As I expected, eMule doesn't work on my setup. It did display a very informative message explaining that I had to export the proper ports through the router. Which would be fine, if it were my router. But it's not, and I'm not going to ask my landlord to help me become a file pirate.
Sure it works, but not very efficiently. To get bandwith, you have to share your own bandwidth. If I can't expose the proper port, people can't download from me, and I get classified as a leech.
Re:Not just Linux and Mac with problems...
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In2TV Goes Public
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· Score: 1
First of all, the cost of paying a few royalties to use DRM software is nothing to the cost of developing, deploying, and supporting an extra platform. I mean, jeez, have you ever worked in a real software operation? Programmers, QA people, support geeks — none of them work for free.
Second of all, can you imagine getting any content without DRM? Yeah, it's a royal pain for the user, but the content owners won't go near a system that doesn't have it. That's actually another reason for supporting Windows only.
If you just want to give content away and not control its redistribution, sure there's plenty of platform-independent client software. You got a business model that works with that?
I don't know that much about the history of the shuttle program, but the site I linked to claimed that SLC-6 was doomed by the modifications made to the shuttle after the Challenger disaster. They made it impossible to for the shuttle to reach polar orbit, and without that, there was no point to a second launch facility.
Whatever the real story, I think you're seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. By the time they decided to close down SLC-6, it was obvious that the original shuttle concept wasn't working. It was supposed to drive down the cost of getting stuff into orbit, which would justify building a whole huge fleet of shuttles. Instead you have an expensive, unreliable design that never launches on time and sometimes kills astronauts. SLC-6 didn't need more support from NASA, it needed a vehicle that made it worth keeping the facility open.
Re:Not just Linux and Mac with problems...
on
In2TV Goes Public
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· Score: 1
Sure the tech exists. But support for multiple platform costs, and user base is tiny. Why should they jump through hoops for such a small return?
I did miss the part about Firewire. But so what? Firewire-powered drives are nothing new. I even own one, which I bought 4 years ago. But I haven't used the Firewire port since my Sony laptop was stolen. USB 2 is the standard now — it's faster, and more widely implemented.
USB-powered isn't a big deal either. You're right, most drives aren't USB-powered. But many are, including this puppy which I just bought from Slashdot's sister site, ironically enough.
Daisy-chaining is nice, but not worth paying such a huge premium for.
I'm always disdainful when people claim that a Slashdot story is just an ad. But this time I've got to wonder. Why else does this product rate a review? It's yet another USB portable hard disk. There must be hundreds on the market.
That's a very good analysis. I'm a strong XML/XSLT advocate, but only because I work with the kind of documents that need them: big nasty technical manuals and guides that have a lot of complicated structure, are always be updated, and have to be delivered in multiple formats. When someone challenges by XML dogma, they always point to some project they've worked on that would have been much harder if they'd had to use XML. Most of the time (not always!) they're right, usually because the particular project is a one-shot document that will see little or no revision. Of course, that just says that XML is useless to them.
XML is a key technology, and much underused by my profession, which still relies too much on FrameMaker, Word, and (God help us!) plain old HTML. But it's not the solution to every content management problem.
Uh, you do know that IMDB data is all contributed by its users? Perhaps the original source for that "fact" was the same misinformed Ebert review I saw!
I've considered Roger Ebert to be a total idiot ever since I heard his rave review of Never Cry Wolf, in which he goes on and on about "the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness". Hello? Did he pay any attention to the dialogue? Which was full of Canadian references, politics, and accents.
But what's really relevent to this discussion is his attitude towards violence in movies. OK, he's entitled to hate slasher movies because they're pretty much all exploitative, unimaginative crap. But that's not why he comes down on them. He consider them evil, "cynical", "misogynistic", and otherwise morally uncool. This from a guy who worships Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker who thoroughly exploited the pornography of death.
Perhaps if the graphics in GTA-III had been better, it wouldn't bother him so much that the game is mainly about killing people....
My sig was supposed to catch your eye! Well, maybe not you specifically, since you apparently don't have a fix to that stupid bug....
You're right, I'm not above pirating something I already paid for. Unfortunately, I share my DSL connection with my landlord. I'm not about to ask him to let me have an external port so I can share torrents! And if you don't share, nobody shares with you. Which is only fair, but it make bittorrent useless to me.
