When the day comes (hah) that I can go into a bookstore and purchase both a 'real book' and an 'E-Book' at the same time, I will be happy.
E-Books are nice when you need to search for something, or you need a quick reference. I think it is quite handy that most of my $60 programming books come with the entire text and examples on CD. Yes, I could copy that cd and give the information away, but nobody wants it because it is asthetically worthless in non-paper form.
Paper books will always rule. We all function with a linear mindset. If you read something in a real book and later need to find it, you don't have to page through the entire thing. *Oh, it was about 1/3 through the second chapter* You flip to about where you thought it was, and find it. I hate searching EBooks by clicking or paging. I haven't seen any ebook devices yet that have any decent search interfaces.
The E-Book is a good idea for publishing companies, it eliminates the only major contribution they make to a book. (aside from editing) It is quite sad that their goal now is to find the most secure format to restrict access to a book. Any system based on mass distribution and individual 'licenses' for something as trivial as a book seems like a waste of time.
And has anybody thought about how, once E-Books take over the world, a person would check a book out from a library? I would hate to even imagine. Since it would be easy for you to make a copy of the electronic book (we are all inherently evil), you probably would not be allowed to leave the library with it.
Bah, humbug. Give me paper or give me death. I'm sick of this computers are taking over the world crap.
I would love to see the targeting system on this thing. If they can shoot a pulse of antigravity through walls, but not through a ball on a string, that is quite amazing. Maybe they should get this targeting over to the Pentagon for our missle defense system.
Can anybody reasonably explain why this 'beam' would have no effect on anything it comes in contact with besides a spherical object? I honstely don't understand it.
Shoot a laser at a wall, the beam hits the wall.
Point a huge subwoofer at a wall, the wall shakes, and so does the next room.
Point an invisible pulse at a wall, it passes Through the wall and only hits spherical objects suspended from strings.
Don't get me wrong, every piece of electronic equipment that I own that can be made by Sony is made by Sony. (Okay, 4/5 boxen ain't bad).
It just figures that they would create a technology that would so damage one of their other products that you would have to buy the second product again.
The funniest part of the whole thing is this (funny as in cynical):
1. User buys new Yanni CD.
2. Sticks CD in Sony CD player, Yanni is so powerful that the CD player starts making crazy noise and then stops making any noise at all.
3. User goes out and purchases a new Sony CD player. (Hopefully not another 52k hi-fi edition)
4. User tries to play Yanni again. Good thing that he has the Sony warranty, but I'm sure the warranty doesn't cover damage by the encoding of their own cd's. (smart).
5. User realizes that the cd broke his player, yet Sony still will not acknowledge any fault on their part.
6. User tries to return the evil Yanni cd, yet Best Buy (and any other store, for that matter), will not accept returns of opened cd media. (who would want to copy Yanni anyways?
Yes, I love Sony... but they do seem to shoot themselves in the foot sometimes.
I wonder if SANS has indexed the Slashdot Internet Worm yet?
Attributes of the Slashdot Internet Worm
1. Client visitation of a certain url(http://www.slashdot.org) many times a day to check for 'updates'.
2. Deployment from said website to new 'target locations' to search for more information
3. Since the slashdot worm is a distributed computing application, there will be thousands of 'attacks' on a persons webserver. These attacks will be untraceable due to their distributed nature.
I wonder what the graph for this one would look like?
Well... if there were a GPS receiver inside MY car when I bought it... I would take my car home, park it in the garage, take the reciever out, and position it on the ceiling of the garage ~6 feet higher than it would have been while it was in the car.
I hope they don't keep track of my mileage with it because while my car is being driven, the gps transmitter will not.
GPS used to have a 'feature' called select availability which could mess up your location readings by miles in some cases. In 2000 Mr. Clinton signed a bill that got rid of that 'feature' and enabled all of us to use our GPS devices with a great amount of stability.
I use my gps a lot when I go on Geocaching excursions. I have noticed that when traveling long distances my location jumps a lot on the screen. Sometimes my car manages to lose a signal and then, BANG, I'm going 120 when my GPS is trying to catch back up with where my car really is.
