2xRedHat and 1xGentoo...MySQL on RedHat was a nightmare and jinxed those two tries. Gentoo everything video and database-wise worked great but there were nasty issues with sound capture (I think it was an OSS problem).
Then I moved to a new 2-floor apartment with cable box downstairs and computer upstairs. Without running unsightly wires up the stairs or building a new computer, my Linux PVR days are over for now.
I tried setting up MythTV three different times with two different distributions of Linux. I got it partially working the 3rd time. MythTV is great, if you have the right hardware (a big IF) and you can also get XMLTV and MySQL to work together correctly.
You are working from a strict definition where censorship is anything that restricts use, I'm working from a practical definition where censorship only occurs if there is no other alternative. Agree to disagree.:-)
First, the misconception that only the rich own pieces of companies. With a small investment (perhaps $200-$250 a month), you too can tell your friends and family that you own a piece of, say, Wallmart. Look into DRIPs and index funds.
Second, when examining a corporation, it is useful to consider everything in terms of profit. There are good profit-based reasons to provide privacy. For example, customers may not shop somewhere because it has had a major privacy incident. Witness the reluctance of people to buy tickets from certain airlines.
However, in many cases, customers will not pay for privacy. At grocery stores, shoppers make a decision to use their privacy-destroying "club card" in order to get the cheaper prices. To them, privacy is not worth the extra money.
Your argument that companies should provide privacy for "moral" reasons is unnecessary. There are plenty of financial reasons for companies to provide good privacy. The problem is that many people won't pay for good privacy. But that's a separate, sociological issue.
If I don't want to buy the Walmart-edited CD, I can go to my local record store, I can go to my local Best Buy, I can order from Amazon.com, I can download from iTunes.
If the government were to say that all copies (Walmart, record store, Best Buy, Amazon.com, iTunes) must not include the offending track, then that would be censorship.
More importantly, if the government were to tell Walmart that it could not sell modified versions of the CD's (that the record company had agreed to), then that would also be censorship.
Why would a company sell products that portray itself in a disparaging light? If I were a shareholder and Walmart had released the unedited CD, I would be pissed. There's no censorship here, just buy your CD somewhere else.
I have trouble understanding how companies caring about profits is bad. They have their shareholder owners in mind. If you want to be someone that companies care about, call your broker and buy a piece of the company.
"most of the profit generated by them gets funnelled back to the shareholders rather than the local community." So you are saying that they are a corporation that cares more about its shareholder OWNERS than the local COMPETITORS. Good for them. If you are a local and think Walmart will win, become an owner and buy Walmart stock. If you are a local and think Walmart will lose, become a competitor and start a local business. It's just business, there's nothing inherently good or evil about the whole thing.
Interesting article [
Tools Coming for Digital Immunity] on a computer security researcher who is using biological metaphors in an effort to create next-generation computer-security tools. This is interesting work, but I am skeptical about a lot of it. The biological metaphor works only marginally well in the computer world. Certainly the monoculture argument makes sense in the computer world, but biological security is generally based on
sacrificing individuals for the good of the species -- which doesn't really apply in the computer world.
If Sun, or someone else, would come along and modify C slightly by removing unsafe functions, and providing alternatives, you could have the best of both, while not having to completely rewrite all the old code.
"Cyclone is a programming language based on C that is safe, meaning that it rules out programs that have buffer overflows, dangling pointers, format string attacks, and so on. High-level, type-safe languages, such as Java, Scheme, or ML also provide safety, but they don't give the same control over data representations and memory management that C does (witness the fact that the run-time systems for these languages are usually written in C.) Furthermore, porting legacy C code to these languages or interfacing with legacy C libraries is a difficult and error-prone process. The goal of Cyclone is to give programmers the same low-level control and performance of C without sacrificing safety, and to make it easy to port or interface with legacy C code."
Re:The names may change, but
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Nope. Spoke to a few females at the ivy league university I graduated from about what they thought about the diamond trade. Though liberal and intelligent, their minds would shut off if diamonds were even mentioned. "Diamonds are forever," was recited to me time and time again.
You are vastly underestimating the desire of females to have the *perfect* wedding, and that includes diamonds, no matter what.
> you're going to have a much easier time getting accepted into a grad program when your undergrad is from the same institution.
Not in computer science. Students are actively discouraged from attending graduate school at their undergraduate university. Every school has a different style that you can benefit from, so by spending your whole academic career at one university, the thought is that you will not develop a well-rounded education.
There is a joke that circulates around grad student communities that pokes fun at MIT (where undergrads there become grad students become professors) for their "academic inbreeding."
