sure it's an open standard. anyone can buy the implementation specifications, and get the reference code for a marginal fee. but it uses patented methods, so even if you make your own implementation, you still have to pay the MPEG licensing authority (MPEG-LA) on their terms.
in a rear-wheel drive car (especially a powerful one), when you turn fast, your car tends to oversteer (towards losing the back end) when you step on the gas. the spoiler helps you with traction to the rear wheels to keep the back end in line. on a front-wheel drive car, the car understeers when you step on the gas. having the back end want to come out a little when you're turning would actually help you make faster turns! the spoiler reduces this tendency, effectively reducing your cornering ability. the larger size rear wheels that you mentioned add weight to the rear of the car, again making up for the oversteer tendencies. a spoiler will not accomplish this.
there's nothing more funny than a civic with a giant wing on the back. it's a clear way to identify that the owner is, in fact, an idiot.
the reg article makes an even better point. microsoft's competitors in the server space (oracle, ibm, etc), are all charging per core. microsoft, however, has not has access to the dual core market since their products run only on x86 architectures, and it will be a year or more before we see any significant inroads for dual core amd/intel chips. at the moment, they're losing nothing. in the future, when these chips are available and you're comparing say different database servers on amd64 dual core hardware, ms's competitors will have to do one of two things. either drop the dual-core as dual processor charging scheme (which will cause their customers on other platforms to demand the same and cost them lots of money), or price themselves out of the competition in the amd64 market. either way, it's a victory for ms by screwing their competitors.
as a side effect, it's also a victory for the consumers, because it will encourage better chip designs instead of higher mhz.
does this mean that now he can say SHIT, and FUCK, and other such offensive words that us americans are too sensitive to hear? i hope he starts off his new show at sirius with the dirtiest joke ever told on any broadcast medium.
you're surprised to see this coming from andersen consulting, aka accenture*? they've been virtualising resources, shifting paradigms, and enabling synergies through proactive leveraging of resources for years. now they're mining reality. sure, why the hell not? it's as much bullshit as anything else they do. you know what they say: a consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, keeps your watch, and bills you for it.
sure: here's one from delphi, another from kenwood. i can't seem to find the sony ones.
obviously, these are only for their specific products. making it work with your average line-out device is all part of the challenge.
Re:broad-pod-casting!
on
How to Podcast
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You mean something like this.
no. that's a halfassed solution of getting from your device to your car. most "quality" (if you can call them that) fm modulator devices for cars don't broadcast fm at all, they attach directly to your car antenna (on the inside, of course), though they still suck compared to aux inputs. i meant modifying one of those antenna drivers for getting music from your device to OTHER PEOPLE's cars, who may happen to be more that 3 feet from your transmitter source.
also, make sure you don't label it with your name if you're planning on throwing it down a well and pretending to be trapped.
broad-pod-casting!
on
How to Podcast
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
bah, that's nothing. how about modding an (automotive) fm modulator to increase the power output, hooking up an antenna to it, and using your mp3 player as your source? share some interesting radio with the cars parked around you in traffic. bonus points if you attach an led display to your rear window showing "now playing".
okay, here's one reason: an antimatter weapon is MUCH MUCH smaller and far simpler than a nuclear weapon. a device stuffed into a container the size of a AA battery could contain a magnetic suspension chamber and a gram of antimatter. easy to plant by a spy or saboteur, very difficult to find, and when the power runs out on the containment field you have an explosion with 0% chance of detonator failure that could level a nice chunk of a city. this is the soviet "suitcase bomb", in the size of a pen, and it emitting no radiation while inactive.
xinhua, while often having its own chinese propaganda spin on world events, is actually capable of reporting real news. this is especially true for events which don't directly concern china. it's often an interesting contrast to "western" news sources, as it has a different viewpoint on some things. it's no more biased than pentagon press releases, al jazeera, or fox news. as a google news user, you get to choose where you get your news from.
the kcna, on the other hand, is entirely a propaganda tool. it has no journalistic value, its only purpose is to make the dprk look good and its enemies look bad.
and no, my last name is not "chan" and i am not chinese (but have been known to date asian girls occasionally). pc-
this is what is called the "zombie" effect. that is, when a cg character goes for total realism, you very often get a case where it does something small and usually not obvious, that makes in not quite human, and gives it a very creepy feeling. you won't get that feeling from an obviously non-human model. i definitely can't put my finger on it, but there is something in her face (when you see the motion, at least), that just seems wrong.
