The reason? The computer was a smoking wreck from lightning strike. He didn't want to call the manufacturer because they would charge him for support.
Oh yeah, been there & seen that. I used to do ADSL faults/installs for the most hated ISP in the country*, and it was remarkably common for this to happen. You'd walk into a house where everything electrical was a smoking wreck, and the customer would insist that you "fix my computer, because it's connected to the modem so the damage must have come from there!"
Or they'd turn around and demand that you, the ISP/phone company, provide them with a loan computer while theirs was away for repair at IBM/Dell/HP/the local Computer Clown...
Lightning strikes are odd, though. More often than not, a single electrical appliance would survive - a clock here, a microwave there. Surprisingly often, it was the ADSL modem that survived. I walked into one place - on the top of a ridge; prime lightning strike territory - and was lead down to the "server room". In this suburban house, I saw the best collection of HP/Cisco routers & switches I've ever seen outside of a datacentre. All in order to connect his desktop & laptop to the internet. OK, so the guy's a geek...
Anyway, the room stinks of smoke. The monitor has a huge ding where the shadowmask has warped & the phosphors have been stripped - must have been nearly a direct strike to cause that. Everything is dead... except, what's that in there? Green lights? The modem's OK?!
Plugged my laptop straight into modem - yup, fine, right on to the 'net. I traced the ethernet cable back to the patch panel so he could temporarily plug his laptop straight in. Couldn't unplug it from the patch-panel though - that end had melted into the jack.
I explain this to the guy, point out to him that the modem is OK - in fact, it's the only thing in the room that's OK - and he goes absolutely ballistic, swearing at me, casting doubts on my parentage, and insisting that my mother had been involved in congress with dogs. Finally, he calms down enough to be merely raving at me that it must be the modem's fault everything's destroyed because "I have a UPS plugged into a filtered powerboard, and that has a $50,000 insurance guarantee". He reaches down to show me the powerboard, and can't - because it's melted into the carpet...
Still, he wanted a replacement ethernet cable. Under warranty, of course. So then I had to break it to him that his warranty had expired 5 days before the storm. I did offer to waive the $99 callout fee - if he signed another 12 month contract...
-- * Don't hate me for that, though - I was one of only 2 or 3 out of 60 who actually understood the technology & knew what they were doing. Which led to me (a) doing it full-time, rather than only occasionally like everybody else, and (b) not meeting their daily job targets, because I only did 3 or 4 jobs a day from running all over town doing the bastard jobs...
Unfortually most MoBO don't hook the ground up properly, so it doesn't work.
Actually, there's 2 differences
The keyboard port requires open collector drivers on CLK & DATA at both ends, because communications is bi-directional, and
IIRC, though I can't find confirmation anywhere, the mouse port doesn't require CLK
The first is probably the origin of the "doesn't hook up the ground properly" myth which, although similar, is not exactly correct.
In reality, on most m'boards these days both are exactly the same - they both have OC drivers, and both supply CLK. Well, full-size m'boards, at least - the A7V8X in my main PC is happy either way, as is the cheap Gigabyte whatever in my server, but the Mini-ITX in my router is picky.
Before the internet they only got to spew conspiracy nonsense to their friends (who probbably stopped listening years ago).
Not true. 20+ years ago, I was getting badly composited and poorly photocopied incoherent screeds ranting against the Number of the Beast & barcodes, government mind-control & flouride, & the Communist takeover through destruction of moral society, stuffed in my letterbox weekly.
Not to mention the Jack Chick tracts every few days. It was a toss-up as to which type was funnier...
(Though, to my mind, the mind-control implant ones that had a picture of a cat with a 555 timer IC crudely cut-and-pasted on its forehead were the best. Somehow they never made the connection that (a) a 555, if you could wire it into the brain, would at best make something akin to a clockwork cat, and (b) "555" was *so* close to "666";-)
You can't negotiate cheaper prices for anything in a medium or large-sized store.
Of course you can. If you can't walk into Harvey Norman, Bing Lee, The Good Guys, or one of the Clive's, and get at least 10% off anything over $100, you're just not trying...
And I don't know about these days, but places like Coles & Woolies used to be open for organised shopping groups outside normal hours, with a 5 or 10% discount across the board.
In austrailia, can you pull something like that off in say, a McDonalds?
Different story - McDonalds store margins are razor-thin - but it can be done. Ring 'em up and make a group booking.
