I have worked in both formats and found the better environment to be a mix of the two.
When a group of people are working on the same (or similar) projects then having them in an open environment tends to make them more productive. Communication between people is easier, quick meetings to hammer out problems are easily held and are usually very productive (usually because you are coding during the meeting and once the meeting is over the code is fixed).
When people are just thrown into a cubicle farm where the person next to you may or may not be working on anything even close to what you are working on then productivity goes down. Too much noise is created by "irrelevant" (to your project that is) conversations. People shuffle around and the office and stop to chit-chat. Meetings with team members have to be scheduled and have to be held away from the working area so the "bounce" effect is magnified. In general it is the most distracting unproductive environment I have ever been in.
If your company is going to use a cubicle farm approach push for cubicle assignments that reflect work assignemnts and enforce the philosophy that a change in projects dictates a change in cubicles. This also gives a benefit to management in that they know that the Accounting programmers always sit on the NE corner, the HR programmers always sit on the NW corner, etc.
If it is possible to get offices, get large offices that can COMFORTABLY seat 3-4 programmers in a room (don't cram 4 programmers into an 8x12 office).
If you are a lone programmer working on a project, I would recommend isolation. I am currently the only programmer in my department and my productivity has noticably increased since I moved from my "veal fattening pen" to my office. I don't have to listen to co-workers family problems, I don't lose time with social graces "Hi, how are you today...". I shut my door and people leave me alone. If anybody needs anything, I get e-mails or they just knock on my door and I open it.
I never said there was a logical fallacy, I said MS needs to keep their lies consistent.
MS is trying to convince congress (and the world) of the fallacy of open sourced programs. One of the arguments they offered is that commercial software companies pay taxes -- the implication being that GPL'd software and the creators of thereof cannot be taxed. Then the second a governmental body tries to tax MS, MS is out in fighting force saying "Hey don't tax us and our innovation!!!"
So, my question to MS is do you want to pay taxes or not? If yes then, the sit down and pay the IP tax. If no then, don't try to convince people about how great commercial software is because you can tax it and how bad GPL'd software is because you can't.
Quote 1:Microsoft says Commercial software pays taxes Quote 2:...Microsoft Corp., are pushing for an amendment to a municipal tax-reform bill to block the taxation of such intellectual property.
Microsoft's talking out of both sides of their mouth again.
Nothing new!!!!
Well, this gives the MPAA and the RIAA one more lobbying tool to get their way.
Copyright holders get to choose where and when you get to see their IP.
The good thing about this, is that I'm going to start copyrighting my phone calls. And then I can just use the agreed statment on article 8 that "the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not in itself amount to communication" as an excuse for not answering my phone.
Like I stated, the surveillance is bad enough. I just don't believe that group has the political clout needed to stop this surveillance.
So, if we assume that the surveillance is going to be installed then we, as citizens, must demand to have access video.
I don't like large corporations profiling me. But at least I know their motive -- PROFIT. I can deal with the PROFIT motive and change my activities enough to screw up their profile. However, when a small group or individual gets exclusive access to this kind of information I have no idea what their motives are -- political gain, scape goat, black mail, revenge, etc.
The surveillance is bad enough; but, with the current political climate it will probably be hard to stop the implementation. What needs to be pushed for is open access to the surveillance.
Surveillance of itself is not good or evil. But when only the government has access to the surveillance video then a small group of people get to decided on what to keep and what to discard and peoples' motives should always be suspect.
If law enforcement wants surveillance on every street corner then fine let it be. However, the citizens need to DEMAND free access to the surveilance cameras and not just after the costly legal process of a subpoena (i.e. display the images over the web). This technology already exists, the infastructure can be installed right along with the cameras. Then every citizen can see unadulterated the actual events taking place in a location and draw their own conclusions and not have to rely on the molested interpretation of the involved parties.
If law enforcment can surveil the citizens, the citizens should be able to surveil law enforcment.
I'm not sure if this helps, but from my understanding USP#3534338 basically patents the idea of multiple screens on one computer system user interface (basically the precursor to 3270) and thus multiple programs running on the same computer are accessible via different interfaces. Secondly, USP#4555775 basically patents the idea of multiple graphical virtual screens (called "windows") to represent the multiple physical screens. And of course we all know that neither MS nor Apple created the idea of a window based GUI. USP#4939507 (issued to Xerox for Virtual and emulated objects for use in the user interface of a display screen of a display processor) even refers to the screen interfaces as "windows". And thus Lindows is simply using common industry terminology to describe what it does "Linux-Windows" - running multiple applications through a graphical user interface that displays multiple bitmapped windows running on a Linux OS.
