What was the test in from 2001-2003? I took it in C++ in 2000, which must have been the lucky year. If not, it must have been in C++ for at least 3 years (was 2000 the first? I can't remember).
I know for a fact that at least at RadioShack there is a sign posted that says they will not sell your information gathered. As a matter of fact, if they do sell the (unique) information I give them, I know exactly where it came from and can sue them for all the fun gadgets I can use.
When I read that the first edition of SoH was flawed I was tempted to take it back to the store and wait for the second edition. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to keep it around. First, is anything screwed up storywise by the flaws? I haven't read my first edition yet and don't want to lose anything from the experience by this. On the otherhand I am NOT a nitpicker. I wouldn't have remembered where Ender was born if I were asked, let alone spotted it in the book.
Does anyone think that these first editions could increase in value eventually? Moreso than the second edition? Should I hold onto my first and buy the second as well?
I don't know about anyone else, but my favorite series of games of all time is the old SSI Gold Box D&D games. I have looked everywhere, and short of a compilation by Wizard Works a number of years ago, it is completely unavailable.
Has anyone else looked for these games? If anyone can give me a pointer to IBM versions of these fantastic classic games, that would be fantastic. Of course, that's useless without scans of the books.
Let's hear it for the best series of RPGs of all time.
Security is what you make of it. If you don't take steps to secure yourself, you shouldn't complain too loudly when you find out you are not secure.
Would the postman reading confidential information off of a postcard be wrong? Yes. Would the sender be completely free of responsibility for the stolen information? Not a chance.
If you want to be secure, be secure. Just don't expect security over an insecure medium.
Note: This message is private. Please don't read it. I know it is in a public forum, but if you read my message it is an invasion of privacy. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
Ok, I haven't read the article, mostly because the link in the story seems to be non-functional.
I am still waiting (though I haven't looked around recently) for a DVD-R{W} drive that will burn regular old CD-Rs too...I know the reason used to be that the companies that made DVD-Rs also made CD-Rs and didn't want to kill their business off, but I suspect that is no longer as big an issue as people are likely to just buy the DVD-Rs in the first place. Are there DVD-R drives that have CD-R capabilities? If not, why not? It seems like it would be an easy thing to do.
Administered by the Gov't and OWNED by the Gov't are different things. In a socialist society, the government would create the infrastructure needed for this system, which would be fairly expensive and lead to a larger government.
The likely solution in the U.S. would still be government control, as they have a (semi) workable system that extends across the country (which is the aim of the program) and can afford to operate at a loss because of other sources of income, namely funds extracted from the populace by the barrel of a gun. (Oops, sorry, was that opinion?) The difference would be that the government would contract the services out, paying private firms to provide the services for free the to populace.
Either that, or I need a refresher course in Comp. Gov't, which is also possible.:-)
I'm not certain, and I don't know exactly what they plan on doing with this, but wouldn't offline browsing and email fit the description they have? It would reduce overhead for the state while increasing load on the citizen, maintaining a market for private ISPs as well. While offline email is a reasonable solution (as it was the last time I used Juno, about three years ago) web browsing would be a real pain.
What governmental system does C.R. operate under? Under a socialist system something like this would be interesting only in its technical aspects, as governmental services are to be expected (and a lack of them would surely lead to a revolt over high taxes).
What would be interesting is if it operates under a free-market capitalistic structure, as the U.S. ostensibly does. How viable do you think this would be, and would it be best administered on a national, state or municipal level? Or perhaps it would be best operated with a centralized structure, with primary control held in a central office, with certain powers delegated to state a local offices.
Ok, I have some quick thoughts, though they aren't terribly organized.
I like encryption. SSH is my friend. How hard would it be to get two ethernet controllers on this thing and set it up as an encrypting proxy between an insecure system and the rest of the world, or at least a server process on a host machine somewhere?
Would it be possible to set up SSH tunneling out to a daemon on a "real" system and use that just like a SLIP, or even PPP connection? So when you come up to an insecure computer, just slip the proxy around back of the machine and compute away in security.
