Wow. The story sounds even more incredible with the details. What a bunch of pricks.
I think you've done the right thing, even if you do have doubts. If they're defaming you, harrassing you, and threatening you, then they're certainly in the wrong. Even if your website is illegal (and I doubt that it is) they still can't act that way.
If nothing else, you seem to hold the moral high ground. The alumni staff are a disgrace to your school, and if I were in your shoes, I'd let the school board know that with a written letter. If nothing else, perhaps the asshat who threatened you will lose his job over it.
Go stand at Toys R. Us, or Best Buy. Wait until someone seems to be about to buy an x-box.
Then tell them what you have just told us, that after you buy the x-box, it won't be your hardware, it will still belong to Microsoft. If they seem incredulous, explain to them exactly how and why this is the case.
See how many of them actually buy the x-box after that. I'd be curious.
I reckon all of them. Also a nice security guard will soon arrive to escort you from the building.
Re:ynlo gcramblins eht tirsf dna tasl setterl
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
Oh my god. I read that just fine but I thought you had *reversed* the words. It wasn't until I'd finished reading it and you'd explained you only swapped the first/last letters that I noticed that.
Performance - Yes, servers tend to have fairly impressive hardware resources available to them. So lets cripple that hardware by making it run an interpreted language.
You've just managed to discredit the value of every webserver running PHP or Perl.
Or in other words, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't turn this into a battle. What was the original purpose of your site? Not fame. Not fortune. To be connected with classmates. Offer your website gratis to the association if they fund the hosting and give you due credit. Then everybody wins. You get free hosting. The alumni gets their donations. Classmates get a better quality service.
Instead of fighting them, or bunkering down at the first threat of litigation (which was probably an ignorant threat with no merit), talk with them and work out how you can both benefit.
Unless they're assholes. In that case, tell them to get stuffed.
PS: I've never been in the situation that you describe but that's what I'd do.
You've totally missed the point. Those bands may be heavily marketed, but it makes no difference if you're only paying attention to the music.
If that was "the point" then it was drowned out by his conceited boasting about how he hadn't "allowed himself to be marketed to by the major labels". I say he was and he's simply too naive to realise it.
I've spent plenty of money on Radiohead, Coldplay, Kronos Quarter, Placebo, John Coltrane, DJ Shadow, Turin Brakes, Goldfrapp, Money Mark, Yo La Tengo, Spiritualized, Royksopp, MC Paul Barman, and countless others. Why? Because I haven't allowed myself to be marketed to by the major labels or Viacom's television network or magazines, and I pick up stuff based on what I like, not what I am told to like.
<sarcasm>Oh yeah, because Placebo, Radiohead and Coldplay haven't been heavily marketted by major labels or television or magazines. They're practically unknowns. You're such a rebel independent.</sarcasm>
Oh yeah, and one other thing: In your poorly written, grammatically incorrect, misspelled "open letter" to the free software community, you deliberately took some quotes out of context. This was silly because the misquoted documents are readily available for all to see your blatent and stupid attempt.
All you've done is prove my point. Patents are being used as if they are lottery tickets. Eolas gets a patent for very little work, and hopes to receive half a BILLION dollars in compensation. That's not moral, even if it is legal. Eolas is receiving an obscene amount of money for very little R&D investment. Patents were supposed to reward inventors for creating new inventions. Instead, patents have become a lucky-dip where a few fortunate companies can strike it rich.
I'll repeat my argument: patents are being abused and (I think) the way to stop the abuse is to require full disclosure of the expected earnings from a patent. If Eolas had said upfront "we're going to patent plugins and we expect to receive more than half a BILLION dollars in compensation within the decade", then perhaps everybody would have treated them a bit more seriously. Perhaps somebody would have stopped this nonsense before it had got this bad.
I'm only interested in discussing that argument, nothing else. Not calculations. Not figures. Not damages. Your calculations are interesting, but I don't think there's any relevance to what I said. I was not disputing the popularity of plugins or that "infringement" has occurred. I was disputing the fact that the patent system only allows for compensation to be decided after the patent has been granted. If the true worth of a patent was decided before being granted, instead of after, then I think there would be fewer examples of these ridiculous cases.
