Must be nice...my DishPVR 501 crashes all the time. Normally if you're careful you can avoid it, but woe to the user that tries to change timer settings while it's recording something, or elects to stop watching something as it's being recorded and goes to the PVR menu. I can crash it about 30% of the time doing either of these common activities. Stupid thing takes almost 4 minutes to reboot, too, so you miss a big chunk of whatever you were trying to watch, plus it commonly crashes again because it gets confused about being in the middle of a timer.
Of course, I have no idea what OS it uses, but I suspect it's unpatched Win95 from its behavior.
The other day I was in one of the computer labs in our university's library, and noticed that they have been 'upgrading' the computers. They're still the 3Ghz P4's they acquired last Spring (I think), but they've replaced all of the 19" and 21" CRT's with 19" flat panels. There was a huge stack of less-than-one-year-old Trinitrons with a sign on them marked "Surplus" behind a door I couldn't pick the lock on. "Surplus" here means it gets tossed in big boxes and sold for a few bucks per pound, or discarded in a location I've never been able to find. I figure they spent $50k per lab on new monitors, because CRT's didn't look 'cool' enough. Mind you, we've been in a salary freeze for five years, raised tuition 15% last year, and still laid off a bunch of faculty, but come hell or high water we're gonna buy $200-$300k worth of flat panels!
Many of us that are XM subscribers work in large, concrete buildings that are not right next to a repeater, and the satellites in geosync orbit have not the smallest prayer of getting a signal through the 6-10 feet of concrete above me. Currently I stream music from my house to my desk computer (amusingly, often I hook up my XM at home to my media server, and stream it to work, but I can't change channels), so this is certainly a viable option. $4 a month extra sounds too expensive to me, though. I'll hold out and see if it gets cheaper.
..were only used to download Netscape Navigator, this will only be used to pirate Windows XP Pro. Is the CD-burning functionality included? That would be very thoughtful of them, maybe they could just add links in the Favorites menu to popular warez sites for WinXP, since they so clearly have the consumer in mind.
I had an even more annoying experience in their store. They made me wait for more than an hour and a half with a fussy one-year-old, as I was trying to renew my contract. Then, the rep wouldn't let me get any of the "promo" plans, which was what I was interested in switching to, despite the fact that they were listed as for both new and renewal customers. I politely declined and left, intending to switch to the only other major carrier in my area (Sprint, ugh), but the wife convinced me to call their phone service first. They promptly transferred me to Retention, who got everything set up nicely with the new, promo contract, waived all fees, and gave us the "new customer" price on two new phones (ie, free), and let me stop in the store again to get them (she added a note to my record to stop f*cking around and give us the phones).
The moral is, call retention and bitch. They are the only people who care. If they don't care about you, well...you're SOL:)
I agree with about 95% of what you have said, except for your per-channel costs.
Note that Echostar (Dish) is for this, but the cable companies aren't (or are indifferent). It costs Echostar virtually zero to split up their channels. They already have a 100% digital system, with all company-controlled boxes. Their distribution costs are fixed, until a satellite falls out of the sky. They are already providing all channels to all viewers, and the boxes limit what you can see. Since they already have an account management system you can access via their website or an on-TV menu, all they have to do is add checkboxes for what channels you want to watch, and change you some minimum fee plus a nominal fee per channel. Add, say 15% to make it a good deal to keep the packages, and everyone's happy. This is very much not the case with the cable companies, which is why they aren't interested.
How is this "+4 Insightful"? If you don't want to publish your contact information according to the rules dealing with high level domains, then don't register your own domain name! It's not like having a.com or.net domain is a right or something. If you can't agree to the rules, then don't register domains.
Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have canceled their online access as protest.
Are you sure? I don't have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but Nature and Science are pretty cheap. In 2002, Nature was $US845/year, and Science was US$390/year for the institutional rates, which are among the lowest in the industry.
Not really. There's some comments above about this. Publishing a paper in any journal runs about $600-$1500 as it is, and you don't retain copyright, you have to pay for reprints, other people have to pay for access to your work, etc. This is a much more interesting model, IMHO.
Frankly, you don't do research. It's just too expensive to do decent research without grants, at least in molecular biology (my field). $600-$1400 for publication and copies is a trivial part of any reasonable project. Our (small) academic lab spends about $30k a year on various expenses.
$1,500 for a paper is very reasonable, especially as the author would retain copyright.
Just to make things clear, it wasn't Alan Cox, but rather Eric Raymond who wrote the initial diatribe, which you can easily see by reading the link above. Let's see if I beat Alan's reply to this comment:)
Also, the graphing component of Calc is almost, but not completely, worthless. At least, it is for doing any kind of scientific graphing. When I'm doing charts for posters & papers, I tend to make them in Excel, then import them into Powerpoint so I can manipulate each line by itself and remove some of Excel's irritating habits. A weird solution, but common. On the bright side, this is a known issue and is being worked on for OOo 2.0. Otherwise I really like OpenOffice.
The Informa Media Group predicts that Sony will sell more than 30 million PlayStation 3s in Europe by 2010
CLEARLY the Informa Media Group is wildly misinformed about the future. If they had ANY skills at predicting the future, it would be obvious to them that the console wars will be won by the Eastern Airlines GameBox! Eastern Airlines! Where world domination is only part of our master plan!
C'mon...what a bunch of idiots. They are predicting the European sales in six years (!!) of a product that hasn't been invented yet?! Where can I get a job like that?
You do have to be careful with the DRMO...my former analytic chem professor bought a GC from them two years ago, spent hundreds of dollars having the huge crate shipped to the university, and it turned out to be a broken FT-IR. They also don't do returns, so he was just screwed. They have good prices, though...
Re:I read the article and I'm confused...
on
Microwave Steelmaking
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He then put iron oxide and coal inside. In a matter of minutes, the microwave energy reduced the iron ore to iron, and the electric arc furnace smelted the iron and coal into steel.
Sounds like he did, (IANAMetallurgist), although you are right, the article is really vague. Amusing how two adjacent sentences refer to adding "iron oxide" and "iron ore", which are completely different.
Your "analysis" may be valid, but it's really not applicable. The title of the story is, "Are 64-bit Binaries Really Slower than 32-bit Binaries?" The author takes a 64-bit machine, compiles a few programs, and tests the resulting binaries to see which is faster. I'd say that the review is aptly titled and an interesting point to think on. Certainly he didn't compile every open source program known to mankind, as it sounds like he missed some pet app of yours. OpenSSL might be kind of arbitrary, but gzip and MySQL seem like reasonable apps to test. Like the last page says (you *did* RTFA, right?), if you don't like his review, go write your own and get it published.
Wouldn't fusion have to have been made practical for terrestrial power generation before anything like this should be started on? Um, that is precisely the point of this station...to prove the essential technologies necessary for useful fusion power. You did read the article, yes?
You are exactly right. A few days ago, I wanted to learn something abou the Nokia 3586i phone I ended up buying. I slogged through more than 100 fake results, all evil redirects and other crap, without ever finding any useful information. Today, I entered "nokia 3586i review" and got a handful of useful results on the first page, just how I expect. Way to go Google! Die linkfarms die!
# Results 1-15 of about 1136552 containing "freebsd" # Results 1-15 of about 341343 containing "openbsd" # Results 1-15 of about 365 containing "linux"
Wait...so, BSD isn't dead? What kind of bizarro world does Microsoft live in?!?
Privacy is all well and good, but I managed to look at as much porn as I wanted when I was a teenager, and our computer was in the living room...you just have to be clever:) I have no intention of making it easy...just because I'm not going to push the issue doesn't mean I have to condone porn. I think we agree on the access priviliges bit; I have every intention of hand-crafting my own blacklist, pretty much just to horrible sites. I never had any filtering, and I turned out OK.
Not trolling you, but here's something interesting I heard once (about that whole looking-over-the-shoulder bit): Try to imagine explaining everything you do to your father. Really makes you think...I certainly do things I wouldn't be confortable discussing with my parents. (shrug)
why not put all the computers in a "family computer lab"?
Exactly. My son is still a few years from using the internet (he's not quite a year), but that's exactly what we'll be doing. The computers all go in the study (except for the webterminals scattered through the house), no computers in, say, your bedroom. I don't have any real use for WiFi, so I just won't wire their rooms:) If they are looking at something that they aren't comfortable with me perhaps glancing over and seeing, well, that's a good indication they shouldn't be looking at it. I'm also going to install squidguard at some point here, but with a loose set of rules, and ALL computers will be bound by it, including mine. I figure that will keep out the worst of the crap (pr0n pop-ups, redirects, goatse.sx, etc.). My kids can look at pretty much anything on the Internet that I do.
After reading the article (gasp!), this guy is saying that if you (the user) choose a passphrase that is susceptible to a dictionary attack, your passphrase could be compromised by someone using a dictionary attack. No kidding? I would have thought that choosing a passphrase of common words would make it HARDER for a brute-force program using a dictionary of common words to crack! Slow news day, or what?
He also points out that WPA is perfectly secure with a good shared key (such as generating 256 bits of random characters) or using the built-in 802.1X authentication system. So....what's the point here?
What on earth are you talking about? The drive size has almost no relevance to this test. He was testing reading through 50,000 files, not one huge contiguous file (where tracks might have some bearing).
Look at the seek times, that is pretty much all that matters here. Every file is going to be a seperate seek. The first SCSI drive had a 6.3ms seek time, which is ~30% faster than the IDE hard drives 8.9ms; however, the actual performance difference is over 600%!
Slashdot Mirror
Must be nice...my DishPVR 501 crashes all the time. Normally if you're careful you can avoid it, but woe to the user that tries to change timer settings while it's recording something, or elects to stop watching something as it's being recorded and goes to the PVR menu. I can crash it about 30% of the time doing either of these common activities. Stupid thing takes almost 4 minutes to reboot, too, so you miss a big chunk of whatever you were trying to watch, plus it commonly crashes again because it gets confused about being in the middle of a timer.
Of course, I have no idea what OS it uses, but I suspect it's unpatched Win95 from its behavior.
"You know, we've never had a _completely_ successful test..."
The other day I was in one of the computer labs in our university's library, and noticed that they have been 'upgrading' the computers. They're still the 3Ghz P4's they acquired last Spring (I think), but they've replaced all of the 19" and 21" CRT's with 19" flat panels. There was a huge stack of less-than-one-year-old Trinitrons with a sign on them marked "Surplus" behind a door I couldn't pick the lock on. "Surplus" here means it gets tossed in big boxes and sold for a few bucks per pound, or discarded in a location I've never been able to find. I figure they spent $50k per lab on new monitors, because CRT's didn't look 'cool' enough. Mind you, we've been in a salary freeze for five years, raised tuition 15% last year, and still laid off a bunch of faculty, but come hell or high water we're gonna buy $200-$300k worth of flat panels!
Many of us that are XM subscribers work in large, concrete buildings that are not right next to a repeater, and the satellites in geosync orbit have not the smallest prayer of getting a signal through the 6-10 feet of concrete above me. Currently I stream music from my house to my desk computer (amusingly, often I hook up my XM at home to my media server, and stream it to work, but I can't change channels), so this is certainly a viable option. $4 a month extra sounds too expensive to me, though. I'll hold out and see if it gets cheaper.
..were only used to download Netscape Navigator, this will only be used to pirate Windows XP Pro. Is the CD-burning functionality included? That would be very thoughtful of them, maybe they could just add links in the Favorites menu to popular warez sites for WinXP, since they so clearly have the consumer in mind.
For your edification, here's the fortune that I found at the bottom of the comments page for this article:
:)
"The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture." -- Elbert Hubbard
Nice job, fortune
I had an even more annoying experience in their store. They made me wait for more than an hour and a half with a fussy one-year-old, as I was trying to renew my contract. Then, the rep wouldn't let me get any of the "promo" plans, which was what I was interested in switching to, despite the fact that they were listed as for both new and renewal customers. I politely declined and left, intending to switch to the only other major carrier in my area (Sprint, ugh), but the wife convinced me to call their phone service first. They promptly transferred me to Retention, who got everything set up nicely with the new, promo contract, waived all fees, and gave us the "new customer" price on two new phones (ie, free), and let me stop in the store again to get them (she added a note to my record to stop f*cking around and give us the phones).
:)
The moral is, call retention and bitch. They are the only people who care. If they don't care about you, well...you're SOL
I agree with about 95% of what you have said, except for your per-channel costs.
Note that Echostar (Dish) is for this, but the cable companies aren't (or are indifferent). It costs Echostar virtually zero to split up their channels. They already have a 100% digital system, with all company-controlled boxes. Their distribution costs are fixed, until a satellite falls out of the sky. They are already providing all channels to all viewers, and the boxes limit what you can see. Since they already have an account management system you can access via their website or an on-TV menu, all they have to do is add checkboxes for what channels you want to watch, and change you some minimum fee plus a nominal fee per channel. Add, say 15% to make it a good deal to keep the packages, and everyone's happy. This is very much not the case with the cable companies, which is why they aren't interested.
How is this "+4 Insightful"? If you don't want to publish your contact information according to the rules dealing with high level domains, then don't register your own domain name! It's not like having a .com or .net domain is a right or something. If you can't agree to the rules, then don't register domains.
Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have canceled their online access as protest.
Are you sure? I don't have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but Nature and Science are pretty cheap. In 2002, Nature was $US845/year, and Science was US$390/year for the institutional rates, which are among the lowest in the industry.
Not really. There's some comments above about this. Publishing a paper in any journal runs about $600-$1500 as it is, and you don't retain copyright, you have to pay for reprints, other people have to pay for access to your work, etc. This is a much more interesting model, IMHO.
Frankly, you don't do research. It's just too expensive to do decent research without grants, at least in molecular biology (my field). $600-$1400 for publication and copies is a trivial part of any reasonable project. Our (small) academic lab spends about $30k a year on various expenses.
$1,500 for a paper is very reasonable, especially as the author would retain copyright.
Just to make things clear, it wasn't Alan Cox, but rather Eric Raymond who wrote the initial diatribe, which you can easily see by reading the link above. Let's see if I beat Alan's reply to this comment :)
Also, the graphing component of Calc is almost, but not completely, worthless. At least, it is for doing any kind of scientific graphing. When I'm doing charts for posters & papers, I tend to make them in Excel, then import them into Powerpoint so I can manipulate each line by itself and remove some of Excel's irritating habits. A weird solution, but common. On the bright side, this is a known issue and is being worked on for OOo 2.0. Otherwise I really like OpenOffice.
The Informa Media Group predicts that Sony will sell more than 30 million PlayStation 3s in Europe by 2010
CLEARLY the Informa Media Group is wildly misinformed about the future. If they had ANY skills at predicting the future, it would be obvious to them that the console wars will be won by the Eastern Airlines GameBox! Eastern Airlines! Where world domination is only part of our master plan!
C'mon...what a bunch of idiots. They are predicting the European sales in six years (!!) of a product that hasn't been invented yet?! Where can I get a job like that?
You do have to be careful with the DRMO...my former analytic chem professor bought a GC from them two years ago, spent hundreds of dollars having the huge crate shipped to the university, and it turned out to be a broken FT-IR. They also don't do returns, so he was just screwed. They have good prices, though...
