What ever happened to "buying" a book. Or a CD. Or a single track from a CD that only you want?
This is like saying, pay us X per month, and then whenever you want to, you can download a book. Wouldn't you really rather just pay Y (which may be close to X) for the book, and then take it with and read ("play") it whenever/wherever you want?
Subscriptions are all about long-term area under the curve. Once you suck somebody into paying X every month (whether X be $5 for this service, or +$30 for cable video), those dollars really add up over the long term.
Unless you are a fairly regular user of the service, monthly subscriptions rarely make sense over purchasing and owning your own copy of the media and its content.
Oh yeah: The University may be "paying" the $5 subscription here, but of course they will pass it on to students. So service fees (or tuitions) rise.
The RIAA is still served, having passed the cost of their monopoly on to the end consumer. Previously accepted copyright practice is compromised in the process.
So the only thing left after the next Big Bang will be Rovers? When I flip on the kitchen light, will little mechanical eyes blink and then instantly stainless steel wheels spin/clatter across the floor?
Ah, but this will make it much easier to do a "sender permitted from" type of thing (call it caller permitted from) with packet filters.
If your friend(s) don't have static IPs, they can use one of the free DNS-alike services to let your filter know what their current (dynamic) IP address is.
Then your filter blocks every IP except the ones you know you want.
2 questions (Earth altitude, Sol heliosphere exit)
on
Japanese Deploy Solar Sail
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
1. Did they get high enough above Earth to enter the inter-planetary "void," and thus avoid the significant effects of Earth's atmosphere? 100, 230, and 400 seconds after liftoff hardly seem "high enough."
2. What happens to such sails when they cross the heliosphere of a regionally prominent star such as Sol? Is it all chaotic photons and miscellanous radiation in the interstellar "void?" Or are conditions regulated by the nearest stellar bodies?
-- In other words, how would one navigate effectively once the prominent wind from Sol fades and is replaced by other forces? Are you doomed to follow your trajectory mainly established by Sol once you leave its heliosphere, possibly modifed by various minor (uncontrollable) forces from other winds in the void? Can you take advantage of such extra-Solar winds to go where you want?
In close proximity to the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, the cancerous mass forgot what it had originally intended to do, and did what Steve required instead:
Allowed itself to become one of the rarer types (less threatening if found early), then went ahead and got itself found early. ("You don't need to harm me... Move along..." -- Jedi Mind Trick.)
Seriously, as others have said, get well soon Steve!
If you have to provide a real looking (validly formatted) email address, don't want it to be your real one, and don't need to respond to a confirmation email -- do this:
Say you're ordering from www.hot-pr0n.com. They want an email address, but they aren't going to send a confirmation email to it (i.e., you don't need to respond to an email they will send to activate your "account" with them). Simply use an address like this:
unlisted@hot-pr0n.com
If they send an email, it'll either come right around to them, or bounce by virtue of being a non-existent address (in which case it goes back to them also). Either way, you provide a valid looking email address, but no info about you is sent to any potentially real address at some unknown location.
HP printers were on a 6 month cycle years (at least 6) ago. HW was release spring and fall.
HW cycles are "predictable," so they always just threw the product over the wall (warts and unfinished hardware problems and all) over the wall to QA.
QA, otoh, was often of a different mind regarding whether the HW (both ME and EE stuff) was really done.
So....
Fix it in firmware! What, it's too late for that? Fix it in software (in the PC-side printer drivers).
"It's just software, anway!" (translation: you can reflash the printers up until they leave the manufacturing line, while switching out a bad gear design is tougher; you can also ship new drivers over the internet _after_ sale to customer; anything ThatEasyToChange can't be that tough, right?)
Of course ME/EE types sometimes miss the part that a "build" for them, while time-consuming and materials/resource intensive, doesn't involve redesign nor re-engineering. Those activities are expensive to redo because all the downstream stuff ("build") must be redone.
A software build is just a matter of firing off make, right! So how hard can software be?! They miss the point about software design complexity being [often] considerable because of the lack of physical build issues.
All I can say about hearing that MS has a serious
Windows Automotive department going is...
You had better have a good firewall in your garage for those times when your car says to you we're home, would you like me to go online and fetch your calendar updates?
It's one thing for an unfirewalled windoze 98 box to be hacked and compromised by a remote attacker. It's quite another to have your vehicle compromised unbeknownst to you--
I don't think I want my car "crashing" its OS while I'm at the wheel, unrelated to any driving choices/mistakes I may have made. I can see it now--
"Honest Officer! I think my car must have caught the Download.Ject virus this morning!" I didn't drive into that bridge abutment on my own! Honest!!" The officer replies--
"Sir, didn't you listen to the latest Microsoft warning? You should never use your steering wheel / joystick to surf to 'unsafe' websites with IE! Now I have to write you a Stupid-Ticket."
But seriously...
How concerned are other developers about MS style code being let loose in a critical system like an automobile? I mean, running a PDA or a desktop printer is one thing. When they crash, people aren't so likely to DIE! A malfunctioning four ton Ford Excursion, on the other hand, is something I'd really rather not encounter.
I'll believe it when I see it -- that is when MS's 90%+ monopoly market share declines and there are true other players.
Until then, MS can mess up all they want (or all you say they do), and still win in the market place. As long as everything runs Windows, everything else has to be compatible with a constantly moving target.
Moving the the target is also how MS keeps their deathgrip on the share percentages. It's part of their "competitive advantages" (read, "platform lockin").
This quote comes from some long ago CS class I had. The size of the pipe often lags a generation or so behind the size of media you want to push through it in reasonable time.
Example.
My DSL provides me about 150KiB per second throughput over its advertised 1.5Mib per second downstream connection. Note that not everyone sees this kind of speed even today. At my former house I was lucky to see 90KiB per second, and that was only a service I was able to get within the last year.
Assume an average DVD movie is four to six GiB. This is typical from what I have seen of pressed dual layer discs. We have to push all that data through a pipe like mine in reasonable time. Let's use 5GiB as the average amount we need to push per movie.
Time to push 5GiB thru 150KiB per second connection --
(5 x 1024 x 1024) / 150 == 34953 seconds
That's almost ten hours to transfer your 1.5 to 2 hour movie. This presumes the connection is healthy during that entire time. This also presumes my ISP will let me transfer this much data regularly.
So I guess I could make a request from BlockBuster.com to begin transferring my movie in the morning, for viewing after work at night. Or maybe I could transfer a movie overnight for next day's viewing.
But this kills all my bandwidth for ten hours. If I use the connection simultaneously for other stuff during that time, I may significantly delay the arrival of my movie.
Note: Even if you have a cable modem and see speeds double of what I see, that is 300KiB per second, it's still gonna take 5 hours to get your movie.
In these days of instant gratification, I'm not sure waiting ten hours to get a movie is fast enough. I can walk to and from my video store in twenty minutes, and they likely have the movie I want.
I know the pipes will get faster. But won't the movies be higher res by then also?
Slashdot Mirror
I have a keyboard propping open a stubborn window at home.
(No, not a Windows(tm), a real window.)
You meant, append ".nyud.net:8090" to a host name. Note the leading period after the first quote above. As written, the story would have you do this:
...which obviously isn't correct. At list the "View Slashdo through Coral" link is correct as follows:
http://slashdot.orgnyud.net:8090/
http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/
What ever happened to "buying" a book. Or a CD. Or a single track from a CD that only you want?
This is like saying, pay us X per month, and then whenever you want to, you can download a book. Wouldn't you really rather just pay Y (which may be close to X) for the book, and then take it with and read ("play") it whenever/wherever you want?
Subscriptions are all about long-term area under the curve. Once you suck somebody into paying X every month (whether X be $5 for this service, or +$30 for cable video), those dollars really add up over the long term.
Unless you are a fairly regular user of the service, monthly subscriptions rarely make sense over purchasing and owning your own copy of the media and its content.
Oh yeah: The University may be "paying" the $5 subscription here, but of course they will pass it on to students. So service fees (or tuitions) rise.
The RIAA is still served, having passed the cost of their monopoly on to the end consumer. Previously accepted copyright practice is compromised in the process.
So the only thing left after the next Big Bang will be Rovers? When I flip on the kitchen light, will little mechanical eyes blink and then instantly stainless steel wheels spin/clatter across the floor?
Ah, but this will make it much easier to do a "sender permitted from" type of thing (call it caller permitted from) with packet filters.
If your friend(s) don't have static IPs, they can use one of the free DNS-alike services to let your filter know what their current (dynamic) IP address is.
Then your filter blocks every IP except the ones you know you want.
1. Did they get high enough above Earth to enter the inter-planetary "void," and thus avoid the significant effects of Earth's atmosphere? 100, 230, and 400 seconds after liftoff hardly seem "high enough."
2. What happens to such sails when they cross the heliosphere of a regionally prominent star such as Sol? Is it all chaotic photons and miscellanous radiation in the interstellar "void?" Or are conditions regulated by the nearest stellar bodies?
-- In other words, how would one navigate effectively once the prominent wind from Sol fades and is replaced by other forces? Are you doomed to follow your trajectory mainly established by Sol once you leave its heliosphere, possibly modifed by various minor (uncontrollable) forces from other winds in the void? Can you take advantage of such extra-Solar winds to go where you want?
So, take two marginalized, possibly failing [in the near future] companies together, and you get ... what loser synergy?
They'll lose and fail even faster now?
In close proximity to the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, the cancerous mass forgot what it had originally intended to do, and did what Steve required instead:
Allowed itself to become one of the rarer types (less threatening if found early), then went ahead and got itself found early. ("You don't need to harm me... Move along..." -- Jedi Mind Trick.)
Seriously, as others have said, get well soon Steve!
Maybe the pounding inside my head would stop... ;-)
Lack of interesting content drives them to protect what little they have left I guess.
You still watch "football" (ne, American Football for people in the real world)?
I don't
This was 12 years ago; many infractions have a statute of limitations of 10 years.
Does this?
How do we know this supposedly named "Neil Gunton" character isn't really John Ashcroft in disguise?
Hmm... Give me all your information. I'm a "free" web site...
If you have to provide a real looking (validly formatted) email address, don't want it to be your real one, and don't need to respond to a confirmation email -- do this:
Say you're ordering from www.hot-pr0n.com. They want an email address, but they aren't going to send a confirmation email to it (i.e., you don't need to respond to an email they will send to activate your "account" with them). Simply use an address like this:
unlisted@hot-pr0n.com
If they send an email, it'll either come right around to them, or bounce by virtue of being a non-existent address (in which case it goes back to them also). Either way, you provide a valid looking email address, but no info about you is sent to any potentially real address at some unknown location.
HP printers were on a 6 month cycle years (at least 6) ago. HW was release spring and fall.
HW cycles are "predictable," so they always just threw the product over the wall (warts and unfinished hardware problems and all) over the wall to QA.
QA, otoh, was often of a different mind regarding whether the HW (both ME and EE stuff) was really done.
So....
Fix it in firmware! What, it's too late for that? Fix it in software (in the PC-side printer drivers).
"It's just software, anway!" (translation: you can reflash the printers up until they leave the manufacturing line, while switching out a bad gear design is tougher; you can also ship new drivers over the internet _after_ sale to customer; anything ThatEasyToChange can't be that tough, right?)
Of course ME/EE types sometimes miss the part that a "build" for them, while time-consuming and materials/resource intensive, doesn't involve redesign nor re-engineering. Those activities are expensive to redo because all the downstream stuff ("build") must be redone.
A software build is just a matter of firing off make, right! So how hard can software be?! They miss the point about software design complexity being [often] considerable because of the lack of physical build issues.
Linux doesn't copy the Blue Screen of Death.
That's one significant difference.
Are you so stupid as to believe MS won't try to sell WinCE and/or XP-Embedded to said manufacturers?
They bought the Commodore name some years ago and have just now revived it for an unrelated line of hardware.
So this isn't really Commodore -- why should anyone care?
You had better have a good firewall in your garage for those times when your car says to you we're home, would you like me to go online and fetch your calendar updates?
It's one thing for an unfirewalled windoze 98 box to be hacked and compromised by a remote attacker. It's quite another to have your vehicle compromised unbeknownst to you--
I don't think I want my car "crashing" its OS while I'm at the wheel, unrelated to any driving choices/mistakes I may have made. I can see it now--
"Honest Officer! I think my car must have caught the Download.Ject virus this morning!" I didn't drive into that bridge abutment on my own! Honest!!" The officer replies--
"Sir, didn't you listen to the latest Microsoft warning? You should never use your steering wheel / joystick to surf to 'unsafe' websites with IE! Now I have to write you a Stupid-Ticket."
But seriously...
How concerned are other developers about MS style code being let loose in a critical system like an automobile? I mean, running a PDA or a desktop printer is one thing. When they crash, people aren't so likely to DIE! A malfunctioning four ton Ford Excursion, on the other hand, is something I'd really rather not encounter.
... that's why compressed air launch is necessary.
How long do you think it will be until retail-ready devices support .11i out of the box?
How long until the AP is $80 at Fry's (like current models), and cards are also cheap?
ls, etc.
In particular, color 'ls' is a must have. "Once you go color, you never go back." My alias for ls looks like this:
alias ls="ls --color -CF"
and the Gnu version of 'ls' (fileutils 4.1) is first in my PATH.
I'll believe it when I see it -- that is when MS's 90%+ monopoly market share declines and there are true other players.
Until then, MS can mess up all they want (or all you say they do), and still win in the market place. As long as everything runs Windows, everything else has to be compatible with a constantly moving target.
Moving the the target is also how MS keeps their deathgrip on the share percentages. It's part of their "competitive advantages" (read, "platform lockin").
Won't that be your users' first question once they hit your intranet?
... they'll say.
"How come I can't reach da inner net?"
I can do several things at once. I guess I've had SMP in my HEAD for some time now.
Example.
My DSL provides me about 150KiB per second throughput over its advertised 1.5Mib per second downstream connection. Note that not everyone sees this kind of speed even today. At my former house I was lucky to see 90KiB per second, and that was only a service I was able to get within the last year.
Assume an average DVD movie is four to six GiB. This is typical from what I have seen of pressed dual layer discs. We have to push all that data through a pipe like mine in reasonable time. Let's use 5GiB as the average amount we need to push per movie.
Time to push 5GiB thru 150KiB per second connection --
(5 x 1024 x 1024) / 150 == 34953 seconds
That's almost ten hours to transfer your 1.5 to 2 hour movie. This presumes the connection is healthy during that entire time. This also presumes my ISP will let me transfer this much data regularly.
So I guess I could make a request from BlockBuster.com to begin transferring my movie in the morning, for viewing after work at night. Or maybe I could transfer a movie overnight for next day's viewing.
But this kills all my bandwidth for ten hours. If I use the connection simultaneously for other stuff during that time, I may significantly delay the arrival of my movie.
Note: Even if you have a cable modem and see speeds double of what I see, that is 300KiB per second, it's still gonna take 5 hours to get your movie.
In these days of instant gratification, I'm not sure waiting ten hours to get a movie is fast enough. I can walk to and from my video store in twenty minutes, and they likely have the movie I want.
I know the pipes will get faster. But won't the movies be higher res by then also?