The problem with patents isn't that they're granted too easily. It isn't that patents are granted for obvious processes, or processes already in existence. It isn't even that patents can hide in a product for years, gaining in popularity, before the patent owner demands payment (though that particular aspect really disgusts me). The real problem with patents is that there's no financial cap on the "reward" the patent owner can demand.
In this case, Eolas got half a BILLION dollars. I can't imagine that even if this patent has merit (I don't think it does) that the staff at Eolas have truly produced something of that worth. There is no way Eolas invested anything like that into research for their patent. Even if Eolas had a rare genius on their staff who invented something truly unique and revolutionary, no single person can produce half a BILLION dollars of worth.
Oh sure, that's just "capitalism" somebody will say. The property owner gets to pick the price. Mysterious "market forces" will sort everything out. But in the case of patents there are no market forces. Patent owners enjoy a monopoly where nobody can legally compete. The patent owners can set their prices sky-high and nobody can undercut them.
Rather than putting the onus on the patent review process to "weed out" the bad patents - which I personally believe is an impossible task - there should instead be a financial valuation done of patents before they are granted. The patent owner can document their expected earnings from the patent. If the patent owner poorly estimates the expected earnings (claims a future earning of $1mill but collects half a BILLION dollars) then something is almost certainly wrong.
This way companies (incl. Microsoft) can easily identify any patents that may financially harm them in the future and invest more effort into disproving their merit. If the patent owner truly believes their patent is worthy then they can invest more time and money into defending the patent. This is pure self-interest at work, so I have every confidence that it will work.
The current patent system is like a lottery. The fix is to make it accountable. My idea might not be practical for reasons I cannot see, but I'm convinced that something similar to it will fix the patent system.
The Subaru station wagons are fair compromises for people who would otherwise buy an SUV. They are cheaper (in the $20Ks, not $30Ks), get decent gas milage relative to an SUV, handle amazingly well with their 16" low-profile tire and good suspension, etc. The only drawback is that tall people (taller than 6'1" or so) will probably find the driver's seat uncomfortable.
Agreed! I bought a Subaru station wagon because I get all the convenience of the wagon (you can fit a mammoth amount of junk in the boot) and it's not nearly so daggy-looking as most wagons. The car handles like a sedan and has great performance around town. Plus it's quite decent for towing; though admittedly not as good as a V6 or a diesel.
You're right about tall people. I'm 6' and the headroom is only barely adequate.
I own a Subaru. Legacy RX 2.5 (though it's called Liberty over here in Australia).
I had one, and it was a constant maintenance problem. There was always something going wrong. It would overheat in the summer unless you ran the heater full blast in the car. (Not making a comfortable drive.) No, there was nothing wrong with the cooling system.
So you had bad luck. This isn't the experience for the rest of us. Open Road magazine covers the Subaru in their yearly reliability reports. The Subaru is consistently in the top-5 along with Honda and Toyota. The most unreliable cars are from Holden (aka General Motors) and Ford.
Let me see what else went wrong with that car... a CV joint went out, the transmission popped out of second gear after the car was a few years old. The transmission was hard to shift into 4WD. The front-end alignment got screwed up way too easy if you hit a pothole.
I don't know what you're talking about. The Subarus don't have to be shifted into 4WD. They are always-on 4WD (called AWD). Are you sure you were driving a Subaru? Subaru hasn't produced a shift-4WD since the 1980s. How old was this car with all the troubles?
The fact is *you* can't see the difference. It's the same thing with audiophiles/musicians and complaints about mp3 compression.
Audiophiles are idiots and musicians are often tone deaf.
Audiophiles can hear artifacts in high quality mp3s,
Audiophiles can supposedly hear artifacts produced by gravity waves passing through solid-gold oxygen-free "ribbon" cables. Stop paying attention to their ramblings: it only encourages them.
Ever hear people talk about movies and how "the human eye can only see 24 fps"?
Actually I think you made that one up. Every movie buff knows that film frames are double shuttered to play at 48fps. Films played with single shutter are noticeably flickery. True movie buffs also know that the director can't pan a shot too fast or he'll get stutter, so they'd be aware that the human eye sees rates in excess of 24 fps.