I actually agree that Google is badly managed. But your characterizing them as a "pyramid scheme" is braindead. In a pyramid scheme, you're not actually selling anything. Google is in fact selling a valuable service (advertising) and making a bloody killing at it. That's how they're able to get away with being badly managed: they're making so much money, they're under no pressure to get themselves organized. The latest stock hassle happend because their annual revenue grew by "only" 87%!
It's also worth mentioning that many of the people who buy Google ads are small — tiny even — businesses that could never afford traditional ads, or even most kinds of online ads. That's because you can buy ads in as small a block as you can afford. And the bloody things are targeted, so you don't have to worry about spending all that moeny and only being seen by people who don't give a shit about what you're selling.
That's a pretty impressive accomplishment. So yeah, Google has fucked up in many ways, but they've done some things right — and made a lot of money doing it.
Of course in your simple universe, everybody's a genius or an idiot. Mostly an idiot. That's what they call projection.
It's interesting that the buzzword "A.I." can still generate interest among Slashdotters. In the industrying, labelling something "A.I." is fatal, because there's so much unfulfilled hype associated with that term. Which was never that useful, being rather vague.
Whatever the technology behind it, you won't get me to try a new search engine by talking about the technology behind it. You need to tell me exactly how my search results will differ from what I'll get from Google. And even then you've got a tough sell. I used to keep a links menu for all the different search engines so I could refer to them in case I found Google's results unsatisfactory. Finally got rid of this menu: I rarely referred to it, and when I did, I never got any hits that Google had missed.
How can an intellectual believe in magical faries...
Dude, have you ever seen an electron? Everybody accepts some things on authority. What's stupid is when people insist that their own authorities are infalible, and other people's authorities are "obviously" demented.
Of course, 0% is rounded to cut out the obscure minority of attention-seeking nob-heads who have to stick their unnecessary pedantry everywhere it's not wanted.
If you don't like "unnecessary pedantry", WTF are you doing hanging out at Slashdot?
Rhetorical question: it's obvious to everybody but you that you're an attention-seeking asshole who makes lots of pointless replies to posts you don't bother to read. Guess who around here is really not wanted?
What bullshit. First, Google employees have made out like bandits from their stock options. Second, I haven't heard from anybody but you that they underpay their employees — indeed, some folks I know who work there are doing pretty good. Then there's the benefits: free lunch every day, free snacks, free laundry, free other stuff, paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave....
Unlike you and your metal mill, nobody at Google is working there because they can't get a job anywhere else. It's harder to get in the door there than any company in Silicon Valley.
Jeez, somebody isn't a "walking-stick shaking, moral guardian" just because they like TV shows that are tamer than what you like. Some of us are entertained by stories that don't involve bestality or rape.
Most new PCs come with 1000baseT connections, which is 4x faster than the proposed coax speeds...
Which means jack for a typical home computer. It's not enough to get a billion bits per second into your computer — your system has to be capable of doing something useful with all those bits. Few computers can even do disk access that fast!
Someday home computers will be able to deal with that much info — but by then the network technology will have evolved too.
Story: when we upgraded our company network from 10baseT to 100baseT, some network-intensive applications did see a performance improvement. But not by a factor of 10! 20% was more typical. Every computer application has to deal with multiple bottlenecks, and getting rid of one of them is never a magic bullet.
It never makes sense to spend a lot of money on hardware that you think you can use sometime in the future. By the time you're ready to use it, that hardware will have lost almost all its value.
Slashdot Mirror
As I expected, eMule doesn't work on my setup. It did display a very informative message explaining that I had to export the proper ports through the router. Which would be fine, if it were my router. But it's not, and I'm not going to ask my landlord to help me become a file pirate.
Sure it works, but not very efficiently. To get bandwith, you have to share your own bandwidth. If I can't expose the proper port, people can't download from me, and I get classified as a leech.
Second of all, can you imagine getting any content without DRM? Yeah, it's a royal pain for the user, but the content owners won't go near a system that doesn't have it. That's actually another reason for supporting Windows only.
If you just want to give content away and not control its redistribution, sure there's plenty of platform-independent client software. You got a business model that works with that?
Whatever the real story, I think you're seeing conspiracies where there aren't any. By the time they decided to close down SLC-6, it was obvious that the original shuttle concept wasn't working. It was supposed to drive down the cost of getting stuff into orbit, which would justify building a whole huge fleet of shuttles. Instead you have an expensive, unreliable design that never launches on time and sometimes kills astronauts. SLC-6 didn't need more support from NASA, it needed a vehicle that made it worth keeping the facility open.
Sure the tech exists. But support for multiple platform costs, and user base is tiny. Why should they jump through hoops for such a small return?
... than underused shuttle facilities at KSC is the Air Force shuttle facility on the west coast, which cost $6 billion, and was never used at all.
USB-powered isn't a big deal either. You're right, most drives aren't USB-powered. But many are, including this puppy which I just bought from Slashdot's sister site, ironically enough.
Daisy-chaining is nice, but not worth paying such a huge premium for.
I'm always disdainful when people claim that a Slashdot story is just an ad. But this time I've got to wonder. Why else does this product rate a review? It's yet another USB portable hard disk. There must be hundreds on the market.
XML is a key technology, and much underused by my profession, which still relies too much on FrameMaker, Word, and (God help us!) plain old HTML. But it's not the solution to every content management problem.
(I'll give eMule a try. But I'm not optimistic. NAT router, y'know.) I too avoid proprietary formats whenver possible. Unfortunately, it rarely is!
Uh, you do know that IMDB data is all contributed by its users? Perhaps the original source for that "fact" was the same misinformed Ebert review I saw!
But what's really relevent to this discussion is his attitude towards violence in movies. OK, he's entitled to hate slasher movies because they're pretty much all exploitative, unimaginative crap. But that's not why he comes down on them. He consider them evil, "cynical", "misogynistic", and otherwise morally uncool. This from a guy who worships Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker who thoroughly exploited the pornography of death.
Perhaps if the graphics in GTA-III had been better, it wouldn't bother him so much that the game is mainly about killing people....
You're right, I'm not above pirating something I already paid for. Unfortunately, I share my DSL connection with my landlord. I'm not about to ask him to let me have an external port so I can share torrents! And if you don't share, nobody shares with you. Which is only fair, but it make bittorrent useless to me.
Great, let's bring back slavery. I mean, "unemployed slave" is pretty much an oxymoron. Now that was an empowering institution!
It's also worth mentioning that many of the people who buy Google ads are small — tiny even — businesses that could never afford traditional ads, or even most kinds of online ads. That's because you can buy ads in as small a block as you can afford. And the bloody things are targeted, so you don't have to worry about spending all that moeny and only being seen by people who don't give a shit about what you're selling.
That's a pretty impressive accomplishment. So yeah, Google has fucked up in many ways, but they've done some things right — and made a lot of money doing it.
Of course in your simple universe, everybody's a genius or an idiot. Mostly an idiot. That's what they call projection.
Whatever the technology behind it, you won't get me to try a new search engine by talking about the technology behind it. You need to tell me exactly how my search results will differ from what I'll get from Google. And even then you've got a tough sell. I used to keep a links menu for all the different search engines so I could refer to them in case I found Google's results unsatisfactory. Finally got rid of this menu: I rarely referred to it, and when I did, I never got any hits that Google had missed.
It's 15 million kelvin, not 15 million Kelvin.
Rhetorical question: it's obvious to everybody but you that you're an attention-seeking asshole who makes lots of pointless replies to posts you don't bother to read. Guess who around here is really not wanted?
Unlike you and your metal mill, nobody at Google is working there because they can't get a job anywhere else. It's harder to get in the door there than any company in Silicon Valley.
Jeez, somebody isn't a "walking-stick shaking, moral guardian" just because they like TV shows that are tamer than what you like. Some of us are entertained by stories that don't involve bestality or rape.
How is that prior art? The Jupiter II wasn't launched until 1997!
In English?
Someday home computers will be able to deal with that much info — but by then the network technology will have evolved too.
Story: when we upgraded our company network from 10baseT to 100baseT, some network-intensive applications did see a performance improvement. But not by a factor of 10! 20% was more typical. Every computer application has to deal with multiple bottlenecks, and getting rid of one of them is never a magic bullet.
It never makes sense to spend a lot of money on hardware that you think you can use sometime in the future. By the time you're ready to use it, that hardware will have lost almost all its value.