You many not realize this, but we are a government sanctioned monopoly. We own all the phones and all the phone lines in this country, including the wiring in your house. You will fall in place and pay for phone service!
No, wait, what we meant was that we own the entire long distance phone system in the United States.
Wait, I'm told that we actually don't own anything anymore. Well, we can be cool, like all these other companies. Here, you want VOIP, you got it! We'll create a standard just for you, so you can get the same friendly, reliable service you've come to rely on from AT&T. Our proprietary standards will allow us to control the, uh, quality of your phone service and bring it to the same level or reliability and affordability you've come to expect from our land-lines. We know you have a choice in your telecommunication options, and choice can be confusing. That is why we are doing our best to make everyone out there exactly the same. You know, like the mobile phone industry. Look at how well that turned out.
Love, AT&T*
* Our corporate logo's resemblence to the Death Star is purely coincidental.
the eMule client (an open-source clone of edonkey, for windows) is an amazing piece of software. much better than the edonkey client, and and awesome program in its own right. and since it's open source, it's about as non-evil (no spyware or other intrusive shit) as they come. there aren't many windows-specific open source programs, and few approach this caliber.
for linux, the mldonkey client is a pretty nice daemon. i generally use kmldonkey as a gui for it. kmldonkey (a nice attempt to clone emule) crashes quite often, but since it is separate from the network core daemon, nothing is affected. just launch it again, and your transfers are still going.
Just like it's illegal to not report profits from illegal activities to the IRS. It gives them more ammo to use against you. If they can't prove one thing, they have something else to go after you for.
actually, the irs has a contingency for this. you can buy "tax stamps" for pre-sales of undisclosed items. you can then sell anything, having already paid the tax on it. i'm not sure how it works out from an accounting perspective (i am no accountant), but you can cover the sales tax, as well as taxes on profits without having to divulge to the irs what it is that you are selling. you could, conceivable, be selling drugs and charging people sales tax on it, as well as giving the government its share of your profits. in reality, this is much more common for grey markets than outright illegal activities.
it is surprising, though heartening, to see that yahoo still plans to carry on with their own media player and store even after purchasing Music Match last week. it seemed that the purchase would have made their own software efforts redundant, and they would be scrapped. yahoo has really been one of the "do no evil" companies (well, mostly. there were a few hiccups), and they tend to do a good job of integrating all the basic services. a player by yahoo may jumpstart start the stagnating media player field. we can only hope to see ogg and flac support.
see what you've done, now i had to go and rtfa just to respond. here's a choice quote:
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days.
now, let's do a little math. the number of milliseconds in 49.7 days = (49.7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000) = 4,294,080,000. recognize that number? that's right, it's 2^32 (actually, this is: 4,294,967,296, but it's pretty damn close). and why is that significant, you ask? because at 2^32, the unsigned int used by some versions of windows to keep the time since boot overflows back to zero, and bad things begin to happen.
is the problem microsoft's fault? goddamn right it is. in software that runs A MAJOR AIRPORT and controls the flight control and radar systems that affect thousands of lives in the air, an error like this just not an option. the people who put this system into production ought to be fired. i don't know what the right os for this task is. solaris? aix? vms? something with provable uptime and reliability, something that can deliver uptime of longer than a month and a half, that's for sure.
I'm sure Linux doesn't store time in an infinite bit counter either.
i don't recall advocating linux for the job. maybe it can do it, maybe not. and in regards to being free, when my life is on the line, they better spend every god-damn dollar they can to make sure that critical systems do not fail under any circumstances. microsoft was absolutely the wrong choice in this case.
the above question was posed in a line of your advertisements well, after spending an hour and a half on a plane on the runway in oakland, and another hour on the runway in l.a. (sunday night), i think i have the answer. i want to go home. sounds like a simple enough request, or so i thought.
but here is what i really want: i would like you (microsoft, inc.), to stop selling your products to mission critical and infrastructure operations until such a time as they are ready to do so. when my desktop computer at work crashes (admittedly a rare occurance nowadays), i am inconvenienced. when hundreds of thousands of travellers in airports across the world are delayed because one of the busiest airports in the world is shut down due to a 10 year old known bug in your operating systems that has not been fixed, that is simply not acceptable. i realize that buyers of software and IT systems are easily suckered or bribed into using your systems, that is why i am appealing directly to you. please exit this market before we are forced to legislate you out.
it seems appropriate that microsoft would name their drm scheme after the two-faced greek god. their previous (now scrapped) drm project before janus was named "mercury", a highly toxic metal.