I claim shenanigans. I don't think anybody claimed that "the human eye can only see 24 fps". You just made it up because you didn't have an argument.
That's actually not true. The X-Windowing-System has come with xmag virtually for ever. High contrast themes are not hard to create. You can make icons and fonts whatever size you want. We've even got sticky keys. The only thing X is missing as far as accessibility is keyboard control of the mouse cursor.
For those with short memories, Alston is the one who banned internet gambling and porn, thereby sending any Australian companies involved in the above overseas. Of course Australians have no trouble engaging in internet gambling or downloading porn - just not from Australian servers now. Well done Alston!
What's really funny is that you got spelling flames for something written in hex. If there was ever any doubt that Slashdot is full of computer nerds...
Air travel hasn't progressed in 30 years. Space travel hasn't progressed in 30 years. Nuclear power hasn't progressed in 30 years. They're stalled. In the past 30 years, there's been more innovation in railroading than in rocketry.
You're kidding, right? I'm fairly ignorant of all three fields but even I know there has been impressive progress. They have not stalled!
Air travel: solar powered planes, ultralights, high altitude planes, remote controlled drones, 100% computer-controlled take-off and landing, etc, incredibly cheap domestic flights (it's now cheaper to fly than catch a bus).
Space travel: the damn hobbyist market is in the race. If that's not fucking progress then I don't know what is. Also space tourists (second one just got back).
Nuclear power: the old RBMK designs (used at Chernobyl) have been superceded by the much safer pebble designs.
The reality is that the fields have not slowed down or stalled. You just stopped learning about them. I daresay this coincided with the same time that you got a job and stopped having free time!
You need a DC coupled amplifier, otherwise the series capacitors found on one or both ends of an AC coupled amplifier tends to mess things up. You also need to couple this energy into the air.
Ah right, I get you. I've never heard it called that before, but it seems to be common parlance because other people grokked you. You're talking about the in-series capacitors that are there to prevent DC traversing the signal path. Well, you don't need a DC coupled amp. We just need bigger capacitors. We're not trying to get DC amplification; the experiment in the article was still using about ~17Hz. That's not far off the normal limits of a standard subwoofer amplifier.
Easiest solution: just short the capacitors out!:-D
As for the problem of getting air to move..... you need to make sure that the air moving away from the cone as it travels forward, doesn't simply travel around to the back of the speaker. If the cone moves slowly then this is more likely. Ideally you want to place the speaker in a heavy, sealed box.
Yup, that's why I said the Vd is only part of the puzzle. The other part is the box design. The easiest solution is an infinite baffle (mount the driver on an outside wall of the building, with the back facing the great outdoors). A sealed box isn't going to be practical because the volumes required will be on-par with a double-door fridge and making a box that big and sufficiently rigid is difficult.
Because these infrasound experimenters don't care about musicality they can choose a single resonance frequency and ignore everything else. That's why a long tube is ideal. You can easily make the tube the right length and it's very easy to make a rigid tube. Basically it is a horn, but the coupling with the air isn't ideal because the end of the tube isn't flared. Though you can always compensate for imperfect coupling with more power.
Seriously, they don't mention what frequencies were used (can someone extrapolate from the pipe length), but getting transducers to work so low isn't easy and you would need a DC coupled amp. Bass speakers theoretically go down to 20Hz but the performance falls off.
I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about a "DC coupled amp" but bass speakers go all the way down to DC (0Hz). There's certainly no practical or theoretical problems reproducing sub-20Hz signals from a bass speaker. Even your tiny 6" mid-range drivers can (and do) reproduce 1Hz signals. You just can't hear it because so little air is being moved.
The actual problem is that the lower the frequency, the more air you need to move in order to hear it. The amount of air a driver can move is partially determined by the Vd figure (volume of air moved). This is simply Sd (surface area of cone) multiplied by Xmax (cone excursion). The 1Hz signal out of your 6" drivers is so quiet that you can't hear it, but it's there. Not enough air is being moved for your ears (which are heavily tuned to 2-4kHz) to detect.
