Bottom line - the signal must be converted back to an analog format to be heard by human ears. Once it's analog, it's easy to rerecord, manipulate, etc. However, practical cracks of any encryption or watermarking scheme are likely to intercept the digital signal on the output side of the codec, which can in turn be recompressed, unwatermarked, etc. with excellent results.
I'm going to patent a business model based on creating crappy products and marketing the hell out of them so that millions of brain-dead consumers engage in the lemming-like behaviour of purchasing tons of my garbage. Then I'm going to sue the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft out of existance.
If their music is so fscking valuable, why is it they can only pony up $10,000 (and maybe not even that much)? After (unless some miracle occurs) suing Napster and MP3.com out of existance for alleged damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, this is the best they can do?
I guess there are two possible options:
1. They are not serious; this is just a weak publicity stunt.
2. They are a bunch of jackasses.
3. Both of the above.
BMW has been researching the use of liquid hydrogen as an alternative fuel for a few decades, and has created several generations of prototype engines. But what is most exciting is that they've created a limited-run production version of the 750 sedan (the 750hL) that is capable of running on either conventional gasoline or liquid hydrogen, and switching between the two modes with the press of a button (even when the car is running). Most recently, they've been using a fleet of 750hL's as shuttle vehicles at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany.
There are some limitations to this technology, the main one being that while liquid H2 is very effecient in terms of stored weight to power produced, it is extremely inefficient in terms of storage volume to power produced (gasoline is 3 1/2 times more efficient in this area). Also, because H2 liquifies at -420 degrees Farenheit, the cars must be refueled by a robot (BMW installed a demonstration fueling station at the Hanover airport to handle the EXPO 2000 fleet).
Despite these limitations, I believe that this is one of the most promising directions for zero-emissions vehicles. You don't have the generation or battery-related environmental problems of electric cars (well-described in a post above), and the car is compatible with existing standards - it can easily run on gasoline where liquid H2 is unavailable. It makes for a very clean upgrade path;)
As far as I know, you can't buy a 750hL yet, but you can get more information on them here.
I've seen several posts here slamming the P4's 133 MHz bus. It should be noted that the P4 uses a quad-pumped connection to the north bridge of the chipset, so a 133MHz connection would actually deliver 533 Mbps per pin, for an overall yield of around 4.26 GB/s - not too shabby. Now, if they can just get rid of the rambus...
I remember a few years ago I was speaking to a friend of mine who was in upper management at Novell, and was told of many high-level IBMers in Provo doing due diligence work for a possible takeover. Nothing came of it (I'm assuming because at the time, Novell still owned Wordperfect, which would compete with SmartSuite, and still owns Groupwise which competes directly with Notes).
Personally, I've always thought the merger made sense. Even though Novell has always had a terrific balance sheet to hold them through tough times (lots of cash, no debt), IBM's ownership could be a huge shot in the arm for them. I remember investigating Notes before IBM bought Lotus, but was put off by the price ($350 per desktop just for the client software). IBM bought them out, dropped the client price to a reasonable level, and Notes' sales took off.
Bottom line - Netware can easily saturate a full-duplex 100Base-T connection (used in most real-world environments) on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro box and not break 30% CPU utilization. In more exotic environments running gigabit ethernet and / or ATM, I could see the being an issue, but I have yet to personally see an installation where lack of proper threading in the Novell protocol stacks caused a measurable performance hit. This issue mainly exists because of benchmarks.
The FTC successfully sued the RIAA companies and basically gave them a slight slap on the wrist for ripping us off to the tune of half a billion dollars. Now the states are suing, but to what end? If there's really going to be some justice here - and I cringe very much to say this - what needs to happen is a class action lawsuit representing music buyers whereby the record labels would be forced to pay us, the music-buying public, the usual treble damages.
There's this feature included in most modern software development system called Exception Handling. Let's all say it together: Ex-cep-tion Han-dling. Now, if, for the sake of agrument, I was developing some piece of software for anything other than a trivial bit that I was going to use once or twice myself, I would make sure that it properly handled its errors and did a reasonably good job cleaning up its mess. I can't imagine the mentality of someone who writes an app that accepts data from another app or system that doesn't check the hell out of every aspect of that data. And please don't tell me I'm the only person left that allocates their buffers dynamically. People who use C/C++/whatever and fill their code with things like
char cBuffer[128];
need to be severely beaten over the head with their copy of The C++ Programming Language, Third Edition and forced to use Visual Basic for MS Office for the rest of their lives.
