You're right, I was wrong, there is such a thing as analog mag discs.
But you should still read TFA before expressing an opinion about it. The dude works for a transcription service. He doesn't know what's on the disk because it's not his disc. Presumably it's important to whoever hired the company to transcribe it.
Why is Imation so sure it's an analog disk? I've never heard of disks being used for magnetic analog recording. (There's vinyl disks, of course, but they're mechnical recordings.) And why would anybody create one? Once you go to all the trouble of creating the hardware to access the tracks, you're pretty much in the digital world anyway, and might as well go all the way.
I doubt if much of the waste is that useful. (A lot of it much be just ordinary household trash, or worse.) A bigger reason for bringing it back is the simple difficulty of disposing of it in orbit. There's already a lot of crap in orbit -- that's why there's such a shortage of launch windows.
But come to think of it, this is a long term problem. If the station is ever finished (which is pretty doubtful at this point), it'll be generating several times as much trash as it is now. Were they really planning on hauling it all back to the surface?
If you're going to pick that kind of nit, you should note the absurdity of reducing all physical health issues to a numeric value that you can restore by finding a box with a red cross on it. In real combat, a soldier runs the risk of damaging a limb and being permanently removed from the "game". Or damaging a vital organ, and being permanently removed from everything.
Not to mention the standard video game convention that you can come back from the dead -- but only a fixed number of times!
Let's face it, this is all fantasy, and there's no point in examining the technical details.
I'm reminded of that TV show Highlander, where the immortal hero went around fighting battles with a sword. At first he carried it around in a case or something, until the writers realized that they couldn't possibly contrive to have the sword available every time he needed it. So whenever a battle started, they'd just cut away for a second, and when they cut back, he'd have the sword in his hands -- as if he'd pulled it out of his hip pocket! That used to bother me more than the silliness of him not being killable.
People aren't indecisive. They just have a short attention span. It's like that episode of the Simpsons where a bear gets loose in Springfield, and people storm the Mayor's Office insisting that he make sure it never happens again (never mind that it never happened before). So he spends a lot of money on an Anti-Bear patrol, passes a tax to pay for it -- and they storm his office again, demanding that he do something about high taxes.
I forget how the episode ends, but it probably wasn't pleasant.
Japan is just a very expensive place to do business. Real estate, cost-of-living, everything is very high.
This wasn't always so. From 1945 to about 1970, Japan was struggling economically, and "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap imported goods. But once you become a leading industrial power (and by some measures, Japan is the leading industrial power) you start running short of cheap unskilled labor, and have to offshore processes that require it. Which certainly chip manufacturing.
CSS wasn't nailed down as an official "recommendation" until late 1996. By then, almost all the work that was going to go into the original Netscape brower engine had already been done.
I agree that Netscape should have paid more attention to CSS and other W3C standards once they actually appeared. But that's all kind of beside my point, which was that Netscape never "defined the standard".
Netscape never "defined the standard". There have always been W3C specs for HTML. The problem was that in the middle 90s, W3C was taking forever to define specs for more than the most trivial web pages, and Netscape wasn't willing to wait on them.
Nor was it true that "nobody cared". Lots of people bitched about it.
"Riddled with references to Word"? Whatever you mean, I don't see it. There's a reference to the Word XML namespace. But all XML applications have to define a namespace.
Why are you so sure you're feeding a troll? My previous comments were honest opinions, even if they were poorly informed -- as I've already admitted. And I happen to agree with everything you just said.
People are too quick to yell "troll!" Doing so means you don't give people a chance to correct their mistakes. Worse, it means you don't give a fair hearing to opinions you don't already share.
Of course, if you err the other way, every once in a while you're going to gratify a real troll. Bad for the ego. But what's more important, your ego, or honestly sharing ideas?
So it's OK to jack cars, attack and kill people to steal their money, drive a cab so fast that pedestrians have no hope of getting out of the way, take work as a hitman, blow police helicopters out of the sky, etc., etc. But having sex is very very bad, and bullying is beyond the pale.
Internet Explorer is complex, buggy, and just plain weird. It can't be a standard, because a standard has to be something others can follow.
In effect, you're saying, "Almost everybody uses IE. Get over it, and forget about those other browsers." That's not a workable solution. We can't afford to have the browser market utterly controlled by a single company with no sense of civic responsibility -- and unimaginably bad quality control.
There are developers looking to improve, and there are developers whose standards compliance is a joke. It's true that nobody's perfect, but that doesn't give Microsoft or Charles Manson a free pass.
Except for one thing, you can't know if he neighbours INTENT was to share his open wireless connection for sharing.
Jeez, have you ever followed a court case? Or even watched an ep of Law and Order? Judges and juries determine intent all the time.
Thats the whole point of Open WiFi afterall, sharing. By doing this they're making Open WiFi illegal, because not only does your computer have to get permission to connect to the network (via the login) but now extra permission is needed too.
Nonsense. All the open network owner has to do is put access permission in his window or on a web page. (Which almost all of them already do.) Somebody accused of stealing access can then point to that permission. But you can't assume every open access point is permission to access, any more than you can assume an unlocked front door is permission to enter.
That's weird. Urban legends always cater to some primal fear or fascination. Like those urban sewer alligator stories that seems to be pretty much universal. But what's the fascination with a walled-up server?
I have my own computer wall story, though it's kind of backwards. A certain university had a huge vacuum-tube mainframe donated to them. They'd fire it up once a year as part of some class or other. The rest of the year it served as partitioning for the grad student offices. Finally, they decided it wasn't worth keeping and sold it for scrap. That meant they had to buy new wooden partitions. It turned out the partitions cost more than they got for the scrap!
This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market...