So the trick is to make the excursion large, the surface area large, thereby getting a large value for Vd. Of course, you now need a lot of power to move that much air around. That's why subwoofers have 18" cones with 1/2" excursions driven by 400W amplifiers. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.
Of course, super-low frequency generators don't bother with all this nonsense. They just use huge pistons behind a suitably long tube. Much easier to move the required amount of air.
That's not his point, he's suggesting that the new version is eyecandy - not extra functionability. When I use XP I immediatly goto the "classic" theme and make it show the standard desktop icons just to be able to use the damn thing. I certainly am not alone in that regard.
Sure, and there were people who said the same thing about Windows 95 and the "Windows 3.1 look" option that it offered. "I'll never change" they declared. But eventually Microsoft will deprecate the old look and you'll be forced to change.
Every generation goes through the same phases. New and shiny. I'll never change. Remember the good old days. You're in stage 2.
True. Pleasantville, The Truman Show and Harry Potter also got nominations in the past, despite not being science fiction.
The Truman Show is definitely sci-fi. Existing scientific knowledge was used a plot device to explore Truman's connection between perception and reality. Without the scientific underpinnings such as 24x7 hidden cameras and an artifical world for Truman, the story would have made no sense. This is what separates true sci-fi from "fantasies in space" like Star Wars.
Other sci-fi stories that aren't immediately obvious are Make Room, Make Room and 1984. In the first story the plot device is world famine due to a population explosion. In the second story the plot device is governmental monitoring and control of media, used to oppress the people. Neither of those stories requires any "fantasy" science like hyperengines or warpblasters, yet they're still sci-fi.
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Wow. The story sounds even more incredible with the details. What a bunch of pricks.
I think you've done the right thing, even if you do have doubts. If they're defaming you, harrassing you, and threatening you, then they're certainly in the wrong. Even if your website is illegal (and I doubt that it is) they still can't act that way.
If nothing else, you seem to hold the moral high ground. The alumni staff are a disgrace to your school, and if I were in your shoes, I'd let the school board know that with a written letter. If nothing else, perhaps the asshat who threatened you will lose his job over it.
Good luck.
Threats are not allowed, even with free speech.
I reckon all of them. Also a nice security guard will soon arrive to escort you from the building.
Oh my god. I read that just fine but I thought you had *reversed* the words. It wasn't until I'd finished reading it and you'd explained you only swapped the first/last letters that I noticed that.
You've just managed to discredit the value of every webserver running PHP or Perl.
Or in other words, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't turn this into a battle. What was the original purpose of your site? Not fame. Not fortune. To be connected with classmates. Offer your website gratis to the association if they fund the hosting and give you due credit. Then everybody wins. You get free hosting. The alumni gets their donations. Classmates get a better quality service.
Instead of fighting them, or bunkering down at the first threat of litigation (which was probably an ignorant threat with no merit), talk with them and work out how you can both benefit.
Unless they're assholes. In that case, tell them to get stuffed.
PS: I've never been in the situation that you describe but that's what I'd do.
If that was "the point" then it was drowned out by his conceited boasting about how he hadn't "allowed himself to be marketed to by the major labels". I say he was and he's simply too naive to realise it.
<sarcasm>Oh yeah, because Placebo, Radiohead and Coldplay haven't been heavily marketted by major labels or television or magazines. They're practically unknowns. You're such a rebel independent.</sarcasm>
Pot, meet... aw fuck it, who cares...
All you've done is prove my point. Patents are being used as if they are lottery tickets. Eolas gets a patent for very little work, and hopes to receive half a BILLION dollars in compensation. That's not moral, even if it is legal. Eolas is receiving an obscene amount of money for very little R&D investment. Patents were supposed to reward inventors for creating new inventions. Instead, patents have become a lucky-dip where a few fortunate companies can strike it rich.
I'll repeat my argument: patents are being abused and (I think) the way to stop the abuse is to require full disclosure of the expected earnings from a patent. If Eolas had said upfront "we're going to patent plugins and we expect to receive more than half a BILLION dollars in compensation within the decade", then perhaps everybody would have treated them a bit more seriously. Perhaps somebody would have stopped this nonsense before it had got this bad.
