Yes, this sounds good, except for the fact that testing was created as an intermediate step between stable and unstable. We can do this as many times as we want and there are still gonna be people that are unhappy. Apt-get makes people lazy (myself included!) I remember the days when if you wanted KDE, you had to download the source packages and compile it. Sure, there were RPMs, but RPM was so horribly broken anyway that they'd never work. Kids these days, I swear...;)
There's actually a reason you don't see this done more often: Unamplified audio (like the stuff coming from a soundcard) doesn't travel very far. 20, 30 feet max before you start getting signal degradation. You'd be better off getting 4 cheap PCs with cheap soundcards and mounting everything remotely over NFS (and there are already stereo components that do this exact same thing.) I know it sounds like a fun project, but you can buy products like this that allow you to access your MP3 collection and control it remotely (via http, remote control, etc.) Basically, you're gonna need some sort of player at every amp, otherwise it's just not gonna sound good.
Alas, for most slashdotters, the first and last set of female genitalia they will ever see belonged to their mother (unless they were born by c-section, then they just have to resort to porn.)
Yes, it will just become bigger. There's not too much need for a "scene" right now because everyone does it out in the open. No need for secrecy etc. I can rip a CD and stick it in my Kazaa share folder and I'm distributing it to tons of people. VCDs and shit at least take some technological know-how to make. MP3s you can just load musicmatch and click "Rip."
Ironically, a good analogy. This is why the war on drugs is such a failure. And why the war on p2p will also be a failure. See, you're attacking the wrong side of the problem. I'll continue your analogy though.. The reason the war on drugs is such a catastrophic failure is because all arresting drug dealers does is make the profits higher. Because there's more risk of being arrested, dealers will charge more, smugglers charge more, and it basically turns the drug trade into the high-stakes game it is today. Thus, the war on drugs actually INCREASES crime, because these guys aren't afraid of knocking off the competition.
P2P will happen pretty much the same way, but for different reasons. All they're going to do is drive the trade underground again. 5 years ago it was one guy who was technologically adept charging his buddies $2 a pop to burn CDs. Now he can do it again, charging say, $5 a pop. They'll start forming private IRC release groups, buying, ripping and sharing MP3s between private groups of people. The RIAA will have a hard time infiltrating these groups. And the RIAA still doesn't see a rise in profits.
What the RIAA needs to do is basically what business logic of the past 2000 years has told us: offer a better product, lower the price, or and *gasp* actually give consumers what they want (like legal, online music downloads.) If you keep selling us the same crap over and over again, guess what? We're not gonna buy it again. Stop clinging to an outdated business model and get with the 21st century. If you refuse to change your ways, you are doomed.
This is a rather obvious troll, but I'll bite (if it's not, it just shows your ignorance.) For shit home use, yeah, you really can't tell the difference between most of these programs. Linux's printing support is horrible, output things to lpr? No thanks. Drivers don't exist for a lot of the hardware professionals use (high end scanners, cameras, printers, etc) and don't even get me started on Linux's piss poor pro audio support. Sure, you might be able to use these programs to do the same thing as their commercial counterparts, but it will take you twice as long and the results will probably not be as good.
Other things like file format compatability (gotta be able to trade files with your customers, and file formats change so having compatability in GIMP now doesn't mean it will work with the next version of Photoshop,) color calibration (you don't calibrate color yourself, you pay someone $125 to make SURE it's right, because if it's wrong it can cost you a lot of money having to do a second print run out of pocket, and these guys don't do Linux,) and interoperability with other programs (cut/paste from illustrator to photoshop to quark, etc) are ALL important, and using a disjointed collection of programs that work "well enough" just won't cut it. OS X is a more viable candidate of a desktop OS than Linux. Not that it matters, they're fighting for a distant second place anyway. As long as I still have my mac, I don't really care.
You can get a quad Xeon for less than $3000? Tell me how that is possible with a 5.1 S/PDIF audio card, FireWire 800, USB2.0, independent SATA channels, DVD burner on a board that supports 8 gigs of ram. 4 Xeon CPUs ALONE will run you $2000. A quad Xeon board is another $400. Already up to $2400 for a CPU/Mobo without a support contract! A case with all the fans you'd need to cool those Xeons will cost a good deal, as will the dual power supplies you're gonna need. And you get to run Linux or WinXP Enterprise on it, you don't even get a cool OS like OS X. No, give me the Mac any day.
Actually, Doom III for Mac will more than likely have a 64-bit version. It seems like Apple would give id a few G5s way ahead of time to let them optimize the asm routines, not to mention the fact that Apple is also releasing an optimized compiler for building FAT (combo 32/64-bit) binaries. So actually, in all probability, Doom III WILL be 64-bit optimized. But it'll run on 32-bit systems no problem.
Wow, "soveirgn citizen"? Has this guy never heard of the concept of a social contract (if you don't like the laws, you're free to leave, otherwise you gotta obey them)? No wonder he can't get a job, employers don't want to hire someone with a felony conviction which he probably does not disclose on job applications (despite the law that says you have to,) considering his insistence that it technically "didn't happen" (even though he was convicted.) This guy looks like a complete nutcase to me, though the fact that there are tons of postings about him on alt.activism.militia probably prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt anyway. He seems to me like someone who wants to give nothing yet get everything in return, and sorry bub, that ain't the way the world works. Well, I mean, he can always move to a cabin in the woods, but then he'd have to move out of his parents' house..
Totally. Akamai really isn't that expensive when compared to buying your own bandwidth. The only thing about Akamai (from what I've heard, I've never used it) is that you have to plan updates a few days ahead of time to give them time to propagate amongst the various Akamai balancing servers. But have you ever noticed that downloads from Akamai are usually the fastest around? And that pretty much every corporate high-traffic site uses them (CNN, Apple, IBM, ETrade, FedEx, Yahoo, etc.) so I think they'd be fine for your small usage.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you still can't get it. Cocaine is illegal in the US and there's still tons of it here. And the US border guards actually care about trying to stop it from coming in, something which I doubt the Iraqis did.
Yes, but you fail to see that buying shoddy component hardware for $600 doesn't give you nearly as nice a system as the Mac. When you buy a Mac, you're not just buying hardware, you're also paying for the OS (which is the only true next-generation desktop OS with the possible exception of the now-defunct BeOS,) the iApps, the sweet looking case, etc. All of these are part of the "Mac experience." Sure, Linux works, you can browse the web, print, write papers, etc. but it doesn't have the experience that a true Mac gives you.
The reason people like Macs so much is that it makes computing fun and easy. The reason OS X is so incredibly awesome is that it's very user-friendly without sacrificing the power of Unix for those who want it. But if you're not a power-user, you'll never see a command line and still have a great computer that you'll enjoy immensely. Linux can't possibly give you a comparable experience, and that's what you pay the extra $1000 for. They're both computers, they're both about as powerful as eachother (for all intents and purposes,) but the Mac lets you do everything in style. THAT is why you buy a Mac, those who own them know this, those who don't just haven't figured it out yet.
I agree, Tower is a great store. The one around here stocks tons of obscure/local stuff, and I was able to pick up Radiohead's Hail to the Thief the day it came out for $8.99. That's a price I'm willing to pay for CDs (honestly because it's Radiohead I would've sacrificed a higher price, but only because I'm a rabid fan.) Though yeah, you're right, Sam Goodie (and the rest of the mega-chains) suck ass. Prices through the roof, no local selections, etc. They're doomed and the rest of the industry will survive, as the market is glutted right now anyway.
Yes, except the opposition Jefferson was talking about here wasn't really evil, they just held different views from Jefferson and his political party. He's talking about the Federalist party, which had a bunch of really smart guys in it, like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (though those two stayed out of partisan politics,) John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. All the best though.
Cops don't care about auto breakins because they're so incredibly common and they're usually covered by insurance. There's also generally no chance of catching the thief, and 90% of the time they're juveniles anyway (someone broke into my car and stole my stereo, I caught them, and it turned out to be a group of 13 and 14 year olds.)
There's no chance of getting restitution, no real chance for jailtime (most they'd get is a month or two in juvie) and no real chance of catching them anyway, so the cops don't bother. In my case I just made them give me back what they stole, which they were still very reluctant to do even after being caught red handed, and I told their parents, who didn't really care. One of them even threatened to press charges for threating her hoodlum child because I chased the kids down with a baseball bat. I threatened to call INS on her ass and she shut the fuck up real quick.
Moral of the story here, there's really no point in wasting manpower on certain crimes where there's no real chance of catching the perpetrators. And even if you do, more than likely nothing will come of it. The cops don't care because they've tried in the past and it's gotten them nowhere. Just get theft insurance on your car and be happy they didn't steal the whole damn thing.
Actually some of the neo-geo roms are huge.. 64 and 128 megs each. MAME also supports a lot of newer games, which are significantly larger than Ms. Pac-Man. MAME also supports some 5000 or so games, so even if they were all less than 256k, that's still much larger than the size of a CD.
Psh, no way, gotta go for the liquid hydrogen. Highly explosive and it hovers somewhere around 4 degrees Kelvin. Though I wasn't aware we had developed the technology to do superconductive lithography.. though I forget if there are low-temp non-ceramic superconductors. Actually come to think of it, I wasn't aware we could use superconductors for anything but straight wires.. It's been 4 or 5 years since I've done any research in the field, however.
If you can even consider throwing one of these (not to mention he said he'd been to a few all weekend sessions) then I'd say it's safe to say they game way too much. My schoolmates actually DID throw things like this; after he failed out, one of them used Daddy's Money (tm) to try and open a LAN gaming cafe. It lasted all of 6 months before it failed and he went to work for daddy. They also seem to have little idea of what they're getting into. When throwing an event of this size, you won't be playing many games yourself. There's just too much to do, too many problems to fix, too much administration to do. Really, it sounds like any number of half-baked plans that will never happen.
Instead of spending all weekend holed up in a room playing computer games, find something better to do with your time. No, I'm being totally serious. This is not a troll. There is much more to life than computer games, and regardless of what you say, I don't see sitting in front of a computer in a dark room for 48 hours as being healthy. Get out, live a little.
I knew some guys in high school who were really in to things like this. They hit college, promptly failed out (because they made straight As in high school without trying, they saw no need to go to class) and are now working at various shit jobs. One works at a gas station, one works at a grocery store, etc. "LAN Gamer" is not a skill that will serve you any good in the near or distant future.
I'm not saying computer games are bad, or even that LAN parties are bad. But there is such a thing called moderation. A LAN party once in a while is a fun thing, a LAN party every weekend or even once a month is probably too much. Likewise, 6 hours of gaming a day is also too much. Get out, live a little, you'll be a much happier person than sitting on a computer half your day.
Not necessarily so. I print and I still write pretty quickly. I still take notes on pen and paper because I've found the act of having to physically write them helps me remember them better.
Well, clock speed is even more totally meaningless when comparing a 32 bit processor to a 64 bit processor. I recall seeing benchmarks on the 1.8 ghz PPC and how it blew the pants off a hyperthreading P4 3.0 ghz. And those were with a prototype, imagine the end product. I have a feeling the PPC 970s are going to be some really awesome computers.
Barring what the other poster said, you can also predict transmission times over fiber VERY accurately. Any time spent processing the photon information to create a new photon to retransmit would be longer than the total transmission time. This would be easily detected.
I have another interesting question though.. Would it be possible to combine this with the "laser teleportation" technology demonstrated earlier this year to have a REALLY secure wireless link? If so, 30 years from now, all communications might be so secure that we wouldn't have to worry about eavesdroppers.
I don't see why this should be so difficult. I mean, they do it today with a big magnet for shoplifting purposes, why can't you make an RFID tag that deactivates when placed over a big magnetic field? This way there's no need to worry about privacy and Walmart gets a way to save money by using technology that already exists in all their stores anyway.
Actually one of the philosophical explanations for the "problem of evil" (if God is all knowing, all powerful and all good, how can evil exist?) is that God allows evil to exist to let us know what is good. People have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and there is no "true" answer because you can't prove any of it. You actually can't prove the existence of God, mostly because you can't technically prove the existence of anything except yourself (yes that's a paraphrase of a Descartes essay.) When you get into philosophical semantics like this it can be quite frustrating.:)
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Yes, this sounds good, except for the fact that testing was created as an intermediate step between stable and unstable. We can do this as many times as we want and there are still gonna be people that are unhappy. Apt-get makes people lazy (myself included!) I remember the days when if you wanted KDE, you had to download the source packages and compile it. Sure, there were RPMs, but RPM was so horribly broken anyway that they'd never work. Kids these days, I swear... ;)
There's actually a reason you don't see this done more often: Unamplified audio (like the stuff coming from a soundcard) doesn't travel very far. 20, 30 feet max before you start getting signal degradation. You'd be better off getting 4 cheap PCs with cheap soundcards and mounting everything remotely over NFS (and there are already stereo components that do this exact same thing.) I know it sounds like a fun project, but you can buy products like this that allow you to access your MP3 collection and control it remotely (via http, remote control, etc.) Basically, you're gonna need some sort of player at every amp, otherwise it's just not gonna sound good.
Alas, for most slashdotters, the first and last set of female genitalia they will ever see belonged to their mother (unless they were born by c-section, then they just have to resort to porn.)
Yes, it will just become bigger. There's not too much need for a "scene" right now because everyone does it out in the open. No need for secrecy etc. I can rip a CD and stick it in my Kazaa share folder and I'm distributing it to tons of people. VCDs and shit at least take some technological know-how to make. MP3s you can just load musicmatch and click "Rip."
Ironically, a good analogy. This is why the war on drugs is such a failure. And why the war on p2p will also be a failure. See, you're attacking the wrong side of the problem. I'll continue your analogy though.. The reason the war on drugs is such a catastrophic failure is because all arresting drug dealers does is make the profits higher. Because there's more risk of being arrested, dealers will charge more, smugglers charge more, and it basically turns the drug trade into the high-stakes game it is today. Thus, the war on drugs actually INCREASES crime, because these guys aren't afraid of knocking off the competition.
P2P will happen pretty much the same way, but for different reasons. All they're going to do is drive the trade underground again. 5 years ago it was one guy who was technologically adept charging his buddies $2 a pop to burn CDs. Now he can do it again, charging say, $5 a pop. They'll start forming private IRC release groups, buying, ripping and sharing MP3s between private groups of people. The RIAA will have a hard time infiltrating these groups. And the RIAA still doesn't see a rise in profits.
What the RIAA needs to do is basically what business logic of the past 2000 years has told us: offer a better product, lower the price, or and *gasp* actually give consumers what they want (like legal, online music downloads.) If you keep selling us the same crap over and over again, guess what? We're not gonna buy it again. Stop clinging to an outdated business model and get with the 21st century. If you refuse to change your ways, you are doomed.
This is a rather obvious troll, but I'll bite (if it's not, it just shows your ignorance.) For shit home use, yeah, you really can't tell the difference between most of these programs. Linux's printing support is horrible, output things to lpr? No thanks. Drivers don't exist for a lot of the hardware professionals use (high end scanners, cameras, printers, etc) and don't even get me started on Linux's piss poor pro audio support. Sure, you might be able to use these programs to do the same thing as their commercial counterparts, but it will take you twice as long and the results will probably not be as good.
Other things like file format compatability (gotta be able to trade files with your customers, and file formats change so having compatability in GIMP now doesn't mean it will work with the next version of Photoshop,) color calibration (you don't calibrate color yourself, you pay someone $125 to make SURE it's right, because if it's wrong it can cost you a lot of money having to do a second print run out of pocket, and these guys don't do Linux,) and interoperability with other programs (cut/paste from illustrator to photoshop to quark, etc) are ALL important, and using a disjointed collection of programs that work "well enough" just won't cut it. OS X is a more viable candidate of a desktop OS than Linux. Not that it matters, they're fighting for a distant second place anyway. As long as I still have my mac, I don't really care.
You can get a quad Xeon for less than $3000? Tell me how that is possible with a 5.1 S/PDIF audio card, FireWire 800, USB2.0, independent SATA channels, DVD burner on a board that supports 8 gigs of ram. 4 Xeon CPUs ALONE will run you $2000. A quad Xeon board is another $400. Already up to $2400 for a CPU/Mobo without a support contract! A case with all the fans you'd need to cool those Xeons will cost a good deal, as will the dual power supplies you're gonna need. And you get to run Linux or WinXP Enterprise on it, you don't even get a cool OS like OS X. No, give me the Mac any day.
Actually, Doom III for Mac will more than likely have a 64-bit version. It seems like Apple would give id a few G5s way ahead of time to let them optimize the asm routines, not to mention the fact that Apple is also releasing an optimized compiler for building FAT (combo 32/64-bit) binaries. So actually, in all probability, Doom III WILL be 64-bit optimized. But it'll run on 32-bit systems no problem.
Wow, "soveirgn citizen"? Has this guy never heard of the concept of a social contract (if you don't like the laws, you're free to leave, otherwise you gotta obey them)? No wonder he can't get a job, employers don't want to hire someone with a felony conviction which he probably does not disclose on job applications (despite the law that says you have to,) considering his insistence that it technically "didn't happen" (even though he was convicted.) This guy looks like a complete nutcase to me, though the fact that there are tons of postings about him on alt.activism.militia probably prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt anyway. He seems to me like someone who wants to give nothing yet get everything in return, and sorry bub, that ain't the way the world works. Well, I mean, he can always move to a cabin in the woods, but then he'd have to move out of his parents' house..
Totally. Akamai really isn't that expensive when compared to buying your own bandwidth. The only thing about Akamai (from what I've heard, I've never used it) is that you have to plan updates a few days ahead of time to give them time to propagate amongst the various Akamai balancing servers. But have you ever noticed that downloads from Akamai are usually the fastest around? And that pretty much every corporate high-traffic site uses them (CNN, Apple, IBM, ETrade, FedEx, Yahoo, etc.) so I think they'd be fine for your small usage.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean you still can't get it. Cocaine is illegal in the US and there's still tons of it here. And the US border guards actually care about trying to stop it from coming in, something which I doubt the Iraqis did.
Yes, but you fail to see that buying shoddy component hardware for $600 doesn't give you nearly as nice a system as the Mac. When you buy a Mac, you're not just buying hardware, you're also paying for the OS (which is the only true next-generation desktop OS with the possible exception of the now-defunct BeOS,) the iApps, the sweet looking case, etc. All of these are part of the "Mac experience." Sure, Linux works, you can browse the web, print, write papers, etc. but it doesn't have the experience that a true Mac gives you.
The reason people like Macs so much is that it makes computing fun and easy. The reason OS X is so incredibly awesome is that it's very user-friendly without sacrificing the power of Unix for those who want it. But if you're not a power-user, you'll never see a command line and still have a great computer that you'll enjoy immensely. Linux can't possibly give you a comparable experience, and that's what you pay the extra $1000 for. They're both computers, they're both about as powerful as eachother (for all intents and purposes,) but the Mac lets you do everything in style. THAT is why you buy a Mac, those who own them know this, those who don't just haven't figured it out yet.
I agree, Tower is a great store. The one around here stocks tons of obscure/local stuff, and I was able to pick up Radiohead's Hail to the Thief the day it came out for $8.99. That's a price I'm willing to pay for CDs (honestly because it's Radiohead I would've sacrificed a higher price, but only because I'm a rabid fan.) Though yeah, you're right, Sam Goodie (and the rest of the mega-chains) suck ass. Prices through the roof, no local selections, etc. They're doomed and the rest of the industry will survive, as the market is glutted right now anyway.
Yes, except the opposition Jefferson was talking about here wasn't really evil, they just held different views from Jefferson and his political party. He's talking about the Federalist party, which had a bunch of really smart guys in it, like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington (though those two stayed out of partisan politics,) John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. All the best though.
Cops don't care about auto breakins because they're so incredibly common and they're usually covered by insurance. There's also generally no chance of catching the thief, and 90% of the time they're juveniles anyway (someone broke into my car and stole my stereo, I caught them, and it turned out to be a group of 13 and 14 year olds.)
There's no chance of getting restitution, no real chance for jailtime (most they'd get is a month or two in juvie) and no real chance of catching them anyway, so the cops don't bother. In my case I just made them give me back what they stole, which they were still very reluctant to do even after being caught red handed, and I told their parents, who didn't really care. One of them even threatened to press charges for threating her hoodlum child because I chased the kids down with a baseball bat. I threatened to call INS on her ass and she shut the fuck up real quick.
Moral of the story here, there's really no point in wasting manpower on certain crimes where there's no real chance of catching the perpetrators. And even if you do, more than likely nothing will come of it. The cops don't care because they've tried in the past and it's gotten them nowhere. Just get theft insurance on your car and be happy they didn't steal the whole damn thing.
Actually some of the neo-geo roms are huge.. 64 and 128 megs each. MAME also supports a lot of newer games, which are significantly larger than Ms. Pac-Man. MAME also supports some 5000 or so games, so even if they were all less than 256k, that's still much larger than the size of a CD.
Psh, no way, gotta go for the liquid hydrogen. Highly explosive and it hovers somewhere around 4 degrees Kelvin. Though I wasn't aware we had developed the technology to do superconductive lithography.. though I forget if there are low-temp non-ceramic superconductors. Actually come to think of it, I wasn't aware we could use superconductors for anything but straight wires.. It's been 4 or 5 years since I've done any research in the field, however.
If you can even consider throwing one of these (not to mention he said he'd been to a few all weekend sessions) then I'd say it's safe to say they game way too much. My schoolmates actually DID throw things like this; after he failed out, one of them used Daddy's Money (tm) to try and open a LAN gaming cafe. It lasted all of 6 months before it failed and he went to work for daddy. They also seem to have little idea of what they're getting into. When throwing an event of this size, you won't be playing many games yourself. There's just too much to do, too many problems to fix, too much administration to do. Really, it sounds like any number of half-baked plans that will never happen.
Instead of spending all weekend holed up in a room playing computer games, find something better to do with your time. No, I'm being totally serious. This is not a troll. There is much more to life than computer games, and regardless of what you say, I don't see sitting in front of a computer in a dark room for 48 hours as being healthy. Get out, live a little.
I knew some guys in high school who were really in to things like this. They hit college, promptly failed out (because they made straight As in high school without trying, they saw no need to go to class) and are now working at various shit jobs. One works at a gas station, one works at a grocery store, etc. "LAN Gamer" is not a skill that will serve you any good in the near or distant future.
I'm not saying computer games are bad, or even that LAN parties are bad. But there is such a thing called moderation. A LAN party once in a while is a fun thing, a LAN party every weekend or even once a month is probably too much. Likewise, 6 hours of gaming a day is also too much. Get out, live a little, you'll be a much happier person than sitting on a computer half your day.
Not necessarily so. I print and I still write pretty quickly. I still take notes on pen and paper because I've found the act of having to physically write them helps me remember them better.
Well, clock speed is even more totally meaningless when comparing a 32 bit processor to a 64 bit processor. I recall seeing benchmarks on the 1.8 ghz PPC and how it blew the pants off a hyperthreading P4 3.0 ghz. And those were with a prototype, imagine the end product. I have a feeling the PPC 970s are going to be some really awesome computers.
Barring what the other poster said, you can also predict transmission times over fiber VERY accurately. Any time spent processing the photon information to create a new photon to retransmit would be longer than the total transmission time. This would be easily detected.
I have another interesting question though.. Would it be possible to combine this with the "laser teleportation" technology demonstrated earlier this year to have a REALLY secure wireless link? If so, 30 years from now, all communications might be so secure that we wouldn't have to worry about eavesdroppers.
I don't see why this should be so difficult. I mean, they do it today with a big magnet for shoplifting purposes, why can't you make an RFID tag that deactivates when placed over a big magnetic field? This way there's no need to worry about privacy and Walmart gets a way to save money by using technology that already exists in all their stores anyway.
Actually one of the philosophical explanations for the "problem of evil" (if God is all knowing, all powerful and all good, how can evil exist?) is that God allows evil to exist to let us know what is good. People have been arguing about this for thousands of years, and there is no "true" answer because you can't prove any of it. You actually can't prove the existence of God, mostly because you can't technically prove the existence of anything except yourself (yes that's a paraphrase of a Descartes essay.) When you get into philosophical semantics like this it can be quite frustrating. :)
Everyone who has a TV in an SUV is invariably a rapper who is watching porno. Or some mom who has to put on a DVD to get her kids to shut up.