Well, they've tried it with Karin Spaink and XS4ALL here in the Netherlands. And they lost.
Yes, but they also tried it with Johan Helsingius and anon.penet.fi in Finland. You can read about the consequences, if you don't already know them, at Karin's webspace on xs4all here.
Okay, good enough! I'm also not in the habit of installing anything I can't get a good report on, but I've got a firewall and Proximotron running, as well as ZA and ad-aware, just in case. I know it's overkill, but it's also an end to popups and all kinds of other crap.
I simply ignore EULAs. In fact, I make it a point to not even read them
That's where, most of the time, the publisher divulges if a product contains adware, spyware, i'm-taking-all-your-honeymoon-pictures-and-startin g-an-amateur-pr0n-site-ware, etc.
As this may be the only place you can read about those things (before Ad-Aware catches up), if they're not obviously listed as installation options, you'd be better off going through it.
Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?
on
Secrets Of BIOS Tweaking
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are some problems if you think in the long term - a typical BIOS wouldn't necessarily get outdated, but one with support for specific file systems would. Or could.
That's why BIOS is usually flashable, right? =)
Seriously, yes, having a built-in set of better diagnostic and prep utilities would be great. Just think of all those Gigabyte motherboards out there with dualie BIOS on the board, and what you could put in all that extra space if you could somehow access it.
On the other hand, while ROM does sound cheap, just remember that a $1 part undoubtedly costs more money to add to a board, probably more like $1.50 when you factor in the extra work in getting it on the board. Multiply $1.50 by 100,000 boards, and suddenly you're talking real money, and that's wholesale, way before retailer markup. Sure, hobbyists would be happy to pay the extra $1.50 (or even $5 or $10), but if they only buy 5-10% of the boards, the decision to include the part suddenly becomes much more difficult. Your average large VAR could care less about special BIOS options, and doesn't need to format drives in individual machines the way we do it because he has OEM licenses from MS, tapes of their latest OSes and software packs, and machines for batch-writing drives with the OS and software pre-installed.
P.S. My dollar figures are used to show the issue of relative costs only, and are probably nothing like the real costs.
I haven't visited Tom's in ages... and it's been even longer since I was a regular reader. Fittingly, it was Ars that supplanted THG in my "holy trinity" of hardware sites to read when bored (Anandtech and SharkyExtreme being the other two - Slashdot is in a different category altogether).
I was really hoping my last memories of Tom's would be good ones. Tom's used to be a great resource in the olden days of overclocking. I learned the basics from him, and overclocked my Pentium 166 to 200 and later my PIII 550 to 733, and both still run stably with "stock" fans and default voltage years later. Now I see deception, and I hear that this isn't the first time.
This is like being 12 years old and being told to go visit your dying grandpa in a hospital room. Instead of just remembering him laughing and teaching you how to work with wood, you get to remember tubes everywhere and his hands shaking...
THE PERFORMANCE OF MICROWAVE OVENS REALLY DOES VARY
I bought a 1500-watt microwave, because it was on sale and because "more is better." Was I ever wrong! I'm thinking about abandoning it when I move and buying a very low wattage one to replace it, simply so I can follow instructions and not have, say, my microwave popcorn burn in two minutes flat.
By the way, don't ever stick cinnamon roll dough from a can in the microwave. I ignored the "do not cook in microwave" warning, thinking that the warning was because people stuck the can in, or something, and I could just stick a couple of the rolls in for 30 seconds... by the time 30 seconds was up, my oven was unplugged and I was trying to get my front door open to shove the oven outside. It's still a nice speckly beige color inside, after scrubbing...
What he could have done was ask some counter-questions to get a better idea of what was going on before answering.
This question-and-answer format doesn't allow for dialogues. However, he could easily have made some assumptions about what what really going on, and presented his opinions based on those.
It seems as if anyone who had a role in developing modern day systems are dieing. Conspiracy, I sure damn hope not.
Considering when most of the "big names" got started, it makes sense statistically. Don't worry, though, there's plenty of young coders out there that work hard. Remember that developer kid a few months back who made news because he was a minor?
I wonder if he's asked his family to freeze his body.
I wonder about this as well, but I expect the answer to be private, unless the family wishes otherwise.
Also, speculation on that note is probably moot, considering the probable condition of his body after the crash.
He did, according to one of the tributes left at the puffin.com tribute page, tell family and friends not to feel sad if he died in a helicopter crash. And as was said, so far, they can't honor that request, either.
He sounded like a cool guy, overall, and it's a shame that most of us never hear about "the people behind the scenes" until it's too late to feel the connection to them. At least more of them get recognized than their counterparts in closed-source commercial projects.
Thrift Shop? I'm posting from an AthlonXP 1800+ Amiga running Amithlon and AmigaOS, and it's faster than linux on the same hardware.
Out of curiousity, I looked up Amithlon, and discovered this statement, by its main author, that he's been forced to stop distributing the software.
This is too bad, because it would have been cool to play with, but the last time I said that, I ended up with a couple of year's worth of BeOS versions and upgrades and 3rd party software for an abandoned platform.
(Then again, I still am going to get my friends' old Indys and NeXT boxes, soon)
Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine
Let's see... you know someone who gets canned at work, or maybe who has forgotten to pay their internet bill and was suspended from their service, or has died, or something. Quickly, you set up a webmail account and tell this service that you're the owner of those accounts. Now you're getting all of their mail!
None of the "competing" products came close in the quality of the DVDs.
Maybe not now, but did you see the quality of first-generation DVDs? Visible blitting, etc? Yuck! We (those of us with laserdiscs) thought it would be years before they took over.
They didn't receive the same amount of marketing funds, either.
Okay, that I can believe.
I must take after my dad... he swore by our Beta vcr until the 90s, and I still have a minidisc recorder from 1995 (same year I bought the LD player, actually).
This scares me, about how closely the benchmarks come in. If it was CPU speed alone that was different, I could see why. But geez, the FSB is a lot higher on the P4. If it still doesn't flat out blow away an Athlon XP in every test, something's got to be said about the usefulness of the chip internals.
I have a long history as an Intel fan, and my Athlon XP 2GHz was a "value" choice to tide me over for a while. But I'm questioning my loyalties...
Because it's more important to keep people employed than to further enrich Wall Street gamblers.
It's also important to keep people employed gainfully, and grow the market (add jobs), by using resources as efficiently as you can. If you throw a thousand people out of work at one company when you dissolve it, but then take the money and invest it so that fifteen hundred people have jobs, are you still a bad guy?
So, umm... Why did they invest in the company in the first place?
As an asset play, of course! That is a workable strategy, assuming you can get a majority of stockholders to force dissolution before the company eats everything up with salaries, advertising, etc.
Is this really necessary? With 100GB hard drives becoming more commonplace, I think we're at the limit of what normal users need out of hardware
Are you serious? And just how do you keep those 100GB drives backed up, except by buying another drive?
DVD+Rs are already at 55 cents or less (US) per GB, and DVD-Rs are even cheaper. However, you'd need two dozen of them to do a decent backup of a hard drive that size. That's rather unwieldy, especially if you want to keep the backups reasonably up to date.
You do know that you can get hard drives at about the cost of $1 per GIGABYTE, right?
Yes, but you can get DVD+Rs for well under $2.50 US, and DVD-Rs are even cheaper. That's under 55 cents US per gigabyte. The fixed cost (the drive itself) becomes irrelevant when dealing with any real quantity.
Besides - if the motor dies on the hard drive, or the head crashes, you're out all your data. Not good, especially for a backup storage medium. And that's not even getting into the whole DVD-Video aspect of the game =)
Okay, cool. Glad you cleared that up for me; I feel better now.
Oh, one more thing, though... the name DivX without the stupid smiley conjures up images of a certain failed DVD format. Isn't that name copyrighted? I haven't yet read your FAQ, so don't know...
Of course we would prefer that the children be going to school, or just about anything more healthy for a child than working. But if nothing more attractive is available, these people migrate to a less desirable, and less visible means of supporting themselves.
This is an excellent point, and one that needs to be repeated until people finally get it.
Yes, it's horrible that these children get exploited, and work til their fingers bleed in maquiladoras for 15 cents a day (or whatever), etc. But it's their economic circumstances that's forcing them to work, not some factory owners. They're working because it's necessary for their families to get by. You cut them off without an alternative source of income, and it's not like the family can get welfare, or WIC, or any other benefits we assume poor people get because they exist in the U.S. They end up more desperate than before, and will likely starve if they don't become criminals or prostitutes, etc.
We should certainly feel bad about those places existing, but unless we're also ready to help the children ourselves, with adequate training and job opportunities for their parents so they can improve their economic situation, we're doing them more harm than good.
P.S. If you want to read a great book on the history of children and work in the U.S., look for Pricing the Priceless Child : The Changing Social Value of Children in your local public library or bookstore. It's useful when thinking about how China might resolve this issue to look at our own history.
(Doesn't it seem a bit demanding for someone making money off consulting to ask why open source authors haven't solved his problem for him?)
Have you tried coding it yourself? If you're not a coder, have you thrown real money at any of the dev teams? If not, well, why not? They're subject to market forces too, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they've tried it with Karin Spaink and XS4ALL here in the Netherlands.
And they lost.
Yes, but they also tried it with Johan Helsingius and anon.penet.fi in Finland. You can read about the consequences, if you don't already know them, at Karin's webspace on xs4all here.
A pioneer's life is never easy... and sometimes it just plain sucks!
Okay, good enough! I'm also not in the habit of installing anything I can't get a good report on, but I've got a firewall and Proximotron running, as well as ZA and ad-aware, just in case. I know it's overkill, but it's also an end to popups and all kinds of other crap.
I simply ignore EULAs. In fact, I make it a point to not even read them
n g-an-amateur-pr0n-site-ware, etc.
That's where, most of the time, the publisher divulges if a product contains adware, spyware, i'm-taking-all-your-honeymoon-pictures-and-starti
As this may be the only place you can read about those things (before Ad-Aware catches up), if they're not obviously listed as installation options, you'd be better off going through it.
There are some problems if you think in the long term - a typical BIOS wouldn't necessarily get outdated, but one with support for specific file systems would. Or could.
That's why BIOS is usually flashable, right? =)
Seriously, yes, having a built-in set of better diagnostic and prep utilities would be great. Just think of all those Gigabyte motherboards out there with dualie BIOS on the board, and what you could put in all that extra space if you could somehow access it.
On the other hand, while ROM does sound cheap, just remember that a $1 part undoubtedly costs more money to add to a board, probably more like $1.50 when you factor in the extra work in getting it on the board. Multiply $1.50 by 100,000 boards, and suddenly you're talking real money, and that's wholesale, way before retailer markup. Sure, hobbyists would be happy to pay the extra $1.50 (or even $5 or $10), but if they only buy 5-10% of the boards, the decision to include the part suddenly becomes much more difficult. Your average large VAR could care less about special BIOS options, and doesn't need to format drives in individual machines the way we do it because he has OEM licenses from MS, tapes of their latest OSes and software packs, and machines for batch-writing drives with the OS and software pre-installed.
P.S. My dollar figures are used to show the issue of relative costs only, and are probably nothing like the real costs.
I haven't visited Tom's in ages... and it's been even longer since I was a regular reader. Fittingly, it was Ars that supplanted THG in my "holy trinity" of hardware sites to read when bored (Anandtech and SharkyExtreme being the other two - Slashdot is in a different category altogether).
I was really hoping my last memories of Tom's would be good ones. Tom's used to be a great resource in the olden days of overclocking. I learned the basics from him, and overclocked my Pentium 166 to 200 and later my PIII 550 to 733, and both still run stably with "stock" fans and default voltage years later. Now I see deception, and I hear that this isn't the first time.
This is like being 12 years old and being told to go visit your dying grandpa in a hospital room. Instead of just remembering him laughing and teaching you how to work with wood, you get to remember tubes everywhere and his hands shaking...
THE PERFORMANCE OF MICROWAVE OVENS REALLY DOES VARY
I bought a 1500-watt microwave, because it was on sale and because "more is better." Was I ever wrong! I'm thinking about abandoning it when I move and buying a very low wattage one to replace it, simply so I can follow instructions and not have, say, my microwave popcorn burn in two minutes flat.
By the way, don't ever stick cinnamon roll dough from a can in the microwave. I ignored the "do not cook in microwave" warning, thinking that the warning was because people stuck the can in, or something, and I could just stick a couple of the rolls in for 30 seconds... by the time 30 seconds was up, my oven was unplugged and I was trying to get my front door open to shove the oven outside. It's still a nice speckly beige color inside, after scrubbing...
What he could have done was ask some counter-questions to get a better idea of what was going on before answering.
This question-and-answer format doesn't allow for dialogues. However, he could easily have made some assumptions about what what really going on, and presented his opinions based on those.
It seems as if anyone who had a role in developing modern day systems are dieing. Conspiracy, I sure damn hope not.
Considering when most of the "big names" got started, it makes sense statistically. Don't worry, though, there's plenty of young coders out there that work hard. Remember that developer kid a few months back who made news because he was a minor?
I wonder if he's asked his family to freeze his body.
I wonder about this as well, but I expect the answer to be private, unless the family wishes otherwise.
Also, speculation on that note is probably moot, considering the probable condition of his body after the crash.
He did, according to one of the tributes left at the puffin.com tribute page, tell family and friends not to feel sad if he died in a helicopter crash. And as was said, so far, they can't honor that request, either.
He sounded like a cool guy, overall, and it's a shame that most of us never hear about "the people behind the scenes" until it's too late to feel the connection to them. At least more of them get recognized than their counterparts in closed-source commercial projects.
Thrift Shop? I'm posting from an AthlonXP 1800+ Amiga running Amithlon and AmigaOS, and it's faster than linux on the same hardware.
Out of curiousity, I looked up Amithlon, and discovered this statement, by its main author, that he's been forced to stop distributing the software.
This is too bad, because it would have been cool to play with, but the last time I said that, I ended up with a couple of year's worth of BeOS versions and upgrades and 3rd party software for an abandoned platform.
(Then again, I still am going to get my friends' old Indys and NeXT boxes, soon)
Of course, I see a huge gaping security hole in this if I register the bounce address as mine
Let's see... you know someone who gets canned at work, or maybe who has forgotten to pay their internet bill and was suspended from their service, or has died, or something. Quickly, you set up a webmail account and tell this service that you're the owner of those accounts. Now you're getting all of their mail!
None of the "competing" products came close in the quality of the DVDs.
Maybe not now, but did you see the quality of first-generation DVDs? Visible blitting, etc? Yuck! We (those of us with laserdiscs) thought it would be years before they took over.
They didn't receive the same amount of marketing funds, either.
Okay, that I can believe.
I must take after my dad... he swore by our Beta vcr until the 90s, and I still have a minidisc recorder from 1995 (same year I bought the LD player, actually).
This scares me, about how closely the benchmarks come in.
If it was CPU speed alone that was different, I could see why. But geez, the FSB is a lot higher on the P4. If it still doesn't flat out blow away an Athlon XP in every test, something's got to be said about the usefulness of the chip internals.
I have a long history as an Intel fan, and my Athlon XP 2GHz was a "value" choice to tide me over for a while. But I'm questioning my loyalties...
Because it's more important to keep people employed than to further enrich Wall Street gamblers.
It's also important to keep people employed gainfully, and grow the market (add jobs), by using resources as efficiently as you can. If you throw a thousand people out of work at one company when you dissolve it, but then take the money and invest it so that fifteen hundred people have jobs, are you still a bad guy?
what are the technical leverages that Liquid Audio claims to offer vs. free competitors such as Ogg Vorbis
Pretty much just DRM, which means the music industry was happy to use it in promos for new releases, etc.
So, umm... Why did they invest in the company in the first place?
As an asset play, of course! That is a workable strategy, assuming you can get a majority of stockholders to force dissolution before the company eats everything up with salaries, advertising, etc.
Is this really necessary? With 100GB hard drives becoming more commonplace, I think we're at the limit of what normal users need out of hardware
Are you serious? And just how do you keep those 100GB drives backed up, except by buying another drive?
DVD+Rs are already at 55 cents or less (US) per GB, and DVD-Rs are even cheaper. However, you'd need two dozen of them to do a decent backup of a hard drive that size. That's rather unwieldy, especially if you want to keep the backups reasonably up to date.
We didn't have to choose between two incompatible video disk formats. We just had to choose between a Panasonic or a Phillips..
Um... what about laserdiscs and CED/Selectavision/Videodiscs?
Granted, they aren't digital, but they are"video disks." So are (s)VCDs, for that matter. I can't remember if VCD came out before DVD, though.
So is Andy Mavis going to be the general manager?
Andy Travis.
"It's the phone cops, I swear!"
"They're solid plastic, so don't settle for imitations."
"I swear, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
You do know that you can get hard drives at about the cost of $1 per GIGABYTE, right?
Yes, but you can get DVD+Rs for well under $2.50 US, and DVD-Rs are even cheaper. That's under 55 cents US per gigabyte. The fixed cost (the drive itself) becomes irrelevant when dealing with any real quantity.
Besides - if the motor dies on the hard drive, or the head crashes, you're out all your data. Not good, especially for a backup storage medium. And that's not even getting into the whole DVD-Video aspect of the game =)
Goddamn, but these people see more like patriots than criminals.
I'm sorry, but since when are the two mutually exclusive?
Ever heard of Congress? Certain highest-ranking members of the Executive branch? =)
Okay, cool. Glad you cleared that up for me; I feel better now.
Oh, one more thing, though... the name DivX without the stupid smiley conjures up images of a certain failed DVD format. Isn't that name copyrighted? I haven't yet read your FAQ, so don't know...
Of course we would prefer that the children be going to school, or just about anything more healthy for a child than working. But if nothing more attractive is available, these people migrate to a less desirable, and less visible means of supporting themselves.
This is an excellent point, and one that needs to be repeated until people finally get it.
Yes, it's horrible that these children get exploited, and work til their fingers bleed in maquiladoras for 15 cents a day (or whatever), etc. But it's their economic circumstances that's forcing them to work, not some factory owners. They're working because it's necessary for their families to get by. You cut them off without an alternative source of income, and it's not like the family can get welfare, or WIC, or any other benefits we assume poor people get because they exist in the U.S. They end up more desperate than before, and will likely starve if they don't become criminals or prostitutes, etc.
We should certainly feel bad about those places existing, but unless we're also ready to help the children ourselves, with adequate training and job opportunities for their parents so they can improve their economic situation, we're doing them more harm than good.
P.S. If you want to read a great book on the history of children and work in the U.S., look for Pricing the Priceless Child : The Changing Social Value of Children in your local public library or bookstore. It's useful when thinking about how China might resolve this issue to look at our own history.
(Doesn't it seem a bit demanding for someone making money off consulting to ask why open source authors haven't solved his problem for him?)
Have you tried coding it yourself? If you're not a coder, have you thrown real money at any of the dev teams? If not, well, why not? They're subject to market forces too, you know.