I'm only interested in discussing that argument, nothing else. Not calculations. Not figures. Not damages. Your calculations are interesting, but I don't think there's any relevance to what I said. I was not disputing the popularity of plugins or that "infringement" has occurred. I was disputing the fact that the patent system only allows for compensation to be decided after the patent has been granted. If the true worth of a patent was decided before being granted, instead of after, then I think there would be fewer examples of these ridiculous cases.
The problem with patents isn't that they're granted too easily. It isn't that patents are granted for obvious processes, or processes already in existence. It isn't even that patents can hide in a product for years, gaining in popularity, before the patent owner demands payment (though that particular aspect really disgusts me). The real problem with patents is that there's no financial cap on the "reward" the patent owner can demand.
In this case, Eolas got half a BILLION dollars. I can't imagine that even if this patent has merit (I don't think it does) that the staff at Eolas have truly produced something of that worth. There is no way Eolas invested anything like that into research for their patent. Even if Eolas had a rare genius on their staff who invented something truly unique and revolutionary, no single person can produce half a BILLION dollars of worth.
Oh sure, that's just "capitalism" somebody will say. The property owner gets to pick the price. Mysterious "market forces" will sort everything out. But in the case of patents there are no market forces. Patent owners enjoy a monopoly where nobody can legally compete. The patent owners can set their prices sky-high and nobody can undercut them.
Rather than putting the onus on the patent review process to "weed out" the bad patents - which I personally believe is an impossible task - there should instead be a financial valuation done of patents before they are granted. The patent owner can document their expected earnings from the patent. If the patent owner poorly estimates the expected earnings (claims a future earning of $1mill but collects half a BILLION dollars) then something is almost certainly wrong.
This way companies (incl. Microsoft) can easily identify any patents that may financially harm them in the future and invest more effort into disproving their merit. If the patent owner truly believes their patent is worthy then they can invest more time and money into defending the patent. This is pure self-interest at work, so I have every confidence that it will work.
The current patent system is like a lottery. The fix is to make it accountable. My idea might not be practical for reasons I cannot see, but I'm convinced that something similar to it will fix the patent system.
Agreed! I bought a Subaru station wagon because I get all the convenience of the wagon (you can fit a mammoth amount of junk in the boot) and it's not nearly so daggy-looking as most wagons. The car handles like a sedan and has great performance around town. Plus it's quite decent for towing; though admittedly not as good as a V6 or a diesel.
You're right about tall people. I'm 6' and the headroom is only barely adequate.
I own a Subaru. Legacy RX 2.5 (though it's called Liberty over here in Australia).
So you had bad luck. This isn't the experience for the rest of us. Open Road magazine covers the Subaru in their yearly reliability reports. The Subaru is consistently in the top-5 along with Honda and Toyota. The most unreliable cars are from Holden (aka General Motors) and Ford.
I don't know what you're talking about. The Subarus don't have to be shifted into 4WD. They are always-on 4WD (called AWD). Are you sure you were driving a Subaru? Subaru hasn't produced a shift-4WD since the 1980s. How old was this car with all the troubles?
I've created an olfactory biocomputer in my shoes, but you don't see me bragging about it.
Audiophiles are idiots and musicians are often tone deaf.
Audiophiles can supposedly hear artifacts produced by gravity waves passing through solid-gold oxygen-free "ribbon" cables. Stop paying attention to their ramblings: it only encourages them.
Actually I think you made that one up. Every movie buff knows that film frames are double shuttered to play at 48fps. Films played with single shutter are noticeably flickery. True movie buffs also know that the director can't pan a shot too fast or he'll get stutter, so they'd be aware that the human eye sees rates in excess of 24 fps.
I claim shenanigans. I don't think anybody claimed that "the human eye can only see 24 fps". You just made it up because you didn't have an argument.
Shift-Numlock. Then use the keypad.
And didn't he justify it by saying that nobody from Australia would use the overseas gambling sites because... drum roll please... nobody would want to pay the long-distance phone calls.
