"reminded me that there are people in this country who don't deserve to live here."
Ah. No differing opinions. Gotcha. Screw freedom of thought.
"The scumbags who made that waste of film will have hopefully forgotten to have gotten the rights to one of those clips and will be sued blind."
Ah. Pro DMCA. Use of copyrighted material in a criticism or paraody does not require permission. You don't seem big on freedom of expression either.
"America is not NAZI Germany... Humans like wars... Humans will always like wars -- deal with it."/i>
Ah. Hitler also believed that war was the natural state of man, and brought out the best in a nation. That killed 6 million Jews, and an equal number of homosexuals, gypsies, and other "undesirables". Lets not count the millions killed during the bombing of London and the fighting ecompassing D-Day to VE Day.
I don't think I've ever seen a country so full of paranoia as America.
I don't think a few hundred thousand gun owners can do much against tanks, F-16s, carriers, napalm, smart bombs, nuclear weapons, etc, etc.
Perhaps in the 18th and 19th century, small arms could have made a difference, but not today.
The biggest threat to modern democracy is large corporations. Period. They typically own politicians. The fake "grass-roots" campaigns to allow politicans to justify their actions.
I bet sometime in the last month you went and watched a movie released by a major studio, while drinking a Coke, Nikes on your feet, Gap t-shirt on your back, and drove home in your Honda.
Perhaps you should worry more about that than some brain-dead technology that won't get off the ground.
The IMF Causes Problems, Not Solves Them
on
Taxing Text Messages?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
International pirates.
They come up with some grand scheme to help a 3rd world country, and loan them a bunch of money for a dam, a power plant, etc, etc. It fails miserably.
Now the country has to pay this mega project off, plus their original debt. If the country looks like it will default on their payments, the IMF comes in and says, "We'll prop you up, but we need to be in control." The IMF then gets farmers to change from food to cash crops, cuts off any semblence of workers benefits, etc.
For example, in Equador, "...the IMF's 167 loan conditions look less like an assistance plan and more like a blueprint for a financial coup d'etat"
As Bruce Cockburn sings, "IMF / dirty enough / takes away anything it can get / always certain that theres one thing left / keep them on the ropes with unsupportable debt..."
I Downloaded Taken
on
Taken?
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
from alt.binaries.multimedia.scifi.
I had high hopes.
I couldn't stand it. Stopped at the 60 minute mark, and deleted it. I couldn't believe how slow it was. Slow is an understatement. It was painful.
It doesn't help that Michael Moriarty was in it. He was great in Law & Order, but has been taken by the drink (he was charged with assaulting his common-law wife, and has been ordered to have no contact with women while drinking).
I don't like a lot of smarm, I don't like alot of romance, and I just don't understand why they keep trying to peddle sci-fi to the mainstream. The compromise between sci-fi and mainstream always sucks.
We have a use for it in our company. As software developers, RAM and GHz is at a premium. We also use workstations as low-end databases for development and QA. Putting 3 Oracle databases on one machine means you needs lots of RAM.
With games, Linux, Oracle, IBM and others porting to match the AMD 64-bit CPU, I think anyone who uses there computer for anything other than email, word processing, browsing the web, will get a nice boost from 64 bits.
Epic said: "We're extremely excited about the upcoming AMD Athlon 64 processor. It's designed to run today's 32-bit games and applications and will actually, clock-for-clock, boost their performance relative to 32-bit AMD Athlon processors. But when you add 64-bits to the picture you can get additional capabilities and other performance boosts," said Mark Rein, vice president, Epic Games Inc. "We're planning to ship a 64-bit update for Unreal Tournament 2003 at the same time the AMD Athlon 64 processors show up on retail shelves."
Anandtech said: "Epic has said that they will ship a 64-bit version of Unreal Tournament 2003 when Athlon 64 makes it to retail, and the performance increase from moving to Opteron is significant. You get a 15% speedup from the on-die memory controller and another 15% from compiler optimization for the additional registers in x86-64 mode."
Perhaps, what I'm asking is, can anybody compare and contrast the two architectures; is there a certain advantage to one or the other?
Yah - AMD will offer it to the consumer combined with motherboards from tier-1 manufacturers like Asus, Abit, IWill, Tyan, and so forth, all at an attractive price (read: the same price as the Athalon XP CPUs).
Intel, on the other hand, will keep their 64 bit CPUs out of the consumer hands by pricing them above what most consumers are willing to pay, thus reaping a premium on them by selling them in servers through Dell and IBM (making even more money on cases and motherboards). There will be limited support for the CPU outside Intel's own motherboard offerings, and if you run with a hard-drive, video card, CD-Rom that has not been explicitly approved by Intel, then forget support (we've had this problem with Intel on some of their server motherboards).
I tried MovieTickets.com once for the first Harry Potter...
Paid for the tickets, took them to the theatre. At the theatre, they told me that I hadn't actually paid for the movie on MovieTickets.com (and I was foolish enough to believe them - maybe they only processed the service charge?).
Anyway, ended up paying twice. Later, I checked my credit card online; I'd paid twice. I went back to the theatre, said I'd been charged twice. They said, "We need to see your credit card statement." So I waited till the end of the month, and then took it back in. "Sorry, we also need to see the MovieTickets.com receipt you printed." So I went back a third time, theatre was closed that afternoon. A fourth time, no manager.
Finally decided that in addition to the $20 that the theatre "stole", I'd wasted half a dozen hours trying to get it back.
Won't use MovieTickets.com, even though it wasn't really their fault. I get back at the theatres by bringing my own food now.
I think the fine is more about the copyrighted material being shared.
Joe has a copy of Star Wars on his computer, and gets caught. He will be fined $60 for it. No, he won't get a copy of Star Wars once Joe pays the $60. George figures someone out there has an illegal copy of SW that was downloaded from Joe's computer.
It sounds like the fine is not for having copyrighted material, but rather for sharing it a P2P application.
Just like the drug war, they are going after the distributors (dealers) rather than the possessors (junkies). Personally, I'm a junkie (metaphorically speaking).
Actually, when the Athalon first came out, and got great reviews, AMD was making money. More to do with their compact-flash business than their processors, but still, they were doing well.
Unfort, the compact flash market has dropped as well, due to fewer sales of digital cameras, mp3 players, etc, etc. Everything AMD makes is part of the same economic cycle. They need to make something that is profitable when CPUs aren't.
We do have archived logs turned on, and they stream over to our standby database.
This is running on Win2k, so copying physical database files is not possible. RMan would be a better solution, but I don't trust,
1) Repositories that need to be installed for a feature. I still have nightmares about that with Designer 2k.
2) Incremental backups.
As for Win2k in a production environment, one of our servers (including the database) was up for 120+ days, with an average Oracle load of 14%. Pretty good.
Our other server (I just checked) has been up for 6500 hours. That's 270ish days, with a 5% load on Oracle.
As *the* DBA, *the* database architect, the senior developer, and the person who moved the database environment from a Veritas high-availability system running on a million dollars worth of Sun hardware to $4,000 worth of Intel servers to save the company, I think I know more than enough to be able to make an informed decision.
just because you have a backup, doesn't mean it works.
We were backing up our Oracle database with the export-utility, and DIRECT=Y flag. Well, unfortunately, sometimes a direct backup is corrupted (a direct backup bypasses all the SQL parsing, and unloads it directy from the tablespace).
Now we restore our backups every few weeks to our development databases, to make sure they are working.
Damn. This was supposed to be in response to a message by GeckoFood,
"...Radeon 8500 or higher card (up to the 9700)...
It is all well and good that they are putting out drivers that works "across the board" for their product line, but I have seen, time and again, where a "universal" device driver is not so universal after all. If it was written on a machine sporting an 8500, where does it degrade with the 9700 and so on? If they are not the same card, they won't be 100% compatible.
Another possibility is that the drivers are written to work generically with the chipset. This would have the distinction of having unremarkable drivers that do not push any card to its full potential.
My deep and sincere apologies to ATI if they are successful in making a universal driver for their stuff that actually takes full advantage of each device. I would bet that such a driver would be a real winner."
nVidia has used a universal driver for years. Doesn't matter if you have a GeForce2 MX or a GeForce 4600, you download the same driver for the OS.
I wonder - is the "installation" package unified, or is the actual driver that gets installed unified?
IE the installation program detects what driver needs to be installed, and then pulls the relevant files out of the installation file and installs them (how many times can one use the word install or it's derivatives in one sentance before you are forced to take a technical writing class?).
I think will have to wait for the benchmarks to come out to figure out the answer.
My wife loves the new computer as well. I stuck with the SiS on-board graphics. The Shuttle case I got doesn't have AGP, as it is the Athalon 1.8. The Intel version would have been $100 more, and I have AMD stock, so might as well get it. So the AIW 7500 is out. Maybe a seperate tv-tuner card at some point.
Yah, ATI isn't market-dominant (they haven't been since the mid-90's, when the Mach 64 was the biz for gaming). Their drivers don't get the attention that nVidia's do. Wish ATI would pump more into their cards. They compete on the same level hardware-wise...
I went cheap on the speakers, as we don't really have the setup in the room for a 4.1 or 5.1.
How do you find the wireless keboard/mouse? I went with the Logitec wireless mouse/keyboard. The range only seems to be about 4 feet, and it's laggy. Read that electrical components can reduce range. The signal-receiver is sitting right on top of the tv, so that might be it...
Mine is mostly for music and divx. No cable, no satellite. Just antenna, and a 2.5 megabit DSL line, so that makes sense. Bought my first DVD the other day - Extended Lord of the Rings - waiting till closer to the Two Towers before I play it... Be interesting to see how good it looks.
"With the introduction of its Hyper-Threading technology, Intel has confirmed that constantly increasing the clock cycle is not the only way to skin the proverbial cat."
Yah, AMD has been saying that for years with their performance-ratings, and Intel's been saying that cycles-per-second was the measurement that the consumer truely understood, and was a good way to get a measure of the speed of the processor.
Wonder if Intel will adopt that, now that they have a CPU that, at lower speeds, can process more data.
They got excellent performance reviews on Storage Review but no reviewer can travel forward in time a few years to see how the drives hold up.
The result is that we have IBM drives in all our production database servers, web servers, and app servers. And I picked the hardware. Who said no-one ever got fired for buying IBM? Guess it's true, as I didn't lose my job over it.
AnandTech had an interesting article here on the drives, and why they went bad (poor microcode that handles the interval between tracks as the drives heat up).
Slashdot Mirror
"reminded me that there are people in this country who don't deserve to live here."
Ah. No differing opinions. Gotcha. Screw freedom of thought.
"The scumbags who made that waste of film will have hopefully forgotten to have gotten the rights to one of those clips and will be sued blind."
Ah. Pro DMCA. Use of copyrighted material in a criticism or paraody does not require permission. You don't seem big on freedom of expression either.
"America is not NAZI Germany... Humans like wars... Humans will always like wars -- deal with it."/i>
Ah. Hitler also believed that war was the natural state of man, and brought out the best in a nation. That killed 6 million Jews, and an equal number of homosexuals, gypsies, and other "undesirables". Lets not count the millions killed during the bombing of London and the fighting ecompassing D-Day to VE Day.
I don't think I've ever seen a country so full of paranoia as America.
I don't think a few hundred thousand gun owners can do much against tanks, F-16s, carriers, napalm, smart bombs, nuclear weapons, etc, etc.
Perhaps in the 18th and 19th century, small arms could have made a difference, but not today.
The biggest threat to modern democracy is large corporations. Period. They typically own politicians. The fake "grass-roots" campaigns to allow politicans to justify their actions.
I bet sometime in the last month you went and watched a movie released by a major studio, while drinking a Coke, Nikes on your feet, Gap t-shirt on your back, and drove home in your Honda.
Perhaps you should worry more about that than some brain-dead technology that won't get off the ground.
International pirates.
They come up with some grand scheme to help a 3rd world country, and loan them a bunch of money for a dam, a power plant, etc, etc. It fails miserably.
Now the country has to pay this mega project off, plus their original debt. If the country looks like it will default on their payments, the IMF comes in and says, "We'll prop you up, but we need to be in control." The IMF then gets farmers to change from food to cash crops, cuts off any semblence of workers benefits, etc.
For example, in Equador, "...the IMF's 167 loan conditions look less like an assistance plan and more like a blueprint for a financial coup d'etat"
As Bruce Cockburn sings, "IMF / dirty enough / takes away anything it can get / always certain that theres one thing left / keep them on the ropes with unsupportable debt..."
from alt.binaries.multimedia.scifi.
I had high hopes.
I couldn't stand it. Stopped at the 60 minute mark, and deleted it. I couldn't believe how slow it was. Slow is an understatement. It was painful.
It doesn't help that Michael Moriarty was in it. He was great in Law & Order, but has been taken by the drink (he was charged with assaulting his common-law wife, and has been ordered to have no contact with women while drinking).
I don't like a lot of smarm, I don't like alot of romance, and I just don't understand why they keep trying to peddle sci-fi to the mainstream. The compromise between sci-fi and mainstream always sucks.
"Apple 2.5 Stars.
:)
Half of the people are 5 Stars
The other Half of the people are 1 star."
That would be 3 stars then. (5+1)/2 = 3, not 2.5.
Your math skills: 1 star
Puppetman.
I really enjoyed George RR Martin's books: A Game of Thrones, Storm of Swords, Clash of Kings.
The fourth book is almost done - A Feast For Crows.
I re-read them three times in the first four months I had them.
Puppetman.
but the biochemical method for manipulating the genese of the mouse to create the Harvard mouse is.
We have a use for it in our company. As software developers, RAM and GHz is at a premium. We also use workstations as low-end databases for development and QA. Putting 3 Oracle databases on one machine means you needs lots of RAM.
With games, Linux, Oracle, IBM and others porting to match the AMD 64-bit CPU, I think anyone who uses there computer for anything other than email, word processing, browsing the web, will get a nice boost from 64 bits.
Huh?
Epic said:
"We're extremely excited about the upcoming AMD Athlon 64 processor. It's designed to run today's 32-bit games and applications and will actually, clock-for-clock, boost their performance relative to 32-bit AMD Athlon processors. But when you add 64-bits to the picture you can get additional capabilities and other performance boosts," said Mark Rein, vice president, Epic Games Inc. "We're planning to ship a 64-bit update for Unreal Tournament 2003 at the same time the AMD Athlon 64 processors show up on retail shelves."
Anandtech said:
"Epic has said that they will ship a 64-bit version of Unreal Tournament 2003 when Athlon 64 makes it to retail, and the performance increase from moving to Opteron is significant. You get a 15% speedup from the on-die memory controller and another 15% from compiler optimization for the additional registers in x86-64 mode."
Perhaps, what I'm asking is, can anybody compare and contrast the two architectures; is there a certain advantage to one or the other?
Yah - AMD will offer it to the consumer combined with motherboards from tier-1 manufacturers like Asus, Abit, IWill, Tyan, and so forth, all at an attractive price (read: the same price as the Athalon XP CPUs).
Intel, on the other hand, will keep their 64 bit CPUs out of the consumer hands by pricing them above what most consumers are willing to pay, thus reaping a premium on them by selling them in servers through Dell and IBM (making even more money on cases and motherboards). There will be limited support for the CPU outside Intel's own motherboard offerings, and if you run with a hard-drive, video card, CD-Rom that has not been explicitly approved by Intel, then forget support (we've had this problem with Intel on some of their server motherboards).
Intel is taking the Cathedral approach, and AMD a Bazaar approach.
Yah, but the alpha was technology out of the hands of the normal user. And you can't buy a kick-ass 3D video card for it.
And I bet the ogg/mp3 tools and players don't exist or suck.
Linux-64, and Unreal Tournament 2003 re-compiled, plus support for those 32-bit games and apps means there will be an instant software base.
I tried MovieTickets.com once for the first Harry Potter...
Paid for the tickets, took them to the theatre. At the theatre, they told me that I hadn't actually paid for the movie on MovieTickets.com (and I was foolish enough to believe them - maybe they only processed the service charge?).
Anyway, ended up paying twice. Later, I checked my credit card online; I'd paid twice. I went back to the theatre, said I'd been charged twice. They said, "We need to see your credit card statement." So I waited till the end of the month, and then took it back in. "Sorry, we also need to see the MovieTickets.com receipt you printed." So I went back a third time, theatre was closed that afternoon. A fourth time, no manager.
Finally decided that in addition to the $20 that the theatre "stole", I'd wasted half a dozen hours trying to get it back.
Won't use MovieTickets.com, even though it wasn't really their fault. I get back at the theatres by bringing my own food now.
I think the fine is more about the copyrighted material being shared.
Joe has a copy of Star Wars on his computer, and gets caught. He will be fined $60 for it. No, he won't get a copy of Star Wars once Joe pays the $60. George figures someone out there has an illegal copy of SW that was downloaded from Joe's computer.
It sounds like the fine is not for having copyrighted material, but rather for sharing it a P2P application.
Just like the drug war, they are going after the distributors (dealers) rather than the possessors (junkies). Personally, I'm a junkie (metaphorically speaking).
They can, if need be, compile the code.
If work needs to be done, you can de-obfuscate the modules they need, and provide them.
This will encourage your client to get you to do modifications, and they will have the source.
This is a purely practical solution, and has nothing to do with licencing, or other abstract solutions.
The story yesterday on AMD states that AMD is going to be branching out to make processors for other pieces of hardware.
Looks like this might be a smart thing to do. Make the processor for the MP3 player, for the handheld, etc, if it's a growing market.
I find my 1.2 ghz Athalon too slow, but my wife is happily running on a P2 450.
Actually, when the Athalon first came out, and got great reviews, AMD was making money. More to do with their compact-flash business than their processors, but still, they were doing well.
Unfort, the compact flash market has dropped as well, due to fewer sales of digital cameras, mp3 players, etc, etc. Everything AMD makes is part of the same economic cycle. They need to make something that is profitable when CPUs aren't.
We do have archived logs turned on, and they stream over to our standby database.
This is running on Win2k, so copying physical database files is not possible. RMan would be a better solution, but I don't trust,
1) Repositories that need to be installed for a feature. I still have nightmares about that with Designer 2k.
2) Incremental backups.
As for Win2k in a production environment, one of our servers (including the database) was up for 120+ days, with an average Oracle load of 14%. Pretty good.
Our other server (I just checked) has been up for 6500 hours. That's 270ish days, with a 5% load on Oracle.
As *the* DBA, *the* database architect, the senior developer, and the person who moved the database environment from a Veritas high-availability system running on a million dollars worth of Sun hardware to $4,000 worth of Intel servers to save the company, I think I know more than enough to be able to make an informed decision.
just because you have a backup, doesn't mean it works.
We were backing up our Oracle database with the export-utility, and DIRECT=Y flag. Well, unfortunately, sometimes a direct backup is corrupted (a direct backup bypasses all the SQL parsing, and unloads it directy from the tablespace).
Now we restore our backups every few weeks to our development databases, to make sure they are working.
Damn. This was supposed to be in response to a message by GeckoFood,
"...Radeon 8500 or higher card (up to the 9700)...
It is all well and good that they are putting out drivers that works "across the board" for their product line, but I have seen, time and again, where a "universal" device driver is not so universal after all. If it was written on a machine sporting an 8500, where does it degrade with the 9700 and so on? If they are not the same card, they won't be 100% compatible.
Another possibility is that the drivers are written to work generically with the chipset. This would have the distinction of having unremarkable drivers that do not push any card to its full potential.
My deep and sincere apologies to ATI if they are successful in making a universal driver for their stuff that actually takes full advantage of each device. I would bet that such a driver would be a real winner."
nVidia has used a universal driver for years. Doesn't matter if you have a GeForce2 MX or a GeForce 4600, you download the same driver for the OS.
I wonder - is the "installation" package unified, or is the actual driver that gets installed unified?
IE the installation program detects what driver needs to be installed, and then pulls the relevant files out of the installation file and installs them (how many times can one use the word install or it's derivatives in one sentance before you are forced to take a technical writing class?).
I think will have to wait for the benchmarks to come out to figure out the answer.
My wife loves the new computer as well. I stuck with the SiS on-board graphics. The Shuttle case I got doesn't have AGP, as it is the Athalon 1.8. The Intel version would have been $100 more, and I have AMD stock, so might as well get it. So the AIW 7500 is out. Maybe a seperate tv-tuner card at some point.
Yah, ATI isn't market-dominant (they haven't been since the mid-90's, when the Mach 64 was the biz for gaming). Their drivers don't get the attention that nVidia's do. Wish ATI would pump more into their cards. They compete on the same level hardware-wise...
I went cheap on the speakers, as we don't really have the setup in the room for a 4.1 or 5.1.
How do you find the wireless keboard/mouse? I went with the Logitec wireless mouse/keyboard. The range only seems to be about 4 feet, and it's laggy. Read that electrical components can reduce range. The signal-receiver is sitting right on top of the tv, so that might be it...
Mine is mostly for music and divx. No cable, no satellite. Just antenna, and a 2.5 megabit DSL line, so that makes sense. Bought my first DVD the other day - Extended Lord of the Rings - waiting till closer to the Two Towers before I play it... Be interesting to see how good it looks.
and it doesn't run that crappy XP.
Ok, I don't have the nifty remote, but I'm sure you can get one after market. Or get the All In Wonder 7500, like Tom did, and get a remote.
There are instructions for this @ Toms Hardware.
More flexibility on the configuration, etc, and you don't have to support any vendor (like Microsoft or Intel) that you don't want to.
"With the introduction of its Hyper-Threading technology, Intel has confirmed that constantly increasing the clock cycle is not the only way to skin the proverbial cat."
Yah, AMD has been saying that for years with their performance-ratings, and Intel's been saying that cycles-per-second was the measurement that the consumer truely understood, and was a good way to get a measure of the speed of the processor.
Wonder if Intel will adopt that, now that they have a CPU that, at lower speeds, can process more data.
They got excellent performance reviews on Storage Review but no reviewer can travel forward in time a few years to see how the drives hold up.
The result is that we have IBM drives in all our production database servers, web servers, and app servers. And I picked the hardware. Who said no-one ever got fired for buying IBM? Guess it's true, as I didn't lose my job over it.
AnandTech had an interesting article here on the drives, and why they went bad (poor microcode that handles the interval between tracks as the drives heat up).
Our composter doesn't stink - you throw a layer of soil on top everytime you add.
Worms make it in - not sure how - ours is packed.
No wasps, and no roaches. We don't have cockroaches here. Wasps in the summer, but more attracted to flowers and garbage.