Wow... how interesting. You think it might not work, not that you have any evidence or personal experience. With the reputation of AC's giving good advice I'll be sure to hang on to this post.
When you are forced to use the line-in on your sound card the signal had to go through a DAC and ADC. Both introduce error and your resulting MP3 isn't as clean.
At this point, I'm tempted to get a Sony Mini-Disc player and record with it. Since my stereo CD player uses digital output and the MD recorder using digital input, I won't be losing as much.
This is really only a short term backup. Since the storage media and the reader are one unit, if either fails the back up is toast. If you have two drives, you might as well setup mirrored RAID.
Real backup is done on semipermanent media (>10 year storage) in a format that can be taken off site easily.
Anything that is drop in simple (like a remote car starter package) isn't a hack. Working around this "feature" is hacking the car. I only assume that the author never considering hooking up the car to a serial line and starting to investigate the I/O.
I've hacked my motorcycles to make things work contrary to the original design on many occasions. Removing parts I didn't want that sucked way power, adding new circuits for auxillary devices, splice here, chop there, etc. Here's the important part, when I've asked other people, the typical response was "Gee, I've never done that." so we figured it out. Wanna know how long it took for someone to figure out that a '96 Kawasaki KLR hand guard could be fit onto a Suzuki SV650 with just a bit of machining? Now that was a hacker at work!
How does a slightly over 3 year old Wired article and the observation that some sites get no traffic deserve a story posting? Are we going to start asking why some magazines go out of business or TV shows get cancelled?
Sometimes people have really great ideas that get put out on the Web and like minded individuals flock to them. Other times you end up with utter crap.
It seems that the judge ruled here that since Felten didn't sell the code or make a product based off of it, he's in the free and clear from DMCA and other laws. He also didn't seem concerned with Scientific American selling copies of that code. I'd think this would make a precedent for anyone that wanted to, say, make DVD decryption software for scientific purposes. Or am I missing something here?
Re:Things the visitor can do besides surf the web
on
Disney World Goes 802.11b
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Disney already has a system in place called SmartPass which allows visitors to "reserve" a place in line so they can go off and do other things (shop) and come back later without having to wait in a huge line. They also get the added benefit of knowing which rides you went on and where you were shopping before hand (your park access card is your room key, park ticket, SmartPass, credit card, Big Brother device, etc).
I won't get into it because it's to OT, but they also have biometric scanners at the gates for season pass holders (no privacy policy, 'natch).
Let's see. I go riding (motorcycles) with my boss and a few of the other guys at his level. I stood up in another developers wedding. I've gone drinking with just about everyone I work with. Oh, and we're going to go see "The One" this Wednesday after work.
Now, what has this cost me? Uh, I only got a total of 133% in raises over the last 4 years. Damn, I'll bet the guy who was in my wedding screwed me over. Oh, and there was that time when they gave me choice of projects. I'll bet my drinking buddy was holding something back then. And all those nights out that got put on the expense report, that must have cost me about $0.01 dip in my stock value.
Having friends sucks! Except the time when a customer was bitching about me and everyone stood up for me because they knew me better. Maybe friends aren't so bad.
Last time I checked there were very few books being published on it and most new developers have never heard of it. However, several large insurance companies still use an app written in it. It appears they all bought the source code and continue to modify it to keep things up to date.
As a tip, if you are ever called out to do a consulting gig and the customer mentions "Visual DOS", run like hell.
Personally, I bring my digital camera with me on vacation, but the laptop stays home. I think it'd be fun to mail some pictures home just by going to a local wireless access node.
Ok, so there aren't any public access nodes, but maybe vacation spots like Disney World could put them in at their hotels. This kind of product is really about playing with the idea of what's possible rather than accepting the status quo.
Ok, granted I'd never want to read/. on a camcorder, but I might want to e-mail a video I just made to my brother in Chicago. Maybe I could upload a video I made of Steve Balmer dancing around like an idiot to a humor website (ok, so someone already did that). All in all, this promises better ways to distribute images over the Internet than conventional means which typically require hooking up to a computer first.
In my mind, its better that they use web browsing and e-mail technology to achieve these things rather than implement something of their own design that wouldn't work with any existing tools.
It is quirky, a pain in the rear, time consuming, but less so than other cross-platform libraries.
I've used it in projects that required common threading, interprocess communication, and a few other things across NT, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. I point out all of the UNIX-like platforms as seperate entities because they all have enough quirks that you can't expect any given library to work across the board.
Oh, and to everyone that has been promoting ideas like "just use gcc" or "just use straight c++", maybe you've never worked on a large scale, long term project, but gcc is not the best option for an app that needs to be highly optimized and writting everything in c++ from scratch is a waste of time (that's why we have libraries in the first place). I'm not flaming here, just pointing out that you need to look at the bigger picture.
What you've discovered, even if you don't seem to be aware of it, is that delivering high speed connections isn't as simple as selling, say, lettuce. There is no skill in selling, growing, or shipping lettuce. You simply do it. Companies work very hard at doing it as inexpensively as possilbe, which makes them large profits. This same mentality has been applied to the cable television industry for years. Get X number of channels into a viewers home (disregard if they're good or not) and charge enough to make a profit.
Now hop over to cable broadband industry. It takes (gasp) skill to implement a WAN/MAN. The technology isn't so simple that you can just pick random parts off a shelf and expect everything to work brilliantly. We should hope that either companies like yours begin to dominate and spread their philosophy of good engineering or that technology improves to the point that setting up a WAN is as simple as setting up a LAN for a game of Quake.
Then you ditch the connection. Just because they raise the price isn't a good reason to dump it.
Hell, my employer hasn't hired anyone or let anyone go from my group in the last year so just to make up for raises and what not our product will cost at least 7% more. If our customers thought like you, we'd be screwed (but so would our competitors).
If I was out of work I'd cut the cable, cable modem, Netflix membership, sell my motorcycles, and anything else to keep food on the table (and keep the table). The article states the painfully obvious. Broadband comes out of discresionary spending and when you need to save money, dropping down to regular dial-up is a viable option to many people.
So long as I have disposable income, however, the extra $20/month to have a cable modem as opposed to a traditional dial-up is worth more, than say, my weekly trip to the arcade.
A better (real) story would be about people who aren't worried about their jobs or the economy dropping broadband because they see no value in it.
Maybe next year will be a royal pain, but up till now this 27-year old developer has been having a blast. Working for a profitable company (that makes a difference), getting more and more say in the direction of the code base, exploring new ideas, being able to look at my own work from just 6 months back and realize how much I've learned....
What a great time!
Now, I'll admit, I didn't get a CS degree. No, Anthropolgy major with CS minor for me, thank you. Of course, I had figured out in my sophmore year that Physics just wasn't going to pan out for me. Maybe all students should change majors after the first year or two. I dunno
I'm not saying the majority of Slashdot readers are professional developers, but don't judge the readership on the first-posters.
That aside, my experience in software development (only 3 years) ball parking (1-3 days, 1 week-3 weeks, 1 month-3months) is usually possible, but tends to become wildly inaccurate beyond a few months. Regardless of what methond we use to determine timelines, some things always seem to slip, while others take a fraction of the expected time.
You obviously missed my point. Those AT cases you bought (probably in the early or mid 90's) probably cost you $35 and you'll end up using it for 10 years. If you had splurged on a really good case, with nice slide out trays and easy access to all the drives it would have only cost $100 more (at the time). That's only $10 more a year for something that makes it more of a joy to work on your computer. Instead, most people blow an extra $100 on a video card that they will replace in 12 months.
I've found that most grocery stores have a store card they'll swipe if you've forgotten yours (and I forget mine a lot). There are ways to dodge data gathering or pollute their information about you. The trick is to find the ethical route that also lets them know how you feel.
Ok, there was the hard drive that wasn't right. Got that from a fly by night that has long since vanished. The no name memory that wasn't even close to spec and made my machine flakey as all hell. That really sucked. Ooh, crapy modems that couldn't get half of the advertised baud rate seem standard from cheap shops. The list goes on, but I'd guess I've been screwed a half dozen times pretty bad.
On the positive side, several purchases from Insight were perfect with good support when a video card fried itself. TC Computers was always good for motherboards and what not (and now owned by Insight). Buy.com and Amazon have also been good to me. So on and so on for about two dozen purchases.
I think the summary here is bad experiences with big (and expensive) on line retailers, less than 10%. Bad experiences with small, fly-by-night retailers, more than 70%. Gee, you really do get what you pay for.
Caldera provides free downloads of the source code to all GPL software in their distribution. The also add no legal restrictions to those software packages.
The distribution as a whole, though, is not GPL and therefore carries a license that Caldera feels happy with. It may be a sucky license and I won't use their distribution because of it, but its their party and they can do what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... how interesting. You think it might not work, not that you have any evidence or personal experience. With the reputation of AC's giving good advice I'll be sure to hang on to this post.
From my experience, yes. The DAC-ADC game results in lots of pops and clicks in the mp3 which I don't normally get (128k/44Hz).
When you are forced to use the line-in on your sound card the signal had to go through a DAC and ADC. Both introduce error and your resulting MP3 isn't as clean.
At this point, I'm tempted to get a Sony Mini-Disc player and record with it. Since my stereo CD player uses digital output and the MD recorder using digital input, I won't be losing as much.
This is really only a short term backup. Since the storage media and the reader are one unit, if either fails the back up is toast. If you have two drives, you might as well setup mirrored RAID.
Real backup is done on semipermanent media (>10 year storage) in a format that can be taken off site easily.
Anything that is drop in simple (like a remote car starter package) isn't a hack. Working around this "feature" is hacking the car. I only assume that the author never considering hooking up the car to a serial line and starting to investigate the I/O.
I've hacked my motorcycles to make things work contrary to the original design on many occasions. Removing parts I didn't want that sucked way power, adding new circuits for auxillary devices, splice here, chop there, etc. Here's the important part, when I've asked other people, the typical response was "Gee, I've never done that." so we figured it out. Wanna know how long it took for someone to figure out that a '96 Kawasaki KLR hand guard could be fit onto a Suzuki SV650 with just a bit of machining? Now that was a hacker at work!
Sometimes people have really great ideas that get put out on the Web and like minded individuals flock to them. Other times you end up with utter crap.
It seems that the judge ruled here that since Felten didn't sell the code or make a product based off of it, he's in the free and clear from DMCA and other laws. He also didn't seem concerned with Scientific American selling copies of that code. I'd think this would make a precedent for anyone that wanted to, say, make DVD decryption software for scientific purposes. Or am I missing something here?
Disney already has a system in place called SmartPass which allows visitors to "reserve" a place in line so they can go off and do other things (shop) and come back later without having to wait in a huge line. They also get the added benefit of knowing which rides you went on and where you were shopping before hand (your park access card is your room key, park ticket, SmartPass, credit card, Big Brother device, etc).
I won't get into it because it's to OT, but they also have biometric scanners at the gates for season pass holders (no privacy policy, 'natch).
Let's see. I go riding (motorcycles) with my boss and a few of the other guys at his level. I stood up in another developers wedding. I've gone drinking with just about everyone I work with. Oh, and we're going to go see "The One" this Wednesday after work.
Now, what has this cost me? Uh, I only got a total of 133% in raises over the last 4 years. Damn, I'll bet the guy who was in my wedding screwed me over. Oh, and there was that time when they gave me choice of projects. I'll bet my drinking buddy was holding something back then. And all those nights out that got put on the expense report, that must have cost me about $0.01 dip in my stock value.
Having friends sucks! Except the time when a customer was bitching about me and everyone stood up for me because they knew me better. Maybe friends aren't so bad.
Last time I checked there were very few books being published on it and most new developers have never heard of it. However, several large insurance companies still use an app written in it. It appears they all bought the source code and continue to modify it to keep things up to date.
As a tip, if you are ever called out to do a consulting gig and the customer mentions "Visual DOS", run like hell.
Personally, I bring my digital camera with me on vacation, but the laptop stays home. I think it'd be fun to mail some pictures home just by going to a local wireless access node.
Ok, so there aren't any public access nodes, but maybe vacation spots like Disney World could put them in at their hotels. This kind of product is really about playing with the idea of what's possible rather than accepting the status quo.
Ok, granted I'd never want to read /. on a camcorder, but I might want to e-mail a video I just made to my brother in Chicago. Maybe I could upload a video I made of Steve Balmer dancing around like an idiot to a humor website (ok, so someone already did that). All in all, this promises better ways to distribute images over the Internet than conventional means which typically require hooking up to a computer first.
In my mind, its better that they use web browsing and e-mail technology to achieve these things rather than implement something of their own design that wouldn't work with any existing tools.
It is quirky, a pain in the rear, time consuming, but less so than other cross-platform libraries.
I've used it in projects that required common threading, interprocess communication, and a few other things across NT, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux. I point out all of the UNIX-like platforms as seperate entities because they all have enough quirks that you can't expect any given library to work across the board.
Oh, and to everyone that has been promoting ideas like "just use gcc" or "just use straight c++", maybe you've never worked on a large scale, long term project, but gcc is not the best option for an app that needs to be highly optimized and writting everything in c++ from scratch is a waste of time (that's why we have libraries in the first place). I'm not flaming here, just pointing out that you need to look at the bigger picture.
What you've discovered, even if you don't seem to be aware of it, is that delivering high speed connections isn't as simple as selling, say, lettuce. There is no skill in selling, growing, or shipping lettuce. You simply do it. Companies work very hard at doing it as inexpensively as possilbe, which makes them large profits. This same mentality has been applied to the cable television industry for years. Get X number of channels into a viewers home (disregard if they're good or not) and charge enough to make a profit.
Now hop over to cable broadband industry. It takes (gasp) skill to implement a WAN/MAN. The technology isn't so simple that you can just pick random parts off a shelf and expect everything to work brilliantly. We should hope that either companies like yours begin to dominate and spread their philosophy of good engineering or that technology improves to the point that setting up a WAN is as simple as setting up a LAN for a game of Quake.
Then you ditch the connection. Just because they raise the price isn't a good reason to dump it.
Hell, my employer hasn't hired anyone or let anyone go from my group in the last year so just to make up for raises and what not our product will cost at least 7% more. If our customers thought like you, we'd be screwed (but so would our competitors).
Ok, not all my motorcycles, just the ones that get less than 10k miles a year. Like the old Ninja 250 and the Honda CL360.
Cable modem has to be kept for a long time in any case. I don't think my wife could return to dial-up access.
If I was out of work I'd cut the cable, cable modem, Netflix membership, sell my motorcycles, and anything else to keep food on the table (and keep the table). The article states the painfully obvious. Broadband comes out of discresionary spending and when you need to save money, dropping down to regular dial-up is a viable option to many people.
So long as I have disposable income, however, the extra $20/month to have a cable modem as opposed to a traditional dial-up is worth more, than say, my weekly trip to the arcade.
A better (real) story would be about people who aren't worried about their jobs or the economy dropping broadband because they see no value in it.
What a great time!
Now, I'll admit, I didn't get a CS degree. No, Anthropolgy major with CS minor for me, thank you. Of course, I had figured out in my sophmore year that Physics just wasn't going to pan out for me. Maybe all students should change majors after the first year or two. I dunno
I'm not saying the majority of Slashdot readers are professional developers, but don't judge the readership on the first-posters.
That aside, my experience in software development (only 3 years) ball parking (1-3 days, 1 week-3 weeks, 1 month-3months) is usually possible, but tends to become wildly inaccurate beyond a few months. Regardless of what methond we use to determine timelines, some things always seem to slip, while others take a fraction of the expected time.
You obviously missed my point. Those AT cases you bought (probably in the early or mid 90's) probably cost you $35 and you'll end up using it for 10 years. If you had splurged on a really good case, with nice slide out trays and easy access to all the drives it would have only cost $100 more (at the time). That's only $10 more a year for something that makes it more of a joy to work on your computer. Instead, most people blow an extra $100 on a video card that they will replace in 12 months.
There's a big difference between blowing $200 on a processor that'll cost $100 in 6 months and $230 on a case that should last several upgrades.
Hopefully, the watch will have no buttons in the final version and all functions will be controlled via wireless access.
Well, maybe a password reset button on the watch would be good.
I've found that most grocery stores have a store card they'll swipe if you've forgotten yours (and I forget mine a lot). There are ways to dodge data gathering or pollute their information about you. The trick is to find the ethical route that also lets them know how you feel.
On the positive side, several purchases from Insight were perfect with good support when a video card fried itself. TC Computers was always good for motherboards and what not (and now owned by Insight). Buy.com and Amazon have also been good to me. So on and so on for about two dozen purchases.
I think the summary here is bad experiences with big (and expensive) on line retailers, less than 10%. Bad experiences with small, fly-by-night retailers, more than 70%. Gee, you really do get what you pay for.
For the umpteenth time:
Caldera provides free downloads of the source code to all GPL software in their distribution. The also add no legal restrictions to those software packages.
The distribution as a whole, though, is not GPL and therefore carries a license that Caldera feels happy with. It may be a sucky license and I won't use their distribution because of it, but its their party and they can do what they want.