I couldn't imagine what it would be like trying to help the average [GNU/Linux user] over the phone with setting up say, a static ip.
Customer buys a BSD or Linux distribution that gives the user the option of using "wizard" style administration tools.
Cust: I bought your second-tier cable modem service, and I'd like to know how to connect my computer to the Internet. (reading the screen) I need to know my IP address, the IP of the DNS server, and the addresses of the mail and Usenet servers.
Tech: Um... (clickety-clack) Your IP is 123.45.67.89. The DNS servers are 123.98.76.54 and 123.98.54.76. Our mail server is mail.foo.net; the Usenet server is news.foo.net.
How hard was that? If that's too hard, just do what many ISPs do by default anyway: use DHCP to give the user a dynamic but unchanging IP address, and then post e-mail and Usenet hostnames on a web page.
700kbps... =... 70K/s. The 100K/s you might have seen is just a spike.
Here's an explanation for some spikes: Many datalink protocols include compression. For instance, PPP over v.90 includes a form of LZW compression called v.42bis. In addition, some protocols will compress data at the presentation/application level; many HTTP/1.1 servers can gzip content on the fly. All this adds up to more than 10 KB per second down on a v.90 dial-up connection when downloading the text of web pages.
If you think you can run the [broadband] business better than the old pros at the cables and phone companies, go to your local bank and consider your loan options.
And watch the municipal governments deny you the right-of-way to lay cables, making broadband just as much of a government-granted monopoly as a copyright or a patent.
Does anybody have a fairly reliable way for me to test my upload just to make sure I didnt just get lucky?
Use Apache (or WinApache) to open a port on your machine. Place some.ogg files in your.../htdocs/ folder. Now, from another machine on a different broadband provider, access your machine and download some.ogg files.
Is there any possiblity of bouncing [an 802.11] radio signal off the building?
You mention that the building's reflective to light. Now you'll need to check two things: 1. the angle of incidence must equal the angle of reflection, and 2. not only light but also the longer 802.11 wavelengths bounce off the building. If both of those work out, get a pair of parabolic dishes and try it!
They don't care how you do it, that's part of what your salary is for.
So in other words, that's how they get away with in effect paying you less than minimum wage, by paying just over the minimum and making the employee pay for a sometimes disproportionate portion of the expenses.
That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself.
Are the professors saying you're supposed to master talking directly to the kernel for I/O in every little program, without even using the abstraction of #include <iostream> (or its equivalents)? How far are the professors willing to take their "no libraries" stance?
When the college says "Do not share code", they mean "Do not share code."
But how far do they want to take it? Can't use libc because you're "sharing code" written by the glibc authors? Can't use GCC because you're "sharing code" generated by the compiler?
You are good. Here's how your predictions match Fort Wayne, Indiana, a city of about 200,000:
I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack)
Extreme 102.3.
a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station
Sunny 106.3 (1940s to 1960s) and Oldies 101.7 (1950s to 1970s).
a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal
WBYR-FM 98.9 The Bear.
A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd
WMEE-FM 97.3.
a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd
WAJI Majic 95.1 (1970s-today)
"Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
WOWO and WGL (both on AM).
We used to have a dance station (Killer Bee 106.3), but it attracted too many under-18 listeners (the ones that don't yet have money to pay advertisers) and was pressured to redefine itself into a modern hard rock station (Storm 106.3) and then a moldy oldies station (Sunny 106.3).
They don't suddenly decide that their brand names don't matter, they just say, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Burble Drive", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Burble Drive is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Burble Drive"?
Likewise, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Linux", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Linux is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Linux" system?
No, they call it Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, Mandrake Linux, and now SuSE United Linux. They simply tack their name onto the front of Torvalds's trademark.
Low-power FM has been discontinued
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 2, Informative
those stations wouldn't be popular if the music wasn't popular (for whatever reasons that music is...
The music is popular because Clear Channel makes it popular.
the fact that those mom-and-pop stations voluntarily sold their stations
How are you sure it was as voluntary as you claim? How are you sure they weren't somehow blackmailed into it?
It means those people who feel they are disenfranchised need to start their own radio stations, non-commercial
The low-power FM program you speak of has been, in effect, discontinued. From http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/getstat.html: "Applications for construction permits for new LPFM stations or major changes to LPFM permittees or licensees cannot be filed until the next application filing window period. We cannot advise as to when the next application filing window might be." This is government-speak for "We cannot guarantee that there will be a next application filing window." According to this list of prior window dates, there hasn't been a new filing window in nearly a year.
or commercial
If you are commercial, you and your advertisers will be harassed by Clear Channel, as coyote-san wrote.