Best non-techie reads (ie. on my bookshelf right now): Robert Ludlum - Bourne Identity James Clavell - Shogun John Grisham - Client and Runaway Jury Dick Francis - absolutely anything Richard Adams - Watership Down William Golding - Lord of the Flies Joseph Heller - Catch 22
I'm not sure if anyone's heard of him but Stephen Lawhead is absolutely amazing. Check out the series that starts with "The Paradise War." Great writing style.
Wheel of Time. Ouch. The first book is actually rather good. It got my hopes up for the entire series. I slogged through the second, still acceptable but barely. Third, bad. Fourth, awful. Fifth, beyond readability. The moral is, don't start the series because you'll be disappointed as you continue to read.
Re:Things that I like after 40 years of reading Sc
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
Excellent choice there with the Amber series. I generally don't like SciFi/Fantasy but I enjoyed the decalogy (ya, count 'em, ten) enough to actually buy it.
I'm on "SCO's side"? Note the quotation marks around the word "support."
I just thought the web site was informative. If you look at an argument through an opponent's eyes, your eyes will become your opponent's argument. Or something like that.:-)
Take a look at the Galoob vs. Nintendo case. Nintendo's argument was that the Game Genie takes Nintendo's copyrighted games and modifies them to create a derivative work. Since creating derivative works is the sole right of the copyright owner, Nintendo claimed that the Game Genie violated its copyrights on its games.
The court ruled against Nintendo because a derivative work must include the original work in some "concrete or permanent form." Since the Game Genie simply modifies the bits sent between the Nintendo and the game cartridge, a derivative work (a modified game) was not stored in tangible form anywhere.
To make this complicated logic clearer, the same court in a different case (regarding selling levels for Duke Nukem 3D) compared the fictional example of a "Pink Screener" to the Game Genie. That is, a device that is a piece of pink cellophane designed to be placed over a TV screen. This device does not create a "derivative work" because, although it changes the colors of the original game, the new, tinted game is not placed into a "concrete or permanent form."
It actually makes perfect sense. When I start my browser, Google pops up as the homepage and the cursor automatically is in the Google search text box. Rather than click in my browser's url box and then type the url in, half the time I just type the url into the Google search box and hit enter.
Sure it requires an extra click from the Google search results page to get to the site I visited, but I don't lose any time because I didn't have to click to the browser url box. So it all comes out equal in the end.
This bears a striking resemblence to the scene in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" where Hank Rearden is forced to open up the method of making Rearden Metal because he is achieving dominance of the market. The powers that be felt that it was "not fair" to let Rearden alone reap the benefits of his own work.
Similarly, AOL has created something easy to use and the FCC is concerned that it is "not fair" to the likes of competitors Microsoft, AT&T and Yahoo! that AOL alone be rewarded for its own work.
Slashdot Mirror
If you like the Thief series, you will enjoy Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. It has the same blend of suspense/action.
2xRedHat and 1xGentoo...MySQL on RedHat was a nightmare and jinxed those two tries. Gentoo everything video and database-wise worked great but there were nasty issues with sound capture (I think it was an OSS problem).
Then I moved to a new 2-floor apartment with cable box downstairs and computer upstairs. Without running unsightly wires up the stairs or building a new computer, my Linux PVR days are over for now.
I tried setting up MythTV three different times with two different distributions of Linux. I got it partially working the 3rd time. MythTV is great, if you have the right hardware (a big IF) and you can also get XMLTV and MySQL to work together correctly.
You are working from a strict definition where censorship is anything that restricts use, I'm working from a practical definition where censorship only occurs if there is no other alternative. Agree to disagree. :-)
Cheers,
DSD
First, the misconception that only the rich own pieces of companies. With a small investment (perhaps $200-$250 a month), you too can tell your friends and family that you own a piece of, say, Wallmart. Look into DRIPs and index funds.
Second, when examining a corporation, it is useful to consider everything in terms of profit. There are good profit-based reasons to provide privacy. For example, customers may not shop somewhere because it has had a major privacy incident. Witness the reluctance of people to buy tickets from certain airlines.
However, in many cases, customers will not pay for privacy. At grocery stores, shoppers make a decision to use their privacy-destroying "club card" in order to get the cheaper prices. To them, privacy is not worth the extra money.
Your argument that companies should provide privacy for "moral" reasons is unnecessary. There are plenty of financial reasons for companies to provide good privacy. The problem is that many people won't pay for good privacy. But that's a separate, sociological issue.
If I don't want to buy the Walmart-edited CD, I can go to my local record store, I can go to my local Best Buy, I can order from Amazon.com, I can download from iTunes.
If the government were to say that all copies (Walmart, record store, Best Buy, Amazon.com, iTunes) must not include the offending track, then that would be censorship.
More importantly, if the government were to tell Walmart that it could not sell modified versions of the CD's (that the record company had agreed to), then that would also be censorship.
Why would a company sell products that portray itself in a disparaging light? If I were a shareholder and Walmart had released the unedited CD, I would be pissed. There's no censorship here, just buy your CD somewhere else.
I have trouble understanding how companies caring about profits is bad. They have their shareholder owners in mind. If you want to be someone that companies care about, call your broker and buy a piece of the company.
You're shopping at the wrong stores. If a store treats you that bad, switch. The stores I shop at would never pull that crap.
"most of the profit generated by them gets funnelled back to the shareholders rather than the local community."
So you are saying that they are a corporation that cares more about its shareholder OWNERS than the local COMPETITORS. Good for them.
If you are a local and think Walmart will win, become an owner and buy Walmart stock. If you are a local and think Walmart will lose, become a competitor and start a local business. It's just business, there's nothing inherently good or evil about the whole thing.
Actually, Java is "better" than C. Java is type-safe while C is not. :-)
Cyclone - A Safe Dialect of C
Nope. Spoke to a few females at the ivy league university I graduated from about what they thought about the diamond trade. Though liberal and intelligent, their minds would shut off if diamonds were even mentioned. "Diamonds are forever," was recited to me time and time again.
You are vastly underestimating the desire of females to have the *perfect* wedding, and that includes diamonds, no matter what.
> you're going to have a much easier time getting accepted into a grad program when your undergrad is from the same institution.
Not in computer science. Students are actively discouraged from attending graduate school at their undergraduate university. Every school has a different style that you can benefit from, so by spending your whole academic career at one university, the thought is that you will not develop a well-rounded education.
There is a joke that circulates around grad student communities that pokes fun at MIT (where undergrads there become grad students become professors) for their "academic inbreeding."
Best non-techie reads (ie. on my bookshelf right now):
Robert Ludlum - Bourne Identity
James Clavell - Shogun
John Grisham - Client and Runaway Jury
Dick Francis - absolutely anything
Richard Adams - Watership Down
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Joseph Heller - Catch 22
I'm not sure if anyone's heard of him but Stephen Lawhead is absolutely amazing. Check out the series that starts with "The Paradise War." Great writing style.
Wheel of Time. Ouch.
The first book is actually rather good. It got my hopes up for the entire series. I slogged through the second, still acceptable but barely. Third, bad. Fourth, awful. Fifth, beyond readability.
The moral is, don't start the series because you'll be disappointed as you continue to read.
Excellent choice there with the Amber series. I generally don't like SciFi/Fantasy but I enjoyed the decalogy (ya, count 'em, ten) enough to actually buy it.
I'm on "SCO's side"? Note the quotation marks around the word "support."
:-)
I just thought the web site was informative. If you look at an argument through an opponent's eyes, your eyes will become your opponent's argument. Or something like that.
Check out the SCOsource website
The page includes a FAQ and quotes from Stallman and Perens that "support" SCO's position.
Take a look at the Galoob vs. Nintendo case. Nintendo's argument was that the Game Genie takes Nintendo's copyrighted games and modifies them to create a derivative work. Since creating derivative works is the sole right of the copyright owner, Nintendo claimed that the Game Genie violated its copyrights on its games.
The court ruled against Nintendo because a derivative work must include the original work in some "concrete or permanent form." Since the Game Genie simply modifies the bits sent between the Nintendo and the game cartridge, a derivative work (a modified game) was not stored in tangible form anywhere.
To make this complicated logic clearer, the same court in a different case (regarding selling levels for Duke Nukem 3D) compared the fictional example of a "Pink Screener" to the Game Genie. That is, a device that is a piece of pink cellophane designed to be placed over a TV screen. This device does not create a "derivative work" because, although it changes the colors of the original game, the new, tinted game is not placed into a "concrete or permanent form."
Ooh, alt-d works under Mozilla as well. Excellent. My googling-for-amazon days are over. Thanks, Jester....
It actually makes perfect sense. When I start my browser, Google pops up as the homepage and the cursor automatically is in the Google search text box. Rather than click in my browser's url box and then type the url in, half the time I just type the url into the Google search box and hit enter.
Sure it requires an extra click from the Google search results page to get to the site I visited, but I don't lose any time because I didn't have to click to the browser url box. So it all comes out equal in the end.
This bears a striking resemblence to the scene in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" where Hank Rearden is forced to open up the method of making Rearden Metal because he is achieving dominance of the market. The powers that be felt that it was "not fair" to let Rearden alone reap the benefits of his own work.
Similarly, AOL has created something easy to use and the FCC is concerned that it is "not fair" to the likes of competitors Microsoft, AT&T and Yahoo! that AOL alone be rewarded for its own work.