Slashdot Mirror

Being a diehard video game music fan I tried to find the soundtrack to an old saturn rpg called Albert Odyssey : Legend of Eldean. I wouldn't have even known it existed if I hadn,t stumbled upon this site.

Of corse I did find the Breath of Fire 2 soundtrack and the Dragon Force 2 soundtrack there so maybe it will turn up some day

If we want to colonize space, and colonize it fast, the way to do that is to create viable land titles on the Moon, Mars, and any other body people want to live on. The value generated by making those title transferable at a distance ("the miracle of capital") will be more that sufficient to fund the trips to those places.

The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization

As to all those people who believe that "the world" should own space locations, and keep them as parks, or Utopias - that will be the easiest way to ensure that they remain completely unused by humanity, until it's *super* easy, whereupon those places will become slums and shanty towns, just like the unpropertied areas in third world countries today.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

It may not be a hoax, but it certainly looks like a cheap gimmick.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

"Most tubes are going to require abot 16,000 volts to the grid."

um... try 160V, at about 5-10mA for your typical preamp tube. Then about 6 or 12V for the filament. Piece of cake for a switched power supply...

The small tubes will contribute some heat, but we're not talking power output tubes, so the extra heat generation should be minimal - well within a PCs cooling limits.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Who are you kidding, AOpen? Leave the high-end audio to the specialists, and leave it off your mobo!

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I think the first question these people should ask themselves is why they are storing their customers cc # at all? If you can avoid doing that, it's by far the most "secure" solution!

Websurfing done right! - StumbleUpon

Bah, I made a bipedal walker out of Robotix when I was 10 years old. Great toy, by the way.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I remember playing all sorts of online games - hack and slash, RPG, TradeWars, strategy games, etc. All text based, but a lot of them just as cool as any game with graphics today - cooler, even, since the BBS ones supported hundreds of users! Graphics aren't everything in a game... in fact, graphics are hardly anything in the kinds of games I like to play :-).

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Writing perl code! Write once, read never.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

There is a problem with all survey's, everywhere and at all time: people often don't do what they say, or say what they do. Everybody says "[I] think that software companies should be paid for their work and [I] support efforts to protect intellectual property" (from the article). But way fewer people actually head out to the local software shop and hand over hundreds of dollars for all the software they "borrowed" off the Jones nextdoor...

I don't see how anyone can take people at their word when they have obvious conflicts of interest and hypocracy...

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

About three months ago I got a call from Shaw, my cable modem company. They called to tell me that they were dropping the price of internet service from can$50 to can$40, retroactive as of three months before that, because of "increasing popularity of internet cable usage without corresponding television cable" (price for the combo was can$70 - and has remained at that, I believe).

So I'd say that all you Americans are just living in the wrong country - we're fine up here in the Great White North.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Even spammers should be innocent until proven guilty. That's only fair, after all.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

How many times have we heard we are going to run out of oil? And guess what: it never happens. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but I don't see it happening any sooner than running out of other important resources like vandium, molybdenum, etc.. New deposits are always being found, and the majority of the world's oil is still present in oil sands (which are becoming much more economical to extract)

The environmental reasons for switching away from oil are a lot more reasonable, however I imagine the replacement is really going to be more fossil fuels, probably hydrogen harvested (or reformed) from natural gas for fuel cells. So keep those oil rigs pumping.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I know that at Queens University, the students don't buy individual packages of software anyway, at least not the engineers. We buy a $200 package of everything we'll need for our 4 years there - MS Office, good telnet client, Maple, matlab, etc. etc. So I don't know that this will make that much difference - it's not like the engineers have a choice...

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Sun has already been fighting back advances from RedHat and IBM... I wonder if they will trigger a mass migration away from Sun? Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I didn't even know that Lucas was going to revise episodes four through six. Is he going to release them again, in *another* special remastering, with all new footage? Isn't that blatent cash cow behaviour anyway?

If someone has any info on this, I'd be much oblidged if they posted the links below...

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

How they arrived at the number 53% is a little bizarre:

Intel cut prices on its Pentium 4 processor for laptop computers by 26 percent to 53 percent

So they just add all the price cuts they've made on the processor together to come up with 53%? What's up with that? It's not like they just dropped it 53%, they dropped it by 26%.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results.

Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.

Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

"worker habits" are not seperable from "the design of computer interfaces" - your environment creates your habits just as much as the reverse. Change your chair and your keyboard, and your habits will change as well. This article is just bunk.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Let Tigert loose on that game and it would be great. FreeCiv could also use a graphic overhaul. Unfortunately geek and graphic artist do not often go hand in hand. Even if we had one graphic artist who could come up with a decent isometric tileset, it might be possibly to recycle that tileset between games like FreeCraft and FreeCiv.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

This is almost certainly true. The days where one human could contain enough of our knowledge in order to make a technologically *useful* advance in that knowledge, in a short period of time, are long over.