Now, I am aware that this is a trademark issue and not a patent issue; however, trademark law does not allow me to create a creamy sandwich spread and call it "Butter" and then sue over "Butter Buds", "Land O'Lakes Butter", "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter", etc for trademark infringement and declaring their names "confusingly similar". This is the exact reason that Kraft Foods names their delightfully tasty fruit flavored gelatin Jell-O because gelatin is the common word for the product and the marketing and legal staff at Kraft knew calling it Kraft Gelatin would be a bad idea..
The term windows is about as common as calling dirt "dirt". Hence Microsoft's choice of the word Windows for their OS is just their own short sightedness. Unfortunately, 800 pound gorillas aren't known for their intelligence just for their jumping up and down and banging their chest.
Why get a "virtual" girlfriend when you can get a real mechanical girlfriend? Check out the Sci-Fi classic Cherry 2000. And now technology is approaching this perfect woman with Real Doll!!
It's almost impossible to buy a PC with out Windows pre-installed on it. This is the only thing that keeps people from buing Windows in a retail box. This means even if you are replacing a machine that you will no longer use, you are going to pay for another copy of Windows. If you decide to upgrade a machine to another version, the OEM license does not give you permission to transfer the old version to another machine so you have paid for 2 licenses and you only get to use one.
With Linux (for most distros at least), you buy one factory burned set of CD's and you can walk around to 100 different machines and install it. If you buy a new machine you don't get forced to buy a new Linux distro. If you upgrade your distro from version x.y.z to version x.y+2.z you don't lose your right to use the x.y.z distro.
The only reason why Linux seems more expensive is because the cost of purchase is very clear and immediate. Microsoft buries the cost of Windows into the machine and so you can't see that $100.00 worth of that machine went to Microsoft. If computer retailers could break out the costs of the computer I'm sure there would be no talk of what we pay more for Windows or Linux. Windows is definitely more expensive.
Goin' on an MP3 hunt...
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 3
Ok, if an average MP3 is 5MB (5,242,880 bytes) then the odds of finding a specific MP3 using a sequence of random numbers is 1/256**5,242,880 (since 8-bit bytes have 256 possibilities). This is about the same as 1/10**12,626,113 (since our base 10 numbering system gives each digit only 10 possibilities)
P(MP3)=1/10**12,626,113 (really close to 0)
Thus the odds of not finding a specific 5Mb MP3 using a sequence of random digits is 1-P(MP3)
~P(MP3)=1-1/10**12,626,113 (much closer to 1)
Since the longest known expansion of Pi is about 500 Billion digits (500,000,000,000) there are 499,987,373,888 consecutive strings of 12,626,113 digits contained in the known expansion. So the question is, what is the probabilty that at least one of these is the specific 5MB MP3 we are looking for.
An easier question is to ask what is the probabilty that we won't find the specific 5MB MP3 in a 500 Billion digit expansion of Pi.
The probability that any specific 12,626,113 digit substring of the 500 Billion digit expansion of Pi is not the 5MB MP3 we are looking for is ~P(MP3). So the probability that every one of the 499,987,373,888 possible 12,626,113 digit expansions is not the 5MB MP3 we are looking for is ~P(MP3)**499,987,373,888.
P(~MP3)=~P(MP3)**499,987,373,888
So now that we know the probability that a specific 5MB MP3 file is not contained in the 500 Billion digit known expansion of Pi, we can calculate the probability that we can find at least one instance of a specific 5MB MP3 as ~P(~MP3)=1-P(~MP3).
I bought a new house last summer and I used Realtor.Com to do my preliminary search. Realtor.Com allowed me to search by geography, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. This allowed me to create a short list (about 10 homes) that I thought I might be interested in. I printed the information about each home and then I visited each home and ranked them in order of preference.
Meanwhile, I still had a Buyer-Agent!!! The Buyer-Agent recommended several homes for me to go view. I actually did not choose any of her homes. The home I finally decided on was one that I found myself. However, my Buyer-Agent still walked through all of the price and improvement work negotiations (she got the seller to come down on the price and the seller did some basic maintenance to the house and some improvements), the phyical and termite inspections, and all the other sundry details of buying house.
I would not ever dream of buying a house with out a Buyer-Agent, but the Realtor.Com was a great additional tool in the process.
If your box is sitting on a network, try installing VNC.
I have several small networks that I support and I mostly use Linux on the servers and firewalls. Since I don't always have a monitor and keyboard that I can dedicate to a machine that is rarely used by a person (and usually stuffed into a closet somewhere), I install VNC and have it run on boot.
This will not solve your problem with how to auto-rip MP3's, however if your MP3 server goes down or stalls for some reason, you can just VNC into the machine and see what is happening and fix it.
Or perhaps this will solve your problem, since now you can have "user input" from any machine on your network.
The software industry needs to be pushed by either customers or congress to accept one or the other. If software companies go to a subscription basis for their software then patents could make it so that certain "technology" is not available in any software currently on the market. If software companies want to patent/copyright their work then they should not be able to place time limits on the usage of the software.
I'm not arguing for or against software patents or copyrights or subscription sales. I'm simply arguing that if software companies want to "force" customers into upgrades through "expired" licenses they should not be able to lock-up the technology and the software for decades.
If Micro$oft doesn't think it can make money on Windows 3.1 anymore what have they got to loose with it going into the public domain? People will still upgrade their systems to the latest OS for the exact same reason that they upgrade their OS now. Those reasons (application availability, cool factor, technical support, etc.) will continue to exist even if the old version written over 10 years ago is in the public domain.
I have worked "on-call" for several employers. Of which these were some of the following solutions:
Guaranteed Hours: One employer I had paid us 5 hours of OT just for being on-call for the week. Then if we actually needed to work, we got paid extra OT for the hours we worked.
Comp Time: Another employer I had allowed us to leave early or come in late to work to compensate for our on-call work withing the same pay period (he didn't want to pay OT). However, we did not have to monitor the system, we just carried pagers and when the pager went off we had to respond. The great thing though was that a lot of times the on-call guy only worked 4 days a week in the office because by the time Friday rolled around he was already at 40 hours so not too many people complained about the on-call work since that usually meant you were going to get a "paid" 3-day weekend.
Salary: The last employer I had where I was required to take an on-call shift paid us on salary and thus eliminated that whole pesky OT pay problem. However, he was pretty good about letting us mangle our hours in the office if we had a lot of after hours work we had to do.
Anyway, as with any other employer/employee relationship make sure to get the rules in writing so that there are no questions about the rules and no way for your employer to screw you out of your pay.
Satan: The Justice department is onto us Bill, what are we going to do.
Bill: Oh Satan, always the worrier. I have a plan.
Satan: A Palm!! Wow, I've got one too.
Bill: Not a Palm you silly prince of darkness, a PLAN to get the DOJ off our tails.
Satan: Oh, what is it?
Bill: First, we need to file for a patent on web based voting and tallying.
Satan: Bill, what does a patent on web based voting have to do with the DOJ.
Bill: Let me finish and quit interrupting.
Satan: Sorry Bill.
Bill: After the patent filing, we will fix the 2000 Presidential election in Florida so that an unpopular republican president will win with the minority of the popular vote but the majority of the electoral college after a contentious legal battle and uncertainty about the punch-card ballots.
Satan: Who are we going to get into the White House that won't detect your plan?
Bill: That's easy, after 8 years of Clinton the GOP will do anything to get one of their guys in the White House and I know a guy in Texas who, well let's say, won't ask too many questions.
Satan: OK, great!! Now we have yet another patent, and we have helped some party boy into the Presidency. How does that solve our problem with the DOJ?
Bill: Satan, I told you not to interrupt. Don't make me BSOD your ass!!
Satan:...
Bill: The GOP will be so glad to get control of the Executive branch that they will lead G.W. to get the DOJ lighten-up on our World Conquest, I mean, Monopolistic practices.
Satan: OK, that will work for 4 years. But what about the next president?
Bill: Remember, that little patent we are going to file? Since the whole country is in an uproar about the lack of technology in voting, there will be congressional studies, focus groups, et cetera to fix this problem. Of course the only way to be sure that all future voting is trustworty is to you the Micro$oft Inter-.NET
Satan: Ohhh, I'm begining to understand, and since we hold the patent on web voting, we control the voting!!!
Bill: Satan, you make me proud some times...
Since day one every body has known what a CO-OP program is for. CO-OPs are for exactly what you are doing -- get cheap labor for meanial tasks.
You will never be involved in a project as a CO-OP student for several reasons:
You are a student -- by definition you are still learning and thus may not have the technical knowledge needed
You are temporary -- the company knows you will be leaving, as such they will not involve you in anything that might require more than 15 minutes of your time
You will eventually work for a competitor -- since you are a minor you can not be bound by a contract and as such what you learn you can take with you to whomever your future employer is, why should your CO-OP company pay to train you to compete with them?
Here is what you, as a student, use the CO-OP program for:
Resume builder -- when you graduate at least you will be able to say you've seen the inside of an engineering shop this will give you some advantage over other graduates that will get you past the HR machine and into an interview (list the projects your CO-OP company was involved in regardless of how little you actually participated, if the projects are high profile you'll look like a little genius)
Contact builder -- DING DING DING DING -- this is the biggy. When you apply for a job most HR departments don't know squat about engineering, they do a global search on your resume for buzz-words, if they are there they forward you resume to the department. Now that you are sitting in an interview you can use "in the know" knowledge (i.e. peoples names, industry inside jokes, etc) that will make you seem like less of a newbie and more like "one of the guys". There is a big difference between not hiring the "green-horn" and not hiring Joe the guy who CO-OPed at BFD Engineering with Al (get the picture).
So, basically stop BMW-ing about your meanial work and start rubbing elbows. Go to lunch with the engineers, ask questions about what they are doing and about the industry as a whole. What you get out of a CO-OP is not the ability to be a part of designing the next generation of space flight vehicles, what you get out of a CO-OP is the ability to develop personal relationships with the people who are designing the next generation of space flight vehicles.
"They simply don't have the technology available for an authorized agreement" that would protect the interests of copyright owners, Rosen said.
When will the RIAA and the "content industry" as a whole learn that there is fundamentally NO technology that will completely protect the "interests" (as defined by the RIAA) of the copyright owners (not to be confused with the artists themselves). Once a digital copy is released, that copy can be perfectly reproduced infinitely many times and distributed. Even keyed systems will fail once keys are compromised. Even encrypted to the speakers/monitors won't completely stop distribution. Eventually there has to be a point of playback that is open for capture and somebody will come out with a technology that will capture it with minimal loss. Even Chinese movie captures from a big screen to a video camera that are posted to USENET are getting better because of better camera technology.
This is a war of escalation that the software industry has also been waging since the 1970's and if you look hard enough you can still get a crack for about any piece of software. What makes the RIAA think that they can do in a few years what the software industry's 30 years of development still has not accomplished?
Simply put, people will pay reasonable prices for reasonable products. I actually pay for software that I use, I actually pay for music I listen to. What I don't like paying for is software and music that sucks -- and usually I only find out it sucks after I pay for it.
Personal note to Hillary Rosen, what kind of business sense does it make to through a bomb in the middle of 50 million of your customers???
Personal note to Orrin Hatch, time to start writting that legislation, if the RIAA won't do what the market demands then compulsary licensing will make you a lot more popular to 50 million people.
Actually, this would be very expensive to implement. First of all in order for this system to be effective it would have to know the 3-dimensional location of your vehicle at all times (since a 35mph road may run under a 65mph interstate).
Secondly, such a system would have to be accurate to at least 1/2 a lane width (to accurately differentiate acceleration/deceleration lanes from normal traffic lanes). A lane is about 3-5 meters wide. Thus the accuracy of such a system would have to be about 2 meters. If we look at the accurace of gps, stand alone systems are accurate to about 10 meters (thanks to W.J.C's executive order).
What this means is that inorder to effectively and safely implement such a system either military grade GPS receivers would have to be installed in all vehicles (woohoo, I'll take 2 thank you) or we will have to move to a differential GPS system which means that D-GPS transmitters will have to setup all across the country ($$$$ major bucks). Either way, what this effectively means is that with the purchase of any vehicle you will receive a box that can pinpoint your exact location to about 2 meters. This sounds really great on the surface, but now imagine a rogue nation with a slight beef against the US (or any other country for that matter).
Though there may be laws against tampering with the device (there are also laws against setting off explosives that seem to be routinely ignored) all that, say Iraq, would have to do is send a couple of operatives to the US, purchase a couple of cheap cars, extract the GPS receivers and implant them into a missle. Launch the missle from just about anywhere and you can be reasonably assured that the missle will be within 2 meters of its target.
As much as law enforcement agencies may love this idea, I am reasonably sure that the even more draconian military will promptly pimp-slap such a plan based on national security.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear /. editors and /code authors,
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If you want to see a good compressor check out this link
THE FUDGE PACKER COMPRESSION ALOGRITHM
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asd dlkjzvkj 834 xcvlkjx08 234lkn zxvlkj 235098 xcvl,m 2349087 xcvlk werlk zv897 234m.,nxlkj ser987 234lkj xv8907 234jh xvclkj 234987 xcvlkj 230987 xv lkj 234
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whoops, gotta click "post anonymously" next time!!!!
IP BAN
I have worked in both formats and found the better environment to be a mix of the two.
...". I shut my door and people leave me alone. If anybody needs anything, I get e-mails or they just knock on my door and I open it.
When a group of people are working on the same (or similar) projects then having them in an open environment tends to make them more productive. Communication between people is easier, quick meetings to hammer out problems are easily held and are usually very productive (usually because you are coding during the meeting and once the meeting is over the code is fixed).
When people are just thrown into a cubicle farm where the person next to you may or may not be working on anything even close to what you are working on then productivity goes down. Too much noise is created by "irrelevant" (to your project that is) conversations. People shuffle around and the office and stop to chit-chat. Meetings with team members have to be scheduled and have to be held away from the working area so the "bounce" effect is magnified. In general it is the most distracting unproductive environment I have ever been in.
If your company is going to use a cubicle farm approach push for cubicle assignments that reflect work assignemnts and enforce the philosophy that a change in projects dictates a change in cubicles. This also gives a benefit to management in that they know that the Accounting programmers always sit on the NE corner, the HR programmers always sit on the NW corner, etc.
If it is possible to get offices, get large offices that can COMFORTABLY seat 3-4 programmers in a room (don't cram 4 programmers into an 8x12 office).
If you are a lone programmer working on a project, I would recommend isolation. I am currently the only programmer in my department and my productivity has noticably increased since I moved from my "veal fattening pen" to my office. I don't have to listen to co-workers family problems, I don't lose time with social graces "Hi, how are you today
I never said there was a logical fallacy, I said MS needs to keep their lies consistent.
MS is trying to convince congress (and the world) of the fallacy of open sourced programs. One of the arguments they offered is that commercial software companies pay taxes -- the implication being that GPL'd software and the creators of thereof cannot be taxed. Then the second a governmental body tries to tax MS, MS is out in fighting force saying "Hey don't tax us and our innovation!!!"
So, my question to MS is do you want to pay taxes or not? If yes then, the sit down and pay the IP tax. If no then, don't try to convince people about how great commercial software is because you can tax it and how bad GPL'd software is because you can't.
Quote 1:Microsoft says Commercial software pays taxes
Quote 2:...Microsoft Corp., are pushing for an amendment to a municipal tax-reform bill to block the taxation of such intellectual property.
Microsoft's talking out of both sides of their mouth again.
Nothing new!!!!
Well we already know there is an Office port for the iPod. or was that porting Office via your iPod?
Read Article 8
Well, this gives the MPAA and the RIAA one more lobbying tool to get their way.
Copyright holders get to choose where and when you get to see their IP.
The good thing about this, is that I'm going to start copyrighting my phone calls. And then I can just use the agreed statment on article 8 that "the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not in itself amount to communication" as an excuse for not answering my phone.
I agree.
Like I stated, the surveillance is bad enough. I just don't believe that group has the political clout needed to stop this surveillance.
So, if we assume that the surveillance is going to be installed then we, as citizens, must demand to have access video.
I don't like large corporations profiling me. But at least I know their motive -- PROFIT. I can deal with the PROFIT motive and change my activities enough to screw up their profile. However, when a small group or individual gets exclusive access to this kind of information I have no idea what their motives are -- political gain, scape goat, black mail, revenge, etc.
The surveillance is bad enough; but, with the current political climate it will probably be hard to stop the implementation. What needs to be pushed for is open access to the surveillance.
Surveillance of itself is not good or evil. But when only the government has access to the surveillance video then a small group of people get to decided on what to keep and what to discard and peoples' motives should always be suspect.
If law enforcement wants surveillance on every street corner then fine let it be. However, the citizens need to DEMAND free access to the surveilance cameras and not just after the costly legal process of a subpoena (i.e. display the images over the web). This technology already exists, the infastructure can be installed right along with the cameras. Then every citizen can see unadulterated the actual events taking place in a location and draw their own conclusions and not have to rely on the molested interpretation of the involved parties.
If law enforcment can surveil the citizens, the citizens should be able to surveil law enforcment.