(Aside: McDonalds really hate it when you bring in a big group without warning, particularly during a slow time. It plays merry hell with their predictive cooking system, which is the very thing that allows them to run with such tight margins. A couple of store owners have told me that when the system goes down, even the best human management means the store will only just beat break even until it's fixed...)
And it's unfortunate that PerversionTracker ground to a halt a couple of years ago. Much easier to navigate than Versiontracker or MacUpdate, it was at least as useful at steering you towards quality Mac apps (or at least steering you away from the truly bad ones)...
A standard would be easier. Just have someone say "Tabs are now officially SOME_NUMBER spaces long, so fuck you."
I thought they had...
[History lesson]
Typewriters - very early typewriters - had tab stops equivalent to 8 spaces. That was it; no ifs, no buts, no negotiation. Later models had the first tab stop equivalent to 8 spaces, then 2 or 3 adjustable tab stops inside that. Even later ones had the first stop adjustable was well.
Y'see, the TAB key is short for "table" - it was designed to make it easy to print tabulated data.
Notice I was very careful to say "equivalent" above - a TAB is not equal to 8 spaces! Nor is it equal to 2, or 4, or 6, or anything else you want to dream up. It's a character in its own right; one whose most common representation is as a gap the same size as 8 spaces.
Somewhere along the line, people involved with computers decided that TAB was actually a macro that meant "print 8 spaces". This was a departure from accepted philosophy and, like most such schisms, led to the Holy War that is still going on. And, like most Holy Wars, people come up with brain-dead attempts at reconciliation that ignore the cause of the problem.
Ever wonder why a config file like/etc/sudoers warns you "This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command"? No, it's not to prove you're 'leet enough to be editing it by forcing you memorize vi commands; the biggest reason is that the fields are delimited by actual TAB characters. Not spaces, but TABs. Look at it in a hex editor sometime...
In short: there are 2 whitespace characters in ASCII - the space, being the equivalent of 1 (average) character wide; and the TAB, being nominally 8 characters, but able to be represented (not replaced!) by whatever you want. Don't confuse them.
And that's the point, really. Two people, who owe their positions in the pantheon of 'Internet celebrities' to a certain amount of nerd-cred, find they have to [be || appear to be] even nerdier to keep those positions. What better way to do that - and generate a nice little publicity storm in a teacup at the same time - than to "switch" to Linux?
Wake me up when RMS buys a Mac...
Re:freedb has sucked for ages, though...
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 1
freedb has sucked almost since it's inception. Multiple entries for the same album, hard to do Various Artist albums, lots of misspellings and mistakes, and no way to ""fix" the problems.
In other words, the same problems that afflicted the original (free) CDDB (now Gracenote)?
FWIW, I've found much the same problems with Musicbrainz, except that it's much more likely to tag a track totally incorrectly than CDDB/Gracenote or FreeDB ever were...
"The device could be used to improve... add an extra dimension... assist... help..."
Noble ideals, indeed.
But you already know the real purposes such technology will be put to - SUV ads will smell of pristine forests, cordite, and female pheremones (rather than stale beer, city smog, and unwashed children); McDonalds ads will smell of freshly-cooked Wagu beef, strawberries, and fresh apples (instead of rancid fat, rancid beef, and little pus-filled pastries); Coke ads will smell of... well you get the picture.
Already, fresh-bread scent is added to the bakery section of the supermarket; roast beef scent is added to the meat section; vanilla scent is added to the frozen foods section.
Never underestimate the power of technology to exploit you. This is one of those cases where things might be better in Soviet Russia...
There doesn't appear to be a way to pre-emptively moderate my post as "-1, Troll", but here goes...
Open up your favourite text editor. Paste the parent post in there. Now, search & replace "Starnes" with "Bush", "Twentieth Century Motor Company" with "United States of America", and "meeting" with "election".
To defraud someone of a dollar is to steal it. Theft is theft under any economic system, but it's institutionalized under socialism.
Eh? How's that? I think you really need to read Marx, Engels, and Feuerbach - and Smith, Hayek, and Friedman too - and forget the 50's "Reds under the bed"-influenced education/indoctrination you've received. Time to stop conflating Leninism, Stalinism, Communism, and Socialism, too...