While you save money on the hardware, you don't on the software.
as opposed to not saving on software AND not saving on hardware? sounds like a good solution to me. besides, you're paying for a single install of winxp, not two, so that's software savings right there. and yes, sometimes windows xp is the right tool for the job and is worth paying for (like in some office environments where the workers know, want, and need windows). forcing people to use linux against their will can be just as stupid as forcing people to use windows against their will.
sweet. it is seriously about time for this feature. i use firefox on windows and linux daily. the windows version is so much slicker, because it plugs right into the windows widgets. it is consistant with the rest of the ui i'm using. the firefox on my kde desktop has an out of place user interface that makes often makes it a pain to get things done. copy and paste consistancy, dragging things, an address bar edit field that doesn't suck, this would be awesome. i'd also love to see kde's spell-checker-in-every-text-field apply to firefox as well.
sure, you guys are thinking that upgrading to an IPv6 is going to be sweet. you'll have tons of torque, and your computer is gonna jump off the line. what most people don't consider when going to IPv6 is all the wasted space under the hood. the v configuration of your packet driver requires a split header design, taking up space on both sides of your cpu. your motherboard will need twin exhausts, and that's really going to take away alot of the space in the case. plus, when you're trying to download slowly, you'll be eating up alot of power just idling that big thing.
that's why i'm switching to IPI6. the inline cylinders make for a faster revving processor, and the headers all fold to one side of the block. not as much torque, sure, but plenty of horsepower on tap when you really want it. the block is really not that much longer than IPv4, and you still have room for the front tie-rods if you want to upgrade to 4 cpu-drive.
well, that's my plan, anyway. for now, i'll just buy a big wing and carbon fiber case-mod and stick it on my IPv4 computer until i get promoted to shift-manager.
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sure it's an open standard. anyone can buy the implementation specifications, and get the reference code for a marginal fee. but it uses patented methods, so even if you make your own implementation, you still have to pay the MPEG licensing authority (MPEG-LA) on their terms.
wow, you took that much better than i thought. i was sure i was treading into flaimbait territory. i salute you.
while i'm here, vi rules!
you're new to driving, aren't you?
in a rear-wheel drive car (especially a powerful one), when you turn fast, your car tends to oversteer (towards losing the back end) when you step on the gas. the spoiler helps you with traction to the rear wheels to keep the back end in line.
on a front-wheel drive car, the car understeers when you step on the gas. having the back end want to come out a little when you're turning would actually help you make faster turns! the spoiler reduces this tendency, effectively reducing your cornering ability. the larger size rear wheels that you mentioned add weight to the rear of the car, again making up for the oversteer tendencies. a spoiler will not accomplish this.
there's nothing more funny than a civic with a giant wing on the back. it's a clear way to identify that the owner is, in fact, an idiot.
the reg article makes an even better point. microsoft's competitors in the server space (oracle, ibm, etc), are all charging per core. microsoft, however, has not has access to the dual core market since their products run only on x86 architectures, and it will be a year or more before we see any significant inroads for dual core amd/intel chips. at the moment, they're losing nothing. in the future, when these chips are available and you're comparing say different database servers on amd64 dual core hardware, ms's competitors will have to do one of two things. either drop the dual-core as dual processor charging scheme (which will cause their customers on other platforms to demand the same and cost them lots of money), or price themselves out of the competition in the amd64 market. either way, it's a victory for ms by screwing their competitors.
as a side effect, it's also a victory for the consumers, because it will encourage better chip designs instead of higher mhz.
i'm going to say this slowly so that you can follow along:
... never ... gets ... old.
porn
does this mean that now he can say SHIT, and FUCK, and other such offensive words that us americans are too sensitive to hear? i hope he starts off his new show at sirius with the dirtiest joke ever told on any broadcast medium.
you're surprised to see this coming from andersen consulting, aka accenture*? they've been virtualising resources, shifting paradigms, and enabling synergies through proactive leveraging of resources for years. now they're mining reality. sure, why the hell not? it's as much bullshit as anything else they do. you know what they say: a consultant is someone who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, keeps your watch, and bills you for it.
