The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.
I bought a 512MB USB drive for $70 last year. That is approximately 13.6 cents per megabyte. NewEgg has a few floppy disks. The ten pack costs $6.50, or 65 cents per disk, or 45 cents per megabyte. This is over three times the cost of a USB flash drive per megabyte. How is a floppy disk cheaper? Also, how many computers do not have USB drives anymore? Talk about universal support, the majority of computers have USB and a version of Windows or MacOS that support these drives out of the box.
Thank you for your rational explanation. I never thought of it that way before. Now that I think about it, it does make sense and it is quite fair to all book stores to do it this way.
No one is forcing them to have an embargo until an exact time; they have chosen to do that on their own initiative.
I never understood this concept. Why would they restrict sales based on what time it is? Why not just start selling the books once they arrive in stores and are on shelves? This goes for software sales too -- I never understood those midnight sales of Windows versions or some games.
One of my friends worked at CompUSA during one of those midnight sales and said it was just a bunch of hardcore nerds that showed up to install Windows a few hours early and snatch up a few worthless sales of blank CDs and whatever other crap they had to offer. What do they think is going to happen -- releasing software or a Harry Potter book a few hours or even a day early will result in piracy or copyright violation? Bah. Losers.
this has been going on for years. These same ideas are used in amaroK, on Audioscrobbler, all over the place. How can they patent something that's been in use for a long time and is probably already patented?
I am sure there is prior art all over the place. For example, most online retailers have blurbs saying "customers who bought this product also bought these..." and give a list. This is the exact same thing done in aggregate, and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
Yes, it is a joy. I am compiling it right now, and I even left my BitTorrent client open for everyone else downloading it:-)
They did make good on their promise to release it in the second quarter, which ends on Thursday. Still, I have a few GPL GUI applications I want to write for Windows, and it was worth the wait. Qt is much more pleasant to work with than GTK+ or Win32 API.
Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers).
This is the key -- subscribers. I choose to pay money to use this site in lieu of viewing advertisements. This is the real issue for companies such as doubleclick. I block them at the firewall level because of their annoying crap. I don't mind advertisements, e.g. the ones on Google. I mind popups, popunders, flashing banners, etc. and am willing to pay money to support a site just so I can get the piece of mind of not having that junk.
Of course, I need to get value for my money, and this is Slashdot...;-)
Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.
I agree. At the very least, he could have provided links to pages describing what these terms mean, or even a short blurb at the beginning of the article. There is much more to Linux than the distro, even for people that do not stray from the confines of the installation CDs. For example, I use Mandriva 2005. Just off the CDs, I have a choice between 8 or 9 desktops, at least 4 email clients, several web browsers, and of course the choice to run in X or the CLI where ncurses becomes an important term to know.
However, I still think this article does a good job. It talks in more abstract terms that do not overwhelm the new Linux user, while providing enough guidance that the user can narrow his search to two or three distributions. This is essential given that too many choices can overwhelm users, and most new users are used to having only one or two choices (e.g. Windows or MacOS).
Like I said, that is the act in a sentence. There are specific measures for protection and disposal of data that are actually quite effective. When I say "with respect" I mean from an individual's perspective, not a bureaucrat's perspective.
In my experience there are two types of people, those who have two (or more) monitors, and those who have never tried it.
How about a third type of person: someone who had a dual-head system, but whose manager took the extra video card and monitor so he could have TWO emails open at once.
The United States Government takes it seriously. While they may be exempt from this law, there are regulations and policies in place to safeguard personal information. These policies are stricter than anything you're likely to find in the private sector.
Specifically, the Privacy Act of 1972. In a sentence, it mandates that all federal government employees will treat personal information with respect.
Other than retaining a similar instruction set, modern "x86" processors have nothing in common with the 386. Calling them "x86-derived" is ignorance.
Modern x86 chips still use the same four basic integer registers, the same stack and instruction pointers, the same bit fields, the same basic instruction set, etc. This is why if you download Intel's whitepapers they are to this day still labeled IA-32, for Intel Architecture 32-bit. We have been using this same architecture for a very long time.
The only real difference is that over the years IA-32 picked up MMX, SSE, et al. This involves more (larger) registers and instructions that operate on them. However, this is merely an extension of the basic architecture, not a replacement.
You fucking troll, since when microsoft's binary document formats are documented, or fast?
Implementing a file format as binary data or even a simple SGML structure such as RTF means less overhead. Using XML you have to run an XML parser, and the file is more freeform. There are no set data structures, it is just a stream of text. With a binary format you can structure it in such a way that you can read a header in and know exactly where to seek in the file to get the information you need. With XML you are pretty much stuck reading sequentially and figuring things out as you go along. Sure, an XML parser library may make it easier, but behind the scenes it is still parsing that stream and processing each tag one at a time.