He then put iron oxide and coal inside. In a matter of minutes, the microwave energy reduced the iron ore to iron, and the electric arc furnace smelted the iron and coal into steel.
Sounds like he did, (IANAMetallurgist), although you are right, the article is really vague. Amusing how two adjacent sentences refer to adding "iron oxide" and "iron ore", which are completely different.
Your "analysis" may be valid, but it's really not applicable. The title of the story is, "Are 64-bit Binaries Really Slower than 32-bit Binaries?" The author takes a 64-bit machine, compiles a few programs, and tests the resulting binaries to see which is faster. I'd say that the review is aptly titled and an interesting point to think on. Certainly he didn't compile every open source program known to mankind, as it sounds like he missed some pet app of yours. OpenSSL might be kind of arbitrary, but gzip and MySQL seem like reasonable apps to test. Like the last page says (you *did* RTFA, right?), if you don't like his review, go write your own and get it published.
Wouldn't fusion have to have been made practical for terrestrial power generation before anything like this should be started on?
Um, that is precisely the point of this station...to prove the essential technologies necessary for useful fusion power. You did read the article, yes?
You are exactly right. A few days ago, I wanted to learn something abou the Nokia 3586i phone I ended up buying. I slogged through more than 100 fake results, all evil redirects and other crap, without ever finding any useful information. Today, I entered "nokia 3586i review" and got a handful of useful results on the first page, just how I expect. Way to go Google! Die linkfarms die!
# Results 1-15 of about 1136552 containing "freebsd"
# Results 1-15 of about 341343 containing "openbsd"
# Results 1-15 of about 365 containing "linux"
Wait...so, BSD isn't dead? What kind of bizarro world does Microsoft live in?!?
Privacy is all well and good, but I managed to look at as much porn as I wanted when I was a teenager, and our computer was in the living room...you just have to be clever :) I have no intention of making it easy...just because I'm not going to push the issue doesn't mean I have to condone porn. I think we agree on the access priviliges bit; I have every intention of hand-crafting my own blacklist, pretty much just to horrible sites. I never had any filtering, and I turned out OK.
Not trolling you, but here's something interesting I heard once (about that whole looking-over-the-shoulder bit): Try to imagine explaining everything you do to your father. Really makes you think...I certainly do things I wouldn't be confortable discussing with my parents. (shrug)
why not put all the computers in a "family computer lab"?
:) If they are looking at something that they aren't comfortable with me perhaps glancing over and seeing, well, that's a good indication they shouldn't be looking at it. I'm also going to install squidguard at some point here, but with a loose set of rules, and ALL computers will be bound by it, including mine. I figure that will keep out the worst of the crap (pr0n pop-ups, redirects, goatse.sx, etc.). My kids can look at pretty much anything on the Internet that I do.
Exactly. My son is still a few years from using the internet (he's not quite a year), but that's exactly what we'll be doing. The computers all go in the study (except for the webterminals scattered through the house), no computers in, say, your bedroom. I don't have any real use for WiFi, so I just won't wire their rooms
After reading the article (gasp!), this guy is saying that if you (the user) choose a passphrase that is susceptible to a dictionary attack, your passphrase could be compromised by someone using a dictionary attack. No kidding? I would have thought that choosing a passphrase of common words would make it HARDER for a brute-force program using a dictionary of common words to crack! Slow news day, or what?
He also points out that WPA is perfectly secure with a good shared key (such as generating 256 bits of random characters) or using the built-in 802.1X authentication system. So....what's the point here?
What on earth are you talking about? The drive size has almost no relevance to this test. He was testing reading through 50,000 files, not one huge contiguous file (where tracks might have some bearing).
Look at the seek times, that is pretty much all that matters here. Every file is going to be a seperate seek. The first SCSI drive had a 6.3ms seek time, which is ~30% faster than the IDE hard drives 8.9ms; however, the actual performance difference is over 600%!