of their affiliated labels (see plaintiffs). They use the RIAA as a front to mask their collusion. I use the term "RIAA" as shorthand. Sorry, but I write too much on this issue to keep writing out all those names.

Ed Hardy dresses are part of a relatively new clothing line that is designed with a rock edge in mind. The designs for Ed Hardy come from the tattoo artwork of Don Ed Hardy, a well known tattoo artist who turned his tattoo designs into actual, frame-able artwork. One of the more popular pieces of the Ed Hardy line are the Ed Hardy dresses. http://www.edhardy-shopping.blogspot.com/

And for the canucks in the audience, you'll find lots of education/linux related links at:
http://cdneducation.blogspot.com/

Here's the image source: http://kettlebellamy.blogspot.com/2008/07/good-stuff.html

Tigarah is Japanese and she loves her iPhone.

My bad, we're up to 14 years now:Chadwick.

With all the shortcomings in Open Source's ability to open Microsoft Office's documents, I wish you luck.

In my experience, school officials are so biased against anything not Microsoft that convincing them is almost impossible. I wish you luck man.

This KDE developer has something that would interest you.

Interesting blog on this here, with subsequent follow-up.

As for the audio comparison you mentioned - are you sure it's not just the change your audio equipment or music preferences over the years? I can't tell the difference between my OGGs/AACs on headphones or computer speakers, but when going through my receiver in the living room, any of the lossy encodings I have just sound a bit wrong. That's a technical description. I've noticed the loss of audio dynamics and clipping mentioned in the blog, but on better audio equipment, all of my CDs still sound better.

Interesting blog on this here, with subsequent follow-up.

As for the audio comparison you mentioned - are you sure it's not just the change your audio equipment or music preferences over the years? I can't tell the difference between my OGGs/AACs on headphones or computer speakers, but when going through my receiver in the living room, any of the lossy encodings I have just sound a bit wrong. That's a technical description. I've noticed the loss of audio dynamics and clipping mentioned in the blog, but on better audio equipment, all of my CDs still sound better.

A bit too well, perhaps. Better than natively, according to some benchmarks. :-/ (via the Linux Haters blog)

If you read the reasons why they haven't made it cross platform yet, it is because the first version on Windows had a *lot* of (uneccesary IMHO) dependencies on Windows-specific OS libraries, which are possible to avoid if you're building something meant to be cross-platform from the start. Here's one post that gives only an eagle-eye view of how little Chrome was cross-platform: http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/11/status-of-chromium-on-linux.html Also, from an article in The Register, not even the HTTP implementation was build without using WinHTTP, necessitating they rewrite that entirely a second time. If cross-platform was a priority for Google, rather than just fighting IE, they would have tried a lot harder. The only parts of Chrome that were cross-platform are the parts Google didn't write. (That's a lot of stuff, but not near enough to make a working browser.)

http://vosl.blogspot.com/

Most of the new phones with the Symbian 60 OS support PyS60. I found an outdated list for older phones -> http://pythonlinks.blogspot.com/2008/01/python-programming-with-pys60-and-nokia.html

I have a Nokia N79, and in my opinion I think it's more advanced than both the G1 and iPhone. It's not as fast when it comes to pure speed. But in functionality it delivers "everything". Especially the camera and video recording quality is better done.

I only wish Linux had numbers like this

Agreed.

For all the hours I've spent building ndiswrapper or ATI display drivers on any number of boxes

ndiswrapper sucks, so do the ATI display drivers, but -- aside from X11 needing some TLC -- a lack of drivers is not GNU/Linux's fault.

but Linux printing support is way behind

No it isn't. Support for GNU/Linux from printer companies is way behind. My HP all-in-one works perfectly, just as well as in Windows, for example.

3D display is way behind

This is true.

sound support is sometimes flawless and sometimes nonexistent.

This again depends upon drivers, not really GNU/Linux's fault. If you wanted to bitch about the various, competing sound sub-systems out there you'd be justified in doing so, however.

Dude, Iran is most certainly not a democracy. It is, to borrow a phrase, a "functional fascist theocracy". They have real religious police. See http://viewfromiran.blogspot.com/

The Cabinet Minutes of the meetings, lies and half truths of the Blair Government that lead us into an illegal war, costing lives and national treasure has been supressed by the Government.

By Jack Straw, in fact, who used his ministerial veto under the Freedom of Information Act to do it. So yes, Jack Straw doesn't care about FoI at all.

The post from Google is here. Show me where they use the beta status as an excuse.

If the movie Gattaca hasn't convinced you that this is wrong: I don't know what will.

