the operating system I had bought to fix the Microsoft glitch of not recognizing AMD processors in Win95 that were faster than 300MHz
There's a patch from MS to fix this. Unfortunatly you have to be able to boot Win95 in order to apply a patch so that you can boot Win95
8-<>
Anyways, the solution is to: 1) Go low-level and temporarily reconfigure your motherboard so that your processor runs slower. 2) Install and patch Win95. 3) Put your processor speed back to nominal.
That wouldn't work - everybody knows politicians almost never get sent to prision.
A must beter choice that would directly impact in the really dangerous criminals would be a list of software developers.
Yep, start with them Open Source Developers - everybody knows thei're all hackers that just haven't been caught in the act yet (dirty basterds). Since hacking has bigger sentences than murder or rape, hacking must be worse.
Re:"Intel ups the anti once again"
on
Pentium 4 2.8GHz
·
· Score: 2
They really meant "Anti". It's all an extraordinarily inteligent word game that us, Average Slashdoters, cannot even begin to compreend.
I agree with some points and i disagree with others. Just a couple of comments:
> It's not government's responsibility to prop them up by becoming their enforcement arm.
What is the government's responsibility anyway? I mean, I'm sure you have your own fantasy about what a government does, but the actual real government does spend quite a lot of its effort propping up industry. And I know you probably think that's only because they're in the pocket of industry, but it might also have something to do with the fact that a healthy economy is more likely to get them re-elected.
It is not the responsibility of the government to prop-up any specific industry.
In order to improve the quality of life of the citizens, a government should act to improve THE WHOLE ECONOMY. From a purely economical point of view, when passing laws a government has to consider the impact of that law on the overall economy - if a law provides a local increase in wealth (say to RIAA and MPAA members) but a decrease in the overall wealth of a country, then that law should not be passed.
On top of this there is also the discussion about the influence of social (read non-economic) factors in the overall quality of life of the citizens of a country - the extremes of optimizing ONLY economic factors or ONLY social factors do not lead to the maximization of the quality of life.
------------------
> The telegram industry was a perfectly legitimate industry that employed millions of people. If they were the RIAA, they would lobby to ban the telephone because it is a threat to their bottom line. It makes little sense.
Except you left out a major difference between telegrams and music. The telegram was rendered obsolete by the telephone. Music isn't becoming obsolete; CDs are. That's a huge distinction.
Telegraphs are "one way of sending information over long distances" CD's are "one way of distributing music"
Telegraphs have become obsolete but the need to "send information over long distances" is still there and has been satisfied by new products
It can be argued that new (superior) products (internet distribution) are now offering competition to CDs in the area of "distributing music" and that they are being hold-back by the legal manouvers of RIAA.
----------- >The problem lies in the fact that I can't put the new Linkin Park CD into my MP3 collection.
Oh look, a red herring. We weren't discussing DRM. We were discussing piracy specifically. Don't try to confuse the two.
Mandatory DRM is being sold by the Music and Cinema industries as a response to piracy. If THEY say it's related to piracy, who are we to say it isn't???
Part of the rationale behind Open Source Only Laws is: - Limit dependency on a single provider. You use MSWord -> You're stuck with Microsoft. If/When the provider decides to stop supporting the version of the software you are using then you're stuck with either buying a newer version or hoping that divine intervention will keep it working ok. If your software provider goes belly up then you're stuck with the "hope for divine intervention" option. - Security. Closed source software may contain dormant or active backdoors and remote exploits, either due to bugs or due to demands from an Inteligence Agency. This is especially relevant for software that is used by government agencies (still, don't forget good old industrial espionage).
Also keep in mind that Open Source doesn't actually imply Publicly Open Source. Laws that require Open Source Software can be made in such a way that the Source Code is only required to be available to the customer. With such a law in place, a Closed Source Company just has to decide if it is or not a good business decision for them to open their software to that specific client (probably with some contractual clauses so that it isn't made available to the outside world).
As i see it, Closed Source companies just don't want to have contractual obligations (like "no source, no deal") imposed by their customers. They would rather have all customers "pay-up and shut-up".
First of all, you have the technical issues. There are no NEO objects strong enough to support hanging an elevator from.
Read the article - it's not going to be tethered to anything on the space side. It's going to be kept in place by a combination of gravitational force on the Earth side and centrifugal force in the space side.
Computer control to keep the Earth end at a constant height (which essentially requires solving the n-body problem where n = several dozen) in real time is impossibly hard.
I'm sure the gravitational effect of Io will not be enought to distabilize a structure hold in place by centrifugal force (Want more centrifugal force? Make the line longer!!!)
Not to mention the fact that the engine to lift the elevator car has to put out the same energy that a rocket engine does (conservation of energy, heard of it?).
You sorta forgot that rockets go up with a lot of useless stuff that ends up falling down again - like fuel, 1st and 2nd stage engines, and basically most of the payload of the rocket at lift-off.
Also, and acording to the article (did i mention you should've read the article?), the lift will move cargo (and eventually passengers) at between 120 and 160 km/h.
Drag (which is a way of loosing energy - conservation of energy, remember?) is proporcional to speed. Any rocket trying to achieve low earth orbit will need to achieve a speed of around least 17,500 miles an hour (Space shuttle low orbit speed - http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/ssa/docs/Space.Shuttle/general.shtml). That means that while still inside Earth's athmosphere the rocket will have to achieve a speed much bigger than 160 km/h which is a drag (pun intended).
Even assuming these issues could be magically fixed somehow, we have the socio-political issues. In order to be geosynchronous it has to be over the equator. Which is either in the ocean, in South Africa or in the middle of the Amazon. The ocean is inconvenient for mass transit on the elevator. The Amazon is needed for biodiversity. Which leaves South Africa--a political hotbed. Not that they'd want it--it'd be a huge eyesore, hovering on the horizon from hundreds of miles away. Even if we paid them to take it the PC crowd would say we were "exploiting the poor blacks" in SA.
The lift will be anchored to a floating platform in the middle of the Pacific ocean. (Did i mentioned that you should read the article?)
-----------------
I don't know who's worse - the author of this article or the moderator that rated it Interesting (at least it wasn't rated Insightful)
Re:People need to read the FAQ...
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2
It's anchored in a floating platform in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
I would like to sugest a new kind of biometric identification - the Personalized Advanced Identification Norm ( P.A.I.N. ).
The user is made to read Slashdot articles at level -1 for 15 minutes. During that time the pattern in which the user bangs his/her head in the table is measured. This pattern is trained into a neural-network, that is later used to identify the user.
This method is a bit slow but i'll personally garantee that it's fail-proof (trust me).
In all seriouseness i believe that to fall for the "Joe says he can do this in 2 ours" line from management one needs to be a lot like Marty in "Back To The Future" - young and naive. Guess what future (in one of the timelines) did that brought to Marty?
Think about it this way: - Managers don't really believe that bullshit. The ones that believe any arbitrary number a developer produces are long gone (after promising to deliver in 2 weeks a project that ended-up taking 1 year or something similar). - Managers (the short-sighted ones, at least) will however try to squeeze as many visible hour of work as they can from the employees (the keyword here is "visible"). If a project is late but it appears that the developers were working 12 hour shifts then the manager looks as somebody able to make their team give out all they can give. - Even if the other developer is actually capable of delivering what he said, so what? In IT, being really good as a developer is not the main factor in promotion and/or increased salary. Being good with company politics and looking good in your CV and in job interviews is much more important. Being an exceptionaly good techie can actually be bad for one's career - if you're not careful you become indispensable in your current position (meaning non-promotable).
MGR: How much time do you think it will take you to do this? POB (Plain Old Bastard): At least 2 weeks. MGR: Jimbo, the programmer over in section C, says that it should only take 2 hours. POB: Well then let Jimbo do it. MGR: He's already assigned to other other projects. POB: I have no doubt that Jimbo is absolutely needed for this part of the project - he is such an outstanding developer that none of us could possible achieve a development effeciency even comparable to his. MGR: *silence* POB: I'm sure he won't mind giving up his lunch time for a couple of days - after all, it's only 2 hours. MGR: *gasp* POB: And may i sugest that the whole group is given 2 weeks of training, having him teach us how to increase our efficiency closer to his level...
Change country - there are actually places in the world were the work mentality is such that is almost unthinkable to ask someone to work more than 9 to 5, even in IT.
The specifically case i know is Holland.
Beware of Portugal and the UK - both share the "squeeze your employee as much as you can" mentality.
The tech bubble was basically a big pyramid scheme: - As long as there was new money coming in (read new investment) the people already in would keep making money (more people buy shares => shares go up => people that bought shares in the past can now sell them with a profit)
Guess what - there were no more fools left (did i say "fools"??? I'm sooo sorry) to buy those extraordinarily overvaluated shares (at the top of the tech bubble P/E ratios were several times the historic value)
That's also why the Dollar has now devaluated in relation to the Euro - during the tech bubble there was a lot of money coming in from european fools (Damn, i did it again!!!). That money now (whatever is left) is leaving the US.
Actually it depends a) Is "My Best Friend's Wedding" a p0rn movie? b) Are we talking about the actors or the viewers here? c) Which part of the body is supposed to be shaved???
Thank you Sony for once again reminding me why i don't buy Sony products anymore.
Ever since the DCMA controversy started i stopped buying Sony products - any Sony products. I don't care if they're good or bad, geeckish or general consumer, music, video, electronics or whatever - i purposely avoid any and all products from Sony any any company i know is part of the Sony "empire".
Compile the system. There's a fanastic guide at linuxfromscratch.org [linuxfromscratch.org].
Set the fstab up to place all read-write hierarchies on a tmpfs filesystem. This include tmp, var, and portions of etc. Have copies of the initial state of thse filesystems in a separate directory on the CD and set the bootscripts up to untar them at bootup.
Compile a highly compatible kernel. Basically, enable most things that cannot be compiled as modules and compile all modules.
Use devfs with compatibility links. it cuts down on confusion as to what devices exist.
Create an ISO of the filesystem, being sure to enable all options required for bootable CDs.
You forgot: - Only the Slashdot Reader has the ability, mental stamina and strong stomach to discuss the finer points of how great Slashsdot Readers think they are (with the exception of the Slashdot Reader that's actually doing the discussion which is naturally the exception)
Not that i disagree with you...
This kinda reminds me of a survey of car drivers: - 90% thought they were good drivers and that most other drivers were bad drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
the operating system I had bought to fix the Microsoft glitch of not recognizing AMD processors in Win95 that were faster than 300MHz
There's a patch from MS to fix this. Unfortunatly you have to be able to boot Win95 in order to apply a patch so that you can boot Win95
8-<>
Anyways, the solution is to:
1) Go low-level and temporarily reconfigure your motherboard so that your processor runs slower.
2) Install and patch Win95.
3) Put your processor speed back to nominal.
For a moment there I thought the "Nintendo Effect" was the name given to some part of the global warming that's due to newer and hotter game machines:
enough beer makes ugly people attractive
And i thought that a beer-belly was unactractive...
Then again maybe this line is sponsered by the BIAA (Beer Industry Association of America)
Damn ... this one is never old !!!
That wouldn't work - everybody knows politicians almost never get sent to prision.
A must beter choice that would directly impact in the really dangerous criminals would be a list of software developers.
Yep, start with them Open Source Developers - everybody knows thei're all hackers that just haven't been caught in the act yet (dirty basterds). Since hacking has bigger sentences than murder or rape, hacking must be worse.
They really meant "Anti". It's all an extraordinarily inteligent word game that us, Average Slashdoters, cannot even begin to compreend.
I agree with some points and i disagree with others. Just a couple of comments:
> It's not government's responsibility to prop them up by becoming their enforcement arm.
What is the government's responsibility anyway? I mean, I'm sure you have your own fantasy about what a government does, but the actual real government does spend quite a lot of its effort propping up industry. And I know you probably think that's only because they're in the pocket of industry, but it might also have something to do with the fact that a healthy economy is more likely to get them re-elected.
It is not the responsibility of the government to prop-up any specific industry.
In order to improve the quality of life of the citizens, a government should act to improve THE WHOLE ECONOMY. From a purely economical point of view, when passing laws a government has to consider the impact of that law on the overall economy - if a law provides a local increase in wealth (say to RIAA and MPAA members) but a decrease in the overall wealth of a country, then that law should not be passed.
On top of this there is also the discussion about the influence of social (read non-economic) factors in the overall quality of life of the citizens of a country - the extremes of optimizing ONLY economic factors or ONLY social factors do not lead to the maximization of the quality of life.
------------------
> The telegram industry was a perfectly legitimate industry that employed millions of people. If they were the RIAA, they would lobby to ban the telephone because it is a threat to their bottom line. It makes little sense.
Except you left out a major difference between telegrams and music. The telegram was rendered obsolete by the telephone. Music isn't becoming obsolete; CDs are. That's a huge distinction.
Telegraphs are "one way of sending information over long distances"
CD's are "one way of distributing music"
Telegraphs have become obsolete but the need to "send information over long distances" is still there and has been satisfied by new products
It can be argued that new (superior) products (internet distribution) are now offering competition to CDs in the area of "distributing music" and that they are being hold-back by the legal manouvers of RIAA.
-----------
>The problem lies in the fact that I can't put the new Linkin Park CD into my MP3 collection.
Oh look, a red herring. We weren't discussing DRM. We were discussing piracy specifically. Don't try to confuse the two.
Mandatory DRM is being sold by the Music and Cinema industries as a response to piracy. If THEY say it's related to piracy, who are we to say it isn't???
Part of the rationale behind Open Source Only Laws is:
- Limit dependency on a single provider. You use MSWord -> You're stuck with Microsoft. If/When the provider decides to stop supporting the version of the software you are using then you're stuck with either buying a newer version or hoping that divine intervention will keep it working ok. If your software provider goes belly up then you're stuck with the "hope for divine intervention" option.
- Security. Closed source software may contain dormant or active backdoors and remote exploits, either due to bugs or due to demands from an Inteligence Agency. This is especially relevant for software that is used by government agencies (still, don't forget good old industrial espionage).
Also keep in mind that Open Source doesn't actually imply Publicly Open Source. Laws that require Open Source Software can be made in such a way that the Source Code is only required to be available to the customer.
With such a law in place, a Closed Source Company just has to decide if it is or not a good business decision for them to open their software to that specific client (probably with some contractual clauses so that it isn't made available to the outside world).
As i see it, Closed Source companies just don't want to have contractual obligations (like "no source, no deal") imposed by their customers. They would rather have all customers "pay-up and shut-up".
First of all, you have the technical issues. There are no NEO objects strong enough to support hanging an elevator from.
e /general.shtml). That means that while still inside Earth's athmosphere the rocket will have to achieve a speed much bigger than 160 km/h which is a drag (pun intended).
Read the article - it's not going to be tethered to anything on the space side. It's going to be kept in place by a combination of gravitational force on the Earth side and centrifugal force in the space side.
Computer control to keep the Earth end at a constant height (which essentially requires solving the n-body problem where n = several dozen) in real time is impossibly hard.
I'm sure the gravitational effect of Io will not be enought to distabilize a structure hold in place by centrifugal force (Want more centrifugal force? Make the line longer!!!)
Not to mention the fact that the engine to lift the elevator car has to put out the same energy that a rocket engine does (conservation of energy, heard of it?).
You sorta forgot that rockets go up with a lot of useless stuff that ends up falling down again - like fuel, 1st and 2nd stage engines, and basically most of the payload of the rocket at lift-off.
Also, and acording to the article (did i mention you should've read the article?), the lift will move cargo (and eventually passengers) at between 120 and 160 km/h.
Drag (which is a way of loosing energy - conservation of energy, remember?) is proporcional to speed. Any rocket trying to achieve low earth orbit will need to achieve a speed of around least 17,500 miles an hour (Space shuttle low orbit speed - http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/ssa/docs/Space.Shuttl
Even assuming these issues could be magically fixed somehow, we have the socio-political issues. In order to be geosynchronous it has to be over the equator. Which is either in the ocean, in South Africa or in the middle of the Amazon. The ocean is inconvenient for mass transit on the elevator. The Amazon is needed for biodiversity. Which leaves South Africa--a political hotbed. Not that they'd want it--it'd be a huge eyesore, hovering on the horizon from hundreds of miles away. Even if we paid them to take it the PC crowd would say we were "exploiting the poor blacks" in SA.
The lift will be anchored to a floating platform in the middle of the Pacific ocean. (Did i mentioned that you should read the article?)
-----------------
I don't know who's worse - the author of this article or the moderator that rated it Interesting (at least it wasn't rated Insightful)
It's anchored in a floating platform in the middle of the Pacific ocean.
When do i get my prize?
I would like to sugest a new kind of biometric identification - the Personalized Advanced Identification Norm ( P.A.I.N. ).
The user is made to read Slashdot articles at level -1 for 15 minutes. During that time the pattern in which the user bangs his/her head in the table is measured. This pattern is trained into a neural-network, that is later used to identify the user.
This method is a bit slow but i'll personally garantee that it's fail-proof (trust me).
In all seriouseness i believe that to fall for the "Joe says he can do this in 2 ours" line from management one needs to be a lot like Marty in "Back To The Future" - young and naive. Guess what future (in one of the timelines) did that brought to Marty?
Think about it this way:
- Managers don't really believe that bullshit. The ones that believe any arbitrary number a developer produces are long gone (after promising to deliver in 2 weeks a project that ended-up taking 1 year or something similar).
- Managers (the short-sighted ones, at least) will however try to squeeze as many visible hour of work as they can from the employees (the keyword here is "visible"). If a project is late but it appears that the developers were working 12 hour shifts then the manager looks as somebody able to make their team give out all they can give.
- Even if the other developer is actually capable of delivering what he said, so what? In IT, being really good as a developer is not the main factor in promotion and/or increased salary. Being good with company politics and looking good in your CV and in job interviews is much more important. Being an exceptionaly good techie can actually be bad for one's career - if you're not careful you become indispensable in your current position (meaning non-promotable).
MGR: How much time do you think it will take you to do this? ...
POB (Plain Old Bastard): At least 2 weeks.
MGR: Jimbo, the programmer over in section C, says that it should only take 2 hours.
POB: Well then let Jimbo do it.
MGR: He's already assigned to other other projects.
POB: I have no doubt that Jimbo is absolutely needed for this part of the project - he is such an outstanding developer that none of us could possible achieve a development effeciency even comparable to his.
MGR: *silence*
POB: I'm sure he won't mind giving up his lunch time for a couple of days - after all, it's only 2 hours.
MGR: *gasp*
POB: And may i sugest that the whole group is given 2 weeks of training, having him teach us how to increase our efficiency closer to his level
Change country - there are actually places in the world were the work mentality is such that is almost unthinkable to ask someone to work more than 9 to 5, even in IT.
The specifically case i know is Holland.
Beware of Portugal and the UK - both share the "squeeze your employee as much as you can" mentality.
The tech bubble was basically a big pyramid scheme:
- As long as there was new money coming in (read new investment) the people already in would keep making money (more people buy shares => shares go up => people that bought shares in the past can now sell them with a profit)
Guess what - there were no more fools left (did i say "fools"??? I'm sooo sorry) to buy those extraordinarily overvaluated shares (at the top of the tech bubble P/E ratios were several times the historic value)
That's also why the Dollar has now devaluated in relation to the Euro - during the tech bubble there was a lot of money coming in from european fools (Damn, i did it again!!!). That money now (whatever is left) is leaving the US.
Actually it depends
a) Is "My Best Friend's Wedding" a p0rn movie?
b) Are we talking about the actors or the viewers here?
c) Which part of the body is supposed to be shaved???
Na, na, na, na, naa, na
What do you mean Konqueror has it too ???
Oops
Thank you Sony for once again reminding me why i don't buy Sony products anymore.
Ever since the DCMA controversy started i stopped buying Sony products - any Sony products. I don't care if they're good or bad, geeckish or general consumer, music, video, electronics or whatever - i purposely avoid any and all products from Sony any any company i know is part of the Sony "empire".
I've voted with my wallet - What about YOU?
So what movies would you want to see on IMAX?
... did i said creamy banana? Sorry about that - please disregard this post
I want to see Creamy Banana 21 in all it's glory!!!
Oh, wait
This one is about drinking too much water. One can actually kill himself by drinking too much water - no need to put any in your lungs.
I'll tell you one thing:
- After you've seen a pre-historic drawing of a penis in a cave wall, you've seen them all.
Am i the only one to think that Saber-tooth Tiger bestiality would be a bit to much???
(Yep - i'm old enough to remember the "good old days" of Usenet with strange groups and strange FAQs. Now, where did i put my cane?)
You forgot:
...
- Only the Slashdot Reader has the ability, mental stamina and strong stomach to discuss the finer points of how great Slashsdot Readers think they are (with the exception of the Slashdot Reader that's actually doing the discussion which is naturally the exception)
Not that i disagree with you
This kinda reminds me of a survey of car drivers:
- 90% thought they were good drivers and that most other drivers were bad drivers.