Yeah, we used to have fair use. It's even in the constitution. While there is no doubt these stupid laws are going to be overturned on several legal grounds, in the meantime it's entirely too risky to play the game.
Fortunately the French don't have the government eating out of industry's hands.
I used to do that with copy-protected diskettes. A lot of them would write something back to the installer to the effect of "I've already been installed once, so there". Well, clone the disk before you install, and you have no such problem.
It's not like I was pirating disks. I just had meager needs to possibly be able to reinstall the damn thing if my hard drive got wiped, or the program got cruddy.
Re:The San Andreas fault is nice and all, but
on
Is This The Big One?
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· Score: 1
I guess it's slacking off.
It's not hard to see why. With the current administration everything is nobody's fault. I am having trouble finding that one on the map, though.
The web is down? Oh right, I host my own root-level domain servers!
How much do you want to bet someone was fiddling with the database and accidentally dropped a table, or tried to delete a record in SQL but forgot the "where" clause.
For you non-database people out there, that's the SQL equivilent of "rm -rf", except that it's easier to do because SQL defaults to dealing with all record unless you tell it otherwise.
I just wish it was a WORKING hack at this point. How much do you want to be an Intern was in at router central and when asked to clean up a record typed "DELETE FROM client_map" with now where clause.
I hate to tell you this, but fighter planes don't dog fight. Generally the one with the longest sensor suite locks on and kills the other from a few dozen miles away. In most cases the two planes are never in visual range of each other.
If it came down to machine gun fisticuffs, a bigger problem than sighting your enemy is G-LOC. Jet planes travel a hell of a lot faster than the dogfighters of WWII. Many modern jets can bank and turn faster than the pilot's body is designed to handle.
Wouldn't a camera and a little screen be cheaper and easier. I have also seen some trucks employ a fresnel lense in the rear window to "telescope" the view from in back of the truck to a mirror up front. Another low-tech solution.
You can fake holography with the right transform equations. The trick is knowing enough about the sensor you are trying to fool to come up with the reference waveform, and having a pixel density enough to not set off aliasing.
If you've ever seen the Marine's new camo, it does this already. The pattern printed on the uniform is so dense and ambigious that the seem to blend into office walls or rocks. It's not that the suit is generating anything wierd, it's that your eye can't pick up any particular shape.
Cost? Since when has cost versus relative perfomance ever entered the minds of people. Just look at the productivity benefits of the paperless office. Computers generate more paper, and what you used to spend on people to file the paper you now spend on licenses for software that doesn't.
Holy crumb. That is revolutionary. Natural light without having to sacrifice structural stability or privacy. (The glass fiber stronger than the limestone it displaces.)
Well, no, you can't run with this stuff on. You would blur just like the Preditor. Probably worse than blur, as there is a transform equation that is run. You have to potential to flare out into interesting color patterns until it settles into a solid state if you step between two radically different backgrounds. (Red to Blue might accidentally take you through green, or flourescent purple.)
The IR thing is more of a problem. Heck, we already have an excellent visible light stealth system. It's called DARK. All night vision systems track IR since it's generally around in abundence at night.
You are also still a target on Radar, and probably Lidar as the system still reflects or absorbs high amplitude pulses of light differently that the background.
You also run into interesting problems with lighting. If someone shines a spotlight on you, your shadow would still be dark, so you would stand out as a dark spot.
There are undoubtedly computational ways around all that, but after a while your number cruncher is going to be more of an emmission signature than whatever you are hiding.
>Yes, but only if you use 3 drives. Parity is >stored on the last drive.
Only raid 3 (which is pretty rare) uses a dedicated parity drive. Raid 5 distributes the parity information over all the disks.
> And yes, I do this for a living.
I guess you learned something new then:)
I don't trust any storage device farther than I can throw it. Scratch that. There seems to be and inverse relationship between heft and reliability. By 20 pound tape backup unit would probably take a bullet, while my wafer thin memory stick looses bits by staring at it.
I plan for failure, it's just a question of when recovery time exceeds the cost difference.
Depends. More platters means the disk can dispatch more reads and write in parallel. (Each platter has it's own head.)
And why would Seagate only have 3 platters? Each disk has 2 sides, so unless the system is crippled (i.e. they use rejects with only 1 good side) the platters should be a multiple of 2.
I'm not experienced enough to say if the number of platters has a bearing on noise.
Yes, but only if you use 3 drives. Parity is stored on the last drive. 4 drives you would lose 1/4 of the space to parity. 10 drives you would "lose" 1/10 of the space to parity.
Just bought a datacenter full of G5 rackmounts with 250GB SATA drives. Feels like the time I had to order a 66 Mhz PowerMac for school in June, and the 80Mhz machines were out in October.
