Here in scenic and beautiful Tennessee, we have a program like this. It's called "READS" link. They have a lot of the classics and a better than average selection of audiobooks.
I am the same way... I go up and down the aisles, and stop randomly, reading book titles. It's amazing the things fascinating things you would never think to google. Boat building leads to seamanship leads to hydroponics leads to farming leads to animal husbandry leads to... Sometimes you stumble across the real gems, like the popular mechanics how-to encyclopedia, which showed how to turn a drill press into a milling machine, how to build bookshelves, airplanes, boats, entertainment centers... No, can't give it up. They can close the libraries over my cold* dead body.
-ellie
* Cold dead body - I am a funded option 2 member of the Cryonics Institute.
Certainly there are ways, they have copy and paste turned off, but printing is enabled so one option would be to print them to a file as postscript and use ps2pdf to roll them back into non-drm pdf's..The question is... is it worth the effort? I.e. Do I really want Psychology 7th edition laying around in my home directory?... this from the girl that read the deathly hallows in one night as 700ish individual jpgs, then bought the book at the B&N party two days later...My costume was cute though. Too bad I don't have red hair....
-ellie
Actually, this is partially incorrect. While Adobe did not initially help out in the linux world, they have since ported the Acrobat Reader, and it works fairly well. In Ubuntu it's available from the commercial-unsupported repository, the package name is acroread. I had to find it because my school DRMs the PDF Textbooks with phone-home Ecmascript, and it only works in the Adobe pdf reader. (not document viewer or evince.)
Let's think about Telcos for a minute. They are slow lumbering behemoths with huge investments in infrastructure, and are radically resistant to change. Ok, now mentally compare that to a small, agile, and responsive dot-com with comparably trivial investments in hardware. A telco cannot "move", they are physically tied down with copper and fiber. A.com can move to a new data center around the block or around the world fairly trivially.
No, I don't think it is going to happen. Google's case of popping into the fiber market is a special one, related to the specific transport requirements of their business model. It will be, IMHO, a very rare occurrence.
First, you need to know that on the internet, the most specific route wins.
A Pakistan based ISP, ASN17557 announced more specific routes than YouTube's ISP, and their peers/upstreams did not have appropriate filtering in place to keep those routes from propagating to the rest of the internet. As those routes propagated across the internet, They directed all the traffic to a webserver to display "approved" content. Unfortunately, YouTube is a very busy site, and this caused some infrastructure problems in-country. Pakistan responded by null routing (an efficient way to silently discard) the incoming youtube traffic. Today, or last night depending on the time zone, PCCW "unplugged" Pakistan to force them to stop advertising the routes. In this case, the more appropriate response would have been to filter out the inappropriate routes, (which they should have done in the first place.)
It's worth mentioning that these "filters" aren't huge boxes or physical devices. They are 3 or 4 lines in a configuration file.
router bgp xxxx
neighbor x.x.x.x prefix-list from-paki in
prefix-list from-paki deny 208.65.153.0/24 le 32
prefix-list from-paki permit 0.0.0.0/0 le 24 (This permits any route except for routes inside www.youtube.com's/24. Not a good idea to do, but it shows how simple this would have been for Pakistan's upstreams to setup inbound or for Pakistan to filter outbound.)
One of the issues with BGP that people have difficulty understanding is that there is no single place to enforce a policy like "drop all routes from Pakistan". Because BGP runs on a distributed system, like an imperfect mesh, it becomes exponentially harder to filter bad routes the farther they are away from their source. According to the APNIC route policy listing, 17557 announces routes to 1239 (Sprint) and 5400 (BT). Both of these are large ISPs with a great number of peers, big enough that filtering routes to other peers is generally infeasible. Once the routes were "received and believed" by the two major ISPs, the route was went to the "whole" internet. Curiously enough, I have worked with Sprint here in the states and they perform vigorous route filtering when connecting to small peers and customers. As Pakistan doesn't have enough pipe to be a "big" isp, I wonder which ISP was caught with their filters down.