Sure, one guy might have an idea, but it would take him years to get all the peices together - just determining if it's gonna work or not! (let alone actually manufacturing it, etc.).

Now, there are places where a good idea can make a difference immediatly - the internet being one of them. But even there, getting people to look at it requires resources...

Websuring done right! StumbleUpon

Yeah, but it's not legal to perform the procedure using federal funding. And considering UCSF is a public university, there could very well be federal funds involved. It would be nice if the article were more clear on this point.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

From the article:

"Mr. Sarnoff next gave a little talk, in which he cheerfully, and with enormous self-effacement, admitted that the real problem of television was not its mechanical vagaries but finding programs for it when it finally gets ironed out."

Sixty-six years of progress, and there is *still* no good programs on television!

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I think Redhat should Gilmore Patent these ideas. The Gilmore Patent was proposed by John Gilmore ( I saw him present this idea at a Foresight Conference ) Basic concept is that a Gilmore Patent is like the GPL of the patent world, once you Gilmore Patent something only companies who have Gilmore Patents (or no patents at all) may use the patent royalty-free.

The only thing that concerns me about this idea is that it seems like it might be easily circumventable, you could do something like set up a subsidiary that doesn't have any patents, and then funnel the money back to the parent company. Any IP lawyers out there have a feasibility assessment of this idea?

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I think companies here in North America still have a lot to learn about cooperation as a method of business. I mean, we have incompatible cell phone standards, lots of proprietary interfaces, etc. The real value in any economy comes from trade - which is basically different things interacting. The more we create closed off little worlds, the worse we do, and yet it seems that's all North American businesses are interested in these days!

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Anyone with some knowledge of online transactions knows that offering something for $1 is generally not profitable. First, you've got fees from the credit cards, and then you've got the the whole chargeback thing. One song gets charged back, and you've wiped out any profit from at least 100 sales. The only thing they've got on their side is that an mp3 is not a very good target for credit card fraud, and most people will not bother to chargeback $1.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

The holy grail! Now we will be able to rain down death on our opponents without risking the neck of even one of our own! Glorious glorious day!

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

The book sounds superficially like David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality", which tries to try everything together using a computational theory of reality + the multiverse intrepretation of quantum mechanics.

Deutsch believes that the simulation of something at a deep enough level is entirely equivalent to the real thing -- which is another way of stating this authors belief that reality is just an algorithm. I personally think it's at least as good a metaphysics as anything else I've read...

Websurfing done Right! StumbleUpon

Exactly. Except it wouldn't have that melted goo all over it.

I was also thinking like a mini Borg ship you could hold in your hand. I think it would be really satisfying to have a big mass of processors in your hand, not like these wimpy delicate little things we have now in their static-proof baggies. Also, once we've conquered the 2nd dimension (ie. we've hit fundamental size limits, like 1 molecule thick wires), 3rd dimension is the next logical step. And vascularization like that found in the brain is a pretty good way to cool things off.

Interestingly, what separates us from the Neanderthals is an extensive system of veins in the back of our head designed to cool the brain. It was an important evolutionary step that allowed us evolve a lot more cerebral processing power.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Given that you don't need to actively cool these chips, I think what would be even cooler(N.P.I.) is a cube of chips stuck together and interwoven with some sort of vascularized heat-sink. A meaty cluster of 100 chips you can hold in your hand, and plug into a big cube-shaped socket on your supercomputing motherboard. Now *that* would be New for Nerds.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

The engineering undergraduate program at Queens University actually has a disasters course as one of the non-technical electives. Basically, it involves dividing the class up into small teams, each of which then picks an engineering disaster to analyse in great detail. Presentations and written reports are submitted at the end of the semester.

Supposedly this engenders a greater sense of responsibility into the engineers to be. I think it worked it for me :-)

Websurfing done Right! StumbleUpon

This is the concept Christensen is famous for (and there is a book titled after it which you should all read) Here's my 10 second synopsis of Innovator's Dilemma:

Your old customers are demanding you spend all your resources on your old technology (eg. 5 1/4 inch disk drives) But there are new potential customers who want to buy new technology you haven't developed yet (eg. 3 1/2 inch disk drives) There are more potential new customers than old customers, and thus more profits in devoting your resources to new technology. But you already have your old customers, and you're supposed to *listen to your customers* So there's the dilemma.

Solution to the dilemma? Sometimes it doesn't pay to listen to your customers. And that's a tough pill for an established company to swallow, since that's how they made money in the first place.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

SONICBlue's legal doc makes some good analogies:

In a personal injury lawsuit, it is relevant to kknow whether a plaintiff who claimed to be wheelchair-bound in fact left his chair; yet, one would be hardpressed to find a discovery ruling in which a judge ordered a plaintiff to place an electronic sensor in his chair seat. In a defamation lawsuit, it would be helpful to know if in fact the defamatory comment had a wide circulation among plaintiff's neighbors; yet, it is unfathomable to think that a court would order a microphone to be place in the local pub.

