Re:Sounds like a bad deal to me
on
Textbooks With EULAs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Sounds like a bad deal to me. The hardcopy version lasts years. The electronic copy is 2/3 the price and only usable for 5 months. Fifteen years after I graduated I still refer to old textbooks from time to time. If you don't want to keep it you can always sell them after use, and probably recover more than a third of the original price.
My Ethical Issues in Computing class required almost $200 worth of text books. None were the same from the previous semester, and none were reused the next -- meaning no used books and no sell-backs. That would have been a great place to save 33%. I have never looked back at those books, and never will. Some of my more relevant texts were worth every penny they cost and then some and have seen a great deal of use since.
Those who are posting that I missed the opportunity to connect the metaphor to linux via the penguin mascot are asking for their satire to be spoon fed to them.
I appreciated your duck comment for its intended humor. Those who felt you missed the opportunity to use the word "penguin", however, are right in that you chose a form of humor that is indistinguishable from ignorance to a great number of people. By chosing ducks because "they are universally agreed upon as sweet, non-threatening creatures", you could have easily chosen bunnies or kitties or something which is further from the "spoon fed satire", and perhaps far enough away that your humor won't be mistaken for ignorance by all but the most zealous of anti-Microsoft Linux fanboys.
...for an underpowered box. Shoulda rolled a household server. Meh.
Underpowered? This thing is in the kitchen, right? What the heck are you doing in your kitchen that a 1GHz+ processor running MacOSX is "underpowered"? Maybe "underpowered for a game rig", maybe "the kitchen is no place for a computer", but combining them? A computer in the kitchen will be used for recipies and e-mail. 1.25GHz is plenty for that. He won't even notice that the hard drive is less than 10k RPM.
my land line works 100% of the time. That's not 2 nines, or even 5 nines. 100% of the time, through blizzard after blizzard here in the Northeast US, through rainstorms, through anything.
That's interesting that you've done the studies for your personal case. Most of us can't tell if our phones blink for a minute here and there per week. Most of us sleep 6+ hours per night and spend another 8+ hours at work, meaning less than half of the day is left for noticing the phone is down.
I used to have a 56k modem full time dialed into my ISP. I could tell when it redialed because my local phone company billed by the minute (and I logged redials; there was also a cap on the number of minutes charged). The machine itself was up for 6 months at a time. The dial connection remained active for about 45 days at a time. Maybe the ISP was rebooting their modem boards from time to time, but maybe my phone service wasn't 100% either.
In the same area, I had my other phone line go down some time between a Tuesday and a Friday. It was really hot, so it was easy to assume the heat caused a wire to loosen and then fall out (the tech claimed the wire was no longer hooked up). The phone service ended up being down for 24 hours after I called it in. It would take several other neighbors to have 100% for the phone company to claim 99.999% in my neighborhood for that year.
Cheaper, more efficient, faster (Disk I/O wise), more stable, more flexible (apt-get) than the Mac Mini.
Cheaper? Granted, by at least 5x. More efficient? Less power, certainly, can't attest to what efficiency you're shooting for -- if its CPU cycles per cubic inch, not likely. Faster? If I put an identical IDE drive on a firewire bridge, the MacMini will be faster than some USB implementation.
Not to mention the ability to hack it when I want (The warranty is already void!).
Who cares about the warranty when you're doing something like this? With a Mac Mini, you're not voiding the warranty by loading an alternative OS anyway.
My Linux box is a PowerMac 7600 with a 500MHz G3 upgrade card, running PowerPC Debian. PowerPC doesn't have all the support of the x86 world in Linux (and ARM is even worse), but Debian provides a great platform to provide support for us non-x86 platform users.
Back in my day, we had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow wearing a sun dress, just to submit our punchcards to the mainframe guy! And you complain about a little typing.
Buddy, I was the mainframe guy. I had to get to work the same route, and trust me-- you were NOT as pretty in the sun dress as you thought. You can complain about typing up the punch cards all you want. I'll complain about looking at you in your dress.
I was a huge fan of the transformers in the early 80's. It was a great block of cartoons. There was He-Man, then Transformers, and then GI Joe (which I thought was weak). Oh, and for a couple years, they had Robotech, which was awesome, followed by Voltron. Talk about good cartoons, I don't think even Thundercats could dethrone those cartoons. Nothing good today like those cartoons.
Friend, I don't know how to break this to you, but don't see these cartoons on rerun. Keep your memories alive. They were great when we were kids, but anything with a computer in it was too. If you were forced to watch an entire episode of any of those old series, you'd need a huge shot of nostalgia to keep you from impaling yourself on your TV remote just to end the pain. Nostalgia and childhood inexperience are the two things that make those cartoons great (with the possible exception of Robotech, which I was not privvy to). Those old TV shows made Star Wars (insert your least favorite number, likely "I") sound like it had good writing.
Transformers: The Movie was the only film I have cried in. I'm nearly 30 and still to this day, when I play the Transformers sountrack (you're a fan, so you have it, too, right?), I can't help but get chills and a tear in my eye when Optimus goes to the bright UPS in the sky.
Back to the Transformers. The new series stunk. It was not true to the old one. I don't think I even saw Megatron, at least not the way I remembered him. He was fairly smart back in the 80's, not crazy like starscream. The new series has no thought in it, that is why i dislike it. It is just like one thoughtless attack after another, no strategy.
There are several new series. Not all of them have the cliche, "the world is always reset to the zero state at the end of the show so you can see it in any order". Megatron was indeed changed, as were all the characters. They went with the recent CGI fad, which presented a completely different style. Arguably, they had to mix up the characters some because the graphics were so different.
Personally, I'm learning that some remakes are acceptable. I don't know about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and any version of A New Hope where Han doesn't shoot first is blasphemy, but the new Battlestar Galactica is clearly its own work inspired by the original. Take it beyond video for a minute, and I enjoy Leaving on a Jet Plane by either Chantel Creviazuk or Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but not John Denver or Peter, Paul and Mary. Additionally, I can't stand Prince, but I enjoy Darling Nikki by the Foo Fighters.