I've often thought of writing a script to flood bogus data into scam sites, so that at least they couldn't get any real data out of it after the script had started.... Anyone think that would work, or am I overlooking something?
Smart scammers will keep track of IP addresses via a script running on the server, and block you after a while. Of course, as we all know from some of the spam and scams out there, the bad guys are not always all that bright.
I remember reading an article on Slashdot about this specifically about a year or so ago, but a search doesn't bring it up. Essentially, someone wrote a script to do just this. However, from a technological point of view, his script was the same thing as any other "bad" script out there that feeds crap to web servers. This made it easy for the scammers to filter out his input. Maybe having a distributed network of computers doing this help keep the signal to noise ratio low, maybe it would just mean more IPs to ban. Anyway, I think it is worth looking into.
That's what Pro-Logic is for. If your system is good enough for you to complain about sound, I'd assume it has Pro-Logic.
Yes, my system has Pro-Logic 2. There is a big difference between a computer deciding how to extrapolate two channels into 5.1, and a skilled sound engineer mixing the original audio into the same. Pro-Logic works decently on digital cable channels, sounds like crap on analog channels (but that's just the crap signal in the first place), but for some reason is really bad on DVDs. Thankfully I only have a couple DVDs that are not Dolby Digital, and most of those are children's movies or shows. I don't think my two year old son really cares about surround sound at this point in his life.
As an offside, how frikken annoying is the anti-script thing. Why did that suddenly appear?
Doesn't ring a bell. I might have heard of it... could you jog my memory?
The DMCA does not make reverse-engineering illegal.
It makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection schemes, which often involves reverse engineering. This is more pedantic than anything in this situation.
Why would you need 5.1 channels for a cartoon? I must be missing something... either that or you're an idiot;-)
Stereo broadcasts and DVDs sound like crap on a 5.1 system. I would much rather the DVD producer mix the audio into the standard Dolby Digital 5.1. Technicaly only 2.0 is required for DVDs, and I can live with that. It sounds better than analog.
No commercials, new episodes, no network censors. I'll be the first in line
Yeah, but I imagine it won't exactly be "uncensored" in the way that I think of it because I doubt there would be any swearing anyway. I am more interested in the quality level -- hopefully recorded at HD video quality, Dolby Digital (and actually mixed in 5.1 channels, not just encoded that way), and 16:9 widescreen (doubtful).
So far Family Guy's return has been decent but not as good as I hoped. If this Futurama rumor turns out to be true, hopefully Groenig and friends can keep the same level of quality as previous seasons.
Because the entire senate obviously reads every single bill all the way through.
No, nor do I expect them to. However, there should be a few days time to give them the option to read it along with a few hours of debate.
How come nobody ever screams about how the House didn't read it?
Because 99% of the House did not vote for it with the other 1% not being present. In fact, my Representative read the bill and voted against it. He urged other Representatives to vote against it. However, both of my Senators voted for it, and since then I have voted against both of them. I would rather have a vegetable in office. While it may not do much, it sure as hell would not vote for the USA PATRIOT Act.
I don't really see the enforcement in that. It's just a flawed idea to make parenting even easier for those parents that can't be bothered to raise kids. Just like the leap-frog reading things for little kids. Why not just read to your child!?
I use a Leapfrog with my son, the key word being "with." It is interactive. I talk with him, show him objects on the page, and he touches them and gets even more feedback. The majority of the time, however, is on road trips. If you are stuck in a car with a young child for 10 or more hours at a time you try to find activities where you can put something on his lap in the back seat and keep him occupied. Whether this is a Leapfrog, another toy, or a portable DVD player, it sure helps keep his boredom from turning into a ten hour crying spree.
And please don't be so negative about Pavlovian training. It may be very unfashionable at the moment, but it can be very beneficial, if only to override the Pavlovian training the television offers. (TV shows Big Mac, kid starts to drool.)
I watch very little TV, but I see this all the time. My wife usually has it on (some of the CSI type shows are okay and I will sit down for 10-15 minutes to watch) and those commercials are insane. They pull every trick in the psychological book to get people not to buy their products, but to crave their products to the point they must have them. Maybe hooking up an exercise bicycle to the TV in order to watch those Big Mac commercials might be a good idea. Children would be more athletic, but die at 30 with high cholesterol and triglycerides.
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The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.
I bought a 512MB USB drive for $70 last year. That is approximately 13.6 cents per megabyte. NewEgg has a few floppy disks. The ten pack costs $6.50, or 65 cents per disk, or 45 cents per megabyte. This is over three times the cost of a USB flash drive per megabyte. How is a floppy disk cheaper? Also, how many computers do not have USB drives anymore? Talk about universal support, the majority of computers have USB and a version of Windows or MacOS that support these drives out of the box.