You know, I remember 3 years ago this would have been incredible, mind-blowing news. Open Source? They know what Open Source is? The headline would read:
Mainstream Press Mentions Open Source
The fact that OS is mentioned is relegated to a footnote in the article writeup is a sign of how far we have come in the last few years. Like many powerful forces, glaciers for instance, it may take awhile to get moving, but once it gains momentum it has the power to move mountains and change the surface of the earth forever.
1. Jousting motorcyclists: This has got to be the worst of the lot. People are supposed to be fighting for their lives, but no, they would rather tease you with a school-kid-type-i-dare-you stunt first instead of just using their guns.
Granted, I was waiting for one of them to just let off the throttle, raise a gun and blow the other's head off. Oh well, here's to an extra half hour of movie and a gratutious fight scene with misguided nobility, etc. Anyone properly trained would have simply sliced the guy open with that knife. But no, the thought that "she will die a horrible death" (wait, didn't I send my people to take care of her? Oh well, I'll not kill him anyway) drives him to not kill him, just beat the crap out of him so he can show mercy at the end of the fight anyway.
2. The villain knows exactly how the hero is going to penetrate the building and that his aim is to destroy the virus. But no, instead of doing something about it, the villain and his cronies would rather wait to get their asses kicked. See, that's so much more cool.
Again, agreed.
3. The hero is trapped behind a small desk at the laboratory. Instead of just killing the guy, the villains want to engage in conversation. "Oh, let's chat, for we may die soon."
Well, they could certainly have thrown people at him until he died, unfortunately those people were busy covering the conversationalists. Of course, bringing in the girl to make a point AFTER Hunt may have already been dead is sort of odd as well.
4. The hero could have taken out the last remaining sample of virus with a single gunshot. But no, he would rather take longing looks at it, hiding behind a desk, waiting for the bimbo to do something stupid with it. And don't tell me the hero can't aim. We all know how many times in the movie he takes out grenades/villains with a bullet from afar.
Good idea, take out the virus when you don't know how many modes of infection it has? What if it is airborne? Do you think the villains OR Hunt wanted to live the rest of their lives out in that lab ib quarentine?
5. The building is worth less 10 seconds of free fall (anyone bother to note how long it took for the hero to free-fall-penetrate or which floor the laboratory was on?). But, it's apparently enough for a parachute to save the guy.
Alright, let's do some math here...acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Over the course of 10 seconds, that is a final delta V of 98 meters per second. Assuming Hunt started at 0 m/s, which it looks like he did, the average velocity comes out to 49m/s. A velocity of 49 meters per second over the course of 10 seconds is 490 meters, or about half of a kilometer. All this really says is that 10 is an unlikely duration for that freefall. Especially considering that the tallest building in Sydney is the AMP Centrepoint Tower, at ~305m. It looked from the diagram that the lab was about halfway down the tower, so we can presume that it is about a 150m max freefall. Over the course of 150m one will fall for about 6 seconds or so.
If you payed any attention at all you would know that the lab was on the 4-somethingth floor, not the 42nd, but above that. Either the 45th or 47th if I recall correctly. Considering that the Park Avenue Plaza building in New York is 44 floors and 175m tall, this is a reasonable benchmark.
Normal minimum height for a freefall parachute jump is 800 meters. B.A.S.E. jumpers have made VERY risky jumps from as low as 300 meters. I find it unlikely indeed that a person can jump OUT of a building at around 175m and survive.
Thanks to Google for the research involved in this post. I learned something about both parachutes and Sydney.
I remember back when there was a cachedot.slashdot.org that maintained a replica in case the server was having trouble. Is there any chance that this could be implemented again but in a different location?
Of course such a thing would not need to be as powerful as the main slashdot systems, but would provide some additional backup in case of another DDOS or a network outage of some sort.
Sort of a "battle bridge" for those of you who remember the days when Star Trek was good. (startrek.version = ST:TNG)
The thing is, AFAIK and INAL, that once a forum of this sort exhibits any control over the content posted by its users, it becomes liable for ALL of the content posted to it.