And what happened to the robot that replaced Optimus Prime, when he died, I remember this robot was stuck inside a comet or astroid, and he had to be found.
I think you mean Hot Rod. Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can.
Nice early troll for a +5 insightful, but the site currently works well and I'm pulling 90KB/s off the video...
Unfortunately, I can't host a torrent when I finish. If it goes down, maybe someone who can will post an e-mail address.
Is it just me, or am I the only one completely freakin annoyed with DVD menus? One out of every two has a DVD menu that is absolutely infuriating from a usability perspective.
It's terribly inefficient, both from time, power and storage, but it's to the point where I'd rather rip the DVD to my hard drive and watch the DVD from my computer (on the computer screen or TV, depending on the video and if others in the family who want to see it). Get a DVD, put it in the computer, hit the button, go to bed. Wake up, return the video to the store (or put it in the mail, depending on the service), see it at your leisure. Delete after viewing to balance digital rights with unconstitutionally powerful copyright laws that further the progress of neither science or arts.
The menu systems are infuriating while the unskippable commercials and warnings are downright insulting. I want the slower to deteriorate / better replayability of DVD and the users rights of VHS players (minus the Macrovision that meant I couldn't route my VCR through my DVD player because my TV didn't have enough inputs). Instead, I'm ripping DVDs to my computer, wasting some time and money and getting the home theater experience I want.
floppy and CD drives that are not used are much less likely to fail over time.
In my experience, dust is the biggest problem for CD and floppy drives. Sitting still, therefore, is often the biggest enemy. Of course, if you're in an exceptionally clean environment where you use the drives alot, I'm certain you're also correct.
Use a floppy or CD based installation. Leave that hard disk out. When that's on, there are no moving parts at work, except for the fan(s), which should be able to run for a few years. Otherwise, buy a cheap fanless VIA epia board with 2 ethernet connections and boot it up from a flash drive.
I disagree with the floppy / CD suggestion. I've had more floppy drives and CD drives fail under regular use than my hard drive.
For two years I had a 486 PS/2 as my firewall. It was modified to have both an internal ethernet card and a 56k modem extended from the single ISA port (modem would stay dialed to my ISP for 40+ days at a time). All those cards blocked airflow and made it hot and unstable with the hard drive running. I ended up paring down a Slackware install floppy and having LILO drop it to a RAM drive. Rc.local spun down the hard drive.
If you go the PC route, don't bog it down with non-firewall activities. Today, the Flash drives are ideal. Pick up a Compact Flash (ATAPI, native) and an IDE bridge (from what I understand, it just rearranges the pins, not honestly a bridge). No spinning down to do. Keep the file system read only and you never have to worry about reliability. If you need logs, perhaps you can make a RAM drive for those and have a cron script offload them (or use the log port, 514, to send it to another computer entirely). Aside from that, cut power consumption as much as possible -- spin down the hard drive if you feel you must have one. If you spin it down when not in use, it'll last for years.
Re:Just saw a preview a couple of days ago ...
on
The Browncoats Rise Again
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· Score: 2, Informative
Warning for the paranoid or purists, parent poster is a referrer link. If you have a problem with that, don't click. If you don't care, no worries.
I remember talking to a guy at Radio Shack about flash-based drives and how this was going to be the new option back in 1992. I think they were calling it a "hard card." Looking back, it was probably the same thing as PCMCIA Flash drive. That's the precursor to Compact Flash cards for you young'uns.
The "hard cards" available at Radio Shack were ISA cards that had standard magnetic media on them. They were basically an integrated RLL (or MFM, I don't recall) and hard drive all in one clean upgrade kit. They weren't solid state storage.
It's long overdue and I'd love to see solid state drives suddenly become financially feasable.
I doubt it's going to happen though because it seems like the cost of the magnetic materials used in disc platters will always be low and a solid state memory cell (flash, ram, eeprom, whatever) takes a couple transistors. The price of both drops, but hard drive price per GB (or MB, TB, whatever) always drops faster because of the lower transistor count.
My laptop needs less than 10 gigs of storage. 5, honestly, would be fine if I knew that going into it. I'd LOVE to have a 1 gig memory card to put into my Linux server (he may get a Compact Flash / IDE bridge during a visit next year to use as the primary drive). He doesn't need more than 500 megs, but that would give me space to upload the family photo album. My laptop doesn't need more than 60 gigs. What are you doing with all that? Taking your entire DVD library with you, along with the CD collections of your closest friends? (I'm exaggerating, I know DVDs are multiple gigs, work with me here.) A "second computer", or one where speed / reliability / power is a concern, deserves to have flash storage.
Magnetic media will, for a long time, win the market for storage of mass numbers of bits. It's just hard to argue with the densities that magnetic media have enabled at such a meager price in power. We're at the point, however, where drives are oversized for most people's use. You can't get a new iMac with less than 250 GB. Most of my friends don't need that kind of space. Those that do might as well be using external drives anyway for as often as their cases come apart.
Or, it could be that Hawaii IN GENERAL is an EXTREMELY popular tourist destination for Japanese tourists. Hawaii caters to Japanese tourists and it's reasonably priced (versus Japan). Have you ever actually been to Japan? It's expensive. It's small. It's a long, expensive flight away.
I've never been to Hawaii. I live in Japan. Just as Hawaii is an extremely popular tourist destination, as are Las Vegas and San Fransisco. To a lesser degree, as are Chicago and New York City. Notably, the cities to which JAL flies.
Japan may be expensive and small, but it is also true that most Japanese people don't need to go far to enjoy some vacation. Novelty is why people travel so far, otherwise any beach in Japan (I've recently enjoyed Fukuoka) will suffice as well as Hawaii.
I do that. Regularly. I consider it a quality I'm proud of.
But let's remember that the Japanese began this war with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor while conducting peace talks with America. That has got to count for something, right?
Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself. The USS Arizona, if memory serves, is one of the most popular tourist magnets for Japanese tourists. Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans? The Japanese seem keen to remember their lessons.
Deciding that any race is worth more, or less, than another is a quality I never wish to have. Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Do you honestly expect me to think that it takes 100 Japanese lives to make up for a single American? Or do I add up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers and then decide how many Germans to slaughter to compensate for Nazi atrocities?