While they are at it, a real scripting interface would be nice. Yes it's cute that they are slowly adding loops and whatnot to their description language, but if it was tied to a python or TCL interpreter, you could unleash a database backend onto it.
Re:What this really means ... ;-)
on
POV-Ray 3.6 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
You will occasionally hear a game engine claim to use ray tracing. What they do in that case is bounce a beam from the camera to check if a polygon is visible. It's not the same thing.
I've been ray tracing since BOB, a precursor to pov-ray that was published as floppies bundled with a textbook. Back when a complex vga resolution render would take a few days on a 386.
The theory hasn't changed much. Just the efficiency of the algorythems, and of course, the horsepower of the computers.
Slashdot Mirror
The other thing to remember is that the "self destruct" on these things doesn't kick in until it's read.
Really, spooks have a much better way of carrying around data. A box with a bomb set to go off if you don't open the case properly.
Fortunately the French don't have the government eating out of industry's hands.
This message self destructed 5 seconds ago.
It's not like I was pirating disks. I just had meager needs to possibly be able to reinstall the damn thing if my hard drive got wiped, or the program got cruddy.
It's not hard to see why. With the current administration everything is nobody's fault. I am having trouble finding that one on the map, though.
In fact, the earthquake patterns on the map show that today is a pretty ho-hum day.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Heck what isn't plugged into the back of my computer is run the old fashioned way. Walking up to the damn console and hitting the buttons!
How much do you want to bet someone was fiddling with the database and accidentally dropped a table, or tried to delete a record in SQL but forgot the "where" clause.
For you non-database people out there, that's the SQL equivilent of "rm -rf", except that it's easier to do because SQL defaults to dealing with all record unless you tell it otherwise.
I just wish it was a WORKING hack at this point. How much do you want to be an Intern was in at router central and when asked to clean up a record typed "DELETE FROM client_map" with now where clause.
If it came down to machine gun fisticuffs, a bigger problem than sighting your enemy is G-LOC. Jet planes travel a hell of a lot faster than the dogfighters of WWII. Many modern jets can bank and turn faster than the pilot's body is designed to handle.
Wouldn't a camera and a little screen be cheaper and easier. I have also seen some trucks employ a fresnel lense in the rear window to "telescope" the view from in back of the truck to a mirror up front. Another low-tech solution.
If you've ever seen the Marine's new camo, it does this already. The pattern printed on the uniform is so dense and ambigious that the seem to blend into office walls or rocks. It's not that the suit is generating anything wierd, it's that your eye can't pick up any particular shape.
It's the optical equivilent of chaffing a radar.
And for large LCD's you can control the opacity by trottling the current.
Cost? Since when has cost versus relative perfomance ever entered the minds of people. Just look at the productivity benefits of the paperless office. Computers generate more paper, and what you used to spend on people to file the paper you now spend on licenses for software that doesn't.
I just wonder how much it costs.
All we need is Admiral Akbar to announce "It's a TRAP!"
The IR thing is more of a problem. Heck, we already have an excellent visible light stealth system. It's called DARK. All night vision systems track IR since it's generally around in abundence at night.
You are also still a target on Radar, and probably Lidar as the system still reflects or absorbs high amplitude pulses of light differently that the background.
You also run into interesting problems with lighting. If someone shines a spotlight on you, your shadow would still be dark, so you would stand out as a dark spot.
There are undoubtedly computational ways around all that, but after a while your number cruncher is going to be more of an emmission signature than whatever you are hiding.
(Mmmm. Crow is sure yummy this time of year, isn't it?)
>stored on the last drive.
Only raid 3 (which is pretty rare) uses a dedicated parity drive. Raid 5 distributes the parity information over all the disks.
> And yes, I do this for a living.
I guess you learned something new then
Learn something new everyday.
Grandparent was still wrong about the amount of space eaten by parity.
I plan for failure, it's just a question of when recovery time exceeds the cost difference.
And why would Seagate only have 3 platters? Each disk has 2 sides, so unless the system is crippled (i.e. they use rejects with only 1 good side) the platters should be a multiple of 2.
I'm not experienced enough to say if the number of platters has a bearing on noise.
And yes, I do this for a living.
Just bought a datacenter full of G5 rackmounts with 250GB SATA drives. Feels like the time I had to order a 66 Mhz PowerMac for school in June, and the 80Mhz machines were out in October.
While they are at it, a real scripting interface would be nice. Yes it's cute that they are slowly adding loops and whatnot to their description language, but if it was tied to a python or TCL interpreter, you could unleash a database backend onto it.
I've been ray tracing since BOB, a precursor to pov-ray that was published as floppies bundled with a textbook. Back when a complex vga resolution render would take a few days on a 386.
The theory hasn't changed much. Just the efficiency of the algorythems, and of course, the horsepower of the computers.