Slashdot manages to avoid this by implementing a user-based peer moderation system, exhibiting no control over user posts as an entity.
As far as I know,/. is not, at this point, responsible for the information posted to it by its users and qualifies as a common carrier.
Actually, I don't think KFC would have a case, as their name is NOT Kentucky Fried Chicken. AFAIK (IANAL (Yet)) the courts decided that you could not make an acronym a trademark, so if the letters stand for anything, they are not protected. Hence there was alot of name changing going on for awhile, i.e.
Kentucky Friend Chicken changed its name to KFC International Business Machines changed to IBM Silicon Graphics Inc. changed to SGI Inc. Public Broadcasting Service Inc. changed to PBS Inc.
I don't know whether the newly named companies are able to register the OLD names as trademarks, but that's why you never see the long names around anymore.
Congratulations Mr. Katz, you have successfully written an article about marketing. Online segregation? Ok, so sites like yahoo, slashdot, freshmeat, memepool, and any and all university sites are all so terribly male-centric that women can't even stand to view them? Please...you take a few examples of special interest sites and blow them into a three page story on a supposed increase in female internet users? Is this news?
The truth is that as more of the population of the world gets online, the internet using community becomes closer and closer to the actual makeup of the world. There is a rise in usage among every demographic EXCEPT for white males ages 15-30.
There are somewhere on the order of x^42 special interest sites, whether they be for grrls, geeks, jocks, porn meisters, music enthusiests, blacks, homosexuals...guess what? Their communities are all growing. I suppose that is good news for media hounds...after all, they can now write x^42 stories on x^42 different demographics.
Mycroft-X, who doesn't mean to flame, who does occasionally enjoy a Katz article, who did have the choice not to read the article, who did read the article, who chose to comment on it, and now that he has presented his opinion, expects to be moderated down.
Ok ok, you are obviously talking about two completely different things, and through the use of incorrect terminology, have gotten your ideas mixed up.
What sorehands is talking about (I think) is using RAM as a BUFFER, so you would have ~6 meg of RAM in the thing that would copy ~6 meg of MP3 off the CD-R. This would allow you to play the music, skip -free for about 6 minutes, and only then would you have to spin the CD up to read another 6 meg.
While this is a good idea, I am pretty sure it takes more energy to spin the CD up to speed than it does to keep it spinning. The question is whether you save more energy by kicking the motor off while playing from RAM or if you save by keeping it running. Either way, the power consumption would probably be pretty close. The other thing is that having my discman spin up every 6 minutes would probably be annoying, unless the put in something to muffle the sound and the perceptable motion it would cause. Better idea is to use RAM as a buffer, but leave the CD spinning with the read head (read as laser) off. THAT would probably save the most power and annoyance factor.
What loki7 is talking about is using the thing to rip CDs. Ignoring the term CD-ROM in sorehands post, he assumes that the idea is to put in an audio CD, have the player rip it to WAV (or directly to encoder), encode it, then store the one song in RAM so that it can be played with less power. No offense intended, but this idea is so stupid I didn't even consider the fact that it could be the actual idea. Apparently loki7 thought otherwise.
Is there a way of locally downloading these? I am cursed with a slow connection and would prefer to watch them locally so I can...well...actually watch them.
Anyone know how to pull streaming media onto one's hard drive?
Slashdot Mirror
What was the test in from 2001-2003? I took it in C++ in 2000, which must have been the lucky year. If not, it must have been in C++ for at least 3 years (was 2000 the first? I can't remember).
I know for a fact that at least at RadioShack there is a sign posted that says they will not sell your information gathered. As a matter of fact, if they do sell the (unique) information I give them, I know exactly where it came from and can sue them for all the fun gadgets I can use.
Mycroft-X
When I read that the first edition of SoH was flawed I was tempted to take it back to the store and wait for the second edition. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to keep it around. First, is anything screwed up storywise by the flaws? I haven't read my first edition yet and don't want to lose anything from the experience by this. On the otherhand I am NOT a nitpicker. I wouldn't have remembered where Ender was born if I were asked, let alone spotted it in the book.
Does anyone think that these first editions could increase in value eventually? Moreso than the second edition? Should I hold onto my first and buy the second as well?
What are you going to do with your copies?
Mycroft-X
I don't know about anyone else, but my favorite series of games of all time is the old SSI Gold Box D&D games. I have looked everywhere, and short of a compilation by Wizard Works a number of years ago, it is completely unavailable.
Has anyone else looked for these games? If anyone can give me a pointer to IBM versions of these fantastic classic games, that would be fantastic. Of course, that's useless without scans of the books.
Let's hear it for the best series of RPGs of all time.
Mycroft-X
Security is what you make of it. If you don't take steps to secure yourself, you shouldn't complain too loudly when you find out you are not secure.
Would the postman reading confidential information off of a postcard be wrong? Yes. Would the sender be completely free of responsibility for the stolen information? Not a chance.
If you want to be secure, be secure. Just don't expect security over an insecure medium.
Note: This message is private. Please don't read it. I know it is in a public forum, but if you read my message it is an invasion of privacy. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
Mycroft
Ok, I haven't read the article, mostly because the link in the story seems to be non-functional.
I am still waiting (though I haven't looked around recently) for a DVD-R{W} drive that will burn regular old CD-Rs too...I know the reason used to be that the companies that made DVD-Rs also made CD-Rs and didn't want to kill their business off, but I suspect that is no longer as big an issue as people are likely to just buy the DVD-Rs in the first place. Are there DVD-R drives that have CD-R capabilities? If not, why not? It seems like it would be an easy thing to do.
Mycroft
Actually, in the U.S. it comes down to how you define 'is'. :-)
Mycroft-X
Administered by the Gov't and OWNED by the Gov't are different things. In a socialist society, the government would create the infrastructure needed for this system, which would be fairly expensive and lead to a larger government.
:-)
The likely solution in the U.S. would still be government control, as they have a (semi) workable system that extends across the country (which is the aim of the program) and can afford to operate at a loss because of other sources of income, namely funds extracted from the populace by the barrel of a gun. (Oops, sorry, was that opinion?) The difference would be that the government would contract the services out, paying private firms to provide the services for free the to populace.
Either that, or I need a refresher course in Comp. Gov't, which is also possible.
Mycroft-X
I'm not certain, and I don't know exactly what they plan on doing with this, but wouldn't offline browsing and email fit the description they have? It would reduce overhead for the state while increasing load on the citizen, maintaining a market for private ISPs as well. While offline email is a reasonable solution (as it was the last time I used Juno, about three years ago) web browsing would be a real pain.
Mycroft-X
What governmental system does C.R. operate under? Under a socialist system something like this would be interesting only in its technical aspects, as governmental services are to be expected (and a lack of them would surely lead to a revolt over high taxes).
What would be interesting is if it operates under a free-market capitalistic structure, as the U.S. ostensibly does. How viable do you think this would be, and would it be best administered on a national, state or municipal level? Or perhaps it would be best operated with a centralized structure, with primary control held in a central office, with certain powers delegated to state a local offices.
Thoughts?
Mycroft-X
Ok, I have some quick thoughts, though they aren't terribly organized.
I like encryption. SSH is my friend. How hard would it be to get two ethernet controllers on this thing and set it up as an encrypting proxy between an insecure system and the rest of the world, or at least a server process on a host machine somewhere?
Would it be possible to set up SSH tunneling out to a daemon on a "real" system and use that just like a SLIP, or even PPP connection? So when you come up to an insecure computer, just slip the proxy around back of the machine and compute away in security.
Any thoughts?
Mycroft-X
Has anyone noticed that the /. clock is wrong? As I post this, it is 1:33am on the East coast...mark.
Mycroft-X
and -- nice to hear -- Open Source acceptance.
You know, I remember 3 years ago this would have been incredible, mind-blowing news. Open Source? They know what Open Source is? The headline would read:
Mainstream Press Mentions Open Source
The fact that OS is mentioned is relegated to a footnote in the article writeup is a sign of how far we have come in the last few years.
Like many powerful forces, glaciers for instance, it may take awhile to get moving, but once it gains momentum it has the power to move mountains and change the surface of the earth forever.
A late night, philosphical musing from
Mycroft-X
1. Jousting motorcyclists: This has got to be the worst of the lot. People are supposed to be fighting for their lives, but no, they would rather tease you with a school-kid-type-i-dare-you stunt first instead of just using their guns.
Granted, I was waiting for one of them to just let off the throttle, raise a gun and blow the other's head off. Oh well, here's to an extra half hour of movie and a gratutious fight scene with misguided nobility, etc. Anyone properly trained would have simply sliced the guy open with that knife. But no, the thought that "she will die a horrible death" (wait, didn't I send my people to take care of her? Oh well, I'll not kill him anyway) drives him to not kill him, just beat the crap out of him so he can show mercy at the end of the fight anyway.
2. The villain knows exactly how the hero is going to penetrate the building and that his aim is to destroy the virus. But no, instead of doing something about it, the villain and his cronies would rather wait to get their asses kicked. See, that's so much more cool.
Again, agreed.
3. The hero is trapped behind a small desk at the laboratory. Instead of just killing the guy, the villains want to engage in conversation. "Oh, let's chat, for we may die soon."
Well, they could certainly have thrown people at him until he died, unfortunately those people were busy covering the conversationalists. Of course, bringing in the girl to make a point AFTER Hunt may have already been dead is sort of odd as well.
4. The hero could have taken out the last remaining sample of virus with a single gunshot. But no, he would rather take longing looks at it,
hiding behind a desk, waiting for the bimbo to do something stupid with it. And don't tell me the hero can't aim. We all know how many times
in the movie he takes out grenades/villains with a bullet from afar.
Good idea, take out the virus when you don't know how many modes of infection it has? What if it is airborne? Do you think the villains OR Hunt wanted to live the rest of their lives out in that lab ib quarentine?
5. The building is worth less 10 seconds of free fall (anyone bother to note how long it took for the hero to free-fall-penetrate or which floor
the laboratory was on?). But, it's apparently enough for a parachute to save the guy.
Alright, let's do some math here...acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s^2. Over the course of 10 seconds, that is a final delta V of 98 meters per second. Assuming Hunt started at 0 m/s, which it looks like he did, the average velocity comes out to 49m/s. A velocity of 49 meters per second over the course of 10 seconds is 490 meters, or about half of a kilometer. All this really says is that 10 is an unlikely duration for that freefall. Especially considering that the tallest building in Sydney is the AMP Centrepoint Tower, at ~305m.
It looked from the diagram that the lab was about halfway down the tower, so we can presume that it is about a 150m max freefall. Over the course of 150m one will fall for about 6 seconds or so.
If you payed any attention at all you would know that the lab was on the 4-somethingth floor, not the 42nd, but above that. Either the 45th or 47th if I recall correctly. Considering that the Park Avenue Plaza building in New York is 44 floors and 175m tall, this is a reasonable benchmark.
Normal minimum height for a freefall parachute jump is 800 meters. B.A.S.E. jumpers have made VERY risky jumps from as low as 300 meters. I find it unlikely indeed that a person can jump OUT of a building at around 175m and survive.
Thanks to Google for the research involved in this post. I learned something about both parachutes and Sydney.
Mycroft-X
Stupid nonfunctioning ill-previewing HTML code...
That is supposed to be (Startrek.version <= ST:TNG)
Now watch this one not work either...
I remember back when there was a cachedot.slashdot.org that maintained a replica in case the server was having trouble. Is there any chance that this could be implemented again but in a different location?
Of course such a thing would not need to be as powerful as the main slashdot systems, but would provide some additional backup in case of another DDOS or a network outage of some sort.
Sort of a "battle bridge" for those of you who remember the days when Star Trek was good. (startrek.version = ST:TNG)
Mycroft-X
The thing is, AFAIK and INAL, that once a forum of this sort exhibits any control over the content posted by its users, it becomes liable for ALL of the content posted to it.
/. is not, at this point, responsible for the information posted to it by its users and qualifies as a common carrier.
Slashdot manages to avoid this by implementing a user-based peer moderation system, exhibiting no control over user posts as an entity.
As far as I know,
Is there any legal standard for this?
Mycroft-X
Actually, I don't think KFC would have a case, as their name is NOT Kentucky Fried Chicken. AFAIK (IANAL (Yet)) the courts decided that you could not make an acronym a trademark, so if the letters stand for anything, they are not protected. Hence there was alot of name changing going on for awhile, i.e.
Kentucky Friend Chicken changed its name to KFC
International Business Machines changed to IBM
Silicon Graphics Inc. changed to SGI Inc.
Public Broadcasting Service Inc. changed to PBS Inc.
I don't know whether the newly named companies are able to register the OLD names as trademarks, but that's why you never see the long names around anymore.
Mycroft-X
For a tileable version of the dot image, grab these:
http://www.academus.net/dotty.gif
or
http://www.academus.net/dotty.png
Mycroft-X
Congratulations Mr. Katz, you have successfully written an article about marketing. Online segregation? Ok, so sites like yahoo, slashdot, freshmeat, memepool, and any and all university sites are all so terribly male-centric that women can't even stand to view them? Please...you take a few examples of special interest sites and blow them into a three page story on a supposed increase in female internet users? Is this news?
The truth is that as more of the population of the world gets online, the internet using community becomes closer and closer to the actual makeup of the world. There is a rise in usage among every demographic EXCEPT for white males ages 15-30.
There are somewhere on the order of x^42 special interest sites, whether they be for grrls, geeks, jocks, porn meisters, music enthusiests, blacks, homosexuals...guess what? Their communities are all growing. I suppose that is good news for media hounds...after all, they can now write x^42 stories on x^42 different demographics.
Mycroft-X, who doesn't mean to flame, who does occasionally enjoy a Katz article, who did have the choice not to read the article, who did read the article, who chose to comment on it, and now that he has presented his opinion, expects to be moderated down.
Ok ok, you are obviously talking about two completely different things, and through the use of incorrect terminology, have gotten your ideas mixed up.
What sorehands is talking about (I think) is using RAM as a BUFFER, so you would have ~6 meg of RAM in the thing that would copy ~6 meg of MP3 off the CD-R. This would allow you to play the music, skip -free for about 6 minutes, and only then would you have to spin the CD up to read another 6 meg.
While this is a good idea, I am pretty sure it takes more energy to spin the CD up to speed than it does to keep it spinning. The question is whether you save more energy by kicking the motor off while playing from RAM or if you save by keeping it running. Either way, the power consumption would probably be pretty close. The other thing is that having my discman spin up every 6 minutes would probably be annoying, unless the put in something to muffle the sound and the perceptable motion it would cause. Better idea is to use RAM as a buffer, but leave the CD spinning with the read head (read as laser) off. THAT would probably save the most power and annoyance factor.
What loki7 is talking about is using the thing to rip CDs. Ignoring the term CD-ROM in sorehands post, he assumes that the idea is to put in an audio CD, have the player rip it to WAV (or directly to encoder), encode it, then store the one song in RAM so that it can be played with less power. No offense intended, but this idea is so stupid I didn't even consider the fact that it could be the actual idea. Apparently loki7 thought otherwise.
Mycroft-X the arbiter.
EMACS is an OS the same way Windows is...while it doesn't take care of things directly, it's an OS environment that runs on top of a CLI. :-)
(This post is only half joking.)
Mycroft-X
- The unpublished preface to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Mycroft-X
Is there a way of locally downloading these? I am cursed with a slow connection and would prefer to watch them locally so I can...well...actually watch them.
Anyone know how to pull streaming media onto one's hard drive?
Mycroft-X
That's ok, everyone knows that holes in GNU stuff gets patched faster than those in proprietarty stuff. :-)
Mycroft-X