I won't say you're wrong. I will say that I can't be as certain as you are without knowing a lot of facts modern historians don't know the answers to. The fact is, I don't know the truth and I believe nobody ever will. I don't think the Japanese, Americans or Soviets knew everything that was going on. Nuclear war certainly wasn't on the table when Japan decided to make its move. How do you evaluate a risk like that when scientists haven't even proven it works?
It saved the lives of approximately One Million US Service Personnel, and it saved the lives of Millions of Japanese Civilians and Soliders
The bombings claimed 70,000+ lives in Nagasaki (they recently released the list of names) about 130,000 in Hiroshima, an additional 65,000 are estimated to have died from fallout. How many US lives would not dropping the bombs cost? Japanese lives? How many Soviet lives would it have cost, if they had finished up getting over China to Kyushu where, by modern theory, the Soviets would have accepted a conditional surrender of the Japanese, ending the war only two weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped? (57M/8 years/52 weeks in a year = 137,000 per week, 270,000 in 2 weeks and that's a severe overestimate because the Mediterranian and European theaters were over by then). Please cite some sources for killing 3 million people inside of two weeks.
How many generations does a life cost? The murdered children? The pregnant women? The women still yet to get pregnant? (Men are easy to count.) The bad will the US earned from the rest of the world by being the only nation to use atomic weapons in war?
Maybe the atomic bombs saved lives in the short term. Heck, maybe Japan would have been communist otherwise and the cold war would have not been so cold because someone would need to use the weapons in wartime to prove their effectiveness.
We're just guessing here. There are no clear cut answers. The fact of the matter is, the US had two reasons, one was saving US servicemen lives (accomplished) and two was saving Japan (and the rest of the world) from them falling to the communists (accomplished). The rest of it is retrospective optimism.
Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence. Cast aside everything inside as propaganda, because that's what it'll take not to put your American / European education into perspective.
So the only way to force an unconditional surrender was a rather raw display of power. The Bombs were a way of saying, "We don't need to use people to decimate you -- we can do it in a manner that you cannot possibly defend against. Now, will you give up?"
I agree with everything you just said. Now how many lives did it cost by dragging the war out an extra month by demanding an unconditional surrender, as suggested by then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson? (By the way, if we're going to discuss "intent to save lives", let's discuss the plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in to prevent another Normandy, shall we? At least
I think the right question is "how should I handle my bandwidth being eaten up?" and a lot of people have responded in a good manner. Verify the source, send logs. Additionally, cut down on promiscuous activity (IRC on some servers, or some channels), some multiplayer games, etc. Generally, if you're smart enough to be doing that kind of stuff, you recognize that it's promiscuous.
One of my favorite stories was how I dealt with port scanners in college in 1996. I had an unswitched 10baseT in my dorms. Password sniffers and hackers were everywhere. I was getting constantly scanned. So, I set up an entry in init.d which launched a counter-offensive if someone went after my finger or name service ports. Everyone who knew me knew that I didn't run either service, so that left the ignorant masses with less than honorable intentions. I'd picked out some effective attacks, mostly against Windows machines. The scans slowed down a great deal after I put in my countermeasures.
When I got to grad school, I moved into an apartment with a cable modem (one of the first markets in the US). Without thinking, I left my countermeasures up. Our sysadmin ran some automated portscans to verify that his customers weren't running open mail relays, IRC servers or name servers (upload hungry services). One day, the cable modem lost its signal. My system logs showed three port scan attempts. Each of them stopped after the first countermeasure enabled port was hit, and after the third countermeasure we lost our cable modem. I had to discuss the situation with the admin before being allowed to use the cable modem again. He was irked, but audibly amused.
So I simplified my countermeasure to just respond to every finger attempt with a finger against the opponent. Shortly after that, I learned our admin was paged every time his scanner computer was fingered...
thanks for noticing our contribution at Normandy - and I say that without irony; the fact that Canada had a Normandy beach all to itself, and was in fact the only country to reach its D-Day objectives, is sadly often overlooked.
Sadly, even when it is mentioned, it is glossed over in favor of the other participants.
But please don't assume we're an American puppet state, militarily - we are not.
I do not assume Canada is a puppet state, militarily or otherwise. I've been unable to find out when Canada joined World War II. I've only read that Canada and the US typically have common goals and perspectives (Viet Nam being quite a notable exception). Given my limited data, I assumed that the US and Canada would choose to enter WWII at similar times -- if Canada had joined due to Pearl Harbor, I would not think it a puppet, only a nation concerned that the country to its south could use what help it could get.
So, what you're saying is that Japan could have surrendered unconditionally, and saved many lives.
The fact that they CHOSE not to is no ones fault but theirs.
Troll much?
The United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor. If we had just surrendered instead of entering World War II, Britian could have fallen to the Nazis, all the American soldiers could have been saved and all the people they shot wouldn't have been killed. The war would have been pretty quick without North American involvement (Canadians did more than pull their own weight at Normandy, and I don't think Canada would have had that level of involvement without US cooperation).
If you want to have a conversation about the idiocy, pointlessness and stupidity of war, let's meet at the local coffee shop some time and we'll agree with each other cup after cup. If you want to start telling me that the Japanese are the ones who deserved to have hundreds of thousands of civilians to die because they didn't unconditionally surrender, I'll put down the caffeine in order to stay calm.
From one perspective, yes, the Japanese could have unconditionally surrendered they day they attacked Pearl Harbor. How many lives (Japanese and American) would that have saved? What I've started to read about is that the Japanese were trying to trade the lives of several thousand of their soldiers in order to surrender to the Soviets, whom they believed would be more lenient and accepting of their culture-- the idea of an unconditional surrender without the perceived threat of atomic bombing the entire civilian population is beyond consideration. They lost that gamble when the first atomic bomb struck. In the ensuing days, there was a lot of handwringing over what the heck just happened and how to react. The second bomb hit and there was no room for question -- there was more than one of these horrific weapons and it was time to make sure no more of them came.
