Slashdot Mirror

ZyXel should set it so the password is randomized by default. That way, it might not be possible for the user to get in, but at least it will be more secure. For boosted security, they could make it re-randomize the password every hour.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I used to be a big fan of Sony, all my stereo equipment more than 3 years old is from them and I have a PSX. With all the crap their music and movie divisions have pulled with anti-piracy attempted, I will never buy from them again. I also check before I see a movie in theaters to make sure it's not made by Sony.

There is no way I'm buying a PS2. I almost gave in and bought a netMD minidisc player because it sounded so good, but luckily I read the reviews and it just confirmed that a total boycott of Sony is the only way to go. The player can only be recorded to with special software bundled with it. For some incomprehensible reason, the software will only work on a pre-installed version of windows on a brand name computer. Since I always assemble my systems from parts, that means I can't even use the player. The software is also much to paranoid about piracy, you have to re-rip your music using their software to a secure sony file format. Then, you can only write each song to MD 3 times before having to re-rip the file. Why in the world would anyone pay for a music device that has so much in it designed to work against them?

As far as X-Box being too little too late, remember OS/2? Warp came out in 1994 and did everything windows 95 promised it would do and a lot more. People still waited for Windows 95 which turned out to fall far short of its promises. MS also missed the early boat on the Internet. There is no such thing as too little too late where MS is concerned.

Jason
ProfQuotes

2 of the best Killer apps for the X-Box I've heard of are the DivX player and the PVR. This chip will go a long way towards making it quick and easy to set those up.

It's too bad MS doesn't jump on the bandwagon. If they produced PVR software and sold it for the price of a normal game, I'd happily buy an X-Box and that software. I'd also pay at least $20 for DivX player software for it.

Jason
ProfQuotes

How about Dan Quayle, he doesn't seem too busy and he's not too bright, but a lot brighter than Hilary; just perfect

Jason
ProfQuotes

Steve Jobs for RIAA Head!

Jason
ProfQuotes

Yeah, in the same sense that MS isn't Bill Gates...he isn't even CEO anymore.

Jason
ProfQuotes

This is the way cats get their nine lives

Jason
ProfQuotes

Is the quality as high as when they started? I went there when they were first mentioned on slashdot. The quality control process they described was very impressive but also daunting for anyone wanting to contribute. If they've reached the 100k article threshold with the same quality control it is world-class resource.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The biggest security problem with running apache on Windows is Windows. Anyone who uses windows for a server deserves what happens to their server.

Jason
ProfQuotes

One minute you're looking out your bay window at your neighbor's back yard, and the next you're watching Tom Cruise and 'Top Gun'

This is a projection screen between the panes of glass, so one minute you neighbor's watching you sitting in your living room, and the next minute he's watching a mirror image of Top Gun

Won't the glass of the window create a glare problem? The wall beside the window probably makes a much better projection screen.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I find it easier because it does exactly what I want at install time. With the other distros, I can never get the installation process to install it the way I want to.

When I say the installation is easier, I'm including the part after installing it where I configure everything.

Red Hat and Mandrake are probably the worst, I didn't even find half the configuration files I needed.

Actually, I've never used apt-get. After reading this thread, I've already decided to give debian an other try just to try apt-get. It's not that hard to type 4-6 commands to install a tarball, but the dependancies can get annoying; the worst was when I installed the PERL drivers to access mySQL, I ended up installing about 20 items to handle the dependencies for 4 items I actually needed. That's one of the major reasons ProfQuotes uses PHP instead of PERL.

Jason
ProfQuotes

It's not very re-assuring when you click on help and get a message that says "Page not found: help".

They also make you provide your credit card info and confirm the order before they tell you how much shipping is and what the total price is.

That being said, I've used slackware since version 2.3, and it's by far my favourite distro. I've tried most of the distros, and imo they don't come close to slackware's functionality and ease of use.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Yeah lots of us have tuner cards and can have all the digital copies of shows we want. But most users don't know how to do that.

All it takes is one person who does know how to put it on Kazaa and that's enough. What does this have to do with the internet as another cable-like broadcast medium? Allowing the general public to easily get these files legally (with commercials) much more easily that kazaa spyware will discourage people from downloading the illegal (commercial free) copies. The proof is that people watch and pay for cable with commercials.