Microsoft is NOT pulling SP1. They are pulling a windows-update pushed installer update. Without this update you can still install it by the traditional download and run method, just not with windows update.... (and it won't uninstall (snicker) cleanly.)
I hate Vista as much as the next girl, but can we get the facts straight? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash Vista. Making up new ones is unnecessary.:)
You are correct in your interpretation. The customer briefly receives more than they pay for after a period of inactivity, this throttles down to the 'purchased' bandwidth as the activity increases. For Read-Click-Load-Read web browsing this gets content in front of eyeballs quicker and is a "good" thing. If you are using a tiny file for a bandwidth test it screws up the results. HINT: USE A BIGGER FILE.
People are out with pitchforks and torches over the "bad" thing Comcast does, throttling Torrent downloads, which works completely differently. To throttle a torrent, they forge a "I'm dead" packet from remote host, and send it to the customer. This causes the customer's torrent application to shop elsewhere for a feed. The repeated connect-forge disconnect-search-connect process slows the overall transfer. This only works because of the multi-peer technology underlying torrents, and wouldn't work with web browsing or ftp*.
-Ellie * technically it would reduce the bandwidth usage, because it terminates the connection. This would result in broken connections and half-downloaded files. Then the pitchforks would REALLY come out.
I have a few "you can't do that on windows.." (I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and use it everyday.)
Reliably simultaneously connect to file shares from multiple Windows domains that don't trust each other.
Make a restore-from-bare-metal backup that works _every time_ (Command line Required)
See which files are open at any given time.
See a real list of what processes are running.
_Know_ that your kids aren't going to break the laptop's os, no matter what their 1337 friends tell them to do. (They have non-privileged accounts.)
Install over 100 apps from the "start" menu, or over 10,000 from the "Control Panel"
Connect to and use remote FTP as a filesystem at a decent speed..... Ditto: ssh
Here's a really fun one.. Replace the Motherboard and processor without reinstalling. WTF... The desktop was up, running, and then the Add new hardware wizard pops up and now I'm not ALLOWED to use my PC without reinstalling?!... and if you compare "straight from the CD" installs, Linux (ubuntu for me) out of the box can open PDF files, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. With Windows you have to download Adobe Acrobat reader and install Office (not free) to "use" the machine.
And finally this isn't windows "fault", but still bugs me. Why does every single application need a separate update utility? Can't they cooperate like apt does?
Linux (Ubuntu) has annoyances... like no easy way to force a scan of wireless networks from the GUI... But all operating systems will have annoyances. You get used to them.
Moving out of the gripefest, here is my opinion. PCs as a commodity are at a transition phase. It used to be that a 3 year old PC was completely obsolete, no matter how much you paid for it. Now, processors are fast enough that a 5 year old system (with enough RAM) is not painfully slower than a new machine. In our company, most of our users have 1ghz machines with 512 or 1g of Ram. They work. There is no drive to upgrade. It is my opinion that the UI and structural changes in Windows Vista are an attempt to reintroduce and enforce the 3 year lifecycle of PCs, and increase the hardware requirements of the low end PC market. That makes business sense for Microsoft and OEMs, but not for our business.
I didn't say that they shouldn't do it, I said "what could possibly go wrong".
The choice between a virologist working on a "Hot" or "cold" ebola specimen is an easy one, and it is work that needs to be done. IMHO, the modified virus should be as tightly controlled as the real thing, and they most certainly will.
-ellie
do you really think that people capable of making a tiny high resolution light projecting curved display out of flexible organic compatible materials are going to be stumped by an eye-tracking-are-you-looking-at-the-hud feature?
'Come Back" meaning, recover the brand image of an innovative company with useful and reliable products.
To say it another way, when was the last time you met a Clueful administrator or tech person excited about a Microsoft product? (other than a mouse, keyboard, or xbox!)
-ellie
In my humble and unsubstantiated opinion, Microsoft is Microsoft's biggest threat. They have too many products and too many people, and it has made them uncompetitive. If they refocus on their core business, they can come back. Google and other OSS competitors are superfluous.