The floppy is dead and will not be missed.
Thank you for your rational explanation. I never thought of it that way before. Now that I think about it, it does make sense and it is quite fair to all book stores to do it this way.
No one is forcing them to have an embargo until an exact time; they have chosen to do that on their own initiative.
I never understood this concept. Why would they restrict sales based on what time it is? Why not just start selling the books once they arrive in stores and are on shelves? This goes for software sales too -- I never understood those midnight sales of Windows versions or some games.
One of my friends worked at CompUSA during one of those midnight sales and said it was just a bunch of hardcore nerds that showed up to install Windows a few hours early and snatch up a few worthless sales of blank CDs and whatever other crap they had to offer. What do they think is going to happen -- releasing software or a Harry Potter book a few hours or even a day early will result in piracy or copyright violation? Bah. Losers.
Actor Morgan Freeman...
Wow, God Himself is promoting this business, it must be good! (for the humor impaired, go watch Bruce Almighty).
this has been going on for years. These same ideas are used in amaroK, on Audioscrobbler, all over the place. How can they patent something that's been in use for a long time and is probably already patented?
I am sure there is prior art all over the place. For example, most online retailers have blurbs saying "customers who bought this product also bought these..." and give a list. This is the exact same thing done in aggregate, and I am sure someone will use it to invalidate this dumb patent.
Thought it has a funny macro kludges in certain places, the QT API is absolutely a joy to work with.
Yes, it is a joy. I am compiling it right now, and I even left my BitTorrent client open for everyone else downloading it :-)
They did make good on their promise to release it in the second quarter, which ends on Thursday. Still, I have a few GPL GUI applications I want to write for Windows, and it was worth the wait. Qt is much more pleasant to work with than GTK+ or Win32 API.
Everyone reading this site while blocking ads is able to do so only because of people like me who do view them (and subscribers).
This is the key -- subscribers. I choose to pay money to use this site in lieu of viewing advertisements. This is the real issue for companies such as doubleclick. I block them at the firewall level because of their annoying crap. I don't mind advertisements, e.g. the ones on Google. I mind popups, popunders, flashing banners, etc. and am willing to pay money to support a site just so I can get the piece of mind of not having that junk.
Of course, I need to get value for my money, and this is Slashdot... ;-)
Do "newbs" know what HAL or curses are or even necessarily the differences between KDE and GNOME? His use of terminology would be baffling if I didn't know a fair amount about Linux.
I agree. At the very least, he could have provided links to pages describing what these terms mean, or even a short blurb at the beginning of the article. There is much more to Linux than the distro, even for people that do not stray from the confines of the installation CDs. For example, I use Mandriva 2005. Just off the CDs, I have a choice between 8 or 9 desktops, at least 4 email clients, several web browsers, and of course the choice to run in X or the CLI where ncurses becomes an important term to know.
However, I still think this article does a good job. It talks in more abstract terms that do not overwhelm the new Linux user, while providing enough guidance that the user can narrow his search to two or three distributions. This is essential given that too many choices can overwhelm users, and most new users are used to having only one or two choices (e.g. Windows or MacOS).
Like I said, that is the act in a sentence. There are specific measures for protection and disposal of data that are actually quite effective. When I say "with respect" I mean from an individual's perspective, not a bureaucrat's perspective.
In my experience there are two types of people, those who have two (or more) monitors, and those who have never tried it.
How about a third type of person: someone who had a dual-head system, but whose manager took the extra video card and monitor so he could have TWO emails open at once.
The United States Government takes it seriously. While they may be exempt from this law, there are regulations and policies in place to safeguard personal information. These policies are stricter than anything you're likely to find in the private sector.
Specifically, the Privacy Act of 1972. In a sentence, it mandates that all federal government employees will treat personal information with respect.
Other than retaining a similar instruction set, modern "x86" processors have nothing in common with the 386. Calling them "x86-derived" is ignorance.
Modern x86 chips still use the same four basic integer registers, the same stack and instruction pointers, the same bit fields, the same basic instruction set, etc. This is why if you download Intel's whitepapers they are to this day still labeled IA-32, for Intel Architecture 32-bit. We have been using this same architecture for a very long time.
The only real difference is that over the years IA-32 picked up MMX, SSE, et al. This involves more (larger) registers and instructions that operate on them. However, this is merely an extension of the basic architecture, not a replacement.
You fucking troll, since when microsoft's binary document formats are documented, or fast?
Implementing a file format as binary data or even a simple SGML structure such as RTF means less overhead. Using XML you have to run an XML parser, and the file is more freeform. There are no set data structures, it is just a stream of text. With a binary format you can structure it in such a way that you can read a header in and know exactly where to seek in the file to get the information you need. With XML you are pretty much stuck reading sequentially and figuring things out as you go along. Sure, an XML parser library may make it easier, but behind the scenes it is still parsing that stream and processing each tag one at a time.