I don't understand how any company can reasonably believe that they can accurately track a persons SPEED with GPS. The locations are typically accurate to a matter of feet. Sometimes the accuracy can get up to a matter of yards or miles. It all depends on the terrain you are in (Trees, etc), as well as how many of those GOVERNMENT OWNED satellites are within sight range of your GPS.
Somehow I doubt that this car rental agency has their own ring of satellites up in orbit that have an accuracy of mere inches. Furthermore, if this system does exist, it would have to be not only accurate but absolutely fool proof. There could be no error at all in any measurements.
If they had that, they would quickly be out of the car rental business and have a lot of people knocking on their door for service.
4 years ago I migrated to Linux, and enjoyed it.
Now I currently have several linux servers in my house, but for my desktop systems I have migrated back to Windows. There is just more software that I use on windows than there is enjoyment in running linux desktops.
Oh well. When Adobe develops for Linux, I might migrate back.
Is there a relationship between company size and linux use?
Do we have evidence of any companies with multi-million dollar revenues that rely on linux solutions for their servers or do most companies that use linux servers do it because they lack the money? (choice/only option)
When statues made of stone, which is a porous material, lay underwater for centuries they are bound to absorb some of the minerals in the water. Being an art and cs major, I spent many of my classes learning about our ancient works of art and where they came from.
Many objects found underwater, such as bronze and stone sculptures, become covered in salt, organic materials, etc. If you put a rock in salt water for a week when you take it out and let it dry in the air it will have a patina/covering of salt residue on it.
This desalinization treatment more than likely progresses the work of art through a process that removes the salt from inside the stone. This will take out the excess minerals and allow us to see the actual stone as it was carved.
The term desalinization refers to removing salt from any material, not just water. In case anybody was wondering.
-Scott
Scott Ruttencutter
Free Tacos For All - This IS RELEVANT.
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 1
Taco Bell is, I guess, offering free tacos for the world if Mir hits their floating target in the South Pacific. Details are on the website linked above, and the images are big below... if you want a desktop background like I did.
If everything in this article holds true, I can see 'personal computers' becoming the type of hard to find and 'uncommon' item that they were 10 years ago. Does this mean we can expect hardware prices for PC's go go up, reaching the thousands of dollars we used to pay for good old Tandy's?
If I had space in that huge salt mine storage facility, I would find backers to store billions in PC parts while they were still cheap. Five years from now we'd open up a huge warehouse with the capability of making 500% profit!
Well. Why doesn't Slashdot create it's own login for the site? Then the viewers, acting as agents of Slashdot, of course, can legally view the link through Slashdot's account.
I think it would be amusing to create one of these BEAM bots with the sole mission of keeping a 1 meter distance between itself and any other object. Then you put it into Battlebot competition. No one controls it, and all it does is run.
I can see the next breed of Battlebots planning for this escapade. They'll all install forward facing halogen lamps. No BEAM bot can resist the light.
Slashdot Mirror
Code Red won't be a huge problem until the script kiddies start to exploit the holes.
Those people posting apache logs of infected machines are just as guilty as those whom use those logs maliciously.
One would think that, even though this is "Microsoft's Fault", we would have some compassion and make an attempt to stop the damage where we can.
What a merry band we are. My box can't get infected, but here is a list of machines you can go exploit.
-S
Did PetSmart pay for that link? That is beyond strange. We go from using e2 tags to linking to petsmart.
I think these guys have been hitting the code red just a little too hard.
-S
When the day comes (hah) that I can go into a bookstore and purchase both a 'real book' and an 'E-Book' at the same time, I will be happy.
E-Books are nice when you need to search for something, or you need a quick reference. I think it is quite handy that most of my $60 programming books come with the entire text and examples on CD. Yes, I could copy that cd and give the information away, but nobody wants it because it is asthetically worthless in non-paper form.
Paper books will always rule. We all function with a linear mindset. If you read something in a real book and later need to find it, you don't have to page through the entire thing. *Oh, it was about 1/3 through the second chapter* You flip to about where you thought it was, and find it. I hate searching EBooks by clicking or paging. I haven't seen any ebook devices yet that have any decent search interfaces.