Microsoft's Products include:
Accounting software (5 distinct huge business packages plus Microsoft Money and a dozen bolt-on applications); Hardware (Mice, Keyboards, Joysticks, cameras, headsets, and game gear); Operating Systems (Servers, workstations, mobile devices, and embedded devices); online services (MSN, Live services, Search, Groups... this is a huge list); database services (Sql Server), Groupware (Exchange), Office Suites (Office, Works), 3 distinct sets of Mapping software, drawing software, desktop publishing software, Reference software, a graphing calculator application, Hardware and software media players, online media services with varying levels of compatibility, tv set top boxes, a dozen different development languages which may or may not be integrated into visual studio.. The list goes on and on,
OSS is one of several competitors offering an alternative for people to switch away from MS products. If oss ceased to exist, some other competitor would arise. That is how a free market works.
-Ellie
p.s. Google, pay attention, you are spreading out too. Diversification is good, but stay good at what makes you great.
Curious. You don't take your laptop everywhere?
I was specifically referring to this story Geek on Everest, which made/. a while back. Also the Antartic data center story from the register this month.:)
-ellie
They will sell these by the case to the antarctic research station and mountain climbers. They go through normal hard drives like pez because of the cold and low air density. How is the power consumption compared to rotating drives?
-ellie
Only 2.5% of the visible universe? Seven of nine could do this in the turbolift on the way back to the astrometrics lab and still have time for solitaire.
(I am a Star Trek Voyager fan.....or more accurately, THE voyager fan.)
Does no-one else observe the futility of griping about a product that does not exist yet? Let's see what they come up with before gathering the pitchforks and torches.
-ellie
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like safari, except with paper.. right?
-ellie
Here in scenic and beautiful Tennessee, we have a program like this. It's called "READS" link. They have a lot of the classics and a better than average selection of audiobooks.
... And there is always project Gutenberg. (sp)
I am the same way... I go up and down the aisles, and stop randomly, reading book titles. It's amazing the things fascinating things you would never think to google. Boat building leads to seamanship leads to hydroponics leads to farming leads to animal husbandry leads to ... Sometimes you stumble across the real gems, like the popular mechanics how-to encyclopedia, which showed how to turn a drill press into a milling machine, how to build bookshelves, airplanes, boats, entertainment centers... No, can't give it up. They can close the libraries over my cold* dead body.
-ellie
* Cold dead body - I am a funded option 2 member of the Cryonics Institute.
Certainly there are ways, they have copy and paste turned off, but printing is enabled so one option would be to print them to a file as postscript and use ps2pdf to roll them back into non-drm pdf's..The question is... is it worth the effort? I.e. Do I really want Psychology 7th edition laying around in my home directory? ... this from the girl that read the deathly hallows in one night as 700ish individual jpgs, then bought the book at the B&N party two days later...My costume was cute though. Too bad I don't have red hair....
-ellie
Actually, this is partially incorrect. While Adobe did not initially help out in the linux world, they have since ported the Acrobat Reader, and it works fairly well. In Ubuntu it's available from the commercial-unsupported repository, the package name is acroread. I had to find it because my school DRMs the PDF Textbooks with phone-home Ecmascript, and it only works in the Adobe pdf reader. (not document viewer or evince.)
-Ellie
Let's think about Telcos for a minute. They are slow lumbering behemoths with huge investments in infrastructure, and are radically resistant to change. Ok, now mentally compare that to a small, agile, and responsive dot-com with comparably trivial investments in hardware. A telco cannot "move", they are physically tied down with copper and fiber. A .com can move to a new data center around the block or around the world fairly trivially.
No, I don't think it is going to happen. Google's case of popping into the fiber market is a special one, related to the specific transport requirements of their business model. It will be, IMHO, a very rare occurrence.