Alston, the world's biggest luddite, and he's minister for communications. It's like a cruel joke.
Bugger. I guess we really haven't done anything interesting in the past 30 years then :-(
What's really funny is that you got spelling flames for something written in hex. If there was ever any doubt that Slashdot is full of computer nerds...
You're kidding, right? I'm fairly ignorant of all three fields but even I know there has been impressive progress. They have not stalled!
Air travel: solar powered planes, ultralights, high altitude planes, remote controlled drones, 100% computer-controlled take-off and landing, etc, incredibly cheap domestic flights (it's now cheaper to fly than catch a bus).
Space travel: the damn hobbyist market is in the race. If that's not fucking progress then I don't know what is. Also space tourists (second one just got back).
Nuclear power: the old RBMK designs (used at Chernobyl) have been superceded by the much safer pebble designs.
The reality is that the fields have not slowed down or stalled. You just stopped learning about them. I daresay this coincided with the same time that you got a job and stopped having free time!
Ah right, I get you. I've never heard it called that before, but it seems to be common parlance because other people grokked you. You're talking about the in-series capacitors that are there to prevent DC traversing the signal path. Well, you don't need a DC coupled amp. We just need bigger capacitors. We're not trying to get DC amplification; the experiment in the article was still using about ~17Hz. That's not far off the normal limits of a standard subwoofer amplifier.
Easiest solution: just short the capacitors out! :-D
Yup, that's why I said the Vd is only part of the puzzle. The other part is the box design. The easiest solution is an infinite baffle (mount the driver on an outside wall of the building, with the back facing the great outdoors). A sealed box isn't going to be practical because the volumes required will be on-par with a double-door fridge and making a box that big and sufficiently rigid is difficult.
Because these infrasound experimenters don't care about musicality they can choose a single resonance frequency and ignore everything else. That's why a long tube is ideal. You can easily make the tube the right length and it's very easy to make a rigid tube. Basically it is a horn, but the coupling with the air isn't ideal because the end of the tube isn't flared. Though you can always compensate for imperfect coupling with more power.
I don't know where you're coming from with this talk about a "DC coupled amp" but bass speakers go all the way down to DC (0Hz). There's certainly no practical or theoretical problems reproducing sub-20Hz signals from a bass speaker. Even your tiny 6" mid-range drivers can (and do) reproduce 1Hz signals. You just can't hear it because so little air is being moved.
The actual problem is that the lower the frequency, the more air you need to move in order to hear it. The amount of air a driver can move is partially determined by the Vd figure (volume of air moved). This is simply Sd (surface area of cone) multiplied by Xmax (cone excursion). The 1Hz signal out of your 6" drivers is so quiet that you can't hear it, but it's there. Not enough air is being moved for your ears (which are heavily tuned to 2-4kHz) to detect.
So the trick is to make the excursion large, the surface area large, thereby getting a large value for Vd. Of course, you now need a lot of power to move that much air around. That's why subwoofers have 18" cones with 1/2" excursions driven by 400W amplifiers. Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.
Of course, super-low frequency generators don't bother with all this nonsense. They just use huge pistons behind a suitably long tube. Much easier to move the required amount of air.
I think Darl would conclude (using SCO logic) that this grants him ownership of the BBC.
Sure, and there were people who said the same thing about Windows 95 and the "Windows 3.1 look" option that it offered. "I'll never change" they declared. But eventually Microsoft will deprecate the old look and you'll be forced to change.
Every generation goes through the same phases. New and shiny. I'll never change. Remember the good old days. You're in stage 2.
The Truman Show is definitely sci-fi. Existing scientific knowledge was used a plot device to explore Truman's connection between perception and reality. Without the scientific underpinnings such as 24x7 hidden cameras and an artifical world for Truman, the story would have made no sense. This is what separates true sci-fi from "fantasies in space" like Star Wars.
Other sci-fi stories that aren't immediately obvious are Make Room, Make Room and 1984. In the first story the plot device is world famine due to a population explosion. In the second story the plot device is governmental monitoring and control of media, used to oppress the people. Neither of those stories requires any "fantasy" science like hyperengines or warpblasters, yet they're still sci-fi.