*pronounced "ass-enter"
Remember AMD used to suck ass until the Athlon XP
your memory is short. i remember them making a 40mhz 386 processor that kicked intel's ass.
sure: here's one from delphi, another from kenwood. i can't seem to find the sony ones.
obviously, these are only for their specific products. making it work with your average line-out device is all part of the challenge.
You mean something like this.
no. that's a halfassed solution of getting from your device to your car. most "quality" (if you can call them that) fm modulator devices for cars don't broadcast fm at all, they attach directly to your car antenna (on the inside, of course), though they still suck compared to aux inputs. i meant modifying one of those antenna drivers for getting music from your device to OTHER PEOPLE's cars, who may happen to be more that 3 feet from your transmitter source.
also, make sure you don't label it with your name if you're planning on throwing it down a well and pretending to be trapped.
bah, that's nothing.
how about modding an (automotive) fm modulator to increase the power output, hooking up an antenna to it, and using your mp3 player as your source? share some interesting radio with the cars parked around you in traffic. bonus points if you attach an led display to your rear window showing "now playing".
Why would we need anything MORE powerful?
okay, here's one reason: an antimatter weapon is MUCH MUCH smaller and far simpler than a nuclear weapon. a device stuffed into a container the size of a AA battery could contain a magnetic suspension chamber and a gram of antimatter. easy to plant by a spy or saboteur, very difficult to find, and when the power runs out on the containment field you have an explosion with 0% chance of detonator failure that could level a nice chunk of a city. this is the soviet "suitcase bomb", in the size of a pen, and it emitting no radiation while inactive.
sounds pretty practical to me.
xinhua, while often having its own chinese propaganda spin on world events, is actually capable of reporting real news. this is especially true for events which don't directly concern china. it's often an interesting contrast to "western" news sources, as it has a different viewpoint on some things. it's no more biased than pentagon press releases, al jazeera, or fox news. as a google news user, you get to choose where you get your news from.
the kcna, on the other hand, is entirely a propaganda tool. it has no journalistic value, its only purpose is to make the dprk look good and its enemies look bad.
and no, my last name is not "chan" and i am not chinese (but have been known to date asian girls occasionally).
pc-
this is what is called the "zombie" effect. that is, when a cg character goes for total realism, you very often get a case where it does something small and usually not obvious, that makes in not quite human, and gives it a very creepy feeling. you won't get that feeling from an obviously non-human model. i definitely can't put my finger on it, but there is something in her face (when you see the motion, at least), that just seems wrong.
Dear Customer,
You many not realize this, but we are a government sanctioned monopoly. We own all the phones and all the phone lines in this country, including the wiring in your house. You will fall in place and pay for phone service!
No, wait, what we meant was that we own the entire long distance phone system in the United States.
Wait, I'm told that we actually don't own anything anymore. Well, we can be cool, like all these other companies. Here, you want VOIP, you got it! We'll create a standard just for you, so you can get the same friendly, reliable service you've come to rely on from AT&T. Our proprietary standards will allow us to control the, uh, quality of your phone service and bring it to the same level or reliability and affordability you've come to expect from our land-lines. We know you have a choice in your telecommunication options, and choice can be confusing. That is why we are doing our best to make everyone out there exactly the same. You know, like the mobile phone industry. Look at how well that turned out.
Love,
AT&T*
* Our corporate logo's resemblence to the Death Star is purely coincidental.
the eMule client (an open-source clone of edonkey, for windows) is an amazing piece of software. much better than the edonkey client, and and awesome program in its own right. and since it's open source, it's about as non-evil (no spyware or other intrusive shit) as they come. there aren't many windows-specific open source programs, and few approach this caliber.
for linux, the mldonkey client is a pretty nice daemon. i generally use kmldonkey as a gui for it. kmldonkey (a nice attempt to clone emule) crashes quite often, but since it is separate from the network core daemon, nothing is affected. just launch it again, and your transfers are still going.
good stuff. super slow network, though.