January 14, 2002
I'm not sure if this helps, but from my understanding USP#3534338 basically patents the idea of multiple screens on one computer system user interface (basically the precursor to 3270) and thus multiple programs running on the same computer are accessible via different interfaces. Secondly, USP#4555775 basically patents the idea of multiple graphical virtual screens (called "windows") to represent the multiple physical screens. And of course we all know that neither MS nor Apple created the idea of a window based GUI. USP#4939507 (issued to Xerox for Virtual and emulated objects for use in the user interface of a display screen of a display processor) even refers to the screen interfaces as "windows". And thus Lindows is simply using common industry terminology to describe what it does "Linux-Windows" - running multiple applications through a graphical user interface that displays multiple bitmapped windows running on a Linux OS.
Now, I am aware that this is a trademark issue and not a patent issue; however, trademark law does not allow me to create a creamy sandwich spread and call it "Butter" and then sue over "Butter Buds", "Land O'Lakes Butter", "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter", etc for trademark infringement and declaring their names "confusingly similar". This is the exact reason that Kraft Foods names their delightfully tasty fruit flavored gelatin Jell-O because gelatin is the common word for the product and the marketing and legal staff at Kraft knew calling it Kraft Gelatin would be a bad idea..
The term windows is about as common as calling dirt "dirt". Hence Microsoft's choice of the word Windows for their OS is just their own short sightedness. Unfortunately, 800 pound gorillas aren't known for their intelligence just for their jumping up and down and banging their chest.
NAT stands for Network Address Translation
However the Cable Companies, at least by what the article intimates, must think it means Network Aided Thievery!!!!
Why get a "virtual" girlfriend when you can get a real mechanical girlfriend? Check out the Sci-Fi classic Cherry 2000. And now technology is approaching this perfect woman with Real Doll!!
vs Linux buy once use many.
It's almost impossible to buy a PC with out Windows pre-installed on it. This is the only thing that keeps people from buing Windows in a retail box. This means even if you are replacing a machine that you will no longer use, you are going to pay for another copy of Windows. If you decide to upgrade a machine to another version, the OEM license does not give you permission to transfer the old version to another machine so you have paid for 2 licenses and you only get to use one.
With Linux (for most distros at least), you buy one factory burned set of CD's and you can walk around to 100 different machines and install it. If you buy a new machine you don't get forced to buy a new Linux distro. If you upgrade your distro from version x.y.z to version x.y+2.z you don't lose your right to use the x.y.z distro.
The only reason why Linux seems more expensive is because the cost of purchase is very clear and immediate. Microsoft buries the cost of Windows into the machine and so you can't see that $100.00 worth of that machine went to Microsoft. If computer retailers could break out the costs of the computer I'm sure there would be no talk of what we pay more for Windows or Linux. Windows is definitely more expensive.
Ok, if an average MP3 is 5MB (5,242,880 bytes) then the odds of finding a specific MP3 using a sequence of random numbers is 1/256**5,242,880 (since 8-bit bytes have 256 possibilities). This is about the same as 1/10**12,626,113 (since our base 10 numbering system gives each digit only 10 possibilities)
P(MP3)=1/10**12,626,113 (really close to 0)
Thus the odds of not finding a specific 5Mb MP3 using a sequence of random digits is 1-P(MP3)
~P(MP3)=1-1/10**12,626,113 (much closer to 1)
Since the longest known expansion of Pi is about 500 Billion digits (500,000,000,000) there are 499,987,373,888 consecutive strings of 12,626,113 digits contained in the known expansion. So the question is, what is the probabilty that at least one of these is the specific 5MB MP3 we are looking for.
An easier question is to ask what is the probabilty that we won't find the specific 5MB MP3 in a 500 Billion digit expansion of Pi.
The probability that any specific 12,626,113 digit substring of the 500 Billion digit expansion of Pi is not the 5MB MP3 we are looking for is ~P(MP3). So the probability that every one of the 499,987,373,888 possible 12,626,113 digit expansions is not the 5MB MP3 we are looking for is ~P(MP3)**499,987,373,888.
P(~MP3)=~P(MP3)**499,987,373,888
So now that we know the probability that a specific 5MB MP3 file is not contained in the 500 Billion digit known expansion of Pi, we can calculate the probability that we can find at least one instance of a specific 5MB MP3 as ~P(~MP3)=1-P(~MP3).
~P(~MP3)=1-P(~MP3) =1-~P(MP3)**499,987,373,888 =1-(1-P(MP3))**499,987,373,888 =1-(1-1/10**12,626,113)**499,987,373,888
Hmmm... I think I'll go by a lottery ticket.
I bought a new house last summer and I used Realtor.Com to do my preliminary search. Realtor.Com allowed me to search by geography, price, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, etc. This allowed me to create a short list (about 10 homes) that I thought I might be interested in. I printed the information about each home and then I visited each home and ranked them in order of preference.