For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed.

Yea, who would ever need more than 640K RAM?

Falcon

they want to see them unquestioningly as sick pedophiles that are destroying society, inhuman evil monsters that can not be related to.

Er no. These parents don't see homosexuals as monsters or anything like that. That's an absurd characterization, and its made so that you can, in turn, demonize the opposition.

Most don't. Some do.

References:

• Rick Warren compares gays to pedophiles
• "There is a strong undercurrent of pedophilia in the homosexual subculture. Homosexual activists want to promote the flouting of traditional sexual prohibitions at the earliest possible age....they want to encourage a promiscuous society - and the best place to start is with a young and credulous captive audience in the public schools" -- Robert Knight, Family Research Council
• More from the FRC
• Report: Pedophilia more common among 'gays'
• Fred Phelps

Of course, this is mostly a bunch of demagoguery, but there are some Americans that buy it -- for example, take this sampling of Arizonans. I don't really think it's fair to claim that this is "demonizing the opposition" when prominent figures have actually said these things. Publicly. On the record.

please read "dbs" in the comment above as standing for "human beings". Apparently ignorant people are still people.

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html

Sounds like decision-making will become less questionable by the openness OSS introduces at several levels: source, formats and price (not necessarily zero, but leaving little room for overspending to factor in kickbacks), to name a few.
In a perfect world, politicians would now start campaigning and competing to advocate and introduce whatever affordable and sufficiently functional software keeps existing hardware usable even longer, minimizes public spending and allows for the biggest tax cut.;-)

It would have been terrible for future generations' access to public records if further decades of material had to be stored in proprietary, DRM-encumbered crypto bottles on closed-source systems which can't be kept alive without the consent of their corporate overlords, and if these could get schools to indoctrinate kids to obey them.

Now all they have to make clear (to prevent monopolies from being built by other means) is that there should be no such thing as software patents...

After seemingly a year or longer of negative vibes towards Sony's little console, today was a big day for the PSP. Announced at Sony's Destination PlayStation retail event were:

Motorstorm (Arctic Edge)
Rock Band
Little Big Planet
Assassin's Creed
Tiger Woods '10
Madden '10 (With PS3 connectivity)
DiRT 2 (Codemasters)


To make the PSP more female friendly comes: Hannah Montana in a purple PSP bundle The Petz range (Ubisoft)

So, no original IP announced (as promised by Sony a while back) and there will be a big struggle to can these monster franchises into the diddy hardware. However, assuming they can pull it off, then you have lots of potential for new sales, great bundles and lots of existing PSP owners dusting down their machines.

On the other hand, all it will take is two or three of these to get middling review scores and fail to ship in numbers and you can pretty much stick a knife in the PSP in its current form. Even if the vaunted 4000 model does arrive, it won't be enough without a HD display, massive internal storage (8GB min) and a powerful hardware upgrade to revive the fortunes of the console. more on me blog - http://goffee-freelance.blogspot.com/2009/02/good-time-to-be-psp-owner.html

I'm happily running Fedora 10 on my Asus Eee PC 1000, the one with the solid state disks. I'm sure you could do the same thing yours. Everything works after installing the latest koji kernel for f10, and the akmod-rt2860 wireless driver. http://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/fedora-10-on-eee-pc-1000.html

I wonder if it has anything to do with a primary Xen developer's wacky business activities?

It's called the invasion of the clueless Ubuntu fanboys. Who, instead of wanting to discuss the issues with Ubuntu's various bugs, just moderate up anyone who is part of the church of Ubuntu and moderate anyone down who doesn't think Ubuntu's is God's gift to the earth.

I've been using Linux since 1995. I wonder how many of these Ubuntu fanboyz know how to configure an ethernet card with ifconfig? Or how to make a Linux live CD distribution? Or the difference between xdm and gdm. Or know that X is a network desktop.

No, the patch fixes the overrun in JBIG2 decompression. The workaround if you don't apply the patch is to disable JavaScript, either with a registry hack or through the Reader Preferences dialog.

In case you failed to read the article, here's the blog entry with the patch , not the workaround.

My issue with Ubuntu is that it's buggy as hell. I've been using Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit for a month and it's been one headache after another headache. I have written about some of my issues on my blog.

I am going to go back to Redhat. The difference between Ubuntu and Fedora Core is that RedHat admits that Fedora Core is an open beta. If you don't want a beta, you can get RHEL for free as CentOS.

Those who know how to RTFA would know that he was charged $0.02/kB data rates.

Wow, he was being ripped off. Verizon will quote you .02 cents