Kidding. I just can't think of which ones cost over $100k, to be honest.
Fair point - I was thinking Oz dollars (rough conversion rate at the moment is A$2 = US$1.)
For instance, the 2001 BMW 530I Sport 4 door sedan
with Steptronic transmissions costs a bit over A$100,000 - not including extras, stamp duty, insurance, dealer "delivery" fees etc. The 7 series starts at A$160,000 and the top end is over A$200,000... Ouch!
If you were thinking of picking up a cheap, repossessed Beamer, forget it. The reason these people get into financial trouble is that instead of buying a car for a modest amount, they are buying an image: "Look at me! I'm driving a car that cost 6 figures - aren't I wonderful." The fact that it's second hand and repossessed isn't an issue, it's a Beamer! If you want the image, go ahead; if you want comfortable, reliable transport, there are better value cars for a fraction of the price.
Re:If Open Source is bad, then why does MS use it?
on
MS VP Speech Online
·
· Score: 2
shoeboy% strings FTP.EXE |grep Copy
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Yep, nuff said.
The trouble is that while the Open Source community knows this, Windows users are oblivious of there being any open source code in Windows.
Pretend you're a Windows user. How would you view these copyright messages? There's no
"View -> Copyright messages" menu item (indeed for ftp.exe, there is no GUI.) Using the command line options for ftp.exe and the ftp commands, I couldn't find a way to display this copyright message. "more ftp.exe" doesn't work, either.
While it might be within the requirements of the BSD license (which I believe applies in this case), as far as Windows users are concerned, this is Microsoft's wonderful TCP stack. This hardly seems fair - credit where credit is due.
I often use the recorder as a handy note-taking device, not only for interviews but to dictate notes to myself while I'm driving or engaged in other hand-occupying activities.
This technology was implemented over 30 years ago:
"And now for something completely different, a man with a tape recorder up his nose."
(Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 9: "The ant, an Introduction", recorded 7 December 1969.)
The GPL is more like a public trust than a corporation. Code licensed under the GPL is held in perpetuity for the good of the computing community; the terms of the GPL prohibit (and hopefully prevent) misuse of the code after the original developer(s) move on. So just as you can buy land to conserve it for wildlife by placing restrictions on its use (I can't remember the correct legal term) to prevent developers moving in with the bulldozers, you can do the same for code with the GPL.
(OT: For examples of the good groups of citizens can do for conservation, see the Birds Australia Gluepot and Newhaven reserves.)
There was no audio (hell, there was barely video) on that machine, and the original data storage medium was cassette tapes. Stored at about 300 baud, or so. The output of the cassette port was about the same +5v / 0v range, and people used the same approach to store data on the tape (I think it's called Frequency Shift Keying, but I'm not sure).
The TRS-80 cassette schematics can be seen here. Unlike the PC speaker output which is a simple square wave (bilevel), the TRS-80 cassette output was trilevel - default was 1V, with 0V and 2V pulses individually generated.
Data output to the cassette was generated as a series of positive and negative pulses approximating a sinewave; from memory, there was a clocking pulse-pair followed by another pulse-pair for "1" or nothing for "0". (I may have misremembered this; there were several utilities that increased the data density on the cassette, and I may be remembering one of these instead.)
Audio sound was generated by manually generating the cassette pulses at given frequencies. Some bright sparks also figured out that you could generate two-voice music by using positive pulses for one voice, and negative pulses for the other. Very neat!
I work in a workplace with a hybrid selection of pc's and the like... theres even an old novell box dickin' around somewhere.
Have you checked your drywalls (plasterboard)?;-)
While checking on MS licenses (and hoping to boost their income in the process), it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is a ploy by Microsoft to identify companies that are buying PCs to use with Linux, BSD etc. i.e. depriving MS of income. Once identified, these evildoers would be subject to something worse than MS auditers - MS salesmen. Expect a flood of freebies and "special" deals to follow...
You might as well head home because the missle will never catch up with its target.:^)
Not necessarily. The high altitude flown by the SR-71 avoided most SAM missiles (SA-5's come close), but high-altitude interceptors (MiG-25 and MiG-31) take away that safety margin. According to this page, six MiG-31's performed a coordinated "attack" on an SR-71 over the Barents Sea that would have defeated it.
Mathematics is where it is today because bygone generations left problems for us to solve. They may have wanted to solve them all, but for whatever reason, they were unable.
Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) plus aluminium is the usual "recipe" for making hydrogen in chemistry textbooks:
2Al + 2NaOH + 6H2O -> 2Na(Al)(OH)4 + 3H2
With an excess of sodium hydroxide solution,
you get about 1.25 litres of hydrogen from one
gram of aluminium (plus a lot of heat...) The hydrogen contains a lot of water vapour, so it is usually dried by bubbling through concentrated sulphuric acid before use.
The NSA is a big organisation, with many hats. One of these hats is to ensure that (US) government systems are secure. No matter how much you want to know others' secrets, it is far more important to protect your own - a poker player who shows his hand while trying to peek at his opponent's is unlikely to win.
Conspiracy theorists are peddling FUD: "Don't use that software - NSA may have put a backdoor in it." They may get away with it with binary-only distributions where proving that there isn't a backdoor is difficult, but source code is a different matter. If there is a backdoor in the code, sooner or later someone will find it - particularly when conspiracy theorists are convinced there must be one, because the NSA wrote it.
Trying to retrofit security on to an existing application *never* works (for applications > trivial.) People who develop applications involving the transfer of money without thinking security, security, security from the very beginning should be working for Microsoft...
I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work, but should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?
The retro feel is "big" at the moment; for example, in the car market: the new VW Beetle, the new Mini, Dodge PT Cruiser etc. These are modern cars that borrow the style of their forebears, but are limited by 60's technology.
(They also carry a premium price, but still sell like hotcakes.) Linux is also retro - a modern implementation of the classic Unix; fortunately it doesn't carry the premium price tag.
Peace, (Free) Love, (Free) Linux - very clever marketing.
Obviously, I'm not PHYSICALLY harmed by an operating system (with the possible exception of STRESS).
After having to deal with a Win2000 laptop yesterday at work, I now have a bruise on my forehead - that seems like physical harm to me.
(Okay, so maybe it was self-inflicted harm, but isn't that the definition of a Windows installation?)
(Probably off-topic:)
I've liberated three of the laptops (IBM Thinkpad T21), although probably only temporarily, by installing RedHat 7.0. Apart from some minor annoyances to get the video and network going (oddball chipsets), and two lockups (one probable APM suspend recovery failure, and one that may have been a user turning the machine off without shutting down after Netscape froze), the laptops have been working flawlessly. They're acting as Internet terminals for a conference at work, doubly as free software/KDE/GNOME "show ponies".
I'm taking a deliberately hands-off approach: no announcement, no salespitch other than a "check out the free software!" instruction page next to each machine, no techie standing by to give the machines the kiss-of-life when they fall over (though I monitor them remotely just in case;-) - just an unfamiliar computer on a desk and a user who wants to check their email/news/sports results. Web requests have doubled each day of the conference as word gets around - 12000+ hits yesterday (and at least one person checking out
Slashdot!) Reading the feedback forms after the conference should be interesting.
But how can one company that has such a clue when it comes to drivers for the SBLive have it so wrong on this device?
According to a poll held by ALive!, Creative is in serious need of a clue regarding the SBLive! They have been promising "official" Linux drivers (with binary components like the NVidia drivers), but have not delivered. The open source drivers are effectively a clean room development, and lack basic features such as MIDI playback (the last time I checked.) Liveware! 3.0 was very ordinary and does *not* support EAX 3.0, and there has been no sign of a new version (perhaps even with EAX 3.0!) for at least a year. The APS 2.0 drivers appear to be dead in the water.
Other than buying out the competition and producing yet another minor tweak to the SBLive! hardware and bloated PlayCenter software, very little appears to be happening in the SoundBlaster division...
... but not that big. The photos were not taken
from "200 million miles up" - that's how far Eros is from Earth: NEAR's landing was confirmed when mission control received a beacon signal from the craft resting on the surface of Eros, some 196 million miles from Earth. (My emphasis.)
NEAR orbited Eros at a distance of less than 100 kilometers for much of the time, usually 70km or 35km depending on the stage of the mission.
The key here is "a" i.e. "a high school student". It's a generalisation - for an average high school student this statement is correct. As with all generalisations, it is understood that there will be exceptions to the rule e.g. "plants are green - except those that aren't."
The Slashdot crew did not add the remark about high school students - they just added the bit about MCSE. (Given the hundreds of MCSEs that have applied for some positions at work on the basis that they have an MCSE but no IT experience, this dig is totally understandable...)
Apart from being the largest "island", Australia sits on its own continental plate (shared with India, often referred to as the "sub-continent"), so it is also the smallest "continent". There isn't an exact correlation between plates and continents, otherwise Arabia and perhaps the Carribean would also be "continents".
Pluto is a planet, regardless of what it is made of or how big it is. It may be a "minor planet" like the main body of asteroids, but it is still a planet since it orbits the Sun, not another planet (which would make it a moon.) It's the largest known member of the Kuiper Belt, just as Ceres is the largest known asteroid. I don't hear people complaining that Ceres isn't a (minor) planet, so why pick on Pluto?
Given that NASA is trying to can the Pluto-Kuiper Express project in favour of playing silly buggers on Mars, the "demotion" of Pluto seems awfully convenient... "It's not a planet, so who cares?"
If your DNA were needed to get criminals off the street, then you must be a criminal.
Nonsense. In a high profile rape case in Australia (an elderly woman was raped and savagely bashed), the entire adult male population of the town where the crime occured volunteered to provide DNA samples. Except one... I believe he tried to flee, but was arrested and eventually convicted.
DNA screening is not grounds for conviction on its own, so unless your DNA matches and there are other grounds to believe you were responsible for the crime. DNA samples are just as important - if not more important, given limited police resources - for determining who isn't a suspect. If you're not a criminal, what have you got to hide?
Original text: For example: how about a wearable language translator when on a foreign operation?
Slashdot translation: For example: what would you say of translator wearable of language when on a foreign execution?
That's amazing! Now if only they could perfect the Slashdot to English module...
Slashdot Mirror
Kidding. I just can't think of which ones cost over $100k, to be honest.
Fair point - I was thinking Oz dollars (rough conversion rate at the moment is A$2 = US$1.)
For instance, the 2001 BMW 530I Sport 4 door sedan with Steptronic transmissions costs a bit over A$100,000 - not including extras, stamp duty, insurance, dealer "delivery" fees etc. The 7 series starts at A$160,000 and the top end is over A$200,000... Ouch!
If you were thinking of picking up a cheap, repossessed Beamer, forget it. The reason these people get into financial trouble is that instead of buying a car for a modest amount, they are buying an image: "Look at me! I'm driving a car that cost 6 figures - aren't I wonderful." The fact that it's second hand and repossessed isn't an issue, it's a Beamer! If you want the image, go ahead; if you want comfortable, reliable transport, there are better value cars for a fraction of the price.
shoeboy% strings FTP.EXE |grep Copy
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Yep, nuff said.
The trouble is that while the Open Source community knows this, Windows users are oblivious of there being any open source code in Windows.
Pretend you're a Windows user. How would you view these copyright messages? There's no "View -> Copyright messages" menu item (indeed for ftp.exe, there is no GUI.) Using the command line options for ftp.exe and the ftp commands, I couldn't find a way to display this copyright message. "more ftp.exe" doesn't work, either.
While it might be within the requirements of the BSD license (which I believe applies in this case), as far as Windows users are concerned, this is Microsoft's wonderful TCP stack. This hardly seems fair - credit where credit is due.
This technology was implemented over 30 years ago:
(Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 9: "The ant, an Introduction", recorded 7 December 1969.)
The GPL is more like a public trust than a corporation. Code licensed under the GPL is held in perpetuity for the good of the computing community; the terms of the GPL prohibit (and hopefully prevent) misuse of the code after the original developer(s) move on. So just as you can buy land to conserve it for wildlife by placing restrictions on its use (I can't remember the correct legal term) to prevent developers moving in with the bulldozers, you can do the same for code with the GPL.
(OT: For examples of the good groups of citizens can do for conservation, see the Birds Australia Gluepot and Newhaven reserves.)
There was no audio (hell, there was barely video) on that machine, and the original data storage medium was cassette tapes. Stored at about 300 baud, or so. The output of the cassette port was about the same +5v / 0v range, and people used the same approach to store data on the tape (I think it's called Frequency Shift Keying, but I'm not sure).
The TRS-80 cassette schematics can be seen here. Unlike the PC speaker output which is a simple square wave (bilevel), the TRS-80 cassette output was trilevel - default was 1V, with 0V and 2V pulses individually generated.
Data output to the cassette was generated as a series of positive and negative pulses approximating a sinewave; from memory, there was a clocking pulse-pair followed by another pulse-pair for "1" or nothing for "0". (I may have misremembered this; there were several utilities that increased the data density on the cassette, and I may be remembering one of these instead.)
Audio sound was generated by manually generating the cassette pulses at given frequencies. Some bright sparks also figured out that you could generate two-voice music by using positive pulses for one voice, and negative pulses for the other. Very neat!
See also the TRS-80 Documentation Preservation Page - very handy since these computers last a lot longer than their manuals...
I work in a workplace with a hybrid selection of pc's and the like ... theres even an old novell box dickin' around somewhere.
;-)
Have you checked your drywalls (plasterboard)?
While checking on MS licenses (and hoping to boost their income in the process), it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is a ploy by Microsoft to identify companies that are buying PCs to use with Linux, BSD etc. i.e. depriving MS of income. Once identified, these evildoers would be subject to something worse than MS auditers - MS salesmen. Expect a flood of freebies and "special" deals to follow...
So, are the USAF/CIA/NSA etc. going to sue their Chinese equivalents under the DMCA for "borrowing" technology obtained from the spy plane?
You might as well head home because the missle will never catch up with its target. :^)
Not necessarily. The high altitude flown by the SR-71 avoided most SAM missiles (SA-5's come close), but high-altitude interceptors (MiG-25 and MiG-31) take away that safety margin. According to this page, six MiG-31's performed a coordinated "attack" on an SR-71 over the Barents Sea that would have defeated it.
Mathematics is where it is today because bygone generations left problems for us to solve. They may have wanted to solve them all, but for whatever reason, they were unable.
Not enough space in the margin?
'If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck.'
And if Slashdot posts a connection to these facts, the mathematicians website is out of luck.
Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) plus aluminium is the usual "recipe" for making hydrogen in chemistry textbooks:
2Al + 2NaOH + 6H2O -> 2Na(Al)(OH)4 + 3H2
With an excess of sodium hydroxide solution, you get about 1.25 litres of hydrogen from one gram of aluminium (plus a lot of heat...) The hydrogen contains a lot of water vapour, so it is usually dried by bubbling through concentrated sulphuric acid before use.
"Cameras don't film people - people film people."
The NSA is a big organisation, with many hats. One of these hats is to ensure that (US) government systems are secure. No matter how much you want to know others' secrets, it is far more important to protect your own - a poker player who shows his hand while trying to peek at his opponent's is unlikely to win.
Conspiracy theorists are peddling FUD: "Don't use that software - NSA may have put a backdoor in it." They may get away with it with binary-only distributions where proving that there isn't a backdoor is difficult, but source code is a different matter. If there is a backdoor in the code, sooner or later someone will find it - particularly when conspiracy theorists are convinced there must be one, because the NSA wrote it.
NSA = New Source Available/Now See All.
Trying to retrofit security on to an existing application *never* works (for applications > trivial.) People who develop applications involving the transfer of money without thinking security, security, security from the very beginning should be working for Microsoft...
I wonder: the analogy to the 1960s may work, but should ex-hippies really be the target audience? Are they the ones running all the servers nowadays?
The retro feel is "big" at the moment; for example, in the car market: the new VW Beetle, the new Mini, Dodge PT Cruiser etc. These are modern cars that borrow the style of their forebears, but are limited by 60's technology. (They also carry a premium price, but still sell like hotcakes.) Linux is also retro - a modern implementation of the classic Unix; fortunately it doesn't carry the premium price tag.
Peace, (Free) Love, (Free) Linux - very clever marketing.
Obviously, I'm not PHYSICALLY harmed by an operating system (with the possible exception of STRESS).
;-) - just an unfamiliar computer on a desk and a user who wants to check their email/news/sports results. Web requests have doubled each day of the conference as word gets around - 12000+ hits yesterday (and at least one person checking out
Slashdot!) Reading the feedback forms after the conference should be interesting.
After having to deal with a Win2000 laptop yesterday at work, I now have a bruise on my forehead - that seems like physical harm to me. (Okay, so maybe it was self-inflicted harm, but isn't that the definition of a Windows installation?)
(Probably off-topic:) I've liberated three of the laptops (IBM Thinkpad T21), although probably only temporarily, by installing RedHat 7.0. Apart from some minor annoyances to get the video and network going (oddball chipsets), and two lockups (one probable APM suspend recovery failure, and one that may have been a user turning the machine off without shutting down after Netscape froze), the laptops have been working flawlessly. They're acting as Internet terminals for a conference at work, doubly as free software/KDE/GNOME "show ponies". I'm taking a deliberately hands-off approach: no announcement, no salespitch other than a "check out the free software!" instruction page next to each machine, no techie standing by to give the machines the kiss-of-life when they fall over (though I monitor them remotely just in case
But how can one company that has such a clue when it comes to drivers for the SBLive have it so wrong on this device?
According to a poll held by ALive!, Creative is in serious need of a clue regarding the SBLive! They have been promising "official" Linux drivers (with binary components like the NVidia drivers), but have not delivered. The open source drivers are effectively a clean room development, and lack basic features such as MIDI playback (the last time I checked.) Liveware! 3.0 was very ordinary and does *not* support EAX 3.0, and there has been no sign of a new version (perhaps even with EAX 3.0!) for at least a year. The APS 2.0 drivers appear to be dead in the water.
Other than buying out the competition and producing yet another minor tweak to the SBLive! hardware and bloated PlayCenter software, very little appears to be happening in the SoundBlaster division...
... but not that big. The photos were not taken from "200 million miles up" - that's how far Eros is from Earth:
NEAR's landing was confirmed when mission control received a beacon signal from the craft resting on the surface of Eros, some 196 million miles from Earth. (My emphasis.)
NEAR orbited Eros at a distance of less than 100 kilometers for much of the time, usually 70km or 35km depending on the stage of the mission.
The key here is "a" i.e. "a high school student". It's a generalisation - for an average high school student this statement is correct. As with all generalisations, it is understood that there will be exceptions to the rule e.g. "plants are green - except those that aren't."
The Slashdot crew did not add the remark about high school students - they just added the bit about MCSE. (Given the hundreds of MCSEs that have applied for some positions at work on the basis that they have an MCSE but no IT experience, this dig is totally understandable...)
Chill out!
Apart from being the largest "island", Australia sits on its own continental plate (shared with India, often referred to as the "sub-continent"), so it is also the smallest "continent". There isn't an exact correlation between plates and continents, otherwise Arabia and perhaps the Carribean would also be "continents".
Pluto is a planet, regardless of what it is made of or how big it is. It may be a "minor planet" like the main body of asteroids, but it is still a planet since it orbits the Sun, not another planet (which would make it a moon.) It's the largest known member of the Kuiper Belt, just as Ceres is the largest known asteroid. I don't hear people complaining that Ceres isn't a (minor) planet, so why pick on Pluto?
Given that NASA is trying to can the Pluto-Kuiper Express project in favour of playing silly buggers on Mars, the "demotion" of Pluto seems awfully convenient... "It's not a planet, so who cares?"
Does the name 'Faraday' ring a bell?
;-)
You're thinking of Quasimodo - Faraday was the guy who liked putting things in cages for their protection (e.g. from electromagnetic fields.)
If your DNA were needed to get criminals off the street, then you must be a criminal.
Nonsense. In a high profile rape case in Australia (an elderly woman was raped and savagely bashed), the entire adult male population of the town where the crime occured volunteered to provide DNA samples. Except one... I believe he tried to flee, but was arrested and eventually convicted.
DNA screening is not grounds for conviction on its own, so unless your DNA matches and there are other grounds to believe you were responsible for the crime. DNA samples are just as important - if not more important, given limited police resources - for determining who isn't a suspect. If you're not a criminal, what have you got to hide?
Original text: For example: how about a wearable language translator when on a foreign operation?
Slashdot translation: For example: what would you say of translator wearable of language when on a foreign execution?
That's amazing! Now if only they could perfect the Slashdot to English module...