Hmm, how long has the Gameboy had a black and white screen until they used color?
People who consider the Nintendo Game Boy inferior tend to ignore the fact that its backlit color competitors (Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and Genesis Nomad) were much larger and ran about four to five hours on a set of six AA batteries. The original GB ran 20 to 30 hours on a set of four. The current GBA with the Afterburner internal frontlight runs 10 to 15 hours on two AA batteries.
In the 6 months that I've been doing GBA development, the biggest problem I've run into has been the audio system's complete lack of response below 400 Hz. Thus my jungle tracks become drum and... silence.
Can you find a law saying that courts have judicial review?
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby..." Laws that break the constitution are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof".
The menus on a DVD title are written in a nearly Turing-complete programming language. ("Nearly" meaning memory is bounded.)
All these companies have to do is hack the dvd program so that it ignores the 'die' command
Impossible. Detecting an inlined version of the 'die' command reliably on a Turing-complete system will solve the halting problem, which Turing proved undecidable way back in 1936.
Likewise, they can send back any region code they want until the contents are viewable.
This still doesn't solve the problem of not being able to import the player into countries that have passed DMCA, EUCD, or other laws prohibiting such circumvention.
Many fans want Star Wars Episode 4-6 version 1.0 (where Greedo didn't shoot first). That will never be available on DVD. By the time Episode III is released, Lucas will have pulled everything that's not 3.0 (i.e. Binks and Portman CG'd where fans feel they don't belong) from the shelves.
If you "want to make changes" you have to accept other people's rights (especially the original author/artist/etc!) to do the same!
Making changes != making changes and destroying the original.
Yes, I have the original trilogy on vhs.
Now watch tapes of the original version of the trilogy shoot up to $200 on eBay.
eliminate copyrights so ANYONE can make changes like this on a whim?
If you worry about the lack of artistic integrity that some think would result from a loosening of the law covering derivative works, don't. That's what trademark law is for. George Lucas controls the Lucasfilm® trademark, and in a world with loose derivative work laws but strong trademark laws, those wishing to find what's canonical can simply "look for the logo."
Not possible to detect as the video disc is passive.
No. Each title in the DVD format contains a menu program. This menu program can call the libdvd function GetPlayerManufacturer() (I'm making up a name) and die if the player manufacturer is known to be easily moddable.
Even with a passive system, the RCE discs have some valid content for all regions. An error message for the "wrong" regions is placed first on the disc before the content for the "correct" regions.
the cost of production for anything always decreases over time, until such a point when demand begins to drastically decline.
Music production is a labor-intensive industry, and the cost of employing songwriters, vocalists, musicians, and recording engineers has not gone down.
Since demand has done nothing but increase
An "increase in demand" means an increase in quantity demanded at all price levels. It pushes the demand curve (the one shaped like a \ sign) up and to the right. This causes an increase in both price and quantity supplied.
and since the technologies employed in the production of CDs have not decreased in efficiency
How are you sure of this? The primary thing that has become more efficient since the dawn of the CD has been the studio process, and in general, studio costs are completely recouped out of the artist's royalties.
In fact, the promotional expenses (also recouped out of the artist's royalties) have actually increased. The promotion agencies are able to bleed the labels more for "adds" to Clear Channel's playlist. Music videos become more extravagant each year. Courtney Love would be glad to do the math for you.
If your software is GPL'ed I believe that sourceforge will be more than happy to host your project for you, including multimedia files.
I had thought they would reject my project because I abandoned the first project I tried to host with them. But if not, thanks for the tip. It's much more helpful than jbn-o's defeatist "then don't distribute your software electronically, and if you can't afford SSL, don't sell it online either" stance.
Assuming that none of the bootleg cd's are identical to the released cd
They are identical. The highest-quality pirates, the ones who trade.shn and.flac instead of.mp3 or.ogg, include "cue files" with their audio sets that describe exactly how long each track lasts. Because Gracenote's CDDB system works solely on track lengths, Gracenote has no way to distinguish some pirate discs from genuine discs.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't imagine what it would be like trying to help the average [GNU/Linux user] over the phone with setting up say, a static ip.
Customer buys a BSD or Linux distribution that gives the user the option of using "wizard" style administration tools.
Cust: I bought your second-tier cable modem service, and I'd like to know how to connect my computer to the Internet. (reading the screen) I need to know my IP address, the IP of the DNS server, and the addresses of the mail and Usenet servers.
Tech: Um... (clickety-clack) Your IP is 123.45.67.89. The DNS servers are 123.98.76.54 and 123.98.54.76. Our mail server is mail.foo.net; the Usenet server is news.foo.net.
