Yeah, I had a friend who told a similar story. He worked in the sugar mines, and it turns out they'd package that sugar many different ways by adding various amounts of flour, milk, eggs, and such to it. They might sell cookies under one brand, and cake under another, but IT WAS STILL THE SAME SUGAR! We're being ripped off!
the point is moot since much of US Government software is developed in India anyways.
Care to provide evidence for this assertion? I've worked for a defense contractor, and I find it unlikely that the government would allow any coding to be outsourced to another country.
"Newsbot (beta) responds to your reading preferences. Clicking on articles determines what we base your recommendations on."
I find this disturbing too, though probably not for the same reasons as you do.
I could care less if the site uses my browsing history to determine what I like and don't like -- it's better for them and for me if they can target ads well enough that I don't see ads for things I wouldn't buy.
The reason I don't like the idea is that because the importance of news should not be based on what I WANT to read about, but rather what I NEED to read about. It would be very easy to establish a pattern of interest that would result in an echo-chamber situation, where I was never exposed to a viewpoint I didn't already possess or agree with. That kind of situation does not make a person any more informed; what, then, is the purpose of news?
every taxpayer is now engaged in protecting the copyright holders, so now you're not only buying their products, but paying for them to keep the prices where they want them.
Copyright protections are not a lopsided us-versus-them situation. There's no line in the sand between content producers (bad) and consumers (good). If you create something, whether you're a media corporation or an individual, copyright works in your favor.
Rembember, even the GNU Copyleft depends on the existence of copyright in order to work.
it removes the potential for community wireless and individual users to be prosecuted for illegal antennas once new certifications are in place
No it doesn't. How'd you come to that conclusion?
If a user has an antenna that exceeds the specs that have been certified for that antenna type with that device, it's still illegal to use and the user can still be prosecuted.
And if the manufacturers don't get their devices certified with anything other than their weak default antenna, you still won't be legally allowed to use anything stronger than their default. This will vary by manufacturer -- Linksys might want to sell powerful upgrade antennas to its users, so it will get its equipment certified with a really powerful antenna. Apple, on the other hand, probably has no plans to sell replacement antennas for its Airport devices and will only get certification for its standard antenna.
Or, to put it succinctly, XHTML is an XML-compliant implementation of the markup language HTML was supposed to be before browser coders kludged it up with style information.
Come on, this kind of encouragement has been going on for DECADES.
RTFP. No, just skimming the Abstract isn't sufficient.
The patent describes a fairly specific method of encouraging and measuring a viewer's attention to detail. It's not nearly as insidious as the impression one might get from reading nothing but a one-sentence summary of the patent.
This happens with every story about patents on Slashdor. Half the posts are "surely product X constitutes prior art, it's different in concept and implementation but a ten-word summary of it would be mostly the same", and the other half are jokes about patenting the practice of filing junk patents. And both halves are certain they have the answer for reforming the Patent OFfice, which is obviously broken and needs to be replaced because some guy on a web message board, with no formal experience in patent law, doesn't understand it.
I give up. I'm heading over to my Preferences page to filter out whatever category patent stories end up in.
He had no idea that there were that many people being screwed by this jerk.
Maybe he would have known earlier if you had reported the scam to the police as soon as it happened to you instead of just blogging about it for weeks and weeks.
Their predictions on clock speed actually aren't that far off the mark, assuming they're talking about the system clock as a whole rather than just the CPU clock speed.
When the 486's came out shortly after that article in 1989, the fastest speed they got up to was still only 33MHz. By applying clock doubling, Intel was able to get the DX2 CPUs running at 66MHz internally -- but externally mainboard speeds were still 33.
In fact, mainboard speeds STILL peaked at 33MHz when the first generation of Pentiums came out. The P5-90 was a clock-tripled 30MHz system, for example.
As I recall, it wasn't until the P5-100 that main speeds above 33MHz were used (some 100's were 33x3, others were 50x2.) And that was circa 1994.
So five years with no progress in base system clockspeeds? The prediction seems pretty accurate to me.
I'd rather buy a Smart. Too bad DaimlerChrysler doesn't seem to think there's a market for small, efficient, stylish cars in the United States (*cough* Mini Cooper *cough*)...