Between Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Filegate, how much can we trust the FBI?
The FBI reports to the Attorney General. The Attorney General reports to the President. Ideally, you would have people with a reasonable amount of integrety in one or both of these positions, but when that is not the case (I mean, does anybody really believe that several hundred FBI files of Clinton's political adversaries really appeared in the White House's possesion through some clerical version of immaculate conception?) there is an unbelievable amount of room for abuse.
Bottom line - the FBI has conclusively demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to respect the privacy of law abiding Americans (and others, for that matter), and when abuses do occur, they cannot be trusted to police their own (we just get coverup on top of coverup). I'm sure that there are many fine FBI agents out there that are people of exceptional character and integrety, but that faith does not extend to their political leadership and therefore the organization as a whole must be considered suspect.
MiniBooNE will use beam from the Booster accelerator for a short-baseline fixed-target experiment, expected to begin taking data late in 2001 via a 12-meter sphere filled with mineral oil and photomultiplier tubes.
I don't know about you, but a large sphere full of mineral oil has much kinkier applications than physics (although I did once try to compute the acceleration due to gravity on a waterbed).
Disclaimer - I have been using nVidia products since the Riva 128 (I'm currently using a GeForce 256 DDR). I think that they make great products and I even own some nVidia stock.
I recall reading about this whole mess as it actually happened. Yes, the "open letter" that Kyle alludes to did actually exist, and it would not shock me in the least to learn that it's true.
One issue I've not seen addressed is the question of how much support these hardware manufacturers actually provide. If they're just sending out evaluation units to the media (common practice in any industry), then they should expect fair reviews, but that's it. If they're buying advertising and / or making other monetary contributions to the web site, then the webmaster should feel comfortable being 0wn3d, because he/she is. I mean, anybody who reads a car magazine (or PC Magazine, for that matter), should more or less intuitively understand this.
I'm also wondering how many review sites are actually necessary in the online community, and how many the hardware / software manufacturers should feel they have to provide with evaluation product. There are probably at least 50 out there right now, which is about 40-45 more than we, as a user community, need. I mean, how many GeForce 2 vs. Radion vs. Voodoo 5/6 numbers does anyone want to see before they get a headache?
My bet would be that the mentality of some of the vendors out there has degenerated to "Well, as long as we're giving out 100 evaluation units to the online media (in addition to the stuff we give to friends, family, the managers and minions at CompUSA, Fry's, Electonics Botiuque, etc.) we expect some #$@! good reviews. I mean, we've given away so many free units, there are only 4 people left to actually sell them to." And let's face it - at least a few of those sites must exist for the sole purpose of getting the webmaster free stuff. If they don't get it, we get long open letter rants posted about how evil and unfair nVidia / 3Dfx / ATI / Intel / Microsoft / Electronic Arts / etc. is. No one should be shocked that things have degenerated to a quid-pro-quo arrangement. A shakeout of the online media is definitely needed.
This being said, vendors do need to go back to expecting nothing more than a fair, honest, and factually-based review of their product in exchange for making evaluation copies available. If this has to go with the understanding that only the "major" sites will be getting the eval units for free, than so be it. A possibly workable compromise would be to let the smaller sites purchase eval units at cost (treatment currently given to the minions at most retail outlets)
Aliens are going to laugh their asses off...
on
Helicopter In Space
·
· Score: 2
Can you imaging if some extraterrestrials sent a probe to earth, and it was a fucking helecopter? I mean, we'd be expecting antigravity drives and warp engines and all that stuff. It'd be a major disappointment. Just imagine if there was intelligent life there - we'd be the joke of the universe...
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
Unlike Microsoft's products, Delphi (upon which Kylix is based) has a solid reputation for having an extremely high-speed compiler.
Bear in mind that the Pascal language is designed to be compiled in one pass, vs C/C++ which is not. Even in some decent-sized Delphi projects, each with several dozen source files (>50,000 lines total), I don't ever recall waiting for more than 3-5 seconds to do a complete build, and that's in full GUI mode with all of the bells and whistles (code optimization, &c.) turned on. Projects of equivelant complexity written in C++ have had build times of 3-5 minutes on the same machine. Considering the quality of code generated, the compile speed of Delphi is simply unreal. Since it's basically the same language and underlying compiler technology, I'd expect Kylix to be equally fast, if not faster due to lack of Windoze overhead.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking C/C++; I use C++ as my language of choice for most projects. For those of you who haven't played around with Delphi though, I'd suggest you try a few small projects in it just so you can feel your jaw come unhinged when you see how quickly it builds. Way cool stuff.
I'd have to agree. The concept is cool, but I can't tell the difference between the way that thing sounds, and, say, an oil refinery or any other area with large amounts of industrial noise. BFD.
No, there is no solid proof yet for String Theory (hence the word "Theory" associated with these little stringy things, and not the word "Law" - isn't it cool how the English language allows you to make these distinctions?). The book makes this very clear, and lists some of the possible methods for obtainig clear proof, the most reasonable of which center around the construction of a much more massive supercollider than exists today. However, String Threory and Superstring Theory do look very neat on paper (which, of course, is no guarantee whatsoever of anything).
I purchased this book on a whim when it first came out in hardcover, enjoyed it throuroughly, and have recommended it to several friends.
Question: Can DooM 3 even live up to the hype? I mean, let's face it - DooM and DooM 2 were some of the best games ever created. I just hope this doesn't turn into some sort of Phantom Menace thing...
Hard Boiled is available on DVD - and in a Criterion Collection version, no less! Despite the obviously much lower-than-Hollywood production standards used in making the film, and the monaural soundtrack, it is one of the nicest-looking, best-sounding discs in my collection. Stop whining and go buy it!
It seems that everyone else has beaten my main concerns (training, distinguishing between commands and other sounds) to death; as long as these concerns are thoroughly addressed, and I was able to see the unit demonstrated (find a retail distribution channnel) to my satisfaction or if the unit had a very generous moneyback guarantee, I would definitely buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom line - the signal must be converted back to an analog format to be heard by human ears. Once it's analog, it's easy to rerecord, manipulate, etc. However, practical cracks of any encryption or watermarking scheme are likely to intercept the digital signal on the output side of the codec, which can in turn be recompressed, unwatermarked, etc. with excellent results.
Umm... compiling large C++ projects comes to mind.
Mr. Moore works out of a cubicle (hey, it's his perogative, I guess).
I'm going to patent a business model based on creating crappy products and marketing the hell out of them so that millions of brain-dead consumers engage in the lemming-like behaviour of purchasing tons of my garbage. Then I'm going to sue the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft out of existance.
If their music is so fscking valuable, why is it they can only pony up $10,000 (and maybe not even that much)? After (unless some miracle occurs) suing Napster and MP3.com out of existance for alleged damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, this is the best they can do?
I guess there are two possible options:
1. They are not serious; this is just a weak publicity stunt.
2. They are a bunch of jackasses.
3. Both of the above.
BMW has been researching the use of liquid hydrogen as an alternative fuel for a few decades, and has created several generations of prototype engines. But what is most exciting is that they've created a limited-run production version of the 750 sedan (the 750hL) that is capable of running on either conventional gasoline or liquid hydrogen, and switching between the two modes with the press of a button (even when the car is running). Most recently, they've been using a fleet of 750hL's as shuttle vehicles at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany.
;)
.
There are some limitations to this technology, the main one being that while liquid H2 is very effecient in terms of stored weight to power produced, it is extremely inefficient in terms of storage volume to power produced (gasoline is 3 1/2 times more efficient in this area). Also, because H2 liquifies at -420 degrees Farenheit, the cars must be refueled by a robot (BMW installed a demonstration fueling station at the Hanover airport to handle the EXPO 2000 fleet).
Despite these limitations, I believe that this is one of the most promising directions for zero-emissions vehicles. You don't have the generation or battery-related environmental problems of electric cars (well-described in a post above), and the car is compatible with existing standards - it can easily run on gasoline where liquid H2 is unavailable. It makes for a very clean upgrade path
As far as I know, you can't buy a 750hL yet, but you can get more information on them here
You realize, of course, that the only way that Microsoft can make a Linux system as unstable as its own is by incorporating the BSOD into hardware.
I've seen several posts here slamming the P4's 133 MHz bus. It should be noted that the P4 uses a quad-pumped connection to the north bridge of the chipset, so a 133MHz connection would actually deliver 533 Mbps per pin, for an overall yield of around 4.26 GB/s - not too shabby. Now, if they can just get rid of the rambus...
I remember a few years ago I was speaking to a friend of mine who was in upper management at Novell, and was told of many high-level IBMers in Provo doing due diligence work for a possible takeover. Nothing came of it (I'm assuming because at the time, Novell still owned Wordperfect, which would compete with SmartSuite, and still owns Groupwise which competes directly with Notes).
Personally, I've always thought the merger made sense. Even though Novell has always had a terrific balance sheet to hold them through tough times (lots of cash, no debt), IBM's ownership could be a huge shot in the arm for them. I remember investigating Notes before IBM bought Lotus, but was put off by the price ($350 per desktop just for the client software). IBM bought them out, dropped the client price to a reasonable level, and Notes' sales took off.
Bottom line - Netware can easily saturate a full-duplex 100Base-T connection (used in most real-world environments) on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro box and not break 30% CPU utilization. In more exotic environments running gigabit ethernet and / or ATM, I could see the being an issue, but I have yet to personally see an installation where lack of proper threading in the Novell protocol stacks caused a measurable performance hit. This issue mainly exists because of benchmarks.
The FTC successfully sued the RIAA companies and basically gave them a slight slap on the wrist for ripping us off to the tune of half a billion dollars. Now the states are suing, but to what end? If there's really going to be some justice here - and I cringe very much to say this - what needs to happen is a class action lawsuit representing music buyers whereby the record labels would be forced to pay us, the music-buying public, the usual treble damages.
- char cBuffer[128];
need to be severely beaten over the head with their copy of The C++ Programming Language, Third Edition and forced to use Visual Basic for MS Office for the rest of their lives.Just my $.02
Now sysadmins are just as appreciated as secretaries. I can hardly contain myself.
...will be creating a more evenly lit purple-glow effect under low-riders.
-Erik The Red
Between Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Filegate, how much can we trust the FBI?
The FBI reports to the Attorney General. The Attorney General reports to the President. Ideally, you would have people with a reasonable amount of integrety in one or both of these positions, but when that is not the case (I mean, does anybody really believe that several hundred FBI files of Clinton's political adversaries really appeared in the White House's possesion through some clerical version of immaculate conception?) there is an unbelievable amount of room for abuse.
Bottom line - the FBI has conclusively demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to respect the privacy of law abiding Americans (and others, for that matter), and when abuses do occur, they cannot be trusted to police their own (we just get coverup on top of coverup). I'm sure that there are many fine FBI agents out there that are people of exceptional character and integrety, but that faith does not extend to their political leadership and therefore the organization as a whole must be considered suspect.
I don't know about you, but a large sphere full of mineral oil has much kinkier applications than physics (although I did once try to compute the acceleration due to gravity on a waterbed).
Disclaimer - I have been using nVidia products since the Riva 128 (I'm currently using a GeForce 256 DDR). I think that they make great products and I even own some nVidia stock.
I recall reading about this whole mess as it actually happened. Yes, the "open letter" that Kyle alludes to did actually exist, and it would not shock me in the least to learn that it's true.
One issue I've not seen addressed is the question of how much support these hardware manufacturers actually provide. If they're just sending out evaluation units to the media (common practice in any industry), then they should expect fair reviews, but that's it. If they're buying advertising and / or making other monetary contributions to the web site, then the webmaster should feel comfortable being 0wn3d, because he/she is. I mean, anybody who reads a car magazine (or PC Magazine, for that matter), should more or less intuitively understand this.
I'm also wondering how many review sites are actually necessary in the online community, and how many the hardware / software manufacturers should feel they have to provide with evaluation product. There are probably at least 50 out there right now, which is about 40-45 more than we, as a user community, need. I mean, how many GeForce 2 vs. Radion vs. Voodoo 5/6 numbers does anyone want to see before they get a headache?
My bet would be that the mentality of some of the vendors out there has degenerated to "Well, as long as we're giving out 100 evaluation units to the online media (in addition to the stuff we give to friends, family, the managers and minions at CompUSA, Fry's, Electonics Botiuque, etc.) we expect some #$@! good reviews. I mean, we've given away so many free units, there are only 4 people left to actually sell them to." And let's face it - at least a few of those sites must exist for the sole purpose of getting the webmaster free stuff. If they don't get it, we get long open letter rants posted about how evil and unfair nVidia / 3Dfx / ATI / Intel / Microsoft / Electronic Arts / etc. is. No one should be shocked that things have degenerated to a quid-pro-quo arrangement. A shakeout of the online media is definitely needed.
This being said, vendors do need to go back to expecting nothing more than a fair, honest, and factually-based review of their product in exchange for making evaluation copies available. If this has to go with the understanding that only the "major" sites will be getting the eval units for free, than so be it. A possibly workable compromise would be to let the smaller sites purchase eval units at cost (treatment currently given to the minions at most retail outlets)
Just my $.02.
-Erik The Red
Possibly related to Magenta from Rocky Horror?
Can you imaging if some extraterrestrials sent a probe to earth, and it was a fucking helecopter? I mean, we'd be expecting antigravity drives and warp engines and all that stuff. It'd be a major disappointment. Just imagine if there was intelligent life there - we'd be the joke of the universe...
Granted, you saw it running on a few machines that weren't on the net. It was blazingly fast. Wow. Did you see what was inside the machines? What kinds of processors? Don't we always point fingers at Microsoft for pulling the same trick, demoing software on ridiculously overpowered CPU's and shovelfuls of memory?
Unlike Microsoft's products, Delphi (upon which Kylix is based) has a solid reputation for having an extremely high-speed compiler.
Bear in mind that the Pascal language is designed to be compiled in one pass, vs C/C++ which is not. Even in some decent-sized Delphi projects, each with several dozen source files (>50,000 lines total), I don't ever recall waiting for more than 3-5 seconds to do a complete build, and that's in full GUI mode with all of the bells and whistles (code optimization, &c.) turned on. Projects of equivelant complexity written in C++ have had build times of 3-5 minutes on the same machine. Considering the quality of code generated, the compile speed of Delphi is simply unreal. Since it's basically the same language and underlying compiler technology, I'd expect Kylix to be equally fast, if not faster due to lack of Windoze overhead.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking C/C++; I use C++ as my language of choice for most projects. For those of you who haven't played around with Delphi though, I'd suggest you try a few small projects in it just so you can feel your jaw come unhinged when you see how quickly it builds. Way cool stuff.
I'd have to agree. The concept is cool, but I can't tell the difference between the way that thing sounds, and, say, an oil refinery or any other area with large amounts of industrial noise. BFD.
No, there is no solid proof yet for String Theory (hence the word "Theory" associated with these little stringy things, and not the word "Law" - isn't it cool how the English language allows you to make these distinctions?). The book makes this very clear, and lists some of the possible methods for obtainig clear proof, the most reasonable of which center around the construction of a much more massive supercollider than exists today. However, String Threory and Superstring Theory do look very neat on paper (which, of course, is no guarantee whatsoever of anything).
I purchased this book on a whim when it first came out in hardcover, enjoyed it throuroughly, and have recommended it to several friends.
Question: Can DooM 3 even live up to the hype? I mean, let's face it - DooM and DooM 2 were some of the best games ever created. I just hope this doesn't turn into some sort of Phantom Menace thing...
Hard Boiled is available on DVD - and in a Criterion Collection version, no less! Despite the obviously much lower-than-Hollywood production standards used in making the film, and the monaural soundtrack, it is one of the nicest-looking, best-sounding discs in my collection. Stop whining and go buy it!
It seems that everyone else has beaten my main concerns (training, distinguishing between commands and other sounds) to death; as long as these concerns are thoroughly addressed, and I was able to see the unit demonstrated (find a retail distribution channnel) to my satisfaction or if the unit had a very generous moneyback guarantee, I would definitely buy one.