Jason
ProfQuotes

My computer can do all that with the signal from my satellite dish too. Should satellite be illegal?

The legalities of all this were hashed out in the betamax case.

It should be illegal for the internet broadcasters to modify the signal (by trimming commercials). I said this in my original post. But as far as the end user's ability to trim commercials, it makes absolutely no difference whether it comes from an internet stream, a satellite signal, cable, or broadcast.

Jason
ProfQuotes

It's exactly the same thing as before. The cable companies didn't care about benefiting the broadcasters, they were out for a quick buck and the fact that the broadcasters benefitted was incidental.

Internet TV will help broadcasters in exactly the same way. If more people watch the broadcasters are better off. As far as the problems with local affiliates, there was the same problem with early cable, and it was only solved by regulation; not banning cable.

I'm in a location where I can get 2 channels by broadcast (and I have a cablemodem). For me, broadcast isn't a viable option, but I do have the bandwidth to download a TV stream. I have a satellite dish, so this doesn't affect me much, but if I were limited to broadcast this would make the difference between my watching or not for most of the broadcasters

Jason
ProfQuotes

This is how the cable companies got started. They set up big receiving antennea, and rebroadcast the signal for a fee. They didn't get permission from or pay the broadcasters. It was perfectly legal 30 years ago. Why does the fact that this involves the internet change anything?

Up until today, as long as you didn't modify it (like trimming out commercials), it would be perfectly legal to retransmit a broadcast signal. The whole point of broadcast is that it's freely put out over the public airwaves for anyone who wants to view it.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The Canadian Alliance is a political party that is not in power right now. The Minister of Heritage is a member of the party in power now (the Liberals). Since it's a majority government, the party in power can do whatever they want, and the other parties can just slow things down a bit.

There is no viable alternative to the Liberals, so they can and do whatever they want.

For example, a vet got his benefits cut off due to a government error. His representitive (who happened to be Liberal)said "you didn't vote for me, why should I help you?" The prime minister backed up the representitive and basically said they shouldn't have to do anything since they're in charge.

There's hundreds of examples, but Canada is basically being run as a tyranny now, and this new law being muscled through is just another example.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I remember back when the Bernardo case was going on, people were making trips into the US to get Wired magazine.

It was banned in Canada because it talked about the publication ban, and just happened to mention that one of the banned pieces of information was that homolka pled guilty.

It was quite funny, customs set a limit on the number of copies of Wired you could bring across the border. They generally treated it as a controlled substance.

Wired probably sold more copies to Canadians that month than any other time before then, which made the whole ban ineffective. I had no trouble getting my hands an a copy from a 'dealer' at school

Jason
ProfQuotes

Once microsoft extends their monopoly to include this, they really will own every throught in the world.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The discharge curve is also very important. If I draw 10 amps from that 17 Ah alkaline D battery, it will last about 30 minutes instead of 1.7 hours. If I take 10 amps from a 9 Ah NiMH D battery, it will last the full 0.9 hours.
The car battery can easily handle 600 amps for a few seconds while starting your car. There's no way the laptop battry can handle 80 amps even for a fraction of a second

This just makes the "10 hour battery" in the article even more meaningless.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Hour is not a measure of power. How many amp- hours is this battery capable of? What terminal voltage?

A standard size D Alkaline battery is 17 amp-hours at 1.5 volts. That sounds a lot more impressive than a 10 hour battery, and it's using 30 year old technology.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The recording industry already has a tax on most computer media in Canada.

It's already 21 cents per CD, and is going up to 59 cents soon. There's also a fee of 21 cents/megabyte for digital camera memory and tiny HDs because they can also be used in mp3 players.

Taxing ISPs is probably just the next logical step up here

Jason
ProfQuotes

The could sue me for breathing if they wanted. There's a big difference between suing someone and actually having a legal leg to stand on.

If they sued me, I'd be in the right, but they have a multi-million dollar legal department, and I don't. When being right goes up against multi-million dollar lawyers, money wins. That's the way the legal system works in the US.

Jason
ProfQuotes

If you look at the extra content that comes on their DVDs, they talk about how they get their ideas from the public domain.

They spin it so it sounds like they're doing charitable work by take these old stories that are central to our culture and making them *more* accessible.