How hard was that? If that's too hard, just do what many ISPs do by default anyway: use DHCP to give the user a dynamic but unchanging IP address, and then post e-mail and Usenet hostnames on a web page.
700kbps ... = ... 70K/s. The 100K/s you might have seen is just a spike.
Here's an explanation for some spikes: Many datalink protocols include compression. For instance, PPP over v.90 includes a form of LZW compression called v.42bis. In addition, some protocols will compress data at the presentation/application level; many HTTP/1.1 servers can gzip content on the fly. All this adds up to more than 10 KB per second down on a v.90 dial-up connection when downloading the text of web pages.
If you think you can run the [broadband] business better than the old pros at the cables and phone companies, go to your local bank and consider your loan options.
And watch the municipal governments deny you the right-of-way to lay cables, making broadband just as much of a government-granted monopoly as a copyright or a patent.
Does anybody have a fairly reliable way for me to test my upload just to make sure I didnt just get lucky?
Use Apache (or WinApache) to open a port on your machine. Place some .ogg files in your .../htdocs/ folder. Now, from another machine on a different broadband provider, access your machine and download some .ogg files.
most of the fiber in this country is dark.
At least in the United States, much of the fiber is dark because routers to send data over fiber cost money.
Is there any possiblity of bouncing [an 802.11] radio signal off the building?
You mention that the building's reflective to light. Now you'll need to check two things: 1. the angle of incidence must equal the angle of reflection, and 2. not only light but also the longer 802.11 wavelengths bounce off the building. If both of those work out, get a pair of parabolic dishes and try it!
They don't care how you do it, that's part of what your salary is for.
So in other words, that's how they get away with in effect paying you less than minimum wage, by paying just over the minimum and making the employee pay for a sometimes disproportionate portion of the expenses.
That's why professors always tell you to not use libraries for assignments you're supposed to do yourself.
Are the professors saying you're supposed to master talking directly to the kernel for I/O in every little program, without even using the abstraction of #include <iostream> (or its equivalents)? How far are the professors willing to take their "no libraries" stance?
When the college says "Do not share code", they mean "Do not share code."
But how far do they want to take it? Can't use libc because you're "sharing code" written by the glibc authors? Can't use GCC because you're "sharing code" generated by the compiler?
We're not going to pop over to freshmeat and download the latest VB4Debian
Oh yes you are. GNOME Basic is an environment compatible with many applications written in the Visual Basic programming language.
XSL is a tool to transform XML documents. Of course it doesn't touch binary formats, that's outside it's scope.
XSLT transforms XML into XML. So what tool transforms Everything Else into XML?
You are good. Here's how your predictions match Fort Wayne, Indiana, a city of about 200,000:
I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack)
Extreme 102.3.
a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station
Sunny 106.3 (1940s to 1960s) and Oldies 101.7 (1950s to 1970s).
a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal
WBYR-FM 98.9 The Bear.
A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd
WMEE-FM 97.3.
a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd
WAJI Majic 95.1 (1970s-today)
"Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
WOWO and WGL (both on AM).
We used to have a dance station (Killer Bee 106.3), but it attracted too many under-18 listeners (the ones that don't yet have money to pay advertisers) and was pressured to redefine itself into a modern hard rock station (Storm 106.3) and then a moldy oldies station (Sunny 106.3).
They don't suddenly decide that their brand names don't matter, they just say, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Burble Drive", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Burble Drive is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Burble Drive"?
Likewise, "Hey, look at the new Frogon Linux", and the other guy says "No, the Grubar Linux is better." How could they still act as separate, competing companies if they all just called what they sold a "Linux" system?
No, they call it Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, Mandrake Linux, and now SuSE United Linux. They simply tack their name onto the front of Torvalds's trademark.
those stations wouldn't be popular if the music wasn't popular (for whatever reasons that music is...
The music is popular because Clear Channel makes it popular.
the fact that those mom-and-pop stations voluntarily sold their stations
How are you sure it was as voluntary as you claim? How are you sure they weren't somehow blackmailed into it?
It means those people who feel they are disenfranchised need to start their own radio stations, non-commercial
The low-power FM program you speak of has been, in effect, discontinued. From http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/getstat.html: "Applications for construction permits for new LPFM stations or major changes to LPFM permittees or licensees cannot be filed until the next application filing window period. We cannot advise as to when the next application filing window might be." This is government-speak for "We cannot guarantee that there will be a next application filing window." According to this list of prior window dates, there hasn't been a new filing window in nearly a year.
or commercial
If you are commercial, you and your advertisers will be harassed by Clear Channel, as coyote-san wrote.
Hmm, how long has the Gameboy had a black and white screen until they used color?
People who consider the Nintendo Game Boy inferior tend to ignore the fact that its backlit color competitors (Game Gear, Atari Lynx, and Genesis Nomad) were much larger and ran about four to five hours on a set of six AA batteries. The original GB ran 20 to 30 hours on a set of four. The current GBA with the Afterburner internal frontlight runs 10 to 15 hours on two AA batteries.
In the 6 months that I've been doing GBA development, the biggest problem I've run into has been the audio system's complete lack of response below 400 Hz. Thus my jungle tracks become drum and ... silence.
It's the greed, desire to control beyond appropriate boundries, and self-agrandisment that makes me sick of Eisner and his boot-lickers.
Anybody seen Shrek? Apparently, the "Lord Farquaad" character (pronounced "lord fuckwad") is supposed to represent Ei$ner.
Can you find a law saying that courts have judicial review?
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby ..." Laws that break the constitution are not "laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof".
What do you mean 'contains a menu program' ?
The menus on a DVD title are written in a nearly Turing-complete programming language. ("Nearly" meaning memory is bounded.)
All these companies have to do is hack the dvd program so that it ignores the 'die' command
Impossible. Detecting an inlined version of the 'die' command reliably on a Turing-complete system will solve the halting problem, which Turing proved undecidable way back in 1936.
Likewise, they can send back any region code they want until the contents are viewable.
This still doesn't solve the problem of not being able to import the player into countries that have passed DMCA, EUCD, or other laws prohibiting such circumvention.
you don't have to buy it
Many fans want Star Wars Episode 4-6 version 1.0 (where Greedo didn't shoot first). That will never be available on DVD. By the time Episode III is released, Lucas will have pulled everything that's not 3.0 (i.e. Binks and Portman CG'd where fans feel they don't belong) from the shelves.
If you "want to make changes" you have to accept other people's rights (especially the original author/artist/etc!) to do the same!
Making changes != making changes and destroying the original.
Yes, I have the original trilogy on vhs.
Now watch tapes of the original version of the trilogy shoot up to $200 on eBay.
eliminate copyrights so ANYONE can make changes like this on a whim?
If you worry about the lack of artistic integrity that some think would result from a loosening of the law covering derivative works, don't. That's what trademark law is for. George Lucas controls the Lucasfilm® trademark, and in a world with loose derivative work laws but strong trademark laws, those wishing to find what's canonical can simply "look for the logo."
Not possible to detect as the video disc is passive.
No. Each title in the DVD format contains a menu program. This menu program can call the libdvd function GetPlayerManufacturer() (I'm making up a name) and die if the player manufacturer is known to be easily moddable.
Even with a passive system, the RCE discs have some valid content for all regions. An error message for the "wrong" regions is placed first on the disc before the content for the "correct" regions.
the cost of production for anything always decreases over time, until such a point when demand begins to drastically decline.
Music production is a labor-intensive industry, and the cost of employing songwriters, vocalists, musicians, and recording engineers has not gone down.
Since demand has done nothing but increase
An "increase in demand" means an increase in quantity demanded at all price levels. It pushes the demand curve (the one shaped like a \ sign) up and to the right. This causes an increase in both price and quantity supplied.
and since the technologies employed in the production of CDs have not decreased in efficiency
How are you sure of this? The primary thing that has become more efficient since the dawn of the CD has been the studio process, and in general, studio costs are completely recouped out of the artist's royalties.
In fact, the promotional expenses (also recouped out of the artist's royalties) have actually increased. The promotion agencies are able to bleed the labels more for "adds" to Clear Channel's playlist. Music videos become more extravagant each year. Courtney Love would be glad to do the math for you.
If your software is GPL'ed I believe that sourceforge will be more than happy to host your project for you, including multimedia files.
I had thought they would reject my project because I abandoned the first project I tried to host with them. But if not, thanks for the tip. It's much more helpful than jbn-o's defeatist "then don't distribute your software electronically, and if you can't afford SSL, don't sell it online either" stance.
Assuming that none of the bootleg cd's are identical to the released cd
They are identical. The highest-quality pirates, the ones who trade .shn and .flac instead of .mp3 or .ogg, include "cue files" with their audio sets that describe exactly how long each track lasts. Because Gracenote's CDDB system works solely on track lengths, Gracenote has no way to distinguish some pirate discs from genuine discs.
Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him... - Eminem
So has Eminem's attitude changed since he recorded "The Real Slim Shady"? "I say download the audio on MP3 and show the whole world..." -- Eminem