-ellie
First, you need to know that on the internet, the most specific route wins. A Pakistan based ISP, ASN17557 announced more specific routes than YouTube's ISP, and their peers/upstreams did not have appropriate filtering in place to keep those routes from propagating to the rest of the internet. As those routes propagated across the internet, They directed all the traffic to a webserver to display "approved" content. Unfortunately, YouTube is a very busy site, and this caused some infrastructure problems in-country. Pakistan responded by null routing (an efficient way to silently discard) the incoming youtube traffic. Today, or last night depending on the time zone, PCCW "unplugged" Pakistan to force them to stop advertising the routes. In this case, the more appropriate response would have been to filter out the inappropriate routes, (which they should have done in the first place.)
It's worth mentioning that these "filters" aren't huge boxes or physical devices. They are 3 or 4 lines in a configuration file.
router bgp xxxxneighbor x.x.x.x prefix-list from-paki in
prefix-list from-paki deny 208.65.153.0/24 le 32
prefix-list from-paki permit 0.0.0.0/0 le 24
(This permits any route except for routes inside www.youtube.com's
One of the issues with BGP that people have difficulty understanding is that there is no single place to enforce a policy like "drop all routes from Pakistan". Because BGP runs on a distributed system, like an imperfect mesh, it becomes exponentially harder to filter bad routes the farther they are away from their source. According to the APNIC route policy listing, 17557 announces routes to 1239 (Sprint) and 5400 (BT). Both of these are large ISPs with a great number of peers, big enough that filtering routes to other peers is generally infeasible. Once the routes were "received and believed" by the two major ISPs, the route was went to the "whole" internet. Curiously enough, I have worked with Sprint here in the states and they perform vigorous route filtering when connecting to small peers and customers. As Pakistan doesn't have enough pipe to be a "big" isp, I wonder which ISP was caught with their filters down.
-EllieThe Pilot was not quoted as saying. "Wow, that sucks. Send me the bill, okay?" :D
-ellie
Microsoft is NOT pulling SP1. They are pulling a windows-update pushed installer update. Without this update you can still install it by the traditional download and run method, just not with windows update.... (and it won't uninstall (snicker) cleanly.)
:)
I hate Vista as much as the next girl, but can we get the facts straight? There are plenty of legitimate reasons to bash Vista. Making up new ones is unnecessary.
-ellie
> what are they going to bitch about?
Land Prices? Gas Prices? Foreign Wars? The stereotypically hot guys on CSI: Miami?
-ellie
You are correct in your interpretation. The customer briefly receives more than they pay for after a period of inactivity, this throttles down to the 'purchased' bandwidth as the activity increases. For Read-Click-Load-Read web browsing this gets content in front of eyeballs quicker and is a "good" thing. If you are using a tiny file for a bandwidth test it screws up the results. HINT: USE A BIGGER FILE.
People are out with pitchforks and torches over the "bad" thing Comcast does, throttling Torrent downloads, which works completely differently. To throttle a torrent, they forge a "I'm dead" packet from remote host, and send it to the customer. This causes the customer's torrent application to shop elsewhere for a feed. The repeated connect-forge disconnect-search-connect process slows the overall transfer. This only works because of the multi-peer technology underlying torrents, and wouldn't work with web browsing or ftp*.
-Ellie
* technically it would reduce the bandwidth usage, because it terminates the connection. This would result in broken connections and half-downloaded files. Then the pitchforks would REALLY come out.
I have a few "you can't do that on windows.." (I run Ubuntu on my laptop, and use it everyday.)
... and if you compare "straight from the CD" installs, Linux (ubuntu for me) out of the box can open PDF files, Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations. With Windows you have to download Adobe Acrobat reader and install Office (not free) to "use" the machine.
Reliably simultaneously connect to file shares from multiple Windows domains that don't trust each other.
Make a restore-from-bare-metal backup that works _every time_ (Command line Required)
See which files are open at any given time.
See a real list of what processes are running.
_Know_ that your kids aren't going to break the laptop's os, no matter what their 1337 friends tell them to do. (They have non-privileged accounts.)
Install over 100 apps from the "start" menu, or over 10,000 from the "Control Panel"
Connect to and use remote FTP as a filesystem at a decent speed..... Ditto: ssh
Here's a really fun one.. Replace the Motherboard and processor without reinstalling. WTF... The desktop was up, running, and then the Add new hardware wizard pops up and now I'm not ALLOWED to use my PC without reinstalling?!
And finally this isn't windows "fault", but still bugs me. Why does every single application need a separate update utility? Can't they cooperate like apt does?
Linux (Ubuntu) has annoyances... like no easy way to force a scan of wireless networks from the GUI... But all operating systems will have annoyances. You get used to them.
Moving out of the gripefest, here is my opinion. PCs as a commodity are at a transition phase. It used to be that a 3 year old PC was completely obsolete, no matter how much you paid for it. Now, processors are fast enough that a 5 year old system (with enough RAM) is not painfully slower than a new machine. In our company, most of our users have 1ghz machines with 512 or 1g of Ram. They work. There is no drive to upgrade. It is my opinion that the UI and structural changes in Windows Vista are an attempt to reintroduce and enforce the 3 year lifecycle of PCs, and increase the hardware requirements of the low end PC market. That makes business sense for Microsoft and OEMs, but not for our business.
-Ellie
I didn't say that they shouldn't do it, I said "what could possibly go wrong".
The choice between a virologist working on a "Hot" or "cold" ebola specimen is an easy one, and it is work that needs to be done. IMHO, the modified virus should be as tightly controlled as the real thing, and they most certainly will. -ellie
Never have I seen an article more suited for the "what could possibly go wrong" tag...
Let's compare the technical difficulties here....
do you really think that people capable of making a tiny high resolution light projecting curved display out of flexible organic compatible materials are going to be stumped by an eye-tracking-are-you-looking-at-the-hud feature?
Ellie
'Come Back" meaning, recover the brand image of an innovative company with useful and reliable products. To say it another way, when was the last time you met a Clueful administrator or tech person excited about a Microsoft product? (other than a mouse, keyboard, or xbox!) -ellie
In my humble and unsubstantiated opinion, Microsoft is Microsoft's biggest threat. They have too many products and too many people, and it has made them uncompetitive. If they refocus on their core business, they can come back. Google and other OSS competitors are superfluous.
Microsoft's Products include:
Accounting software (5 distinct huge business packages plus Microsoft Money and a dozen bolt-on applications); Hardware (Mice, Keyboards, Joysticks, cameras, headsets, and game gear); Operating Systems (Servers, workstations, mobile devices, and embedded devices); online services (MSN, Live services, Search, Groups... this is a huge list); database services (Sql Server), Groupware (Exchange), Office Suites (Office, Works), 3 distinct sets of Mapping software, drawing software, desktop publishing software, Reference software, a graphing calculator application, Hardware and software media players, online media services with varying levels of compatibility, tv set top boxes, a dozen different development languages which may or may not be integrated into visual studio.. The list goes on and on,
OSS is one of several competitors offering an alternative for people to switch away from MS products. If oss ceased to exist, some other competitor would arise. That is how a free market works.
-Ellie
p.s. Google, pay attention, you are spreading out too. Diversification is good, but stay good at what makes you great.Curious. You don't take your laptop everywhere? I was specifically referring to this story Geek on Everest, which made /. a while back. Also the Antartic data center story from the register this month. :)
-ellie
They will sell these by the case to the antarctic research station and mountain climbers. They go through normal hard drives like pez because of the cold and low air density. How is the power consumption compared to rotating drives? -ellie
There may be a "patent troll" of artificial life, but there will be no Microsoft. DNA is, by definition, open source.
-ellie
Only 2.5% of the visible universe? Seven of nine could do this in the turbolift on the way back to the astrometrics lab and still have time for solitaire. (I am a Star Trek Voyager fan. ....or more accurately, THE voyager fan.)
Our solar system is safe. We have Chuck Norris AND Cowboy Neal.
Does no-one else observe the futility of griping about a product that does not exist yet? Let's see what they come up with before gathering the pitchforks and torches. -ellie
Okay, lets get to the important part... Will it blend?!
there is a small chance an upgrade will corrupt your childhood.