As for fears that small planes might be used to carry weapons of mass destruction, I can't imagine any hostile states currently having the technology to produce a nuke weighing under a ton.
It's not nukes we need to worry about, it's chemical and biological weapons.
How much Anthrax spore do you suppose could be carried in a payload on one of these planes? And how deadly would it be if it were released into the air 500 feet above a busy city?
There are at least three variables in this equation:
1. Number of users
2. Number of RSS feeds
3. Size of each request
And I'll add:
4. Time at which each request occurs
If RSS requests were evenly distributed throughout the hour, the problems would be minimal. When every single RSS reader assumes that updates should be checked exactly at X o'clock on the hour, you get problems.
We need a school that only teaches programming in a cost effective manner, lets people graduate in 2 years and has such a good results that companies would rather hire its students that someone with a full degree.
There's dozens of 2-year technical/trade schools with programs just like that, and yet I'd guess you'd find most employers more likely to hire a candidate with a 4-year degree than one with a certificate from ITT or DeVry.
Perhaps those general education courses aren't so useless after all.
As a fringe benefit, the universities' networks will return to pre-Napster (old Napster, obviously) levels of functionality.
How do you figure? The same amount of data will still be passing from point A to point B -- only now, point A is an official Napster(TM) music server instead of some student sharing his MP3 collection from Kazaa Lite.
Note I do not differentiate between intra-net and inter-net traffic -- that's because it's irrelevant. Bits are bits, regardless of where they're from and where they're going.
But this is like buying paper for students who would otherwise steal it.
But they're using the students' own money to pay for it. Okay, maybe collective bargaining means that the university can get a better deal on paper than a student could individually, but some of the students don't even USE paper; they have notebook computers. Why are they being forced to subsidize the other students with a ream-a-week habit?
And the deal only covers three kinds of paper -- legal pads, standard graph paper, and college-ruled three-hole punch. The music students still have to buy their staff paper separately. The engineering students still have to buy their logarithmic graph paper separately. The art students have a dozen different kinds of paper they need to buy for their courses.
The university does not belong in the paper selling business. If a lot of paper is getting stolen from the campus store, don't just give it away and split the charges among everyone -- instead increase the security at the store so that those who steal will be held responsible for their own behavior.
you should be upset about how much of your donations are wasted on bandwidth to download pirated movies, music, and software.
I'm not. My school's on a backbone -- it's not like they pay more if they exceed some transfer threshold.
It's also not like offering the Dave Matthews back catalog via Napster is going to reduce the amount of Internet bandwidth being used to download pirated music and software and anything else that still won't be available through the licensed service.
And are you going to ask the President & Board to cut off the student's cable TV
Maybe it's different at your school, but in my dorms the students that wanted cable TV had to pay for it. The school didn't just assume everyone needed it and tack another $5 a month onto the room and board fees.
I applaud them for spending a few dollars to keep their student populations from committing piracy.
We're talking about students in the age range of roughly 18 to 22 here. They're old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong, and to face up to the consequences of whatever decisions they do make. They don't need the university to be their nanny and forcibly prevent them from committing piracy.
I'm an alumnus of one of the universities mentioned, and I'm writing up a letter to be sent to the President and Board of Trustees. It will express my disappointment in their capitulation to RIAA pressure and negligent misuse of funds, and let them know that as long as this deal is in place, the university will no longer be getting any alumni support from myself, and I will encourage my fellow alumni to do the same.
Napster has no legitimate educational purpose. They can go ahead and waste someone else's money (read: the current student body's) on this worthless and unjustifiable service, but I can make sure they will not be wasting my money on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had a friend who told a similar story. He worked in the sugar mines, and it turns out they'd package that sugar many different ways by adding various amounts of flour, milk, eggs, and such to it. They might sell cookies under one brand, and cake under another, but IT WAS STILL THE SAME SUGAR! We're being ripped off!
it seems like it works by recording IR signals as audio, and then re-broadcasting by playing the sounds. Actually that's kind of interesting.
VERY interesting, as infrared wavelengths are a few orders of magnitude above Nyquist for even the most high-fidelity audio DAC.