Somebody upthread brough up the concept of "Perfect Information", and added "Scamming someone violates the idea of "perfect information" and is the reason we have anti-fraud laws on the books in every capitalist country". Well, what's modern advertising, if not an attempt to distort "perfect information" in favour of the advertiser? Sounds pretty damned close to institutionalised theft/fraud to me, sanctioned by your favourite socio-economic philosophy...
something involving solenoids, cams, clutches, and ratchets - among other things - would be needed
That's pretty much it - the trick is all in the timing (and keeping the timing in sync).
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - no relays allowed, at least not in the receive signal path. You can't go building a shift register / buffer that easily;-)
If you want to see something similar, look into old "reproducing" player pianos.
Yup, very similar technologies. In fact, I'd be prepared to bet money that the early electromechanical teleprinter engineers and technicians were influenced by the - then state-of-the-art - technology. The early 1900's was when the marriage of electricity and mechanicals really took off on all sorts of cool directions.
... he also had to use twisted-pair wire, grounding one of the pair to improve signal shielding and prevent crosstalk over the length of wire...
Should've used a current-loop interface;-)
I wonder why more people don't find this old technology fascinating, given the popularity of "steampunk" fiction amongst the Slashdotting class. They were building huge text-based addressable store-and-forward networks before the advent of the microprocessor - or even electronics - y'know...
Plastic was "cheap" and steel meant quality. If the case wasn't heavy enough to kill someone with, it wasn't quality.
Tell that to the Honeywell Rosy 26 teleprinter in my garage. Plastic case, 20 years younger than the 2 Model 100's sitting next to it, much the same feature set, but 3x the weight. I was going to throw it out today, but damned near killed myself just trying to lift it!
FWIW, I suspect the real reason that Teletype Model 33 looks so ancient is that, from looking at the internals, it appears to be a clone/ripoff of a Siemens Model 100 or a Creed Model 47 - both much earlier models - updated with an "electronic" keyboard. IIRC, Teletype Corp bought (or maybe partnered with) the UK-based Creed.
(Slashdotters with a mechanical bent really should look into the old electromechanical teleprinters. They're amazing machines; a real tribute to the ingenuity of their designers. Given a motor spinning at 3000 RPM, and no electronics, how would you convert a 5-bit code to printed text?)
No more voter registration along party lines. Either you're elligible to vote, or not. Who you vote for, what party you want to be aligned with, etc., are all your own bloody business.
This is one of the things about the American political / electoral system which seems just crazy to an outsider - the whole "registered Democrat / Republican" thing. I know it's not compulsory, I know it's not done in every state, and I know it's (supposed to be) only used for your strange system of Primaries etc. But do you really not see how it's not too far removed from wearing a (cue Godwin...) Jewish Star?
Want to vote in Party elections? Fine, go join that party, separately, off your own back. It's something which has no place on a supposedly impartial electoral roll...
Does anybody have a rational explanation why a paper copy of a letter would have more significance than an electronic copy? Does the act of printing, stuffing into an envelope and mailing really add that much more meaning?
Because any fool, as often evidenced by this very forum, can type something on their computer and hit the "Send" button. It takes next to no effort at all - hell, I've sent this just by sitting on my arse for a few minutes and wiggling my fingers.
Going to the effort of finding pen, paper, envelope, stamp, composing it, writing it down, and sending it indicates the person writing cares just that little bit more about the issue - maybe just that little more necessary to reconsider their vote at election time.
Same thing goes for spelling - a correctly spelled (& gramatically correct!) letter indicates the person has either (a) a better, wider education than most, or (b) a decent computer with spellchecker, the nous to use it, & the even more nous required to know when it's wrong;-)
I sometimes wonder how many people who have raved against things on/. have held their beliefs for longer than the time it takes to read the comments? I know myself that, while there are certain brands of hardware I remember not to buy because they've fscked over the GPL, Linux, or customers in the past, there are also other issues I've felt strongly about until they've scrolled off the bottom of the page...
As much as I hate the poisonous warty brown little bastards, it's interesting to note that the humane techniques for killing them are much more effective than the inhumane. Whilst they have been observed to re-ingest their own internals and continue on their merry way after being run over, and I have personally seen one still living (with its guts hanging out its back) 3 weeks after being stabbed repeatedly with a pitchfork, the two common humane methods of killing them - freezing them, or severing the brain stem - are 100% effective.
... DVD has more than enough bitrate to hold all of the data that still remains on the mistreated film reels.
So you don't understand how compression works in the real world. That's fine, but it's no reason to go spreading misinformation.
All that noise, jitter, grain, flecks, scratches, etc means that old sources compress less well than nice clean modern film stock & TV source. MPEG-2/4 compression works to a large degree by interpreting and encoding interframe differences - the transient noise in old/poor/noisy film stock tends to vary a lot between frames, so needs higher bitrates, not lower, to approach the quality of the original source. Put simply, the worse the source, the higher the bitrate you need to keep what quality there is in the original.
Then again, older movies are often shorter, so some of their need for higher bitrates on DVD is offset right there...
I haven't bothered to figure it out yet, but they sometimes work, often don't.
I've never seen the first one I use work.
I just put it down to confirmation bias - y'know, the brain thrashes around trying to make a pattern out of one datum point, then incorporates further information into this pattern rather than using the whole to form a logical conclusion.
I'd like to hear anyone's explanation of this. Oddly, they're all working this time except the first one.
Or, it could be that the first one is broken.
I have just one question: What the hell are you talking about?!
He told me it's the change of environment (in this case from dirty to clean air) that did it for him. Very strange.
Not at all. I'll often get hay-fever-like symptoms - sneezing, runny eyes and nose, sinus, etc - when going from one environment to another. From outside into air-conditioned offices, from offices into the outside air, etc.
Personally, I've found the best cure is to have a cigarette. 20 years ago I'd go back to the original non-triggering environment to do it - but now you can't smoke in offices, so I go outside. This tends to piss people off when I'm in a meeting, start sneezing uncontrollably, get up, and leave - so I make a point of pulling out my cigarette packet on the way out the door;-).
For the same reason, I'll almost always smoke before getting in a car or on public transport.
They applied statistical analysis to the less predictable of the modern team sports.
And that's the real story here. Such analysis software has been used for years in other tactical team & individual sports - cricket, tennis, other football codes, etc.
Of course, it's not the first time it's been used in soccer either. Though it is fairly impressive that it can be developed to analyse what is, as the parent says, one of the less predictable team sports. Compared to this, similar analysis of American football looks like a set of fairly simple lookup tables (and probably is...)
Why is this YRO? Wiki isn't a government organization. If they don't like what Joe Random does, they can't kick the door down & send him to the gulag.
Yet...;-)
Slashdot, circa 1925... "Why is this YRO? The MPAA isn't a government organization. If they don't like what Joe Random does, they can't kick the door down & send him to the gulag."
Slashdot Mirror
I was about 5 or 6 when I asked my father (an electrician) what he meant by "male" & "female" connectors.
I was so scarred by his explanation that I'm now 39 and still posting on Slashdot...
Or they'd turn around and demand that you, the ISP/phone company, provide them with a loan computer while theirs was away for repair at IBM/Dell/HP/the local Computer Clown...
Lightning strikes are odd, though. More often than not, a single electrical appliance would survive - a clock here, a microwave there. Surprisingly often, it was the ADSL modem that survived. I walked into one place - on the top of a ridge; prime lightning strike territory - and was lead down to the "server room". In this suburban house, I saw the best collection of HP/Cisco routers & switches I've ever seen outside of a datacentre. All in order to connect his desktop & laptop to the internet. OK, so the guy's a geek...
Anyway, the room stinks of smoke. The monitor has a huge ding where the shadowmask has warped & the phosphors have been stripped - must have been nearly a direct strike to cause that. Everything is dead
Plugged my laptop straight into modem - yup, fine, right on to the 'net. I traced the ethernet cable back to the patch panel so he could temporarily plug his laptop straight in. Couldn't unplug it from the patch-panel though - that end had melted into the jack.
I explain this to the guy, point out to him that the modem is OK - in fact, it's the only thing in the room that's OK - and he goes absolutely ballistic, swearing at me, casting doubts on my parentage, and insisting that my mother had been involved in congress with dogs. Finally, he calms down enough to be merely raving at me that it must be the modem's fault everything's destroyed because "I have a UPS plugged into a filtered powerboard, and that has a $50,000 insurance guarantee". He reaches down to show me the powerboard, and can't - because it's melted into the carpet...
Still, he wanted a replacement ethernet cable. Under warranty, of course. So then I had to break it to him that his warranty had expired 5 days before the storm. I did offer to waive the $99 callout fee - if he signed another 12 month contract...
--
* Don't hate me for that, though - I was one of only 2 or 3 out of 60 who actually understood the technology & knew what they were doing. Which led to me (a) doing it full-time, rather than only occasionally like everybody else, and (b) not meeting their daily job targets, because I only did 3 or 4 jobs a day from running all over town doing the bastard jobs...
- The keyboard port requires open collector drivers on CLK & DATA at both ends, because communications is bi-directional, and
- IIRC, though I can't find confirmation anywhere, the mouse port doesn't require CLK
The first is probably the origin of the "doesn't hook up the ground properly" myth which, although similar, is not exactly correct.In reality, on most m'boards these days both are exactly the same - they both have OC drivers, and both supply CLK. Well, full-size m'boards, at least - the A7V8X in my main PC is happy either way, as is the cheap Gigabyte whatever in my server, but the Mini-ITX in my router is picky.
Not to mention the Jack Chick tracts every few days. It was a toss-up as to which type was funnier...
(Though, to my mind, the mind-control implant ones that had a picture of a cat with a 555 timer IC crudely cut-and-pasted on its forehead were the best. Somehow they never made the connection that (a) a 555, if you could wire it into the brain, would at best make something akin to a clockwork cat, and (b) "555" was *so* close to "666"
And I don't know about these days, but places like Coles & Woolies used to be open for organised shopping groups outside normal hours, with a 5 or 10% discount across the board.
Different story - McDonalds store margins are razor-thin - but it can be done. Ring 'em up and make a group booking.
(Aside: McDonalds really hate it when you bring in a big group without warning, particularly during a slow time. It plays merry hell with their predictive cooking system, which is the very thing that allows them to run with such tight margins. A couple of store owners have told me that when the system goes down, even the best human management means the store will only just beat break even until it's fixed...)
But Fugu doesn't do FTP - only SFTP.
And it's unfortunate that PerversionTracker ground to a halt a couple of years ago. Much easier to navigate than Versiontracker or MacUpdate, it was at least as useful at steering you towards quality Mac apps (or at least steering you away from the truly bad ones)...
[History lesson]
Typewriters - very early typewriters - had tab stops equivalent to 8 spaces. That was it; no ifs, no buts, no negotiation. Later models had the first tab stop equivalent to 8 spaces, then 2 or 3 adjustable tab stops inside that. Even later ones had the first stop adjustable was well.
Y'see, the TAB key is short for "table" - it was designed to make it easy to print tabulated data.
Notice I was very careful to say "equivalent" above - a TAB is not equal to 8 spaces! Nor is it equal to 2, or 4, or 6, or anything else you want to dream up. It's a character in its own right; one whose most common representation is as a gap the same size as 8 spaces.
Somewhere along the line, people involved with computers decided that TAB was actually a macro that meant "print 8 spaces". This was a departure from accepted philosophy and, like most such schisms, led to the Holy War that is still going on. And, like most Holy Wars, people come up with brain-dead attempts at reconciliation that ignore the cause of the problem.
Ever wonder why a config file like
In short: there are 2 whitespace characters in ASCII - the space, being the equivalent of 1 (average) character wide; and the TAB, being nominally 8 characters, but able to be represented (not replaced!) by whatever you want. Don't confuse them.
And that's the point, really. Two people, who owe their positions in the pantheon of 'Internet celebrities' to a certain amount of nerd-cred, find they have to [be || appear to be] even nerdier to keep those positions. What better way to do that - and generate a nice little publicity storm in a teacup at the same time - than to "switch" to Linux?
Wake me up when RMS buys a Mac...
FWIW, I've found much the same problems with Musicbrainz, except that it's much more likely to tag a track totally incorrectly than CDDB/Gracenote or FreeDB ever were...
But you already know the real purposes such technology will be put to - SUV ads will smell of pristine forests, cordite, and female pheremones (rather than stale beer, city smog, and unwashed children); McDonalds ads will smell of freshly-cooked Wagu beef, strawberries, and fresh apples (instead of rancid fat, rancid beef, and little pus-filled pastries); Coke ads will smell of
Already, fresh-bread scent is added to the bakery section of the supermarket; roast beef scent is added to the meat section; vanilla scent is added to the frozen foods section.
Never underestimate the power of technology to exploit you. This is one of those cases where things might be better in Soviet Russia...
There doesn't appear to be a way to pre-emptively moderate my post as "-1, Troll", but here goes...
Open up your favourite text editor. Paste the parent post in there. Now, search & replace "Starnes" with "Bush", "Twentieth Century Motor Company" with "United States of America", and "meeting" with "election".
Re-read. Uncomfortable, isn't it?
Ayn Rand was the Ann Coulter of her day...
Somebody upthread brough up the concept of "Perfect Information", and added "Scamming someone violates the idea of "perfect information" and is the reason we have anti-fraud laws on the books in every capitalist country". Well, what's modern advertising, if not an attempt to distort "perfect information" in favour of the advertiser? Sounds pretty damned close to institutionalised theft/fraud to me, sanctioned by your favourite socio-economic philosophy...
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - no relays allowed, at least not in the receive signal path. You can't go building a shift register / buffer that easily
Yup, very similar technologies. In fact, I'd be prepared to bet money that the early electromechanical teleprinter engineers and technicians were influenced by the - then state-of-the-art - technology. The early 1900's was when the marriage of electricity and mechanicals really took off on all sorts of cool directions.
Should've used a current-loop interface
I wonder why more people don't find this old technology fascinating, given the popularity of "steampunk" fiction amongst the Slashdotting class. They were building huge text-based addressable store-and-forward networks before the advent of the microprocessor - or even electronics - y'know...
FWIW, I suspect the real reason that Teletype Model 33 looks so ancient is that, from looking at the internals, it appears to be a clone/ripoff of a Siemens Model 100 or a Creed Model 47 - both much earlier models - updated with an "electronic" keyboard. IIRC, Teletype Corp bought (or maybe partnered with) the UK-based Creed.
(Slashdotters with a mechanical bent really should look into the old electromechanical teleprinters. They're amazing machines; a real tribute to the ingenuity of their designers. Given a motor spinning at 3000 RPM, and no electronics, how would you convert a 5-bit code to printed text?)
Want to vote in Party elections? Fine, go join that party, separately, off your own back. It's something which has no place on a supposedly impartial electoral roll...
Going to the effort of finding pen, paper, envelope, stamp, composing it, writing it down, and sending it indicates the person writing cares just that little bit more about the issue - maybe just that little more necessary to reconsider their vote at election time.
Same thing goes for spelling - a correctly spelled (& gramatically correct!) letter indicates the person has either (a) a better, wider education than most, or (b) a decent computer with spellchecker, the nous to use it, & the even more nous required to know when it's wrong
I sometimes wonder how many people who have raved against things on
And here's the original source of that google video, if you want it in its full QT or DivX glory...
All that noise, jitter, grain, flecks, scratches, etc means that old sources compress less well than nice clean modern film stock & TV source. MPEG-2/4 compression works to a large degree by interpreting and encoding interframe differences - the transient noise in old/poor/noisy film stock tends to vary a lot between frames, so needs higher bitrates, not lower, to approach the quality of the original source. Put simply, the worse the source, the higher the bitrate you need to keep what quality there is in the original.
Then again, older movies are often shorter, so some of their need for higher bitrates on DVD is offset right there...
I just put it down to confirmation bias - y'know, the brain thrashes around trying to make a pattern out of one datum point, then incorporates further information into this pattern rather than using the whole to form a logical conclusion.
Or, it could be that the first one is broken.
I have just one question: What the hell are you talking about?!
Personally, I've found the best cure is to have a cigarette. 20 years ago I'd go back to the original non-triggering environment to do it - but now you can't smoke in offices, so I go outside. This tends to piss people off when I'm in a meeting, start sneezing uncontrollably, get up, and leave - so I make a point of pulling out my cigarette packet on the way out the door
For the same reason, I'll almost always smoke before getting in a car or on public transport.
Of course, it's not the first time it's been used in soccer either. Though it is fairly impressive that it can be developed to analyse what is, as the parent says, one of the less predictable team sports. Compared to this, similar analysis of American football looks like a set of fairly simple lookup tables (and probably is...)
So the real gist of the article is "Open Source is interesting - but watch out for the IP issues, and if the original developers leave, you're hosed."
Hardly a glowing recommendation, is it? It shares more in common with the SCO FUD further down the front page than you may realise...
Slashdot, circa 1925...
"Why is this YRO? The MPAA isn't a government organization. If they don't like what Joe Random does, they can't kick the door down & send him to the gulag."
So what sort of pussy lab do you work in where you don't regularly immerse your undergrads in custard?