The E-Book is a good idea for publishing companies, it eliminates the only major contribution they make to a book. (aside from editing) It is quite sad that their goal now is to find the most secure format to restrict access to a book. Any system based on mass distribution and individual 'licenses' for something as trivial as a book seems like a waste of time.
And has anybody thought about how, once E-Books take over the world, a person would check a book out from a library? I would hate to even imagine. Since it would be easy for you to make a copy of the electronic book (we are all inherently evil), you probably would not be allowed to leave the library with it.
Bah, humbug. Give me paper or give me death. I'm sick of this computers are taking over the world crap.
-S
What, is this a Slashdot Smart Tag (tm)?
=)
-S
I would love to see the targeting system on this thing. If they can shoot a pulse of antigravity through walls, but not through a ball on a string, that is quite amazing. Maybe they should get this targeting over to the Pentagon for our missle defense system.
Can anybody reasonably explain why this 'beam' would have no effect on anything it comes in contact with besides a spherical object? I honstely don't understand it.
Shoot a laser at a wall, the beam hits the wall.
Point a huge subwoofer at a wall, the wall shakes, and so does the next room.
Point an invisible pulse at a wall, it passes Through the wall and only hits spherical objects suspended from strings.
This seems sketchy to me.
-S
Well, it figures.
Don't get me wrong, every piece of electronic equipment that I own that can be made by Sony is made by Sony. (Okay, 4/5 boxen ain't bad).
It just figures that they would create a technology that would so damage one of their other products that you would have to buy the second product again.
The funniest part of the whole thing is this (funny as in cynical):
1. User buys new Yanni CD.
2. Sticks CD in Sony CD player, Yanni is so powerful that the CD player starts making crazy noise and then stops making any noise at all.
3. User goes out and purchases a new Sony CD player. (Hopefully not another 52k hi-fi edition)
4. User tries to play Yanni again. Good thing that he has the Sony warranty, but I'm sure the warranty doesn't cover damage by the encoding of their own cd's. (smart).
5. User realizes that the cd broke his player, yet Sony still will not acknowledge any fault on their part.
6. User tries to return the evil Yanni cd, yet Best Buy (and any other store, for that matter), will not accept returns of opened cd media. (who would want to copy Yanni anyways?
Yes, I love Sony... but they do seem to shoot themselves in the foot sometimes.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
I wonder if SANS has indexed the Slashdot Internet Worm yet?
Attributes of the Slashdot Internet Worm
1. Client visitation of a certain url(http://www.slashdot.org) many times a day to check for 'updates'.
2. Deployment from said website to new 'target locations' to search for more information
3. Since the slashdot worm is a distributed computing application, there will be thousands of 'attacks' on a persons webserver. These attacks will be untraceable due to their distributed nature.
I wonder what the graph for this one would look like?
-S
Was this title used just because we all love Google's Zeitgeist, or is it just a coincidence?
I know I was thinking "Google" when I read that article header.
I wish I could get away with naming my novel Natalie Portman, I bet all of you would buy it the next time a Star Wars movie came out
Maybe if it's about beer, you will read it also.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
The site is down!? Maybe Mars is going to attack the "whitehouse" because of our pesky "Code Red" problem.
Let's hope that Dubya remembered to bring his favorite Slim Whitman LP. "When I'm Calling You"
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
How long do you think it will take Microsoft to sue Slashdot under the DCMA for these trolls posting links to copyrighted information?
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Um, what on earth would I want this for if I can't plug any drives into it?
Oh, right. I forgot about that 60Gb flash card I had in my pocket.
Give me a break,
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Who is to say that Microsoft will even limit the number of words that they link to. Possibly clicking on the letter A would take you to 'About Microsoft', or the word TO would take you to 'To find out more about microsoft' etc, etc. Who is going to limit the amount of words that MS makes into smarttags? I know that I would be pissed at the point that I didn't know what content was on the page and what content was provided by MS. Not because I think MS is evil, just because I hate clutter.