Of course there's no mention that they're trying to kill the public domain. Besides preventing stories from enering, they hijack the stories they borrow. If I tried to make a movie based on the fairy-tale Beauty and the Beast, then Disney would sue me even though I didn't take anything from their movie. What's more disappointing is most people wouldn't like my moving because they're used to the disney version and since mine is different, it must be all wrong.

Jason ProfQuotes

Tell me again what the U stands for?

Jason
ProfQuotes

In my experience, the community colleges are the worst for catering to the lowest common denominator of students.

Every time I've taken a course at one, the class is divided into two groups of people, those who are there to learn, and those who don't know why they're there. The ones who don't know why they're there don't do any of the assignments and try to learn as little as possible. Invariably, the class is dumbed down to suit them, and the most interesting half the of the material is skipped.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Nerdcore is much stupider. You'd have to be a total ditz to use the word nerdcore.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Eventually someone will take their webserver along on the plane and then posts a Slashdot article about it. What happens when we slashdot an airplane?

Jason
ProfQuotes

10km still belongs to the country that owns the land below it. From an international law standpoint, airspace goes all the way up.

Even if you're on a ship in international waters, you're still bound by the laws of wherever you ship is registered.

You'll also be restricted by the laws of whoever owns the connection you're using.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Most people aren't going to download large quantities of mp3's or movies while sitting on a plane. They'll do that before they leave.

The service is intended for websurfing. Think about what percentage of time you spend loading pages vs reading them on your high speed connection. Even with 50 people sharing the connection, only a few will be downloading pages at a time, and the rest will be reading what they've already downloaded.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Among the data found on the 158 drives were 5,000 credit-card numbers

The RIAA/MPAA system recognizes that each digit is a number taken by itself. Since credit cards have 16 digit numbers, 31 numbers/person sounds about right, it's an average of just under 2 cards/person.

Jason
ProfQuotes

How can the human create information without an algorithm?

What you are citing with Godel proves that humans must use algorithms too. It's just that the algorithms are very complex and not understood. The is no reason we can't learn and duplicate the human algorithms, and that's what this contest is all about.

You do a nice job proving that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Step 1:
Make up a set of game boards and have a group of humans each play the game on those boards. Each human will play once on each board. This gives us real human data to compare the software to.

Step 2a:
Let each of the submitted emulators play the game on every one of the boards created in Step 1. We now have a set of results for each human and each emulator on all the game boards

Step 2b:
For every detector that was submitted, give if every set of results. It returns its answer for which it thinks are humans and which are emulators in a very precise way. We now have a matrix of (number of humans + number of emulators) x (number of detectors), where each element is a mathematical answer to 'is this a human player'.

Step 3:
Repeat and take the average score. The Detector that was right the most wins.

Step 4:
The emulator that fooled the most detectors wins. If there's a tie (for either emulators or detectors) in the 95% confidence interval for the model used to compute scores, then the prize is shared among the tied entries

Jason
ProfQuotes

We're just trying give the humans more time to play tetris

Jason
ProfQuotes

That does seem to be the way things are going, but what's in it for the software and hardware companies? How can they profit by going out of their way to give the customer a broken product?

Maybe selling DRM hardware and software will be the only way the products will be able to access media in the future, and they figure more people care about watching the latest Britney Spears video than about their fair use rights. Unfortunately, that's true, but I think most people who want to watch videos and listen to music on their computers are the ones who do car about fair use. The ones who just want to access the media will use dedicated devices.

This leaves nobody to buy the crippled computer hardware and software, which is as it should be

Jason
ProfQuotes

There is no way they'd be able to pass legislation requiring computers to have DRM. They'd have to prove computers have no other use besides playing media. Not even the RIAA can bribe enough politicians for that.

They're just trying to spin the fact that they can't force that kind of legislation to make it sound like they're being the good guys.

What difference does it make to them if there's that kind of legislation anyway? They're doing everything they can to restrict their CDs to DRM players as it is.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I used to play multiplayer tetris on the LAN at work. There were bonus pieces that let you do good things like eliminate rows from the bottom of the screen or bad things like drop random blocks on someone's screen

It was team based and you generally had to use your good blocks on an ally who's in trouble. We'd play it for hours at a time, and we were enjoying it and socializing, not too numbed to stop. Since we were all in the same room, it was like a LAN party. Occasionally, even the managers would play.