Besides, this is not just a bomb that killed thousands of people. It's a bomb that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By forcing the Japanese into surrender, a months-long, duke-it-out, land invasion of Japan became unneccessary.
I live in Nagasaki (temporarily) as an American ex-pat (ex like external, not ex-wife). I sat through all the same lessons you did in school. I know the Western perspective.
They say the victor of war gets to define "history". Well, current "history", whoever the victor, isn't looking too keen on the American atomic bombing. There are several stories that the Japanese Emperor looked for a way to conditionally surrender, but the American president found that unacceptable -- the Emperor must give up his throne and tell his people he was not a god. (For this culture, that was not negotiable.) Additionally, the Japanese appeared to be postponing invasion long enough to surrender to the Soviets, who were making steady progress accross China at this time, and were supposedly 2 weeks away. The Soviets, as the theory goes, would accept a war-ending surrender that left the Japanese Emperor his throne and some dignity left. There was no realistic way the Japanese could surrender to the Americans if they believed any of them would still be alive to meet the Soviets -- the Americans knew this and were desperate to save the Japanese from the Communists.
I've been to the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. My grandfather was a US Navy fighter pilot in World War II. Every fiber of my being wants the Americans to have been justified in wiping out 150,000 civilians in two blinks of an eye, and perhaps tenfold (or more) than that in the decades to follow.
I'm not a historian, but I've read some history books (and watched The History Channel do its story on the end of WW2 in the Pacific). I don't claim to know what's right, but I want to offer these other perspectives for you to consider before making your bold claim that killing that many people was an effort to "save lives". Please take a look at bothsides on Wikipedia (although it's clear you're pretty up on the proponents' side, the opposition is quite interesting to consider). We can't know for sure what happened 60 years ago. Maybe, even if the atomic bombs ended up costing more lives and Japan fell to the Russians, the world political landscape would have been different, causing World War 3 or the something like the Cuban Missile Crisis to play out differently so the long term cost in life would have been much higher. Maybe not.
For fun, I'd record the embarrassing things officers do in the holodeck and then play them for everyone in the cafeteria. I'm telling you, I could put some life back into "Star Trek".
I had to check there for a second... I was starting to worry (hope?) that you were CleverNickName. Then I saw "willing to learn acting"... which isn't a problem he has.
As an aside, Wil had a rare second Slashdot interview last year. Then we never saw the answers, beyond what he responded in the actual questions. Now, Slashdot is no longer linked to in his blog. Did Wil and/. have a falling out?
The truth is that in 2002, Turner CEO Jamie Kellner said that editing out commercials entirely with special software in DVRs is stealing.
You will never see my post because I'm too late. So be it. I am compelled to respond anyway.
I don't care if George W. Bush gets up with John Kerry at a podium with Kofi Anan and the new Pope and they all proclaim loud and clear that editing out commercials is stealing. They are entitled to their opinion, just as I am mine. "Right" and "wrong" are not absolutes, despite what others wish us to believe.
Copyright is a right given to companies and individuals. GIVEN. It can be taken away if abused. It's not unalienable. According to the US Constitution, copyright is there to provide for the betterment of art and science. What part of refusing to accept the Internet as a delivery mechanism is for the betterment of art or science?
5+ years ago, music "piracy" was abounding on the Internet. Napster was HUGE. I heard gradmas telling me FIRST HAND that they were downloading stuff off the Internet. I heard a guy who worked for a hard drive company tell me how much he loved Napster because that's what was driving his business in those days. Nowadays, how much RIAA action do you hear about? Personally, I hear very little. Online music distribution has made legal what was going to happen anyway. Companies like Apple (your supposed employer or otherwise affiliate, I lose track) made this possible for us. There were hundreds of thousands or even millions of people willing to give people money for what they were doing, if only someone would take it! All iTunes did was legitimize the behavior that was happening before (the leasing of content) and take the money that people were willing to pay anyway.
Commercials are a way for TV broadcasters to get money indirectly from consumers. I would suspect that there's a lot of profit to be made by cutting advertisers out of the loop. Sure, maybe that gets realized in the form of lower costs to the consumer, but probably it's going to be more profits to the first few firms who bite. I say "fine!", "do it" and "what's stopping you?".
If television broadcasters and movie companies don't get a grip and get on the Internet quickly, they will find trends continuing. We're willing to part with our money. Just give us ad-free content we can download and watch on demand. I've done the math, for each Nielson family, a half hour long show costs us up to 50 cents in eyeball time. An hour long show can cost almost a dollar. That cost is getting passed on to us every time we purchase Coke or any other advertised-for product. Why not give it directly to the broadcaster and pay less for consumer products? Aren't ad costs supposed to be the primary price difference between name brand and generics?
I have a credit card in my outstretched hand for these content delivery services. My eyeballs are not currently for sale.
Make a 30 minute show available for a buck, make a 60 minute show two bucks. Make old movies the same as blockbuster, and make first runs the same as theaters. Remove the justification for Grandmas to torrent the stuff!
Commercials currently are part of a social contract. View a TV show, get exposed to the commercials. Get familiarity with the brands, buy the brands later. Stating that it's stealing to edit out commercials is only a half step away from stating that it's stealing not to purchase products advertised on the shows one watches. Even if I watch shows who accept advertising dollars from Diet Coke, I'm not buying anything with aspertame in it, AND THAT'S NOT STEALING. Editing out a commercial for Diet Coke isn't stealing, it's saving myself time.
The argument doesn't hold up.
These pay-per-month services are rentals: you stop paying and you no longer have access to the music
Please allow me to slightly modify the argument. People have catastrophic hard drive crashes often enough, say, every 2-3 years. Most of us don't back up well. Lots of others simply don't want to keep the MP3s they kept from Napster 1 back in 1999. Let's assume I downloaded a HUGE number of MP3s in 1999. Somewhere, Ace of Base's "Cruel Summer" stopped being cool, Prince's "Party Like It's 1999" lost its attraction, and even that Ricky Martin song I was ashamed to download somehow disappeared from my hard drive. I've still got my CD media from 1992 when I got my first CD player. I own those. But MP3s were effectively borrowed from 1999 until I lost interest and freed up that drive space. One might consider that to have been rented without pay.
Assume I got a lot of music in 1999. The numbers like I could get from Yahoo (or the recorded from the radio, whose quality is compared to 128kbps MP3 but that's another matter altogether). 6 years have passed since Napster started to make its impact. 6 years, times 12 months, times $5 limits most people to well under $360.
Just because there are always people who don't know how this works...
Each generation of Debian is named after a character from Toy Story. Potato, Sarge, Woody (the one I run), Slink, Hamm and Sid. Sid is always "testing", the most unstable places for apps to go. Remember who Sid was in Toy Story? Same thing. After packages get more stable, they get promoted to "testing". For a while, this has been "Sarge". After "testing" proves itself (and they demote packages that can't get more stable), it gets promoted to "stable"-- today that's "woody".
Sarge being frozen means that sometime in the near future, we'll have a new "stable", with more recent packages.
People who run servers but can't afford to qualify them much should probably stick with "stable". "Testing" is for desktop users who don't like much churn, but it's still more stable than Windows, IMHO. "Unstable" is for the bleeding edge who want someone else to do the compiling.
Number 1, they are not "his" stores. As CEO of Apple, he has a fiduciary responsible to Apple's owners (i.e., the shareholders). Pulling Wiley's books does not uphold this in any way; Steve Jobs is not Apple.
Steve Jobs is Apple. When Apple hired Jobs, they hired his charisma, his contacts, his reputation, his expertise. The CEO of every company is a figurehead, a spokesperson, a representative in every way. If Steve believes that this book casts his leadership in a negative way, then it is very easy to believe that it casts the company in the same negative way.
I say all this a long-time Mac user, Apple shareholder and overall fan of the company.
So you know something about the Apple's Reality Distortion Field. Wait, no, that didn't happen when Jobs wasn't there. Right. It's Jobs' Reality Distortion Field. The man is the company.
But ask yourself this: what good has ever come from governments or corporations bullying the press?
Do you believe that Apple / Jobs are bullying Wiley? Do you honestly think that Apple's online store is responsible for a noticable percentage of Wiley's sales? I've seen their books in almost every English book store I've walked into in the past 5 or 10 years. When you go to the Apple store, you buy hardware. You buy books at bn.com, amazon.com or your local bookstore / coffee shop.
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My Ethical Issues in Computing class required almost $200 worth of text books. None were the same from the previous semester, and none were reused the next -- meaning no used books and no sell-backs. That would have been a great place to save 33%. I have never looked back at those books, and never will. Some of my more relevant texts were worth every penny they cost and then some and have seen a great deal of use since.
I appreciated your duck comment for its intended humor. Those who felt you missed the opportunity to use the word "penguin", however, are right in that you chose a form of humor that is indistinguishable from ignorance to a great number of people. By chosing ducks because "they are universally agreed upon as sweet, non-threatening creatures", you could have easily chosen bunnies or kitties or something which is further from the "spoon fed satire", and perhaps far enough away that your humor won't be mistaken for ignorance by all but the most zealous of anti-Microsoft Linux fanboys.
Underpowered? This thing is in the kitchen, right? What the heck are you doing in your kitchen that a 1GHz+ processor running MacOSX is "underpowered"? Maybe "underpowered for a game rig", maybe "the kitchen is no place for a computer", but combining them? A computer in the kitchen will be used for recipies and e-mail. 1.25GHz is plenty for that. He won't even notice that the hard drive is less than 10k RPM.
That's interesting that you've done the studies for your personal case. Most of us can't tell if our phones blink for a minute here and there per week. Most of us sleep 6+ hours per night and spend another 8+ hours at work, meaning less than half of the day is left for noticing the phone is down.
I used to have a 56k modem full time dialed into my ISP. I could tell when it redialed because my local phone company billed by the minute (and I logged redials; there was also a cap on the number of minutes charged). The machine itself was up for 6 months at a time. The dial connection remained active for about 45 days at a time. Maybe the ISP was rebooting their modem boards from time to time, but maybe my phone service wasn't 100% either.
In the same area, I had my other phone line go down some time between a Tuesday and a Friday. It was really hot, so it was easy to assume the heat caused a wire to loosen and then fall out (the tech claimed the wire was no longer hooked up). The phone service ended up being down for 24 hours after I called it in. It would take several other neighbors to have 100% for the phone company to claim 99.999% in my neighborhood for that year.
Cheaper? Granted, by at least 5x. More efficient? Less power, certainly, can't attest to what efficiency you're shooting for -- if its CPU cycles per cubic inch, not likely. Faster? If I put an identical IDE drive on a firewire bridge, the MacMini will be faster than some USB implementation.
Who cares about the warranty when you're doing something like this? With a Mac Mini, you're not voiding the warranty by loading an alternative OS anyway.
My Linux box is a PowerMac 7600 with a 500MHz G3 upgrade card, running PowerPC Debian. PowerPC doesn't have all the support of the x86 world in Linux (and ARM is even worse), but Debian provides a great platform to provide support for us non-x86 platform users.
Buddy, I was the mainframe guy. I had to get to work the same route, and trust me-- you were NOT as pretty in the sun dress as you thought. You can complain about typing up the punch cards all you want. I'll complain about looking at you in your dress.
Friend, I don't know how to break this to you, but don't see these cartoons on rerun. Keep your memories alive. They were great when we were kids, but anything with a computer in it was too. If you were forced to watch an entire episode of any of those old series, you'd need a huge shot of nostalgia to keep you from impaling yourself on your TV remote just to end the pain. Nostalgia and childhood inexperience are the two things that make those cartoons great (with the possible exception of Robotech, which I was not privvy to). Those old TV shows made Star Wars (insert your least favorite number, likely "I") sound like it had good writing.
Transformers: The Movie was the only film I have cried in. I'm nearly 30 and still to this day, when I play the Transformers sountrack (you're a fan, so you have it, too, right?), I can't help but get chills and a tear in my eye when Optimus goes to the bright UPS in the sky.
There are several new series. Not all of them have the cliche, "the world is always reset to the zero state at the end of the show so you can see it in any order". Megatron was indeed changed, as were all the characters. They went with the recent CGI fad, which presented a completely different style. Arguably, they had to mix up the characters some because the graphics were so different.
Personally, I'm learning that some remakes are acceptable. I don't know about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and any version of A New Hope where Han doesn't shoot first is blasphemy, but the new Battlestar Galactica is clearly its own work inspired by the original. Take it beyond video for a minute, and I enjoy Leaving on a Jet Plane by either Chantel Creviazuk or Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, but not John Denver or Peter, Paul and Mary. Additionally, I can't stand Prince, but I enjoy Darling Nikki by the Foo Fighters.
I think you mean Hot Rod. Wikipedia has a better explanation than I can.
Nice early troll for a +5 insightful, but the site currently works well and I'm pulling 90KB/s off the video... Unfortunately, I can't host a torrent when I finish. If it goes down, maybe someone who can will post an e-mail address.
It's terribly inefficient, both from time, power and storage, but it's to the point where I'd rather rip the DVD to my hard drive and watch the DVD from my computer (on the computer screen or TV, depending on the video and if others in the family who want to see it). Get a DVD, put it in the computer, hit the button, go to bed. Wake up, return the video to the store (or put it in the mail, depending on the service), see it at your leisure. Delete after viewing to balance digital rights with unconstitutionally powerful copyright laws that further the progress of neither science or arts.
The menu systems are infuriating while the unskippable commercials and warnings are downright insulting. I want the slower to deteriorate / better replayability of DVD and the users rights of VHS players (minus the Macrovision that meant I couldn't route my VCR through my DVD player because my TV didn't have enough inputs). Instead, I'm ripping DVDs to my computer, wasting some time and money and getting the home theater experience I want.
In my experience, dust is the biggest problem for CD and floppy drives. Sitting still, therefore, is often the biggest enemy. Of course, if you're in an exceptionally clean environment where you use the drives alot, I'm certain you're also correct.
I disagree with the floppy / CD suggestion. I've had more floppy drives and CD drives fail under regular use than my hard drive.
For two years I had a 486 PS/2 as my firewall. It was modified to have both an internal ethernet card and a 56k modem extended from the single ISA port (modem would stay dialed to my ISP for 40+ days at a time). All those cards blocked airflow and made it hot and unstable with the hard drive running. I ended up paring down a Slackware install floppy and having LILO drop it to a RAM drive. Rc.local spun down the hard drive.
If you go the PC route, don't bog it down with non-firewall activities. Today, the Flash drives are ideal. Pick up a Compact Flash (ATAPI, native) and an IDE bridge (from what I understand, it just rearranges the pins, not honestly a bridge). No spinning down to do. Keep the file system read only and you never have to worry about reliability. If you need logs, perhaps you can make a RAM drive for those and have a cron script offload them (or use the log port, 514, to send it to another computer entirely). Aside from that, cut power consumption as much as possible -- spin down the hard drive if you feel you must have one. If you spin it down when not in use, it'll last for years.
Warning for the paranoid or purists, parent poster is a referrer link. If you have a problem with that, don't click. If you don't care, no worries.
The "hard cards" available at Radio Shack were ISA cards that had standard magnetic media on them. They were basically an integrated RLL (or MFM, I don't recall) and hard drive all in one clean upgrade kit. They weren't solid state storage.
My laptop needs less than 10 gigs of storage. 5, honestly, would be fine if I knew that going into it. I'd LOVE to have a 1 gig memory card to put into my Linux server (he may get a Compact Flash / IDE bridge during a visit next year to use as the primary drive). He doesn't need more than 500 megs, but that would give me space to upload the family photo album. My laptop doesn't need more than 60 gigs. What are you doing with all that? Taking your entire DVD library with you, along with the CD collections of your closest friends? (I'm exaggerating, I know DVDs are multiple gigs, work with me here.) A "second computer", or one where speed / reliability / power is a concern, deserves to have flash storage.
Magnetic media will, for a long time, win the market for storage of mass numbers of bits. It's just hard to argue with the densities that magnetic media have enabled at such a meager price in power. We're at the point, however, where drives are oversized for most people's use. You can't get a new iMac with less than 250 GB. Most of my friends don't need that kind of space. Those that do might as well be using external drives anyway for as often as their cases come apart.
I've never been to Hawaii. I live in Japan. Just as Hawaii is an extremely popular tourist destination, as are Las Vegas and San Fransisco. To a lesser degree, as are Chicago and New York City. Notably, the cities to which JAL flies.
Japan may be expensive and small, but it is also true that most Japanese people don't need to go far to enjoy some vacation. Novelty is why people travel so far, otherwise any beach in Japan (I've recently enjoyed Fukuoka) will suffice as well as Hawaii.
I do that. Regularly. I consider it a quality I'm proud of.
Forgotten history is doomed to repeat itself. The USS Arizona, if memory serves, is one of the most popular tourist magnets for Japanese tourists. Why aren't either hypocenter of the atomic bombs detonations a destination for Americans? The Japanese seem keen to remember their lessons.
Deciding that any race is worth more, or less, than another is a quality I never wish to have. Do you really think the US has the high road by comparing the slaughter of 2400 volunteer servicemen to the murder of nearly a quarter of a million women, children and old men in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Do you honestly expect me to think that it takes 100 Japanese lives to make up for a single American? Or do I add up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers and then decide how many Germans to slaughter to compensate for Nazi atrocities?
Educate me.
Fix Wikipedia.
I won't say you're wrong. I will say that I can't be as certain as you are without knowing a lot of facts modern historians don't know the answers to. The fact is, I don't know the truth and I believe nobody ever will. I don't think the Japanese, Americans or Soviets knew everything that was going on. Nuclear war certainly wasn't on the table when Japan decided to make its move. How do you evaluate a risk like that when scientists haven't even proven it works?
The bombings claimed 70,000+ lives in Nagasaki (they recently released the list of names) about 130,000 in Hiroshima, an additional 65,000 are estimated to have died from fallout. How many US lives would not dropping the bombs cost? Japanese lives? How many Soviet lives would it have cost, if they had finished up getting over China to Kyushu where, by modern theory, the Soviets would have accepted a conditional surrender of the Japanese, ending the war only two weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped? (57M/8 years /52 weeks in a year = 137,000 per week, 270,000 in 2 weeks and that's a severe overestimate because the Mediterranian and European theaters were over by then). Please cite some sources for killing 3 million people inside of two weeks.
How many generations does a life cost? The murdered children? The pregnant women? The women still yet to get pregnant? (Men are easy to count.) The bad will the US earned from the rest of the world by being the only nation to use atomic weapons in war?
Maybe the atomic bombs saved lives in the short term. Heck, maybe Japan would have been communist otherwise and the cold war would have not been so cold because someone would need to use the weapons in wartime to prove their effectiveness.
We're just guessing here. There are no clear cut answers. The fact of the matter is, the US had two reasons, one was saving US servicemen lives (accomplished) and two was saving Japan (and the rest of the world) from them falling to the communists (accomplished). The rest of it is retrospective optimism.
Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence. Cast aside everything inside as propaganda, because that's what it'll take not to put your American / European education into perspective.
I agree with everything you just said. Now how many lives did it cost by dragging the war out an extra month by demanding an unconditional surrender, as suggested by then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson? (By the way, if we're going to discuss "intent to save lives", let's discuss the plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in to prevent another Normandy, shall we? At least
I think the right question is "how should I handle my bandwidth being eaten up?" and a lot of people have responded in a good manner. Verify the source, send logs. Additionally, cut down on promiscuous activity (IRC on some servers, or some channels), some multiplayer games, etc. Generally, if you're smart enough to be doing that kind of stuff, you recognize that it's promiscuous.
One of my favorite stories was how I dealt with port scanners in college in 1996. I had an unswitched 10baseT in my dorms. Password sniffers and hackers were everywhere. I was getting constantly scanned. So, I set up an entry in init.d which launched a counter-offensive if someone went after my finger or name service ports. Everyone who knew me knew that I didn't run either service, so that left the ignorant masses with less than honorable intentions. I'd picked out some effective attacks, mostly against Windows machines. The scans slowed down a great deal after I put in my countermeasures.
When I got to grad school, I moved into an apartment with a cable modem (one of the first markets in the US). Without thinking, I left my countermeasures up. Our sysadmin ran some automated portscans to verify that his customers weren't running open mail relays, IRC servers or name servers (upload hungry services). One day, the cable modem lost its signal. My system logs showed three port scan attempts. Each of them stopped after the first countermeasure enabled port was hit, and after the third countermeasure we lost our cable modem. I had to discuss the situation with the admin before being allowed to use the cable modem again. He was irked, but audibly amused.
So I simplified my countermeasure to just respond to every finger attempt with a finger against the opponent. Shortly after that, I learned our admin was paged every time his scanner computer was fingered...
Sadly, even when it is mentioned, it is glossed over in favor of the other participants.
I do not assume Canada is a puppet state, militarily or otherwise. I've been unable to find out when Canada joined World War II. I've only read that Canada and the US typically have common goals and perspectives (Viet Nam being quite a notable exception). Given my limited data, I assumed that the US and Canada would choose to enter WWII at similar times -- if Canada had joined due to Pearl Harbor, I would not think it a puppet, only a nation concerned that the country to its south could use what help it could get.
Troll much?
The United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor. If we had just surrendered instead of entering World War II, Britian could have fallen to the Nazis, all the American soldiers could have been saved and all the people they shot wouldn't have been killed. The war would have been pretty quick without North American involvement (Canadians did more than pull their own weight at Normandy, and I don't think Canada would have had that level of involvement without US cooperation).
If you want to have a conversation about the idiocy, pointlessness and stupidity of war, let's meet at the local coffee shop some time and we'll agree with each other cup after cup. If you want to start telling me that the Japanese are the ones who deserved to have hundreds of thousands of civilians to die because they didn't unconditionally surrender, I'll put down the caffeine in order to stay calm.
From one perspective, yes, the Japanese could have unconditionally surrendered they day they attacked Pearl Harbor. How many lives (Japanese and American) would that have saved? What I've started to read about is that the Japanese were trying to trade the lives of several thousand of their soldiers in order to surrender to the Soviets, whom they believed would be more lenient and accepting of their culture-- the idea of an unconditional surrender without the perceived threat of atomic bombing the entire civilian population is beyond consideration. They lost that gamble when the first atomic bomb struck. In the ensuing days, there was a lot of handwringing over what the heck just happened and how to react. The second bomb hit and there was no room for question -- there was more than one of these horrific weapons and it was time to make sure no more of them came.
I live in Nagasaki (temporarily) as an American ex-pat (ex like external, not ex-wife). I sat through all the same lessons you did in school. I know the Western perspective.
They say the victor of war gets to define "history". Well, current "history", whoever the victor, isn't looking too keen on the American atomic bombing. There are several stories that the Japanese Emperor looked for a way to conditionally surrender, but the American president found that unacceptable -- the Emperor must give up his throne and tell his people he was not a god. (For this culture, that was not negotiable.) Additionally, the Japanese appeared to be postponing invasion long enough to surrender to the Soviets, who were making steady progress accross China at this time, and were supposedly 2 weeks away. The Soviets, as the theory goes, would accept a war-ending surrender that left the Japanese Emperor his throne and some dignity left. There was no realistic way the Japanese could surrender to the Americans if they believed any of them would still be alive to meet the Soviets -- the Americans knew this and were desperate to save the Japanese from the Communists.
I've been to the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. My grandfather was a US Navy fighter pilot in World War II. Every fiber of my being wants the Americans to have been justified in wiping out 150,000 civilians in two blinks of an eye, and perhaps tenfold (or more) than that in the decades to follow.
I'm not a historian, but I've read some history books (and watched The History Channel do its story on the end of WW2 in the Pacific). I don't claim to know what's right, but I want to offer these other perspectives for you to consider before making your bold claim that killing that many people was an effort to "save lives". Please take a look at both sides on Wikipedia (although it's clear you're pretty up on the proponents' side, the opposition is quite interesting to consider). We can't know for sure what happened 60 years ago. Maybe, even if the atomic bombs ended up costing more lives and Japan fell to the Russians, the world political landscape would have been different, causing World War 3 or the something like the Cuban Missile Crisis to play out differently so the long term cost in life would have been much higher. Maybe not.
I had to check there for a second... I was starting to worry (hope?) that you were CleverNickName. Then I saw "willing to learn acting"... which isn't a problem he has.
As an aside, Wil had a rare second Slashdot interview last year. Then we never saw the answers, beyond what he responded in the actual questions. Now, Slashdot is no longer linked to in his blog. Did Wil and /. have a falling out?
You will never see my post because I'm too late. So be it. I am compelled to respond anyway.
I don't care if George W. Bush gets up with John Kerry at a podium with Kofi Anan and the new Pope and they all proclaim loud and clear that editing out commercials is stealing. They are entitled to their opinion, just as I am mine. "Right" and "wrong" are not absolutes, despite what others wish us to believe.
Copyright is a right given to companies and individuals. GIVEN. It can be taken away if abused. It's not unalienable. According to the US Constitution, copyright is there to provide for the betterment of art and science. What part of refusing to accept the Internet as a delivery mechanism is for the betterment of art or science?
5+ years ago, music "piracy" was abounding on the Internet. Napster was HUGE. I heard gradmas telling me FIRST HAND that they were downloading stuff off the Internet. I heard a guy who worked for a hard drive company tell me how much he loved Napster because that's what was driving his business in those days. Nowadays, how much RIAA action do you hear about? Personally, I hear very little. Online music distribution has made legal what was going to happen anyway. Companies like Apple (your supposed employer or otherwise affiliate, I lose track) made this possible for us. There were hundreds of thousands or even millions of people willing to give people money for what they were doing, if only someone would take it! All iTunes did was legitimize the behavior that was happening before (the leasing of content) and take the money that people were willing to pay anyway.
Commercials are a way for TV broadcasters to get money indirectly from consumers. I would suspect that there's a lot of profit to be made by cutting advertisers out of the loop. Sure, maybe that gets realized in the form of lower costs to the consumer, but probably it's going to be more profits to the first few firms who bite. I say "fine!", "do it" and "what's stopping you?".
If television broadcasters and movie companies don't get a grip and get on the Internet quickly, they will find trends continuing. We're willing to part with our money. Just give us ad-free content we can download and watch on demand. I've done the math, for each Nielson family, a half hour long show costs us up to 50 cents in eyeball time. An hour long show can cost almost a dollar. That cost is getting passed on to us every time we purchase Coke or any other advertised-for product. Why not give it directly to the broadcaster and pay less for consumer products? Aren't ad costs supposed to be the primary price difference between name brand and generics?
I have a credit card in my outstretched hand for these content delivery services. My eyeballs are not currently for sale.
Make a 30 minute show available for a buck, make a 60 minute show two bucks. Make old movies the same as blockbuster, and make first runs the same as theaters. Remove the justification for Grandmas to torrent the stuff!
Commercials currently are part of a social contract. View a TV show, get exposed to the commercials. Get familiarity with the brands, buy the brands later. Stating that it's stealing to edit out commercials is only a half step away from stating that it's stealing not to purchase products advertised on the shows one watches. Even if I watch shows who accept advertising dollars from Diet Coke, I'm not buying anything with aspertame in it, AND THAT'S NOT STEALING. Editing out a commercial for Diet Coke isn't stealing, it's saving myself time.
Please allow me to slightly modify the argument. People have catastrophic hard drive crashes often enough, say, every 2-3 years. Most of us don't back up well. Lots of others simply don't want to keep the MP3s they kept from Napster 1 back in 1999. Let's assume I downloaded a HUGE number of MP3s in 1999. Somewhere, Ace of Base's "Cruel Summer" stopped being cool, Prince's "Party Like It's 1999" lost its attraction, and even that Ricky Martin song I was ashamed to download somehow disappeared from my hard drive. I've still got my CD media from 1992 when I got my first CD player. I own those. But MP3s were effectively borrowed from 1999 until I lost interest and freed up that drive space. One might consider that to have been rented without pay.
Assume I got a lot of music in 1999. The numbers like I could get from Yahoo (or the recorded from the radio, whose quality is compared to 128kbps MP3 but that's another matter altogether). 6 years have passed since Napster started to make its impact. 6 years, times 12 months, times $5 limits most people to well under $360.
Just because there are always people who don't know how this works...
Each generation of Debian is named after a character from Toy Story. Potato, Sarge, Woody (the one I run), Slink, Hamm and Sid. Sid is always "testing", the most unstable places for apps to go. Remember who Sid was in Toy Story? Same thing. After packages get more stable, they get promoted to "testing". For a while, this has been "Sarge". After "testing" proves itself (and they demote packages that can't get more stable), it gets promoted to "stable"-- today that's "woody".
Sarge being frozen means that sometime in the near future, we'll have a new "stable", with more recent packages.
People who run servers but can't afford to qualify them much should probably stick with "stable". "Testing" is for desktop users who don't like much churn, but it's still more stable than Windows, IMHO. "Unstable" is for the bleeding edge who want someone else to do the compiling.
For more information, visit your local library.
Steve Jobs is Apple. When Apple hired Jobs, they hired his charisma, his contacts, his reputation, his expertise. The CEO of every company is a figurehead, a spokesperson, a representative in every way. If Steve believes that this book casts his leadership in a negative way, then it is very easy to believe that it casts the company in the same negative way.
So you know something about the Apple's Reality Distortion Field. Wait, no, that didn't happen when Jobs wasn't there. Right. It's Jobs' Reality Distortion Field. The man is the company.
Do you believe that Apple / Jobs are bullying Wiley? Do you honestly think that Apple's online store is responsible for a noticable percentage of Wiley's sales? I've seen their books in almost every English book store I've walked into in the past 5 or 10 years. When you go to the Apple store, you buy hardware. You buy books at bn.com, amazon.com or your local bookstore / coffee shop.