Then they have just committed corporate suicide. Glad I don't hold any of their stock...
I disagree. What they've done sounds very rude and deceptive to me. But it may very well be legal and may result in them staking a claim in an emerging, lucrative market. Thus, the company's perceived value may increase and shareholders may be pleased. I'm not predicting that their stock price will rise with certainty, but I don't believe it's a foregone conclusion that this will tank it. Talk to a penny-stock promoter good at spinning publicity. He/she'll tell you that there's almost no such thing as bad publicity for an upstart. A piece of news (or even a rumor) like this that puts them on the map and on traders' tongues may be just what their stock price needed. Time will tell. Afterall, we only need to look to companies like Verisign with horrible, headline-making security and privacy goof-ups and deceptive practices to see that their rude actions and policies do not result in corporate suicide. (Unfortunately.)
If they've committed any type of "suicide", it's simply image-suicide in the eyes of a very small, elite crowd (ie, Slashdotters, privacy defenders, etc.) The market and shareholders may not care about this.
Looking at the letter it is very unclear that you are signing up with a different registrar.
Okay, Verisign is a lousy registrar and their service sucks. But their letter is reasonably clear, I think. Click on the link to that letter and you'll quickly see: 1. A nice clear Verisign logo. (duh) 2. The words "Transfer Authorization" just above where you sign.
Anyone who can't see those two things in black & white simply isn't up to the responsibility of being the administrative contact for a domain. I still dislike and distrust Verisign, but if the person in charge of my domains didn't clearly see that as a TRANSFER to VERISIGN, then they'd be out of a job.
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that.
Check your high school physics notes again. Gravity has everything to do with mass. Gravity is the attraction of objects to each other because of their mass. Every object posessing mass has a gravitational field. The strength of that field is proportional to the amount of... wait for it... mass.
If you witness/measure less gravitational force in a system, you can conclude at least one of three things, according to the high school physics you speak of: 1. The universal gravitational constant has been reduced. 2. One or more masses in the system have been reduced. 3. The distance between the masses has been increased.
The theoretical maximum (for silica) I've heard quoted is 40Tbit/s, but I'm sure you could squeeze a bit more out.
Hmmm. I'll tell you how to squeeze more out... take whatever was giving you 40Tbit/s before. Lay down 7 more of those. In parallel. Presto! Now you've got 40TBYTES/s. Repeat as required.
If people order the Smartmedia card or Compact flash memory separate from the player, it wouldn't be taxed, right? (After all, you could be using it for your digital camera.)
I hope you're right. But consider the fact that removable media like CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, etc, will also be heavily taxed under this proposed legislation, despite the fact that there are lots of non-music uses for them.
In other words, Joe Consumer or Joe Business buys a pack of pure data CD-Rs (not "audio" labelled) for simple data backup purposes, and they will get hit with a significant tax per disc under this proposal.
I was pretty happy to read that they included consumer S/PDIF digital audio out. Then a little farther down in the specs, it says:
One S/PDIF out (optional and multiplex with RCA TV out)
Doh. That sucks. So I can't drive my (composite) TV and digital receiver simultaneously? Hopefully there's a way to split out the digital audio before the multiplexor and add another jack.
Re:You just dont get it, open source isnt about fr
on
Mandrake Asks for Support
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The point is that many Windows people will turn to Linux to find out how good "free" can be. They don't understand RMS yet. They don't understand the distinction between different "free" definitions. Can't blame them. It takes a little while for that kind of paradigm shift. Anyways, a typical Windows user has been lulled into such comfort that he doesn't have a hope of installing any Linux distro except maybe Mandrake. And now it seems to be going commercial like they perceive the Open/Free/Linux crowd says is so evil. I'm not saying this pereception is correct, but I believe it will happen and may be hard for a newbie to understand. Anyways, so perhaps they'll turn to something truly non-commercial like Debian, say, and have a really rough time at it and then just give up on Linux. Perhaps. I truly hope not. Just throwing out a prediction here and some reasoning behind it.
Ironic: It's better for newbies when it's free
on
Mandrake Asks for Support
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I see Mandrake as a fantastic Linux distro. I commonly recommend it above Red Hat and even above the otherwise really great (but more effortful to install) Debian. Definitely, it's what I suggest to my Windows colleagues for a taste of Linux.
Anyways, that's what's kind of ironic about their plea for a subscription-based Member Club. Their perfect niche is Linux newbies, but those newbies probably won't grok the concept of why they should subscribe monthly for their OS. (In fact, it tends to be the Linux crowd shouting at them to NOT buy into evil subscription models that are coming down the pipe by Microsoft.) And those of us that "get" it and recognize how important Mandrake could be are likely "move on" to other distros like Debian (for their social contract)), or maybe even dip into something like OpenBSD (for its priorities on security and robustness). Anyways, as I'm skipping around installing different distros for different purposes, it's hard for me to buy into a Membership for just one. Sigh.
Mandrake, your excellent installer has probably got you unfairly pigeonholed!
Understand you're [sic] point, consumer products are not a good example.
I think the consumer product example is good, because it displays a scale of increasingly stringent requirements as the implications of a product's failure increases. This keeps the end costs proportionate to how much we care.