So how's it work?
the point is moot since much of US Government software is developed in India anyways.
Care to provide evidence for this assertion? I've worked for a defense contractor, and I find it unlikely that the government would allow any coding to be outsourced to another country.
"Newsbot (beta) responds to your reading preferences. Clicking on articles determines what we base your recommendations on."
I find this disturbing too, though probably not for the same reasons as you do.
I could care less if the site uses my browsing history to determine what I like and don't like -- it's better for them and for me if they can target ads well enough that I don't see ads for things I wouldn't buy.
The reason I don't like the idea is that because the importance of news should not be based on what I WANT to read about, but rather what I NEED to read about. It would be very easy to establish a pattern of interest that would result in an echo-chamber situation, where I was never exposed to a viewpoint I didn't already possess or agree with. That kind of situation does not make a person any more informed; what, then, is the purpose of news?
I am one of the most well-informed people I know.
Suuure you are.
every taxpayer is now engaged in protecting the copyright holders, so now you're not only buying their products, but paying for them to keep the prices where they want them.
Copyright protections are not a lopsided us-versus-them situation. There's no line in the sand between content producers (bad) and consumers (good). If you create something, whether you're a media corporation or an individual, copyright works in your favor.
Rembember, even the GNU Copyleft depends on the existence of copyright in order to work.
it removes the potential for community wireless and individual users to be prosecuted for illegal antennas once new certifications are in place
No it doesn't. How'd you come to that conclusion?
If a user has an antenna that exceeds the specs that have been certified for that antenna type with that device, it's still illegal to use and the user can still be prosecuted.
And if the manufacturers don't get their devices certified with anything other than their weak default antenna, you still won't be legally allowed to use anything stronger than their default. This will vary by manufacturer -- Linksys might want to sell powerful upgrade antennas to its users, so it will get its equipment certified with a really powerful antenna. Apple, on the other hand, probably has no plans to sell replacement antennas for its Airport devices and will only get certification for its standard antenna.
Or, to put it succinctly, XHTML is an XML-compliant implementation of the markup language HTML was supposed to be before browser coders kludged it up with style information.
Can anybody translate this SCO/Baystar stock market mumbojumbo into plain English? What's SCO trying to pull here?
Come on, this kind of encouragement has been going on for DECADES.
RTFP. No, just skimming the Abstract isn't sufficient.
The patent describes a fairly specific method of encouraging and measuring a viewer's attention to detail. It's not nearly as insidious as the impression one might get from reading nothing but a one-sentence summary of the patent.
This happens with every story about patents on Slashdor. Half the posts are "surely product X constitutes prior art, it's different in concept and implementation but a ten-word summary of it would be mostly the same", and the other half are jokes about patenting the practice of filing junk patents. And both halves are certain they have the answer for reforming the Patent OFfice, which is obviously broken and needs to be replaced because some guy on a web message board, with no formal experience in patent law, doesn't understand it.
I give up. I'm heading over to my Preferences page to filter out whatever category patent stories end up in.
He had no idea that there were that many people being screwed by this jerk.
Maybe he would have known earlier if you had reported the scam to the police as soon as it happened to you instead of just blogging about it for weeks and weeks.
Their predictions on clock speed actually aren't that far off the mark, assuming they're talking about the system clock as a whole rather than just the CPU clock speed.
When the 486's came out shortly after that article in 1989, the fastest speed they got up to was still only 33MHz. By applying clock doubling, Intel was able to get the DX2 CPUs running at 66MHz internally -- but externally mainboard speeds were still 33.
In fact, mainboard speeds STILL peaked at 33MHz when the first generation of Pentiums came out. The P5-90 was a clock-tripled 30MHz system, for example.
As I recall, it wasn't until the P5-100 that main speeds above 33MHz were used (some 100's were 33x3, others were 50x2.) And that was circa 1994.
So five years with no progress in base system clockspeeds? The prediction seems pretty accurate to me.
but rather
Non-commercial use is also prohibited according to this ruling.
This means all homebrew and hobbyist coders in the UK can no longer modify their consoles to run games they have written.
Oh no! I hope that both of them have other hobbies to fall back on.
I'd rather buy a Smart. Too bad DaimlerChrysler doesn't seem to think there's a market for small, efficient, stylish cars in the United States (*cough* Mini Cooper *cough*)...
As for fears that small planes might be used to carry weapons of mass destruction, I can't imagine any hostile states currently having the technology to produce a nuke weighing under a ton.
It's not nukes we need to worry about, it's chemical and biological weapons.
How much Anthrax spore do you suppose could be carried in a payload on one of these planes? And how deadly would it be if it were released into the air 500 feet above a busy city?
"Virii" is, and let me put this gently, not a goddamn word.
Neither are "mouses" and "boxen", but they're both widely-used and generally-accepted plural forms in the tech world.
Quitcher bitchin'.
There are at least three variables in this equation:
1. Number of users
2. Number of RSS feeds
3. Size of each request
And I'll add:
4. Time at which each request occurs
If RSS requests were evenly distributed throughout the hour, the problems would be minimal. When every single RSS reader assumes that updates should be checked exactly at X o'clock on the hour, you get problems.
We need a school that only teaches programming in a cost effective manner, lets people graduate in 2 years and has such a good results that companies would rather hire its students that someone with a full degree.
There's dozens of 2-year technical/trade schools with programs just like that, and yet I'd guess you'd find most employers more likely to hire a candidate with a 4-year degree than one with a certificate from ITT or DeVry.
Perhaps those general education courses aren't so useless after all.
As a fringe benefit, the universities' networks will return to pre-Napster (old Napster, obviously) levels of functionality.
How do you figure? The same amount of data will still be passing from point A to point B -- only now, point A is an official Napster(TM) music server instead of some student sharing his MP3 collection from Kazaa Lite.
Note I do not differentiate between intra-net and inter-net traffic -- that's because it's irrelevant. Bits are bits, regardless of where they're from and where they're going.
Didn't Digital Equipment Corporation invent SMB
No, I'm pretty sure it was Nintendo that invented Super Mario Bros.
But this is like buying paper for students who would otherwise steal it.
But they're using the students' own money to pay for it. Okay, maybe collective bargaining means that the university can get a better deal on paper than a student could individually, but some of the students don't even USE paper; they have notebook computers. Why are they being forced to subsidize the other students with a ream-a-week habit?
And the deal only covers three kinds of paper -- legal pads, standard graph paper, and college-ruled three-hole punch. The music students still have to buy their staff paper separately. The engineering students still have to buy their logarithmic graph paper separately. The art students have a dozen different kinds of paper they need to buy for their courses.
The university does not belong in the paper selling business. If a lot of paper is getting stolen from the campus store, don't just give it away and split the charges among everyone -- instead increase the security at the store so that those who steal will be held responsible for their own behavior.
you should be upset about how much of your donations are wasted on bandwidth to download pirated movies, music, and software.
I'm not. My school's on a backbone -- it's not like they pay more if they exceed some transfer threshold.
It's also not like offering the Dave Matthews back catalog via Napster is going to reduce the amount of Internet bandwidth being used to download pirated music and software and anything else that still won't be available through the licensed service.
And are you going to ask the President & Board to cut off the student's cable TV
Maybe it's different at your school, but in my dorms the students that wanted cable TV had to pay for it. The school didn't just assume everyone needed it and tack another $5 a month onto the room and board fees.
I applaud them for spending a few dollars to keep their student populations from committing piracy.
We're talking about students in the age range of roughly 18 to 22 here. They're old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong, and to face up to the consequences of whatever decisions they do make. They don't need the university to be their nanny and forcibly prevent them from committing piracy.
I'm an alumnus of one of the universities mentioned, and I'm writing up a letter to be sent to the President and Board of Trustees. It will express my disappointment in their capitulation to RIAA pressure and negligent misuse of funds, and let them know that as long as this deal is in place, the university will no longer be getting any alumni support from myself, and I will encourage my fellow alumni to do the same.
Napster has no legitimate educational purpose. They can go ahead and waste someone else's money (read: the current student body's) on this worthless and unjustifiable service, but I can make sure they will not be wasting my money on it.
Alright PHP guys, can you give us that?
I bet PHPEclipse would be useful.