Games like quake3 where all you do is go around shooting things are boring. That's what's mind-numbing and crippling. Tetris makes you concentrate and think.

The best games are the simple ones with high playability, so to answer the question in the summary, there will always be a demand for this.

Jason
ProfQuotes

If this comes here, does it mean I'll be getting all that porn spam on my phone? Maybe it would be better to convince them I'm under 18.

Would under 13 make it illegal for them to send any spam?

Jason
ProfQuotes

So that the people running the project can buy the new Hy-Wire car instead?

Jason
ProfQuotes

It sounds like the car is fueled by hydrogen. People won't buy the cars until they can get hydrogen fuel at nearly every corner gas station. Nobody want's to travel a long way to buy gas, or worse, find themselves low on gas 100 miles from the nearest hydrogen station.

The gas stations will not invest in the eqipment to dispense hydrogen until there's a large number of the cars on the road that can use it.

Jason ProfQuotes

Evolution still exists. There are thousands of new species evolving every years, mostly single-celled organisms, but some larger ones.

The only way of naming every species would be to create a standard naming convention like the IUPAC system for chemicals, but this isn't even close to what the article is about

Jason
ProfQuotes

This is true; an easy to use desktop is like a scope with the volts per division and timebase fixed so people don't have to worry about learning what they are.

The funny part is that if you want to make Linux easy to use, creating yet another distribution is not the right way to go. This has been attempted a lot of times, and it usually just makes it harder to do anything except a few basic things the distro creators want you to do

Jason
ProfQuotes

P and L got used up by APL though. This is BCD..Binary Coded Decimal.

Jason
ProfQuotes

This sort of product should have been on the market a year ago. I'm sure it's just the beginning of a flood from all the major manufacturers, and the price will drop fast.

Jason
ProfQuotes

a) With the company alienating 95% of the market for exactly the reason I said, it is just a matter of time until they go bankrupt. They have a cult following among their users and most people hate them. Smells like Amiga, and it will have the same result. We've even had a discussion here about that.

From TiVo's own website:
A TiVo DVR is intended for use only with a paid subscription to the TiVo service. Without the TiVo service, a TiVo DVR has extremely limited functionality. No functionality is represented or should be expected
If there's no TiVo company, your TiVo box has as much functionality as a door-stop.

b) The one time up front charge is a bigger rip-off. It's the same price as 2 years of service, and it's glued to your TiVo box. If you want to upgrade, you have to pay again. If your TiVO breaks and you replace it, you have to play again. 2 years is an eternity in the tech industry.
This has the same problem that when (not if) TiVo goes bankrupt, it's still a door-stop, but one you paid $250 more for. Why in the world is their a service fee at to use it as a media center? It is supposed to be a piece of hardware, not a service.

c) We were discussing the parent wanting to wait until TiVo comes out with the HP 5000 type features when the HP 5000 does a much better job of it already.
You're probably just one of the suckers who bought a TiVo and you hate having it rubbed in your face how stupid you were

d) Oooh, my first freak, and you do such a great job of proving how aptly named it is. I have all the facts because I want a PVR, not a TiVo POS. You're the one who's spewing.

Jason
ProfQuotes

So I'll wait an extra 4 months to get a piece of crap that's totally useless unless the company is there to give it permission to work?

If someone goes with the TiVo option, they're investing in the company; when the company goes bankrupt, their player is useless.

To add insult to injury, you also have to pay a monthly fee to use their product, even just the Media Center option.

Not to mention you're comparing the price of a refubished TiVo to a new HP box

Jason
ProfQuotes

If you build your own, what do you have for a UI. I sit in front of my computer for too many hours a day; I don't want my entertainment center to have a mouse/keyboard driven desktop application as its interface.

I use my old AIW as a PVR, and it's pretty awful for that very reason. The only reason I don't go out and buy a TiVo or ReplayTV is because I want a product, not a service. As soon as a PVR comes out that does everything my VCR does plus the TV-on-Demand type features, I'll be first in line to buy it...even though it will not have any more functionality than the AIW. The UI makes all the difference in the world.

Jason
ProfQuotes