In other words, Microsoft is learning lessons from open source software and making IIS more like Apache httpd.
fighting fire with fire sometimes works...
That or it just makes a bigger fire.
I've often thought of writing a script to flood bogus data into scam sites, so that at least they couldn't get any real data out of it after the script had started.... Anyone think that would work, or am I overlooking something?
Smart scammers will keep track of IP addresses via a script running on the server, and block you after a while. Of course, as we all know from some of the spam and scams out there, the bad guys are not always all that bright.
I remember reading an article on Slashdot about this specifically about a year or so ago, but a search doesn't bring it up. Essentially, someone wrote a script to do just this. However, from a technological point of view, his script was the same thing as any other "bad" script out there that feeds crap to web servers. This made it easy for the scammers to filter out his input. Maybe having a distributed network of computers doing this help keep the signal to noise ratio low, maybe it would just mean more IPs to ban. Anyway, I think it is worth looking into.
That's what Pro-Logic is for. If your system is good enough for you to complain about sound, I'd assume it has Pro-Logic.
Yes, my system has Pro-Logic 2. There is a big difference between a computer deciding how to extrapolate two channels into 5.1, and a skilled sound engineer mixing the original audio into the same. Pro-Logic works decently on digital cable channels, sounds like crap on analog channels (but that's just the crap signal in the first place), but for some reason is really bad on DVDs. Thankfully I only have a couple DVDs that are not Dolby Digital, and most of those are children's movies or shows. I don't think my two year old son really cares about surround sound at this point in his life.
As an offside, how frikken annoying is the anti-script thing. Why did that suddenly appear?
Doesn't ring a bell. I might have heard of it... could you jog my memory?
The DMCA does not make reverse-engineering illegal.
It makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection schemes, which often involves reverse engineering. This is more pedantic than anything in this situation.
Why would you need 5.1 channels for a cartoon? I must be missing something... either that or you're an idiot ;-)
Stereo broadcasts and DVDs sound like crap on a 5.1 system. I would much rather the DVD producer mix the audio into the standard Dolby Digital 5.1. Technicaly only 2.0 is required for DVDs, and I can live with that. It sounds better than analog.
No commercials, new episodes, no network censors. I'll be the first in line
Yeah, but I imagine it won't exactly be "uncensored" in the way that I think of it because I doubt there would be any swearing anyway. I am more interested in the quality level -- hopefully recorded at HD video quality, Dolby Digital (and actually mixed in 5.1 channels, not just encoded that way), and 16:9 widescreen (doubtful).
So far Family Guy's return has been decent but not as good as I hoped. If this Futurama rumor turns out to be true, hopefully Groenig and friends can keep the same level of quality as previous seasons.
Because the entire senate obviously reads every single bill all the way through.
No, nor do I expect them to. However, there should be a few days time to give them the option to read it along with a few hours of debate.
How come nobody ever screams about how the House didn't read it?
Because 99% of the House did not vote for it with the other 1% not being present. In fact, my Representative read the bill and voted against it. He urged other Representatives to vote against it. However, both of my Senators voted for it, and since then I have voted against both of them. I would rather have a vegetable in office. While it may not do much, it sure as hell would not vote for the USA PATRIOT Act.
I don't really see the enforcement in that. It's just a flawed idea to make parenting even easier for those parents that can't be bothered to raise kids. Just like the leap-frog reading things for little kids. Why not just read to your child!?
I use a Leapfrog with my son, the key word being "with." It is interactive. I talk with him, show him objects on the page, and he touches them and gets even more feedback. The majority of the time, however, is on road trips. If you are stuck in a car with a young child for 10 or more hours at a time you try to find activities where you can put something on his lap in the back seat and keep him occupied. Whether this is a Leapfrog, another toy, or a portable DVD player, it sure helps keep his boredom from turning into a ten hour crying spree.
And please don't be so negative about Pavlovian training. It may be very unfashionable at the moment, but it can be very beneficial, if only to override the Pavlovian training the television offers. (TV shows Big Mac, kid starts to drool.)
I watch very little TV, but I see this all the time. My wife usually has it on (some of the CSI type shows are okay and I will sit down for 10-15 minutes to watch) and those commercials are insane. They pull every trick in the psychological book to get people not to buy their products, but to crave their products to the point they must have them. Maybe hooking up an exercise bicycle to the TV in order to watch those Big Mac commercials might be a good idea. Children would be more athletic, but die at 30 with high cholesterol and triglycerides.
You obviously.. ...haven't read the "Patriot Act" have you?
Neither did the Senate.
I don't think the bases in the US are all that necessary.
God knows the Department of "Defense" does not have the job of defending our country, so it does not need bases in this country.