The point I think they are trying to make is that the only reason this seems even slightly reasonable (and the above examples do not) is because it affects so many people that it becomes a statistic, and the way in which those people's privacy is violated is complicated enough that it is easy to gloss over the fact that it is a severe intrusion into the living rooms of SONICBlue's customers!

This ruling is sickening, and I think it seriously hints at some money changing hands between the plaintiff's and the powers that be. This ruling unquestionably violates the rights of SONICBlue and its customers, and it is without legal precedent.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

You can't compare mechanical engineering and software engineering. Like it or not, all large software projects have bugs... lots of bugs. In a perfect world, there would be no bugs, but in this world the bugs are the standard. Since IE6 is the predominant browser, people code HTML to work around IE6's rendering problems, and if other browsers do not account for these bugs, they will render incorrectly. No browser will ever support W3C's standards perfectly, Mozilla sure doesn't and neither does W3C's own reference browser!

There is only one solution to this problem, and that is to limit the number of browsers. Otherwise there will simply be too many rendering problems for web developers to worry about, and a bunch of the browsers will get left behind. I do not have the time to test my pages in every browser, and neither does anyone else.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Yes, competition is good, but there is a point where there are just too many browsers. As a maker of all things web, it is very difficult to work around all the quirks of these browsers (and yes, *all* browsers have quirks) I have Opera users tell me they are MSIE in their user agents, I have Galeon users thinking they are running Mozilla, and bizarre rendering bugs across the board.

Making things even more difficult, I have to contend with varying and often non-existant toolbar API's which make things like the superb Google Toolbar and (in my mind) the also superb StumbleUpon Toolbar impossible to develop for browsers that are not Mozilla or IE.

I think its time to go for a little Darwinian Selection. Survival of the fittest browser. And I think that browser is Mozilla. Its the most full featured browser out there, it's free, it's open source. I had a couple problems with it, I filed bugs, and they were both fixed within the week! I'm having a hard time finding any flaws with RC2, it's brilliant. For all those who are using alternate browsers because Mozilla is "bloated" and "buggy", check again.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Yes, competition is good, but there is a point where there are just too many browsers. As a maker of all things web, it is very difficult to work around all the quirks of these browsers (and yes, *all* browsers have quirks) I have Opera users tell me they are MSIE in their user agents, I have Galeon users thinking they are running Mozilla, and bizarre rendering bugs across the board.

Making things even more difficult, I have to contend with varying and often non-existant toolbar API's which make things like the superb Google Toolbar and (in my mind) the also superb StumbleUpon Toolbar impossible to develop for browsers that are not Mozilla or IE.

I think its time to go for a little Darwinian Selection. Survival of the fittest browser. And I think that browser is Mozilla. Its the most full featured browser out there, it's free, it's open source. I had a couple problems with it, I filed bugs, and they were both fixed within the week! I'm having a hard time finding any flaws with RC2, it's brilliant. For all those who are using alternate browsers because Mozilla is "bloated" and "buggy", check again.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

They didn't opt-out. They didn't read the email Yahoo sent them (since they are usually not worth reading) And they are not conscious of why they are getting more and more junk mail and *very annoying unsolicited phone calls* during their family dinner. They think it's just a sign of the times, when in fact it's because Yahoo sold their phone number, mailing address and other personal information without their consent.

Even worse, the reason Yahoo has all this information like phone numbers and mailing addresses in the first place is because they require it when processing credit card transactions for Yahoo Wallet (ie. Yahoo is screwing over its own paying customers).

What Yahoo did is criminal. And if people understood that, there would be a class action suit, just like there were criminal procedings against DoubleClick and Alexis for similar violations of privacy. I'm all for free market, but what Yahoo did is fraudulent, and I have never heard of a free market that protects fraud.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

There's another fairly balanced article and discussion about iDrive over at Kuro5hin that's worth checking out. The author has similar mixed feelings about the technology, and talks about how other car manufacturers like Saab and Audi are developing similar systems.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I'm dying for this feature. I don't install messenger, and I use sylpheed as my mail client. I'm sure lots of people are using other handlers like mutt, outlook, evolution, etc... In the old and netscape they had this API where you had to write a C program just to use an alternative handler. Seems pretty crazy to me. All I want is a text box like:

Mail Handler : sylpheed -to %email

Or something to that effect. Maybe a substitution for ?subject= as well.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I find no matter how quiet they make these cooling systems in both laptops and desktops, water or air-cooled, its the hard drive noise that's drives me nuts. I use SilentPC stuff, including their hard drive cover, but I still find that high pitched whir of the HD is the loudest and most irritating thing coming out of my box.

Now sure I can get my hard drive to spin down when not in use, but even when I'm not sitting at the computer there are many a cron job that need to get done, and when they write to disk the hard drive spins up again. Apparently IBM's drives are supposed to be quiet, but I got one and they are anything but.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

I always thought this was an interesting idea. Here's a link to some pics of rotary rocket. The rocket uses helicopter-like blades to slow re-entry and thus is it a reusable rocket. Unfortunately, the company went bankrupt beginning of last year. However, I have heard a rumour that someone has bought up the company and plans on reviving the technology.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

The fair user may find it more difficult to engage in certain fair uses with regard to electronic books, but nevertheless, fair use is still available.

I'm sick of that argument. It's just not valid, if you make something "difficult" enough, people won't do it. And if people won't do it, it's equivalent to banning it. That it could be done "in theory" or by "people who are willing to put in extra effort" is irrelevant.

In fact, all laws work on a relative disincentive principle ... most people would rather avoid breaking the law than possibly landing in jail. In this case, most people would rather not exercise the full extent of their fair use than put in the effort to sidestep the DMCA. There is no difference, the DMCA "silencing effect" is an affront to free speech. I think the fact that a person intelligent enough to become a judge used this argument shows he has ulterior motives.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Check the links I provided in my post. The solution I offered has the portability of pda/laptop/tablets (in fact, I would argue they are more portable) while still maintaining and even exceeding the ergonomics of a desktop workstation. It's the best of both worlds, whereas where we seem to be going with these small desktops is the worst of both worlds, with progressively worse display and input devices.

I think wearable computers are the future of computing, and they are available today. The problem with this mini laptop is that they have just mindlessly scaled down a device that was barely comfortable to use in the first place. To make an interface that is usable at that size, you have to change more than just its scale.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

The guy is typing with his thumbs! And the icons look pinhead-size. This is all very neat how we can shrink things smaller and smaller, but... ergonomics anyone? How about keeping your eyesight past your 20's?

I think the whole PDA/Tablet PC/Subnotebook thing is in general pretty silly. For general use they are horrible. Better to get something like the Hitachi WIA with an input device like the Twiddler and keep your wrists and eyes healthy.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Climate - The condition of a place in relation to various phenomena of the atmosphere, as temperature, moisture, etc., especially as they affect animal or vegetable life.

Sorry to fall back to dictionary definitions, but this sure sounds like weather to me. Maybe averaged on a longer time scale, but it's still quite obviously a chaotic system. We've found loose correlations with sunspots, deforestation, etc.. but even very large trends like the "little ice age" of 1500AD are unexplained and most likely chaotic. If we can't explain hundreds of years of pronounced trends, I don't see how we can do anything with the relatively uneventful last 50 years.

Websurfing: The Next Generation - StumbleUpon

If it wasn't, we'd have accurate forecasts up a few months in advance. As it is, I find forecasts are routinely wrong about even tomorrow's weather. What happened to the hole "butterfly flapping its wings in Singapore affects the weather in Kansas" thing? I don't see how initial conditions would tell them much, I bet even random quantum events have a very strong influence on weather models over 50 years. I'd put the odds of success for this distributed computing project around the same as SETI.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

If you actually want to stop being made to do unethical coding projects, there's needs to be laws that ban those sort of things. Like a "no spyware bill" or something. This probably already falls under bills that attempt to protect people's privacy.

Personally I think if a company is intending on invading your privacy they should be forced to display a *short* *readable* warning (ie. not legalese) that tells the user what they are about to do. Hiding something in a 30 page privacy policy is no different than not mentioning it at all, even lawyers don't read those things!

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

Amphibians, particularly frogs, are supposed to be an indicator species for pollution. From all accounts I've read they are dying off in great numbers around the world. Maybe because the live near the surface of the water, they are more sensitive to things like acid rain?

So why all the frogs? Hawaii... also Australia has also had a heck of a time with frogs, and in BC we've had a problem with huge frogs (the tadpoles are the size of your fist, and mature frogs so big they have been eating the ducks!) Just seems like contradictory evidence to me, maybe some species are heartier than others?

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon

With Bill Joy's alarmist speil about nanobots replicating out of control, this is hardly good PR for nanotech. I mean, viruses? We're talking about the most evil self-replicating things we can find, throw them in with nanotech and it doesn't exactly make a good association.

Now I'm not particularly worried about these custom virii infecting humans, particularly if they're using virii that don't infect multicellular organisms (like the very cool bacteriophage virus). I think the laymen will, however, and the last thing I want to see if governments restricting nanotech the way they are clamping down on biotech.

Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon