First off, I am a lawyer...buwahahahaha! Only kidding - IANAL - I ain't no arsehole lawyer. After all, I read Slashdot, don't I?
But I do have some comments to make.
You say, that the software is "..increasingly expensive because the small company I work for has moved into direct competition with the software provider..."
If that's so, I've got to say what country are you in? There are a spate of laws here in Europe at least that are supposed to protect your company against that sort of thing. Secondly, you're right to get out from under the thumb of a competing company - it would be a bad move to try and keep things as they are.
Thirdly, as far as I know, there should be no legal ramifications of a re-implementation of the sort I think you mean. At the very least, it's something that hasn't been frowned upon in the past in the programming community. As all the other posts have said, however, a few trips to a lawyer would sort this out. Mind you even if the lawyer says it is illegal, you've got to consider if all this lawyer has done is gone to software provider and directly asked them, rather than pulling on a pool of knowledge about your national/local law, then his opinion can equally be discounted.
In short, if precident is anything to go by, there should be no problems. Probably.
I mean it - screw the nit-picking about the grammer on the manufacturer's website. Feck the page that fails to mention 'die-hard geeks' as a potential market. This looks like a sweet deal.
First off, it works in a 386. Brilliant. That means that my ol' 030 server from the early ninties can use it.
It has a hardware boot menu and password! Like the reviewer, I've always been wary about the various software applications you can get to do this - especially since they each tend to want to control your MBR and end up deleting each other.(I usually end up running Lilo from a floppy rather than risk having the fixes for the 8Gb limitation of my bios overwritten). Also, I recently discovered the big dark secret behind writing such applications and I'm not impressed by the vast majority I've had a crack(--errr, I mean look 8) at.
Also, family member recently did me the great favour of trying to install a firewall on my Athlon 750Mhz(of which he owns a stake; six months ago a 750Mhz machine was expensive) - and deleted the Partition Table in the process. I really could have used this card then as it took me the best part of a week to figure out the obvious problem 8(.
I must say, however, that the limitation on disk sizes would, in my opinion, make the card more suitable for power-home users than large institutions with are bound to need more than a measly 2Gb a partition.
In short, depending on pricing, this card definitely peaks my interest.
I'm just wondering, all the problems with this technology aside(e.g. size of equipment), what about the discomfort to the subject? In fact, other questions present themselves:
What are the numbers for resultant eye-infection?
What, if any, supplemental medication has to be prescribed - such as eye drops etc...? What's the effect of the Lasik surgical manoeuvre on eyesight when Williams' apparatus isn't present? I mean, 20/10, or maybe even 20/2.5, maybe great, but drop your glasses and if your left with 2/300 - well that would stop me getting the op... Unless they paid me
You're right.
That's some sweeeeet(and I mean sweeeeeeeeeeeet) tech right there.
Unless there's some type of three pence(cent), cheap knockoff route that they've decided to take - methinks I've heard this proposal before(late 80's) involving a network of radio transmitters (THAT plan was dumped for obvious reasons).
Anywho, I've got a question - if they can put 'em in Furbies, why do only the £30,000 BMWs have GPS?.
Leaving the matter at hand aside for a moment, I must admit my kneejerk reaction is to say that freedom of speech should be a basic human right. At the same time, anyone with a website should moderate its content with regards to the national law associated with the location of the servers that host the site. To do less is to try and create martyrs(-sp?) - and to practice unsafe webmastering.
As for the whole political situation in China - there are good and bad things about the system. When it works, it works good. When it fails, it fails badly. Is that so much worse than the pseudo-grey myre that seems to envelope the Western world? I honestly don't know.
But at this stage I am a little tired of hearing about how 'evil' everything is that hasn't been rubber stamped by the US since 1950. I'm tired of the tear-jerking stories that are supposed to pull at specific heart-strings or stike a cord with certain segments of society(i.e. in this case geeks and journalists) - only to be torn to shreds quietly in a few months when the one important fact that was left out of the story emerges on a non-English speaking news site. And while I'm ranting (and thoroughly wrecking my karma - I may have been a karma whore once, but I'm kissing that goodbye now I'm just sickened by this recurring topic) I'm tired of the media furore everytime a British or American person is convicted of a crime abroad. I'm sick of American marines and pilots coming on staged news conferences and saying things like: they felt like '...a scared little bunny-rabbit...' when trapped behind enemy lines.(Do any Americans even remember that? It was an insult to the American Armed Forces as a whole). I'm tired of American commentators coming on like part of the cast of Star Trek, quoting a prime directive of interference when something's going right and quoting a policy of non-interference when the dirt's hitting the fan. I'm tired of television assuring me I have inalienable rights under my constitution; I'm tired of being assured that my political leaders are doing their best in Washington D.C.; I'm tired of news articles filled with flotsam about American politicans or policies. I'm just plain tired of nice, neat wars that just happen to come about every four years when the polls for an American leader are sagging.
I'm tired of American xenophobia disguised as concern for the standard of living. I am tired of the tug of war between Europe and America (and you can bet that's only in its infancy). I am tired of American abuses going unreported except by the 'crackpot' press - which only serve to discredit the truth. I am tired of Americans being 'holier-than-thou' when comparitive abuses exsist within their own shores. I am tired of Americans pretending the diseases spread by their armed forces are part of history because they happened more than one political administration ago. I'm tired of in living in fear of criticising Israeli policy lest I be cast as an anti-semite. I'm tired of living in fear of criticising Islamic Albania because they are in political favour with American this month. I'm just plain tired of it all. The man should have had more sense - it doesn't take much to host the site outside mainland China. There's someone who wanted to be a hero - the fact he had a wife and child doesn't change that fact. I'll shed no tears for him, even if his sentence is severe - which given the current situation I sincerely doubt.
Bye-bye karma, but you know how these things go when you need to say something. I was tired of living in fear of losing karma, so I just don't care. However, don't mark this as a 'Troll' or 'Offtopic'; this comment is neither. Truth may set you free but it can make you damned unpopular.
Typical, I don't log on to Slashdot for one day and this passes by with little or no comment by the Slashdot community.
I mean, this seems like pretty revolutionary stuff to me. Is no one else intrigued by the possiblities this presents. To quote: "By using the correct distribution of particle sizes, these multi-color emissions could allow storage of more than one bit of information in each data point..."
Does this not strike anyone as a boon?
What about: "...[it could be used] for writing and reading in parallel [in a binary system]..."
Surely this development opens up a whole new field for electronic components? Surely it opens up new vistas for computing? Maybe I'm missing something here, but I am blown away.
Would cost of materials or cost of manufacturing be prohibitive, I wonder. Or would the system be necessarialy fragile in real world systems?
I wonder, however, if one of you Chemi-geeks out there might answer a naive Compu-geek's question: are silver oxide(Ag2O) nanoparticles unique in this respect - i.e. with regards to the ability to 'program' the ability to fluoresce with blue laser light.
8)
Yup, shore is.
If you go to the address and click on archives you'll see the previous three shows in the series (this is the fourth). The show that's on tonight will probably be added in the next few days - luckly enough for those of us in Ireland(GMT) and elsewhere who have to get up at six tomorrow.
Mind you, I expected more interest from the ubergeeks here on slashdot. I don't have anything to do with space, but I'll be glued to my computer monitor watching this. Or aren't propulsion/navigation dynamics considered geeky enough anymore?
8)
Oh, come on.
I've waited for this for about four years now - when they started making those IBM microdot drives in Ireland we got the first announcements of this new technology. These were supposed to go into production in 2001. Suppose a lot happens in 4 years.
Wonder if the problem is securing financial backing? With the quoted performance rate, maybe the drives are a little too good. (Probably not, they were probably just refining the thing - but I like to introduce a healthy amount of paranoia now and again).
I pressed submit too soon.
What I wanted to ask is "Would a forked version of the kernel be subject to the GPL, and for that matter would anything written for it?."
The straight answer is probably "Yes", but I wonder if there isn't some legal workaround.
"We need a full-time leader and a nonprofit organization that can be funded by IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Well, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. It occurs to me that these nonprofit organisations might end up causing more division then they're worth...what if, heaven's forbid, Compaq disagrees with Dell and, shock, horror, one threatens to pull funding. What you're looking at is the potential sanction of seperate forked versions of the kernel...including a lame assed version released for use under the GPL, with more and more lawyer workarounds for proprietory(sp-?) versions.
"Despite Torvalds' technical reign over Linux, IBM and Compaq have quickly become the industry's de facto Linux leaders, and tensions over the kernel's direction will heighten as market forces intensify, experts say..."
These damned, physcic, unamed experts again. Would that be the expert working for Microsoft, or the 20 year old college student skipping all his classes to hack code? (HACK, not crack 8)...and when they say industry, do they mean the Hardware industry? Last time I checked there were a few other companies that held popular LINUX distros/solutions(mind you, I did blink yesterday to moisten my eyeballs...maybe everything changed then).
I think that covers it. Put that puppy to rest...won't stop me writing the same article in a few weeks time, but it satisfied by Linux frenzy for the moment.
I think what he may be talking about is the idea of swarming a planet with cheap, uneducated and potentially modified/augmented 'drones' for want of a better word. They'd do the leg work, get mechanical adaptations and be taught how to obey and perform specific tasks. They'd soak up much of the dangers, statisically speaking, reducing the losses of any trained, natural born humans. There would be a core of natural born scientists and stuff to give orders.
Come on, people. This is the mainstay of science fiction stuff... it may never happen 8(, but it doesn't make his remarks crypic - then again, maybe you're not geeky enough to have read as much sci-fi as I have 8). The book that sticks in my mind as an introduction to the concept is "Forty Thousand in Gehanna"...I forget who it's by.
8)
America's War on Drugs...
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 5
Let me first start by saying that the issue of drugs is probably the only area on which I have anyway conservative views - but even I can see that the 'War on Drugs' launched by America is not only a failure, but a catastrophy.
I would almost say world-wide catastrophy.
Sites like november.org give a smattering of alarming statistics about the effects in America of the war on drugs(for example "The average sentence for a first time, non-violent drug offender is longer than the average sentence for rape, child molestation, bank robbery or manslaughter..."). Walter Cronkite takes a dim view of the war here. Also, some surprising 'mistakes' of the war on drugs can be found here.
But here's where the international aspect comes in: most of the War on Drugs aid that is being sent to foreign(i.e. non-US) nations is being mainly used to support regiemes that otherwise might topple. For instance Marxist rebels in Columbia have found themselves pitted against a regieme supported by War on Drugs money and soldiers trained by American 'advisors'. As freerepublic.com puts it:"Formally, all U.S. aid to Colombia, which produces most of the world's cocaine and most of the heroin consumed in the United States, is intended for anti-drug rather than counter-insurgency efforts. But in practical terms, the distinction is fading...". Ironic, considering it's pro-government paramilitaries that control the larger proportion of the drugs trade...the very same paramilitaries that routinely commit genocidal raids on villages that have tried to remain neutral...the very same paramilitaries that wander Columbia armed with American made weaponary such as MP-5s and secure in their training from American soldiers...oops! I mean advisors. No-one's saying that the rebels are angels - they too have participated in the drugs trade and kidnapping and so on. I'm just saying when a policy has got it so wrong, both on the American domestic front and on the foreign front, why is the policy persued so fanactically by certain Americans?
Anyway....just to be more on topic, I saw C4's 'Traffikk', pretty good. I hope the film 'Traffic' hasn't dulled the message too much so as to render the message unreadable to the vast majority of people(i.e. non-slashdotters 8).
Yeah, I sure would like to know more about DU in weapons tech. - if you feel like posting more about it, you've got my vote.
I am familar, however, with some of the basics - uranium is primarially an Alpha ray emitter. These are basically harmless - a sheet of paper can stop them. Of course, decay can produce Beta and Gamma radiation. The fact that the "real" danger from, as you rightly point out, depleted uranium only arises when you're talking about inhalation of dust-like particles (for whatever that 'fact' means- according to the media today and yesterday in Ireland, Britain and France the 'facts' about DU seemed to change from station-to-station hour-to-hour) has not escaped me.
The thing that I find deplorable -if true- is the way that such matter can effectively and easily poison a water/food supply. I assume this could happen because of the radioactivity of the matter produced by a DU weapon's strike. However, details were sketchy on the TV reports.
I've looked up the subject of DU on the internet - again lots of controversy but with the anti-DU voice being the loudest.
Try http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm. I must state, I am very wary of a site like iacenter.org, but sites such as this (http://www.rama-usa.org/ducdi.htm) hold much more sway as they seem less politically motivated.
Another site, this time an American veteran's, is here, and a very comprehensive site is here. For my money, the better site is http://www.psr.org/duissuebrief.html.
Mind you, just to add my voice to the mass of anecdotal evidence out there: I've been around a variety of dangerous chemicals and elements. I've had fun with everything from quick silver(liquid mercury to the modern man) to a variety of radioactive isotopes(calm down- it was within the confines of a university 8). I am well aware that there is unecessary panic by those without a good knowledge of the related chemistry and/or physics. However, I am still very uneasy about certain things I have had direct contact and just because I've experienced no side-effects, it doesn't mean everyone else will escape side-affects after sharing the same experience as myself.
Now, call me crazy, but people keep assuming that an in-atmosphere launch is a given when dealing with spacecraft. I doubt very much that this drive is intended for use in an atmosphere, and I know for a fact that both Project Helios and Project Orion were not intended for use inside the atmosphere of Earth.
But, since you mentioned them, I just want to comment on Projects Orion and Helios, related to this article by the fact they too were potentially great boons to space travel way back twenty years ago:
Having become aware of the projects way back in the eighties because of a children's book(!) I began to research as much as I could on the projects. I really began to gather information when I got connected to the internet back in 1996. The internet is a wealth of information but in this case 98% of what you'll find will be either pure dross or pure fiction dressed up in science sounding terms. I'll add "in my opinion" rather than just state the above as a fact - IANASY (I Am Not A Scientist Yet). I've let my search lapse in the last few years mainly because of all the extra fake and useless info that appeared on the internet after films like "Deep Impact" which briefly mention Orion or Helios. But from what I gathered, the official reasons the projects were terminated rather abruptly were highly unlikely, the main one cited being the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) and SALT-II treaties with the Soviet Union. A second reason often given was that the '...radiation problem caused...[by the detonation of nuclear devices]...an unavoidable health risk[to the crew].."
Looking over the technical details I managed to track down, I do not believe this reason. Even with limited knowledge, most people would be able to proffer ways of protecting a crew from any major health risk - working only on a design basis. Fears of contaminating the Earth's atmosphere seem unjustified considering it would be possible to limit operation of either the Orion or Helios drive(for want of a better term) to an acceptable distance from Earth. I don't mean to spread paranoia, but at the very least the people who cancelled these projects were misguided - I leave any other alternatives up to your imagination!
I'm not an amoral person who puts science before people : NATO's use of DU(Depleted Uranium) based weapons is deplorable; fission is an unsafe and unnecessary technology for use in power stations; the use of growth hormones in livestock farming and relatively untested GM techniques in Agriculture is plain crazy in Western economies. The fact remains that Orion and Helios were two projects which shouldn't have been cancelled.
I hope to goodness that, just because this new drive employs a radioactive isotope, it isn't designated 'too risky' out of hand - which seems to be a popular thing to do nowadays. (By the way, I know it's a different isotope, but check your smoke alarms....there's a good chance it contains Americium 241 (probably about 0.9 micro curie)
(By-the-by, if you're planning to look for info on Orion or Helios, try the following phrases "Advanced Propulsion Design", "JPL", "Helios" and "Orion" You'll also find that various university professors have, at one time or another, written papers on the subject - try contacting your local university's physics department. )
I've just purchased the Irish patent rights to this topic. I refute your right to stop Irish people posting on this topic - that's my job. You wanna' challenge it? See you in an Irish court!
p.s. Ireland is a little blob on the map, first green bit after the words 'Atlantic' on the map. Yes, we do have some law here....Wait...that probably means I have to leave my internet connection to register my patent...Oh, sh*** - forget it...it's all yours, bub.
Yup. But it's not just the Irish(which, depending on who you listen to, number between 3.5 and 7 million located on the island of Ireland itself). What I was trying to get accross was that in Britain and France -as well as Ireland- such things are known about because they are an issue.
I've only been to America once, and there seemed to be a huge difference between what people knew about and were prepared to buy. For example, in many stores there seemed to be a prime example of the irony: on the same shelf beside nifty, affordable and hi-tech gadgets that weren't going to be available in Ireland until six months or so later there were ancient and outmoded technology being sold for prices you wouldn't have seen back in the eighties!!
Knowledge is definitely power, and because CSS (Region Encoding) managed by movie studios provided America with movies first, it was a non-issue to Americans, so the man in the street wasn't bothered about it, salesmen didn't use it in their pitches etc, etc...
A thing like this proposed hard-drive spec. modification(I assume modification is more fitting than upgrade 8) would have a 'potential, practical(-sp) negative impact' on an American's use of a hard-drive, just as much as an Irish or Japanese person's. Also, despite the fact that the American public has been relatively shielded from the whole region encoding thang, they had their own quickly fought battle: DiVX (I'm not sure if this is the right spelling) vs DVD. When I was in America the DIVX was still being hyped as a great thing. I have never heard of it in any real sense being marketed in Ireland or Britain - in fact I only began to find out about it when I was in America.
Americans were intelligent enough to shun that mistake because they had knowledge about something that would affect their entertainment negatively. I'm sure when faced with hard-drives that affect both their entertainment and, perhaps, livelyhood(i.e. programmers, offices and such) the American punter will, like punters accross the globe, vote with their feet and not buy.
(By-the-by, I always rant after a good turkey dinner, do sorry if I bored you 8)
Well, I have to disagree.
Here in Ireland and the UK almost anyone interested in purchasing DVD equipment knows about Region Encoding....Why?
Because as a former salesperson in a computer superstore it was a major selling point in the speel I gave to the average purchaser. Every ad for DVD players and DVD drives use region encoding as a major selling point. Heck, even the news has done pieces on it.
Mind you, I suppose in America average consumers would think less about the world outside their Region One box - why should they when they are so effectively cloistered from the multi-origin hardware world by extremely good marketing and PR?
The Montgomery County Council passed a law?
I'm not familar with the American system, but can County Councils do that in America? I thought they were stopped from doing this after the fiasco of 'blue-book' laws in the 50s and 60s.
(As I say, I'm not familar with the system and I may have it totally wrong.)
But it seems like now two County Councils on the planet have done something for their constituants: Montgomery County Council (the whole genetic test thing)and South-Dublin County Council(the whole Refuse (as in waste) Tax thing- genetic testing is not a big issue in Ireland or Europe). Wow! Elected officals doing something! Unfortunately I live in neither catchement[sp-?].
8)
Yup. I've just spent two hours, from just before Christmas day to now(02:11, Irish Time) reading every comment here. I've come to the conclusion that this is probably a non-story. In the unlikely event that this technology is integrated into the next gen of drives, so many programs will have to implement work-arounds that these work-arounds would- without doubt -be quickly absorbed into the mainstream of programming. It would be a matter of months at most before every slashdot user carried a copy of unprotecthd.exe/unprotecthd.prg on their emergency floppy disk (and I know you all have one!). Plus I've just finish working out a set of(or probably, more correctly, a matrix of) file conversion algorithms - so I'm very confident that in a broad sense all algorithms are workable.
As for me, I'm off to finish programming a Christmas present for my father in Q-BASIC (I know, I know...there's a reason, but don't ask me why.) Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight..
For those of us with IQs higher than yours(i.e. 10) losing a measly ten here and there doesn't really hurt us.
And your statement that moderators are 'crackwhores' is discriminatory - some of us are 'cocaine-fiends' or 'caffine-junkies' (I am the latter, by the way).
(Mind you, the last ten that I lost seemed to take my o-beel-et-tay 2 speel properlay wit et.)
8)
...I agree with you for the most part... It seems that in the Western world(well, America and Eurasia[not EurAsia]) 'Innocent until proven guilty' is now translatable into 'Guilty until proven innocent'.
Way-back-when - in the 198*s to be more precise - I began to get into the computers. I thanked the Lord every day that some of those funky continental programmers(Usually German or Spanish) always managed to circumvent copy protection. Why should I pay twice to use the same program on two machines without endangering a master disk?
The vast majority of users now may not be clever and vocal in the sense the know every bit of their MBR off by heart but as IT gets more popular they are learning. The fact is that users can understand when something is going to limit their usage. For example, most will not recognise the term CSS, but they'll all have heard of Region Encoding and will shy away from any DVD models which don't have some easy circumvention. Looks like IT manufacturers are a victim of their own success - they've created a standard they can no longer divert from a straight improvement.
I've worked in computer retail and I know one thing for sure, if this stupid protection gets passed the term 'legacy-compatible' or 'restriction free data device' will become the mainstays of every salesman's pitch.
Anyway, surely enough geeks have now secreted themselves into the cubicles and managerial positions of N. America. Maybe it's time to send out the activation code? (Not for the rest of the world - we still have a good few European and Chinese sources for non-brand hard-drives 8)
I got the little tit-bit of information from a one-day computer workshop I took about three years ago.
The guy who was actually teaching us had worked for Sony and IBM, among others. Aside from a few half-remembered explanations in computer mags when CDs were new and mysterious and optical discs cost upwards of £900, I've only got what he said to go on. Apparently there were lots of plausible reasons floating around, but the only 'real' one was that management didn't like receiving reports from different departments talking about the same thing while using different spellings of disk(disc). So they formalised it, trying to head off any major problems - but apparently they decided it wasn't that major a problem anymore.
Anyway, it just something you can use when to want to be pedantic or trying to prove you're a bigger geek than someone else: "..surely you mean disc, don't you?";)
(p.s. the guy used to have a website but the link got deleted thanks to Win95 OSR1!)
8)
I've always wanted to know, is it actually true that in American there's such a large amount(maybe a small percentile, but in human terms a large amount) of people who can't speak US English?
TV seems to imply their presence is accepted without any attempt to educate but getting truth from American TV is like trying to use 'McGyver' as a DIY manual!!!
8)
Errrr....this may be paranoia, but who says the elected American government is really in control of things? Surely it's more likely to be the civil servants who don't get replaced in administrations but merely get pushed around on paper a bit. That's why you give almost three months(!) to protect their positions and fabricate excuses for retaining their positions?
Anyway, just to be cryptic: "Wheels within wheels, circles within circles. Have you ever followed the paper trail?"
8)
What ever happened to this 'great technological cyber-punk nation' we were all supposed to become a part of, with tech speak being based around the Japanese and manderin (sp-?) languages? Maybe with even a bit of English thrown in there?
Where's this badly-lit neon future we were promised in movies like 'nemesis'? Where are the 'Cyber-Samurai'? Where are the cops that look either like soldiers or 1950's dectectives?
This was a future without Spears and her bubble-gum pink cohorts shoving sickly sweet products down our throats. This was a distopia for everyone but geeks, but that shouldn't have stopped us?! What went wrong? Did we lose a war or something?
Go on...what happened to this vision of 2000?
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I am a lawyer...buwahahahaha! Only kidding - IANAL - I ain't no arsehole lawyer. After all, I read Slashdot, don't I?
But I do have some comments to make.
You say, that the software is "..increasingly expensive because the small company I work for has moved into direct competition with the software provider..."
If that's so, I've got to say what country are you in? There are a spate of laws here in Europe at least that are supposed to protect your company against that sort of thing. Secondly, you're right to get out from under the thumb of a competing company - it would be a bad move to try and keep things as they are.
Thirdly, as far as I know, there should be no legal ramifications of a re-implementation of the sort I think you mean. At the very least, it's something that hasn't been frowned upon in the past in the programming community. As all the other posts have said, however, a few trips to a lawyer would sort this out. Mind you even if the lawyer says it is illegal, you've got to consider if all this lawyer has done is gone to software provider and directly asked them, rather than pulling on a pool of knowledge about your national/local law, then his opinion can equally be discounted.
In short, if precident is anything to go by, there should be no problems. Probably.
8)
I mean it - screw the nit-picking about the grammer on the manufacturer's website. Feck the page that fails to mention 'die-hard geeks' as a potential market. This looks like a sweet deal.
First off, it works in a 386. Brilliant. That means that my ol' 030 server from the early ninties can use it.
It has a hardware boot menu and password! Like the reviewer, I've always been wary about the various software applications you can get to do this - especially since they each tend to want to control your MBR and end up deleting each other.(I usually end up running Lilo from a floppy rather than risk having the fixes for the 8Gb limitation of my bios overwritten). Also, I recently discovered the big dark secret behind writing such applications and I'm not impressed by the vast majority I've had a crack(--errr, I mean look 8) at.
Also, family member recently did me the great favour of trying to install a firewall on my Athlon 750Mhz(of which he owns a stake; six months ago a 750Mhz machine was expensive) - and deleted the Partition Table in the process. I really could have used this card then as it took me the best part of a week to figure out the obvious problem 8(.
I must say, however, that the limitation on disk sizes would, in my opinion, make the card more suitable for power-home users than large institutions with are bound to need more than a measly 2Gb a partition.
In short, depending on pricing, this card definitely peaks my interest.
I'm just wondering, all the problems with this technology aside(e.g. size of equipment), what about the discomfort to the subject? In fact, other questions present themselves:
What are the numbers for resultant eye-infection?
What, if any, supplemental medication has to be prescribed - such as eye drops etc...?
What's the effect of the Lasik surgical manoeuvre on eyesight when Williams' apparatus isn't present?
I mean, 20/10, or maybe even 20/2.5, maybe great, but drop your glasses and if your left with 2/300 - well that would stop me getting the op...
Unless they paid me
8)
You're right.
That's some sweeeeet(and I mean sweeeeeeeeeeeet) tech right there.
Unless there's some type of three pence(cent), cheap knockoff route that they've decided to take - methinks I've heard this proposal before(late 80's) involving a network of radio transmitters (THAT plan was dumped for obvious reasons).
Anywho, I've got a question - if they can put 'em in Furbies, why do only the £30,000 BMWs have GPS?.
8)
Leaving the matter at hand aside for a moment, I must admit my kneejerk reaction is to say that freedom of speech should be a basic human right. At the same time, anyone with a website should moderate its content with regards to the national law associated with the location of the servers that host the site. To do less is to try and create martyrs(-sp?) - and to practice unsafe webmastering.
As for the whole political situation in China - there are good and bad things about the system. When it works, it works good. When it fails, it fails badly. Is that so much worse than the pseudo-grey myre that seems to envelope the Western world? I honestly don't know.
But at this stage I am a little tired of hearing about how 'evil' everything is that hasn't been rubber stamped by the US since 1950. I'm tired of the tear-jerking stories that are supposed to pull at specific heart-strings or stike a cord with certain segments of society(i.e. in this case geeks and journalists) - only to be torn to shreds quietly in a few months when the one important fact that was left out of the story emerges on a non-English speaking news site.
And while I'm ranting (and thoroughly wrecking my karma - I may have been a karma whore once, but I'm kissing that goodbye now I'm just sickened by this recurring topic) I'm tired of the media furore everytime a British or American person is convicted of a crime abroad. I'm sick of American marines and pilots coming on staged news conferences and saying things like: they felt like '...a scared little bunny-rabbit...' when trapped behind enemy lines.(Do any Americans even remember that? It was an insult to the American Armed Forces as a whole). I'm tired of American commentators coming on like part of the cast of Star Trek, quoting a prime directive of interference when something's going right and quoting a policy of non-interference when the dirt's hitting the fan. I'm tired of television assuring me I have inalienable rights under my constitution; I'm tired of being assured that my political leaders are doing their best in Washington D.C.; I'm tired of news articles filled with flotsam about American politicans or policies. I'm just plain tired of nice, neat wars that just happen to come about every four years when the polls for an American leader are sagging.
I'm tired of American xenophobia disguised as concern for the standard of living. I am tired of the tug of war between Europe and America (and you can bet that's only in its infancy). I am tired of American abuses going unreported except by the 'crackpot' press - which only serve to discredit the truth. I am tired of Americans being 'holier-than-thou' when comparitive abuses exsist within their own shores. I am tired of Americans pretending the diseases spread by their armed forces are part of history because they happened more than one political administration ago. I'm tired of in living in fear of criticising Israeli policy lest I be cast as an anti-semite. I'm tired of living in fear of criticising Islamic Albania because they are in political favour with American this month. I'm just plain tired of it all.
The man should have had more sense - it doesn't take much to host the site outside mainland China. There's someone who wanted to be a hero - the fact he had a wife and child doesn't change that fact. I'll shed no tears for him, even if his sentence is severe - which given the current situation I sincerely doubt.
Bye-bye karma, but you know how these things go when you need to say something. I was tired of living in fear of losing karma, so I just don't care. However, don't mark this as a 'Troll' or 'Offtopic'; this comment is neither. Truth may set you free but it can make you damned unpopular.
8)
Typical, I don't log on to Slashdot for one day and this passes by with little or no comment by the Slashdot community.
I mean, this seems like pretty revolutionary stuff to me. Is no one else intrigued by the possiblities this presents. To quote:
"By using the correct distribution of particle sizes, these multi-color emissions could allow storage of more than one bit of information in each data point..."
Does this not strike anyone as a boon?
What about:
"...[it could be used] for writing and reading in parallel [in a binary system]..."
Surely this development opens up a whole new field for electronic components? Surely it opens up new vistas for computing? Maybe I'm missing something here, but I am blown away.
Would cost of materials or cost of manufacturing be prohibitive, I wonder. Or would the system be necessarialy fragile in real world systems?
I wonder, however, if one of you Chemi-geeks out there might answer a naive Compu-geek's question: are silver oxide(Ag2O) nanoparticles unique in this respect - i.e. with regards to the ability to 'program' the ability to fluoresce with blue laser light.
8)
Yup, shore is.
If you go to the address and click on archives you'll see the previous three shows in the series (this is the fourth). The show that's on tonight will probably be added in the next few days - luckly enough for those of us in Ireland(GMT) and elsewhere who have to get up at six tomorrow.
Mind you, I expected more interest from the ubergeeks here on slashdot. I don't have anything to do with space, but I'll be glued to my computer monitor watching this. Or aren't propulsion/navigation dynamics considered geeky enough anymore?
8)
Oh, come on.
I've waited for this for about four years now - when they started making those IBM microdot drives in Ireland we got the first announcements of this new technology. These were supposed to go into production in 2001. Suppose a lot happens in 4 years.
Wonder if the problem is securing financial backing? With the quoted performance rate, maybe the drives are a little too good. (Probably not, they were probably just refining the thing - but I like to introduce a healthy amount of paranoia now and again).
8)
I pressed submit too soon.
What I wanted to ask is "Would a forked version of the kernel be subject to the GPL, and for that matter would anything written for it?."
The straight answer is probably "Yes", but I wonder if there isn't some legal workaround.
8)
"We need a full-time leader and a nonprofit organization that can be funded by IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Well, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. It occurs to me that these nonprofit organisations might end up causing more division then they're worth...what if, heaven's forbid, Compaq disagrees with Dell and, shock, horror, one threatens to pull funding. What you're looking at is the potential sanction of seperate forked versions of the kernel...including a lame assed version released for use under the GPL, with more and more lawyer workarounds for proprietory(sp-?) versions.
"Despite Torvalds' technical reign over Linux, IBM and Compaq have quickly become the industry's de facto Linux leaders, and tensions over the kernel's direction will heighten as market forces intensify, experts say..."
These damned, physcic, unamed experts again. Would that be the expert working for Microsoft, or the 20 year old college student skipping all his classes to hack code? (HACK, not crack 8)...and when they say industry, do they mean the Hardware industry? Last time I checked there were a few other companies that held popular LINUX distros/solutions(mind you, I did blink yesterday to moisten my eyeballs...maybe everything changed then).
I think that covers it. Put that puppy to rest...won't stop me writing the same article in a few weeks time, but it satisfied by Linux frenzy for the moment.
8)
I think what he may be talking about is the idea of swarming a planet with cheap, uneducated and potentially modified/augmented 'drones' for want of a better word. They'd do the leg work, get mechanical adaptations and be taught how to obey and perform specific tasks. They'd soak up much of the dangers, statisically speaking, reducing the losses of any trained, natural born humans. There would be a core of natural born scientists and stuff to give orders.
Come on, people. This is the mainstay of science fiction stuff... it may never happen 8(, but it doesn't make his remarks crypic - then again, maybe you're not geeky enough to have read as much sci-fi as I have 8). The book that sticks in my mind as an introduction to the concept is "Forty Thousand in Gehanna"...I forget who it's by.
8)
Let me first start by saying that the issue of drugs is probably the only area on which I have anyway conservative views - but even I can see that the 'War on Drugs' launched by America is not only a failure, but a catastrophy.
:"Formally, all U.S. aid to Colombia, which produces most of the world's cocaine and most of the heroin consumed in the United States, is intended for anti-drug rather than counter-insurgency efforts. But in practical terms, the distinction is fading...". Ironic, considering it's pro-government paramilitaries that control the larger proportion of the drugs trade...the very same paramilitaries that routinely commit genocidal raids on villages that have tried to remain neutral...the very same paramilitaries that wander Columbia armed with American made weaponary such as MP-5s and secure in their training from American soldiers...oops! I mean advisors. No-one's saying that the rebels are angels - they too have participated in the drugs trade and kidnapping and so on. I'm just saying when a policy has got it so wrong, both on the American domestic front and on the foreign front, why is the policy persued so fanactically by certain Americans?
I would almost say world-wide catastrophy.
Sites like november.org give a smattering of alarming statistics about the effects in America of the war on drugs(for example "The average sentence for a first time, non-violent drug offender is longer than the average sentence for rape, child molestation, bank robbery or manslaughter..."). Walter Cronkite takes a dim view of the war here. Also, some surprising 'mistakes' of the war on drugs can be found here.
But here's where the international aspect comes in: most of the War on Drugs aid that is being sent to foreign(i.e. non-US) nations is being mainly used to support regiemes that otherwise might topple. For instance Marxist rebels in Columbia have found themselves pitted against a regieme supported by War on Drugs money and soldiers trained by American 'advisors'. As freerepublic.com puts it
Anyway....just to be more on topic, I saw C4's 'Traffikk', pretty good. I hope the film 'Traffic' hasn't dulled the message too much so as to render the message unreadable to the vast majority of people(i.e. non-slashdotters 8).
8)
Yeah, I sure would like to know more about DU in weapons tech. - if you feel like posting more about it, you've got my vote.
I am familar, however, with some of the basics - uranium is primarially an Alpha ray emitter. These are basically harmless - a sheet of paper can stop them. Of course, decay can produce Beta and Gamma radiation. The fact that the "real" danger from, as you rightly point out, depleted uranium only arises when you're talking about inhalation of dust-like particles (for whatever that 'fact' means- according to the media today and yesterday in Ireland, Britain and France the 'facts' about DU seemed to change from station-to-station hour-to-hour) has not escaped me.
The thing that I find deplorable -if true- is the way that such matter can effectively and easily poison a water/food supply. I assume this could happen because of the radioactivity of the matter produced by a DU weapon's strike. However, details were sketchy on the TV reports.
I've looked up the subject of DU on the internet - again lots of controversy but with the anti-DU voice being the loudest.
Try http://www.iacenter.org/depleted/du.htm. I must state, I am very wary of a site like iacenter.org, but sites such as this (http://www.rama-usa.org/ducdi.htm) hold much more sway as they seem less politically motivated. Another site, this time an American veteran's, is here, and a very comprehensive site is here.
For my money, the better site is http://www.psr.org/duissuebrief.html.
Mind you, just to add my voice to the mass of anecdotal evidence out there: I've been around a variety of dangerous chemicals and elements. I've had fun with everything from quick silver(liquid mercury to the modern man) to a variety of radioactive isotopes(calm down- it was within the confines of a university 8). I am well aware that there is unecessary panic by those without a good knowledge of the related chemistry and/or physics. However, I am still very uneasy about certain things I have had direct contact and just because I've experienced no side-effects, it doesn't mean everyone else will escape side-affects after sharing the same experience as myself.
8)
Now, call me crazy, but people keep assuming that an in-atmosphere launch is a given when dealing with spacecraft. I doubt very much that this drive is intended for use in an atmosphere, and I know for a fact that both Project Helios and Project Orion were not intended for use inside the atmosphere of Earth.
But, since you mentioned them, I just want to comment on Projects Orion and Helios, related to this article by the fact they too were potentially great boons to space travel way back twenty years ago: Having become aware of the projects way back in the eighties because of a children's book(!) I began to research as much as I could on the projects. I really began to gather information when I got connected to the internet back in 1996. The internet is a wealth of information but in this case 98% of what you'll find will be either pure dross or pure fiction dressed up in science sounding terms. I'll add "in my opinion" rather than just state the above as a fact - IANASY (I Am Not A Scientist Yet). I've let my search lapse in the last few years mainly because of all the extra fake and useless info that appeared on the internet after films like "Deep Impact" which briefly mention Orion or Helios. But from what I gathered, the official reasons the projects were terminated rather abruptly were highly unlikely, the main one cited being the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) and SALT-II treaties with the Soviet Union. A second reason often given was that the '...radiation problem caused...[by the detonation of nuclear devices]...an unavoidable health risk[to the crew].."
Looking over the technical details I managed to track down, I do not believe this reason. Even with limited knowledge, most people would be able to proffer ways of protecting a crew from any major health risk - working only on a design basis. Fears of contaminating the Earth's atmosphere seem unjustified considering it would be possible to limit operation of either the Orion or Helios drive(for want of a better term) to an acceptable distance from Earth. I don't mean to spread paranoia, but at the very least the people who cancelled these projects were misguided - I leave any other alternatives up to your imagination!
I'm not an amoral person who puts science before people : NATO's use of DU(Depleted Uranium) based weapons is deplorable; fission is an unsafe and unnecessary technology for use in power stations; the use of growth hormones in livestock farming and relatively untested GM techniques in Agriculture is plain crazy in Western economies. The fact remains that Orion and Helios were two projects which shouldn't have been cancelled. I hope to goodness that, just because this new drive employs a radioactive isotope, it isn't designated 'too risky' out of hand - which seems to be a popular thing to do nowadays. (By the way, I know it's a different isotope, but check your smoke alarms....there's a good chance it contains Americium 241 (probably about 0.9 micro curie)
(By-the-by, if you're planning to look for info on Orion or Helios, try the following phrases "Advanced Propulsion Design", "JPL", "Helios" and "Orion" You'll also find that various university professors have, at one time or another, written papers on the subject - try contacting your local university's physics department. )
8)
I've just purchased the Irish patent rights to this topic. I refute your right to stop Irish people posting on this topic - that's my job. You wanna' challenge it? See you in an Irish court!
p.s. Ireland is a little blob on the map, first green bit after the words 'Atlantic' on the map. Yes, we do have some law here....Wait...that probably means I have to leave my internet connection to register my patent...Oh, sh*** - forget it...it's all yours, bub.
8)
Yup. But it's not just the Irish(which, depending on who you listen to, number between 3.5 and 7 million located on the island of Ireland itself). What I was trying to get accross was that in Britain and France -as well as Ireland- such things are known about because they are an issue.
I've only been to America once, and there seemed to be a huge difference between what people knew about and were prepared to buy. For example, in many stores there seemed to be a prime example of the irony: on the same shelf beside nifty, affordable and hi-tech gadgets that weren't going to be available in Ireland until six months or so later there were ancient and outmoded technology being sold for prices you wouldn't have seen back in the eighties!!
Knowledge is definitely power, and because CSS (Region Encoding) managed by movie studios provided America with movies first, it was a non-issue to Americans, so the man in the street wasn't bothered about it, salesmen didn't use it in their pitches etc, etc...
A thing like this proposed hard-drive spec. modification(I assume modification is more fitting than upgrade 8) would have a 'potential, practical(-sp) negative impact' on an American's use of a hard-drive, just as much as an Irish or Japanese person's. Also, despite the fact that the American public has been relatively shielded from the whole region encoding thang, they had their own quickly fought battle: DiVX (I'm not sure if this is the right spelling) vs DVD. When I was in America the DIVX was still being hyped as a great thing. I have never heard of it in any real sense being marketed in Ireland or Britain - in fact I only began to find out about it when I was in America. Americans were intelligent enough to shun that mistake because they had knowledge about something that would affect their entertainment negatively. I'm sure when faced with hard-drives that affect both their entertainment and, perhaps, livelyhood(i.e. programmers, offices and such) the American punter will, like punters accross the globe, vote with their feet and not buy.
(By-the-by, I always rant after a good turkey dinner, do sorry if I bored you 8)
Well, I have to disagree.
Here in Ireland and the UK almost anyone interested in purchasing DVD equipment knows about Region Encoding....Why?
Because as a former salesperson in a computer superstore it was a major selling point in the speel I gave to the average purchaser. Every ad for DVD players and DVD drives use region encoding as a major selling point. Heck, even the news has done pieces on it.
Mind you, I suppose in America average consumers would think less about the world outside their Region One box - why should they when they are so effectively cloistered from the multi-origin hardware world by extremely good marketing and PR?
8)
The Montgomery County Council passed a law?
I'm not familar with the American system, but can County Councils do that in America? I thought they were stopped from doing this after the fiasco of 'blue-book' laws in the 50s and 60s.
(As I say, I'm not familar with the system and I may have it totally wrong.)
But it seems like now two County Councils on the planet have done something for their constituants: Montgomery County Council (the whole genetic test thing)and South-Dublin County Council(the whole Refuse (as in waste) Tax thing- genetic testing is not a big issue in Ireland or Europe). Wow! Elected officals doing something! Unfortunately I live in neither catchement[sp-?].
8)
Yup. I've just spent two hours, from just before Christmas day to now(02:11, Irish Time) reading every comment here. I've come to the conclusion that this is probably a non-story. In the unlikely event that this technology is integrated into the next gen of drives, so many programs will have to implement work-arounds that these work-arounds would- without doubt -be quickly absorbed into the mainstream of programming. It would be a matter of months at most before every slashdot user carried a copy of unprotecthd.exe/unprotecthd.prg on their emergency floppy disk (and I know you all have one!). Plus I've just finish working out a set of(or probably, more correctly, a matrix of) file conversion algorithms - so I'm very confident that in a broad sense all algorithms are workable.
As for me, I'm off to finish programming a Christmas present for my father in Q-BASIC (I know, I know...there's a reason, but don't ask me why.) Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight..
guv'ner.
8)
For those of us with IQs higher than yours(i.e. 10) losing a measly ten here and there doesn't really hurt us.
And your statement that moderators are 'crackwhores' is discriminatory - some of us are 'cocaine-fiends' or 'caffine-junkies' (I am the latter, by the way).
(Mind you, the last ten that I lost seemed to take my o-beel-et-tay 2 speel properlay wit et.)
8)
...I agree with you for the most part... It seems that in the Western world(well, America and Eurasia[not EurAsia]) 'Innocent until proven guilty' is now translatable into 'Guilty until proven innocent'.
Way-back-when - in the 198*s to be more precise - I began to get into the computers. I thanked the Lord every day that some of those funky continental programmers(Usually German or Spanish) always managed to circumvent copy protection. Why should I pay twice to use the same program on two machines without endangering a master disk?
The vast majority of users now may not be clever and vocal in the sense the know every bit of their MBR off by heart but as IT gets more popular they are learning. The fact is that users can understand when something is going to limit their usage. For example, most will not recognise the term CSS, but they'll all have heard of Region Encoding and will shy away from any DVD models which don't have some easy circumvention. Looks like IT manufacturers are a victim of their own success - they've created a standard they can no longer divert from a straight improvement.
I've worked in computer retail and I know one thing for sure, if this stupid protection gets passed the term 'legacy-compatible' or 'restriction free data device' will become the mainstays of every salesman's pitch.
Anyway, surely enough geeks have now secreted themselves into the cubicles and managerial positions of N. America. Maybe it's time to send out the activation code? (Not for the rest of the world - we still have a good few European and Chinese sources for non-brand hard-drives 8)
I got the little tit-bit of information from a one-day computer workshop I took about three years ago. ;)
The guy who was actually teaching us had worked for Sony and IBM, among others. Aside from a few half-remembered explanations in computer mags when CDs were new and mysterious and optical discs cost upwards of £900, I've only got what he said to go on. Apparently there were lots of plausible reasons floating around, but the only 'real' one was that management didn't like receiving reports from different departments talking about the same thing while using different spellings of disk(disc). So they formalised it, trying to head off any major problems - but apparently they decided it wasn't that major a problem anymore.
Anyway, it just something you can use when to want to be pedantic or trying to prove you're a bigger geek than someone else: "..surely you mean disc, don't you?"
(p.s. the guy used to have a website but the link got deleted thanks to Win95 OSR1!)
8)
I've always wanted to know, is it actually true that in American there's such a large amount(maybe a small percentile, but in human terms a large amount) of people who can't speak US English?
TV seems to imply their presence is accepted without any attempt to educate but getting truth from American TV is like trying to use 'McGyver' as a DIY manual!!!
8)
Errrr....this may be paranoia, but who says the elected American government is really in control of things? Surely it's more likely to be the civil servants who don't get replaced in administrations but merely get pushed around on paper a bit. That's why you give almost three months(!) to protect their positions and fabricate excuses for retaining their positions?
Anyway, just to be cryptic: "Wheels within wheels, circles within circles. Have you ever followed the paper trail?"
8)
What ever happened to this 'great technological cyber-punk nation' we were all supposed to become a part of, with tech speak being based around the Japanese and manderin (sp-?) languages? Maybe with even a bit of English thrown in there?
Where's this badly-lit neon future we were promised in movies like 'nemesis'? Where are the 'Cyber-Samurai'? Where are the cops that look either like soldiers or 1950's dectectives?
This was a future without Spears and her bubble-gum pink cohorts shoving sickly sweet products down our throats. This was a distopia for everyone but geeks, but that shouldn't have stopped us?! What went wrong? Did we lose a war or something?
Go on...what happened to this vision of 2000?