Meanwhile, I still had a Buyer-Agent!!! The Buyer-Agent recommended several homes for me to go view. I actually did not choose any of her homes. The home I finally decided on was one that I found myself. However, my Buyer-Agent still walked through all of the price and improvement work negotiations (she got the seller to come down on the price and the seller did some basic maintenance to the house and some improvements), the phyical and termite inspections, and all the other sundry details of buying house.
I would not ever dream of buying a house with out a Buyer-Agent, but the Realtor.Com was a great additional tool in the process.
If your box is sitting on a network, try installing VNC.
I have several small networks that I support and I mostly use Linux on the servers and firewalls. Since I don't always have a monitor and keyboard that I can dedicate to a machine that is rarely used by a person (and usually stuffed into a closet somewhere), I install VNC and have it run on boot.
This will not solve your problem with how to auto-rip MP3's, however if your MP3 server goes down or stalls for some reason, you can just VNC into the machine and see what is happening and fix it.
Or perhaps this will solve your problem, since now you can have "user input" from any machine on your network.
The software industry needs to be pushed by either customers or congress to accept one or the other. If software companies go to a subscription basis for their software then patents could make it so that certain "technology" is not available in any software currently on the market. If software companies want to patent/copyright their work then they should not be able to place time limits on the usage of the software.
I'm not arguing for or against software patents or copyrights or subscription sales. I'm simply arguing that if software companies want to "force" customers into upgrades through "expired" licenses they should not be able to lock-up the technology and the software for decades.
If Micro$oft doesn't think it can make money on Windows 3.1 anymore what have they got to loose with it going into the public domain? People will still upgrade their systems to the latest OS for the exact same reason that they upgrade their OS now. Those reasons (application availability, cool factor, technical support, etc.) will continue to exist even if the old version written over 10 years ago is in the public domain.
Guaranteed Hours: One employer I had paid us 5 hours of OT just for being on-call for the week. Then if we actually needed to work, we got paid extra OT for the hours we worked.
Comp Time: Another employer I had allowed us to leave early or come in late to work to compensate for our on-call work withing the same pay period (he didn't want to pay OT). However, we did not have to monitor the system, we just carried pagers and when the pager went off we had to respond. The great thing though was that a lot of times the on-call guy only worked 4 days a week in the office because by the time Friday rolled around he was already at 40 hours so not too many people complained about the on-call work since that usually meant you were going to get a "paid" 3-day weekend.
Salary: The last employer I had where I was required to take an on-call shift paid us on salary and thus eliminated that whole pesky OT pay problem. However, he was pretty good about letting us mangle our hours in the office if we had a lot of after hours work we had to do.
Anyway, as with any other employer/employee relationship make sure to get the rules in writing so that there are no questions about the rules and no way for your employer to screw you out of your pay.
Satan: The Justice department is onto us Bill, what are we going to do.
Bill: Oh Satan, always the worrier. I have a plan.
Satan: A Palm!! Wow, I've got one too.
Bill: Not a Palm you silly prince of darkness, a PLAN to get the DOJ off our tails.
Satan: Oh, what is it?
Bill: First, we need to file for a patent on web based voting and tallying.
Satan: Bill, what does a patent on web based voting have to do with the DOJ.
Bill: Let me finish and quit interrupting.
Satan: Sorry Bill.
Bill: After the patent filing, we will fix the 2000 Presidential election in Florida so that an unpopular republican president will win with the minority of the popular vote but the majority of the electoral college after a contentious legal battle and uncertainty about the punch-card ballots.
Satan: Who are we going to get into the White House that won't detect your plan?
Bill: That's easy, after 8 years of Clinton the GOP will do anything to get one of their guys in the White House and I know a guy in Texas who, well let's say, won't ask too many questions.
Satan: OK, great!! Now we have yet another patent, and we have helped some party boy into the Presidency. How does that solve our problem with the DOJ?
Bill: Satan, I told you not to interrupt. Don't make me BSOD your ass!!
Satan:
Bill: The GOP will be so glad to get control of the Executive branch that they will lead G.W. to get the DOJ lighten-up on our World Conquest, I mean, Monopolistic practices.
Satan: OK, that will work for 4 years. But what about the next president?
Bill: Remember, that little patent we are going to file? Since the whole country is in an uproar about the lack of technology in voting, there will be congressional studies, focus groups, et cetera to fix this problem. Of course the only way to be sure that all future voting is trustworty is to you the Micro$oft Inter-.NET
Satan: Ohhh, I'm begining to understand, and since we hold the patent on web voting, we control the voting!!!
Bill: Satan, you make me proud some times...
Since day one every body has known what a CO-OP program is for. CO-OPs are for exactly what you are doing -- get cheap labor for meanial tasks.
You will never be involved in a project as a CO-OP student for several reasons:
You are a student -- by definition you are still learning and thus may not have the technical knowledge needed
You are temporary -- the company knows you will be leaving, as such they will not involve you in anything that might require more than 15 minutes of your time
You will eventually work for a competitor -- since you are a minor you can not be bound by a contract and as such what you learn you can take with you to whomever your future employer is, why should your CO-OP company pay to train you to compete with them?
Here is what you, as a student, use the CO-OP program for:
Resume builder -- when you graduate at least you will be able to say you've seen the inside of an engineering shop this will give you some advantage over other graduates that will get you past the HR machine and into an interview (list the projects your CO-OP company was involved in regardless of how little you actually participated, if the projects are high profile you'll look like a little genius)
Contact builder -- DING DING DING DING -- this is the biggy. When you apply for a job most HR departments don't know squat about engineering, they do a global search on your resume for buzz-words, if they are there they forward you resume to the department. Now that you are sitting in an interview you can use "in the know" knowledge (i.e. peoples names, industry inside jokes, etc) that will make you seem like less of a newbie and more like "one of the guys". There is a big difference between not hiring the "green-horn" and not hiring Joe the guy who CO-OPed at BFD Engineering with Al (get the picture).
So, basically stop BMW-ing about your meanial work and start rubbing elbows. Go to lunch with the engineers, ask questions about what they are doing and about the industry as a whole. What you get out of a CO-OP is not the ability to be a part of designing the next generation of space flight vehicles, what you get out of a CO-OP is the ability to develop personal relationships with the people who are designing the next generation of space flight vehicles.
When will the RIAA and the "content industry" as a whole learn that there is fundamentally NO technology that will completely protect the "interests" (as defined by the RIAA) of the copyright owners (not to be confused with the artists themselves). Once a digital copy is released, that copy can be perfectly reproduced infinitely many times and distributed. Even keyed systems will fail once keys are compromised. Even encrypted to the speakers/monitors won't completely stop distribution. Eventually there has to be a point of playback that is open for capture and somebody will come out with a technology that will capture it with minimal loss. Even Chinese movie captures from a big screen to a video camera that are posted to USENET are getting better because of better camera technology.
This is a war of escalation that the software industry has also been waging since the 1970's and if you look hard enough you can still get a crack for about any piece of software. What makes the RIAA think that they can do in a few years what the software industry's 30 years of development still has not accomplished?
Simply put, people will pay reasonable prices for reasonable products. I actually pay for software that I use, I actually pay for music I listen to. What I don't like paying for is software and music that sucks -- and usually I only find out it sucks after I pay for it.
Personal note to Hillary Rosen, what kind of business sense does it make to through a bomb in the middle of 50 million of your customers???
Personal note to Orrin Hatch, time to start writting that legislation, if the RIAA won't do what the market demands then compulsary licensing will make you a lot more popular to 50 million people.
Secondly, such a system would have to be accurate to at least 1/2 a lane width (to accurately differentiate acceleration/deceleration lanes from normal traffic lanes). A lane is about 3-5 meters wide. Thus the accuracy of such a system would have to be about 2 meters. If we look at the accurace of gps, stand alone systems are accurate to about 10 meters (thanks to W.J.C's executive order).
What this means is that inorder to effectively and safely implement such a system either military grade GPS receivers would have to be installed in all vehicles (woohoo, I'll take 2 thank you) or we will have to move to a differential GPS system which means that D-GPS transmitters will have to setup all across the country ($$$$ major bucks). Either way, what this effectively means is that with the purchase of any vehicle you will receive a box that can pinpoint your exact location to about 2 meters. This sounds really great on the surface, but now imagine a rogue nation with a slight beef against the US (or any other country for that matter).
Though there may be laws against tampering with the device (there are also laws against setting off explosives that seem to be routinely ignored) all that, say Iraq, would have to do is send a couple of operatives to the US, purchase a couple of cheap cars, extract the GPS receivers and implant them into a missle. Launch the missle from just about anywhere and you can be reasonably assured that the missle will be within 2 meters of its target.
As much as law enforcement agencies may love this idea, I am reasonably sure that the even more draconian military will promptly pimp-slap such a plan based on national security.