Just like it's illegal to not report profits from illegal activities to the IRS. It gives them more ammo to use against you. If they can't prove one thing, they have something else to go after you for.
actually, the irs has a contingency for this. you can buy "tax stamps" for pre-sales of undisclosed items. you can then sell anything, having already paid the tax on it. i'm not sure how it works out from an accounting perspective (i am no accountant), but you can cover the sales tax, as well as taxes on profits without having to divulge to the irs what it is that you are selling. you could, conceivable, be selling drugs and charging people sales tax on it, as well as giving the government its share of your profits. in reality, this is much more common for grey markets than outright illegal activities.
it is surprising, though heartening, to see that yahoo still plans to carry on with their own media player and store even after purchasing Music Match last week. it seemed that the purchase would have made their own software efforts redundant, and they would be scrapped. yahoo has really been one of the "do no evil" companies (well, mostly. there were a few hiccups), and they tend to do a good job of integrating all the basic services. a player by yahoo may jumpstart start the stagnating media player field. we can only hope to see ogg and flac support.
ian and dave, i'm looking forward to the release.
see what you've done, now i had to go and rtfa just to respond. here's a choice quote:
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days.
now, let's do a little math. the number of milliseconds in 49.7 days = (49.7 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000) = 4,294,080,000. recognize that number? that's right, it's 2^32 (actually, this is: 4,294,967,296, but it's pretty damn close). and why is that significant, you ask? because at 2^32, the unsigned int used by some versions of windows to keep the time since boot overflows back to zero, and bad things begin to happen.
is the problem microsoft's fault? goddamn right it is. in software that runs A MAJOR AIRPORT and controls the flight control and radar systems that affect thousands of lives in the air, an error like this just not an option. the people who put this system into production ought to be fired. i don't know what the right os for this task is. solaris? aix? vms? something with provable uptime and reliability, something that can deliver uptime of longer than a month and a half, that's for sure.
I'm sure Linux doesn't store time in an infinite bit counter either.
i don't recall advocating linux for the job. maybe it can do it, maybe not. and in regards to being free, when my life is on the line, they better spend every god-damn dollar they can to make sure that critical systems do not fail under any circumstances. microsoft was absolutely the wrong choice in this case.
where do you want to go today?
dear microsoft,
the above question was posed in a line of your advertisements well, after spending an hour and a half on a plane on the runway in oakland, and another hour on the runway in l.a. (sunday night), i think i have the answer. i want to go home. sounds like a simple enough request, or so i thought.
but here is what i really want: i would like you (microsoft, inc.), to stop selling your products to mission critical and infrastructure operations until such a time as they are ready to do so. when my desktop computer at work crashes (admittedly a rare occurance nowadays), i am inconvenienced. when hundreds of thousands of travellers in airports across the world are delayed because one of the busiest airports in the world is shut down due to a 10 year old known bug in your operating systems that has not been fixed, that is simply not acceptable. i realize that buyers of software and IT systems are easily suckered or bribed into using your systems, that is why i am appealing directly to you. please exit this market before we are forced to legislate you out.
thanks,
pc
it seems appropriate that microsoft would name their drm scheme after the two-faced greek god. their previous (now scrapped) drm project before janus was named "mercury", a highly toxic metal.
dupidy dupe. ever read the site, editors?
While you save money on the hardware, you don't on the software.
as opposed to not saving on software AND not saving on hardware? sounds like a good solution to me. besides, you're paying for a single install of winxp, not two, so that's software savings right there. and yes, sometimes windows xp is the right tool for the job and is worth paying for (like in some office environments where the workers know, want, and need windows). forcing people to use linux against their will can be just as stupid as forcing people to use windows against their will.
sweet. it is seriously about time for this feature.
i use firefox on windows and linux daily. the windows version is so much slicker, because it plugs right into the windows widgets. it is consistant with the rest of the ui i'm using. the firefox on my kde desktop has an out of place user interface that makes often makes it a pain to get things done. copy and paste consistancy, dragging things, an address bar edit field that doesn't suck, this would be awesome. i'd also love to see kde's spell-checker-in-every-text-field apply to firefox as well.
sure, you guys are thinking that upgrading to an IPv6 is going to be sweet. you'll have tons of torque, and your computer is gonna jump off the line. what most people don't consider when going to IPv6 is all the wasted space under the hood. the v configuration of your packet driver requires a split header design, taking up space on both sides of your cpu. your motherboard will need twin exhausts, and that's really going to take away alot of the space in the case. plus, when you're trying to download slowly, you'll be eating up alot of power just idling that big thing.
that's why i'm switching to IPI6. the inline cylinders make for a faster revving processor, and the headers all fold to one side of the block. not as much torque, sure, but plenty of horsepower on tap when you really want it. the block is really not that much longer than IPv4, and you still have room for the front tie-rods if you want to upgrade to 4 cpu-drive.
well, that's my plan, anyway. for now, i'll just buy a big wing and carbon fiber case-mod and stick it on my IPv4 computer until i get promoted to shift-manager.