Scott Ruttencutter
I bumped around redhat.com and found:
s /tux/
http://www.redhat.com/products/software/webserver
In case anybody had no clue, like me.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Well... if there were a GPS receiver inside MY car when I bought it... I would take my car home, park it in the garage, take the reciever out, and position it on the ceiling of the garage ~6 feet higher than it would have been while it was in the car.
I hope they don't keep track of my mileage with it because while my car is being driven, the gps transmitter will not.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
GPS used to have a 'feature' called select availability which could mess up your location readings by miles in some cases. In 2000 Mr. Clinton signed a bill that got rid of that 'feature' and enabled all of us to use our GPS devices with a great amount of stability.
I use my gps a lot when I go on Geocaching excursions. I have noticed that when traveling long distances my location jumps a lot on the screen. Sometimes my car manages to lose a signal and then, BANG, I'm going 120 when my GPS is trying to catch back up with where my car really is.
I don't understand how any company can reasonably believe that they can accurately track a persons SPEED with GPS. The locations are typically accurate to a matter of feet. Sometimes the accuracy can get up to a matter of yards or miles. It all depends on the terrain you are in (Trees, etc), as well as how many of those GOVERNMENT OWNED satellites are within sight range of your GPS.
Somehow I doubt that this car rental agency has their own ring of satellites up in orbit that have an accuracy of mere inches. Furthermore, if this system does exist, it would have to be not only accurate but absolutely fool proof. There could be no error at all in any measurements.
If they had that, they would quickly be out of the car rental business and have a lot of people knocking on their door for service.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
4 years ago I migrated to Linux, and enjoyed it.
Now I currently have several linux servers in my house, but for my desktop systems I have migrated back to Windows. There is just more software that I use on windows than there is enjoyment in running linux desktops.
Oh well. When Adobe develops for Linux, I might migrate back.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Is there a relationship between company size and linux use?
Do we have evidence of any companies with multi-million dollar revenues that rely on linux solutions for their servers or do most companies that use linux servers do it because they lack the money? (choice/only option)
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
What are the breakdowns for age and linux use? Does older mean wiser or does younger mean more 31337.
Scott Ruttencutter
Well.
When statues made of stone, which is a porous material, lay underwater for centuries they are bound to absorb some of the minerals in the water. Being an art and cs major, I spent many of my classes learning about our ancient works of art and where they came from.
Many objects found underwater, such as bronze and stone sculptures, become covered in salt, organic materials, etc. If you put a rock in salt water for a week when you take it out and let it dry in the air it will have a patina/covering of salt residue on it.
This desalinization treatment more than likely progresses the work of art through a process that removes the salt from inside the stone. This will take out the excess minerals and allow us to see the actual stone as it was carved.
The term desalinization refers to removing salt from any material, not just water. In case anybody was wondering.
-Scott
Scott Ruttencutter
Taco Bell is, I guess, offering free tacos for the world if Mir hits their floating target in the South Pacific. Details are on the website linked above, and the images are big below... if you want a desktop background like I did.
See: Low Resolution Image Of The Target
High Resolution Image Of The Target
Scott Ruttencutter
If everything in this article holds true, I can see 'personal computers' becoming the type of hard to find and 'uncommon' item that they were 10 years ago. Does this mean we can expect hardware prices for PC's go go up, reaching the thousands of dollars we used to pay for good old Tandy's?
If I had space in that huge salt mine storage facility, I would find backers to store billions in PC parts while they were still cheap. Five years from now we'd open up a huge warehouse with the capability of making 500% profit!
Yeah.
Right.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Since there is no reference to the actual painting in the article, an image can be found here at vangoghgallery.com.
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0766.htm
Scott Ruttencutter
Well. Why doesn't Slashdot create it's own login for the site? Then the viewers, acting as agents of Slashdot, of course, can legally view the link through Slashdot's account.
Well?
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
As opposed to some of our higher moderated posts, 6x10^10 is 60 BILLION not 6 million.
We're smarter than that.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
I think it would be amusing to create one of these BEAM bots with the sole mission of keeping a 1 meter distance between itself and any other object. Then you put it into Battlebot competition. No one controls it, and all it does is run.
I can see the next breed of Battlebots planning for this escapade. They'll all install forward facing halogen lamps. No BEAM bot can resist the light.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter