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Stories · 3,462
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Still More RIAA News
We just did an article about the RIAA's mendacity with statistics, and here come some more: first, someone has gone to the trouble to deconstruct their income figures over the past few years, showing that the RIAA's lack of investment in new releases is in itself sufficient to explain any dropping sales, and second, this website concerning the music industry settling a price-fixing lawsuit, which I believe is this one, filed two years ago.
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Drives Supporting All DVD Writing Standards?
lnxslak asks: "I was asked today to research a viable DVD burning solution. I thought this would be a simple task, little did I know of the horrors waiting me just around the corner. There are 5 different DVD writing standards. DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW. After coming to terms with this I figured I'd just get a drive that does them all. Is there a drive out there that does this, and (hopefully) more ? Have you guys had any experiences positive/negative with various brands? C-Net reviews are great, but I'd like some comments from people that actually know how to use a computer."
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Escape from California?
An anonymous reader asks: "Is there any escape from California? I'm a very experienced software engineer (7+ years) with a MSEE and lots of great work experience. Even in this market, jobs in CA are easy to grab if I want them. Trouble is, I don't want to live here anymore. Six figures in Northern CA gets mostly pissed away on a mortgage for a house that isn't worth half that anywhere else, and I'm pretty much just waiting for the earthquake to hit and wipe it out. I'd love to move to the midwest, but decent software jobs seem to not exist. I'm more than willing to take a huge paycut to get a job there, but where to even start looking?"
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Solving Feynman's Unsolved Puzzle?
An anonymous reader asks: "In The Feynman Lectures on Computation, Richard Feynman poses an interesting little puzzle involving the synchronization of finite state machines acting as generals and soldiers. While he was able to find an answer to the problem, the minimum time solution apparently eluded him, and he ended his description of the puzzle with the following Fermat-like declaration: 'Somebody has actually found a solution with this minimum time. That is very difficult though, and you should not be so ambitious. It is a nice problem, however, and I often spend time on airplanes trying to figure it out. I haven't cracked it yet.' My best attempt performs at about 3N, not quite the minimum time of 2N-2. So I'm asking Slashdot: Has anyone ever come across the minimum time solution to this puzzle? Or maybe someone here can figure it out!"
"Here is the full description of the problem, in Feynman's own words. Please remember that these are finite state machines, so you can't use any methods that involve counting the number of soldiers or assigning a number to each soldier.
Problem 3.4: Before turning to Turing machines, I will introduce you to a nice FSM problem that you might like to think about. It is called the 'Firing Squad' problem. We have an arbitrarily long line of identical finite state machines that I call 'soldiers'. Let us say there are N of them. At one end of the line is a 'general', another FSM. Here is what happens. The general shouts 'Fire'. The puzzle is to get all of the soldiers to fire simultaneously, in the shortest possible time, subject to the following constraints: firstly, time goes in units; secondly, the state of each FSM at time T+1 can only depend on the state of its next-door neighbors at time T; thirdly, the method you come up with must be independent of N, the number of soldiers. At the beginning, each FSM is quiescent. Then the general spits out a pulse, 'fire', and this acts as an input for the soldier immediately next to him. This soldier reacts as in some way, enters a new state, and this in turn affects the soldier next to him and so on down the line. All the soldiers interact in some way, yack yack yack, and at some point they become synchronized and spit out a pulse representing their 'firing'. (The general, incidentally, does nothing on his own initiative after starting things off.)
There are different ways of doing this, and the time between the general issuing his order and the soldiers firing is usually found to be between 3N and 8N. It is possible to prove that the soldiers cannot fire earlier than T=2N-2 since there would not be enough time for all the required information to move around. Somebody has actually found a solution with this minimum time. That is very difficult though, and you should not be so ambitious. It is a nice problem, however, and I often spend time on airplanes trying to figure it out. I haven't cracked it yet." -
Should Every Retail Outfit Have A Webpage?
Kaz Riprock asks: "A few months ago, I was looking for a store where I could purchase AbraCabubble, a hard candy with gum center made by Brach's. I figured most manufacturers have a website with product locator and the closest store to me with Brach's bulk candy would do. After an hour or two probing the web with Google (like you needed the link), I was only able to come up with a few stock projections. This was amazing to me, because when I set out to find even the most obscure facts on the web, I usually don't come back quite so empty-handed, especially when looking for a presence for the third largest candy manufacturer in the US. Since then, they've put up a website. It's true that a business could get by without a web presence in this day and age, but what's the likelihood? What's the largest business that you sought lately to find an official page on and came up without anything to show for your efforts? Have they since come around and put a page up? I think it'd be interesting to keep a page (or even use this article) of companies that you should not expect to find a page on, so that at the very least, you'd find that page and know to stop looking. Thoughts?"
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Known-Good MD5 Database
bgp4 writes "Have you ever examined a system you thought was broken into but you weren't sure? If only you had run an integrity verification program like osiris or Tripwire first you could have figured out what programs had been changed. In an effort to help out in the instances when you can't answer the question "what was this like before?" we've constructed a searchable database of MD5 and SHA-1 hashes for files in many standard operating systems. You can search using the filename or the checksum and see if you have a trojaned binary or an overactive imagination. Currently at knowngoods.org we have many FreeBSD, OS X, Linux, and Solaris installations checksummed and cataloged. If you have other programs or distributions you would like to see in the database, please let us know."
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Creating Music Using Your PC?
onenil asks: "I'm a guy who has sort of fallen into IT from a young age, but was also quite heavily into music when I was younger. I now want to spark up my interest in music again as I want to broaden my horizons, and I figure the best way to do it is with my PC. I've started looking around for hardware and software, and have come to the conclusion that the best option is to buy a simple MIDI keyboard for music input (which just takes the keys you play and sends em off to the computer, with no in-built synthesizer) and a really kick-ass software package to do all the sound processing. Are there any musicians out there who can shed some light on this area?"
"I've been told by a shop clerk that with a simple Sound Blaster Live s/c, I'll need to buy a package like Reason as it processes all sounds with the CPU, and sends one track to the sound card. Reason retails for around AU$995 (roughly $500 US?). Is this the best way to go? Or should I perhaps look at a more hardware-based solution (some type of synthesizer built-in to a sound card, or perhaps a keyboard that does synth and output). As I'm just starting, out I want something that gives good sound (I don't like the MIDI that comes out of my SBLive), but also doesn't cost too much. It would be great to also build on it when my wants and desires aren't fulfilled by what I have."
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Secure, Efficient and Easy C programming
cras writes "Feeling a bit of masochist today.. First in the morning I wrote Secure, Efficient and Easy C Programming Mini-HOWTO. And since I already spent a few hours with it, I figured I might just as well see what Slashdot people would think about it."
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Cancer Mouse Not Patentable in Canada
Proaxiom writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting the Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that OncoMouse, the so-called 'Harvard Mouse' that is especially prone to cancer, cannot be patented under Canadian law. The hapless rodent still enjoys patent protection in the U.S., Japan and much of Europe. So there is at least one place where higher life forms cannot be patented, but I am not familiar enough with the intricacies of international intellectual property treaties to figure out the consequences of the discrepancy. I'm sure countless IANAL's will be willing to offer opinions."
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Newsflash: Mac Users Love Apple, Hate Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "An article on wired.com talks about how Mac users helped Apple through the dark years of the 90s." It goes on to discuss how a psychologist was hired to figure out how to woo Mac users away from Apple, with some (to him) surprising results.
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No Need to Upgrade that PC?
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free reg.) has an interesting article about a developing trend in the computer retail business: People aren't buying new PCs. Why? Well, no suprise to those who read this, but grandma and Joe Sixpack don't need a screaming new P4 to surf the net and write letters. Are they just figuring this out?"
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MiniDVs as a Backup Medium?
Matey-O asks: "Having purchased a MiniDV camcorder for the impending arrival of my twins (I suspect a majority of camcorder sales HAVE to be bought by new parents), I also purchased the firewire connection kit. Based on the software estimates on how much uncompressed video can be stored on the harddisk, it looks like a 60 minute MiniDV cassette holds about 15 Gb. Since the PC can control the camera, and the transfer is billed as lossless, has any work been done on using MiniDV as a backup medium? One Cassette looks like it'd store ALL of my important info, and at $5 per, it'd be pretty economical too." Reading this definition, it looks like the submitter may be mistaken about the 15GB size, and the Backfire pages at Sourceforge indicate a more realistic figure of 12GB. Backfire itself looks like it might be the project the Matey-O wants, but the last update is from April of 2000. Has anyone taken up this idea and tried this particular backup path, before? Is it a practical alternative to your standard computer tape drives?
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Jobs for Students - Where Are They?
jtpalinmajere asks: "The past few years students like myself have found themselves in an ominously precarious situation. This is to say that the availability for jobs in the computer industry that are suited well for fresh meat graduates are dwindling at an alarming rate. Personally, I graduate this coming Spring and have been job searching for the past semester with little if any success at finding a prospective future employer. The placement office at my university hasn't been too helpful for many students in the CS department. The only companies that I have come in contact with that might consider fresh graduates are Microsoft and government agencies such as the FBI. If I can actually compete with the 76% foreign immigrant population of Microsoft then I might see that as a fairly good start, though the odds don't seem to roll in my favor. As far as the government is concerned, I'm simply not old enough for any job that gets paid more than minimum wage and has actual job security. Most of my job searching has been conducted through services like Dice and Monster. 99% of the jobs listed in these services require 2 - X many years of previous experience using Y software with a current Z security clearance level. I've even found one company that wants 10 years experience specifically with .NET -- go figure! I'm not looking for the dream job that everyone hopes to one day attain. I'm looking for a job that will simply get me into the industry with a meager salary large enough to sustain life. How many other students find themselves in my position? What are some opinions, particularly from our non-students, for soon to be graduates like myself?"
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Microsoft Profit and Loss by Business Area
An anonymous submitter writes "The Register is reporting in this article striking new evidence of what in my opinion can only be described as abuse of their monopoly position. A recent SEC filing shows that they lose money in every business area except Windows (86% profit) and Office (79% profit)." Another notes that the Financial Times has a story on the same subject - Dr. No writes "According to the Financial Times, Microsoft's Windows division has a profit margin of 85%. This is the first time this figure has been made public." The full version of Windows XP costs about $300.00. Microsoft could sell it for $45 and still make a profit. The difference between the $45 price and the $300 price is what economists call "monopoly rents".
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Doing Open-Source Development, Anonymously?
An anonymous reader asks: "I have some free time, and I've recently started looking into some open-source projects that I'd like to start working on. (I'm a great fan of open-source. A package that I wrote four years ago, and which shall remain un-named, is probably running on you Linux system). But I have a problem: I strongly suspect that my after-hours work might be 'frowned upon' by my employer, and although I have no contractual commitment to abstain from such work, and I will not use office-computers or anything, I realize that in these times it might get me into trouble. So I figured I'll use an assumed identity. However, in order to release copyleft software, you have to first claim copyright to it, and this is not likely to legaly hold for an assumed identity. I don't want to release to the public-domain either. So what can I do?"
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Wall-Mounting 1U Devices Without a Rack?
c640180 asks: "I need to figure out a way to mount a 1U enclosure in a small closet that doesn't have a relay rack or anything similar. Is there such a thing as a set of right angle brackets that would provide me with 19" wide screw holes so that I could mount the device vertically (so that the screws would be pointing down)? how do other folks who don't have real network closets mount real networking hardware?"
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MEMS Actuated On Chip Water Cooling
Epoch of Entropy writes "Electronics Cooling has this article : "A Stanford research team is using MEMS technology to explore the lower bound volume for the heat sink. The technology combines two-phase convection in micromachined silicon heat sinks (microchannels) with a novel electroosmotic pump to achieve minimal heat sink volume at the chip backside. ...features a novel and compact electroosmotic pump, forced two-phase convection in the heat sink, and a remote heat rejecter." This translates into: We've figured out a way to put a water cooling system right on the CPU."
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We Are Not Related
mao che minh writes "From Pravda.ru - German and American geneticists recently discovered that the neanderthal has nothing to do with modern day man's genealogy. I figured that the lack of a genetic relationship between the two species was already well known, especially when you consider the empirical evidence compiled thus far that concludes that cromagnon man and neaderthal coexisited. I suppose that the geneticists aim to put the story to bed with their DNA research."
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State Coalition Approves Internet Sales Tax Plan
An anonymous reader submits this story about the U.S. states banding together to figure out a way to tax mail-order transactions.
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Ultimate Sleds?
frenchgates asks: "I recently moved near a long and steep sledding hill with dangerous trees right at the bottom. I have acquired a fleet of sleds at this point, plastic shells, inflatables, a toboggin, a flexible flyer, etc, but all have one potentially fatal (literally) flaw: no brakes. I figure this crowd probably takes its gravity-fun seriously so I am looking for info on sleds (or customizations) allow rapid stopping in all snow conditions."