That's silly. Has Metrowerks suddenly developed an allergy to generating x86 code? I doubt it. More likely they decided that there are too many competing Windows and Linux products for them to make a profit selling to the PC market. But their OS X expertise would give them an edge in the Intel/Mac world, even if other x86 vendors decide to start offering Mac development tools. Obviously they've decided the Mac marketplace isn't important enough to justify the cost following Apple to the new architecture.
... I doubt that they would whitelist an IP address the resolves to a broadband connection.
I'm sure you're right. And you've also described the likely reason Chris is getting filtered: Yahoo and Hotmail just assume any home user with their own server is a spammer. (Stupid of me to not think of it.) Can't hurt to ask, but that's probably the answer.
There might be very good reasons to run your own mail server on your own PC, but I don't see any advantage on using this approach for direct delivery of outgoing email.
Hey, this is Slashdot. People here don't just use commercial products or services, not when they can hack out their own solutions.
Besides, there are practical reasons to have your own email server. Like being able to reconfigure the thing as you need to. For example, you might have noticed that he gave his email address as slashdot@chrisbartle.com. That's obviously one that he created for the occasion and will discard as soon as the conversation is over. Can't do stuff like that with most ISPs.
One thing Chris might consider doing is moving his email server to colocated or virtual host. A suggestion which will probably not please him, since that's something he has to pay for. But it's probably the only way to get off the email providers' shitlists. Of course, he should make sure that the hosting provider leases him an IP address that isn't on any blacklists...
Slashdot Mirror
But you should still read TFA before expressing an opinion about it. The dude works for a transcription service. He doesn't know what's on the disk because it's not his disc. Presumably it's important to whoever hired the company to transcribe it.
OK, I stand corrected. It would aid the current discussion if you gave us the maker of that machine you owned. Lanier?
Why is Imation so sure it's an analog disk? I've never heard of disks being used for magnetic analog recording. (There's vinyl disks, of course, but they're mechnical recordings.) And why would anybody create one? Once you go to all the trouble of creating the hardware to access the tracks, you're pretty much in the digital world anyway, and might as well go all the way.
But come to think of it, this is a long term problem. If the station is ever finished (which is pretty doubtful at this point), it'll be generating several times as much trash as it is now. Were they really planning on hauling it all back to the surface?
Not to mention the standard video game convention that you can come back from the dead -- but only a fixed number of times!
Let's face it, this is all fantasy, and there's no point in examining the technical details.
I'm reminded of that TV show Highlander, where the immortal hero went around fighting battles with a sword. At first he carried it around in a case or something, until the writers realized that they couldn't possibly contrive to have the sword available every time he needed it. So whenever a battle started, they'd just cut away for a second, and when they cut back, he'd have the sword in his hands -- as if he'd pulled it out of his hip pocket! That used to bother me more than the silliness of him not being killable.
I forget how the episode ends, but it probably wasn't pleasant.
Actually, my sig is a total lie. I read ACs all the time. I just got tired of all the ACs who made braindead kneejerk responses to my posts.
This wasn't always so. From 1945 to about 1970, Japan was struggling economically, and "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap imported goods. But once you become a leading industrial power (and by some measures, Japan is the leading industrial power) you start running short of cheap unskilled labor, and have to offshore processes that require it. Which certainly chip manufacturing.
I agree that Netscape should have paid more attention to CSS and other W3C standards once they actually appeared. But that's all kind of beside my point, which was that Netscape never "defined the standard".
Nor was it true that "nobody cared". Lots of people bitched about it.
"Riddled with references to Word"? Whatever you mean, I don't see it. There's a reference to the Word XML namespace. But all XML applications have to define a namespace.
People are too quick to yell "troll!" Doing so means you don't give people a chance to correct their mistakes. Worse, it means you don't give a fair hearing to opinions you don't already share.
Of course, if you err the other way, every once in a while you're going to gratify a real troll. Bad for the ego. But what's more important, your ego, or honestly sharing ideas?
Oops, you're completely correct. Like everyone else here, my short-term memory is impaired...
So it's OK to jack cars, attack and kill people to steal their money, drive a cab so fast that pedestrians have no hope of getting out of the way, take work as a hitman, blow police helicopters out of the sky, etc., etc. But having sex is very very bad, and bullying is beyond the pale.
Nothing about this year's Vinyl Vanna? For shame!
In effect, you're saying, "Almost everybody uses IE. Get over it, and forget about those other browsers." That's not a workable solution. We can't afford to have the browser market utterly controlled by a single company with no sense of civic responsibility -- and unimaginably bad quality control.
There are developers looking to improve, and there are developers whose standards compliance is a joke. It's true that nobody's perfect, but that doesn't give Microsoft or Charles Manson a free pass.
OK, you obviously know the issues better than I do. But why on earth did Nokia buy up x86 tools? Aren't most smart phones xscale?
So what?
I have my own computer wall story, though it's kind of backwards. A certain university had a huge vacuum-tube mainframe donated to them. They'd fire it up once a year as part of some class or other. The rest of the year it served as partitioning for the grad student offices. Finally, they decided it wasn't worth keeping and sold it for scrap. That meant they had to buy new wooden partitions. It turned out the partitions cost more than they got for the scrap!
Besides, there are practical reasons to have your own email server. Like being able to reconfigure the thing as you need to. For example, you might have noticed that he gave his email address as slashdot@chrisbartle.com. That's obviously one that he created for the occasion and will discard as soon as the conversation is over. Can't do stuff like that with most ISPs.
One thing Chris might consider doing is moving his email server to colocated or virtual host. A suggestion which will probably not please him, since that's something he has to pay for. But it's probably the only way to get off the email providers' shitlists. Of course, he should make sure that the hosting provider leases him an IP address that isn't on any blacklists...