We're all aware of UL and CSA, but the previous poster said that they don't really care, in the context of how much more the DOT (for cars) and FAA (for aircraft) care. A bathroom lightbulb is an imprecise, low-quality, highly unpredictable piece of garbage compared to an airplane wing bulb, and UL (or whoever) don't really care. Nor should they!
there's nothing magic about Lisp that will make your enemies behave more intelligently, a dumb loop in lisp is still a dumb loop
LOL. A loop? If you find yourself writing a loop in Lisp, well... maybe it's time to stick to imperative languages until you've seen the functional light.
Do plumbers carry around Palm Pilots with cellphones attached? No. They have those old 1993 Motorola pagers that cost $3.95 a month. So my advice is, stop trying to upgrade to the latest greatest toy and get to work.
Um, I do work. And my work doesn't involve crawling around flooded basements, displaying butt cleavage, or sticking my arms into shit-plugged toilets. To each their own, I guess, but I don't generally look up to plumbers for lifestyle advice.
My tree parser took six lines in C. Doncha just luve recursion! Some guys took over a day to write their parser in fortran.
If you want to learn more about recursive Fortran programming, check here or here.
If your classmates were using a strictly conforming Fortran 77 compiler (like GNU), that might explain why their parsers were more difficult to write (ie, without recursion). Most 77 compilers (and anything recent) will let you write recursion just fine.
what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do
I did a CS degree many years ago. At my school, Apple had a strangle-lock on on supplying all the general purpose computing labs with gear. There were a few IBMs, but lots of Pascal, C, and of course all spreadsheeting, word processing, and presentation preparations were done on Apple hardware. This near-monopoly went on for a very long time. Additionally, on the computing-specific side of campus, Sun had a monopoly on the programming lab hardware. Actually, there were a bunch of NeXT cubes there also. But absolutely NO Microsoft OSs. So I did a lot of Mac and Unix programming, and only touched a PC once for an OS course (ie, didn't even use DOS). Did it make me want to program Macs (or Unix) when I got out? No. I learned the concepts of software design, and if anything, I wanted to apply those principles to different hardware and OSs than I'd been exposed to thus far. So I went towards proprietary game consoles and PCs (DOS at the time, followed by all flavours of Windows). There was a little bit of Unix work in there, but I've never professionally created an app on Apple hardware. I had a huge grad class in CS and I'm not aware of anybody that went on to create Apple applications despite 4-5 years of exposure and programming on them.
Maybe the "what they learn at school is what they go on to do" theory works at community colleges or vocational schools where training is very specific and more resume-based rather than fundamental-based.
You can still pay absolutely nothing and read all the stories and/or comments. Nothing is changing about that.
That remains to be seen. CmdrTaco's article clearly says: we intend to offer additional features to subscribers, and one of the possibilities he gives is the abilility to read articles that non-paying subscribers can't read (the rejected stories bin). You can look at kuro5hin for a taste of this. kuro5hin has its own problems, mind you. And obviously in these post-dot-bomb times, finances could end up driving access to content on that site also.
Re:Policy on revoked moderators?
on
BeOS For Linux
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
My bad. A BeOS story got posted soon after the paid Slashdot story and I replied to the BeOS story instead. Totally my fault. There goes my karma! Anyways, the correct posting is here. It's most definitely on-topic there. Please read it!
CmdrTaco, I have a question.. Will there be true freedoms for paid users who moderate? I haven't really tracked the "official" policy, but I understand that many high-karma users (including myself) have had their moderation privileges revoked because of some posting or moderating or meta-moderating action they performed. (ie, modding up something controversial the editors didn't like, supporting controversial posters with meta-mods, etc.)
To be honest, I'm not sure at what point I lost my mod priveleges, but I haven't had them for quite some time. Yet I continue to try to post informative or insightful or funny things.
To CmdrTaco... what is your position going to be on revoking mod priveleges to paying subscribers? If I pay, will I be able to freely post and mod and meta-mod like I thought I could before?
Policy on revoked moderators?
on
BeOS For Linux
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I haven't really tracked the "official" decision, but I understand that many high-karma users (including myself) have had their moderation privileges revoked because of some posting or moderating or meta-moderating action they performed. (ie, modding up something controversial the editors didn't like, supporting controversial posters with meta-mods, etc.)
To be honest, I'm not sure at what point I lost my mod priveleges, but I haven't had them for quite some time. Yet I continue to try to post informative or insightful or funny things.
To CmdrTaco... what is your position going to be on revoking mod priveleges to paying subscribers? If I pay, will I be able to freely post and mod and meta-mod like I thought I could before?
If this happens with monetary incentives, many people will DEFINITELY pull the old Karma-whoring tricks like a single user using multiple freely registered accounts to alternate posting and modding each other until one of those accounts hits the Karma discount level. There are other techniques. Smart people, these/. readers; they'll rise to the challenge.
Okay, using your anti-criteria for news... Winchester touts their rifles' abilities to fire ammunition extremely accurately with immense force as one of their selling points. So when a person uses one to kill a president or a few dozen schoolchildren, is it newsworthy?
Someone has discovered a new, ironic, and devious way to use an iPod for piracy. It's funny. And nerdy. And newsworthy. Especially on/.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they have just committed corporate suicide. Glad I don't hold any of their stock...
I disagree. What they've done sounds very rude and deceptive to me. But it may very well be legal and may result in them staking a claim in an emerging, lucrative market. Thus, the company's perceived value may increase and shareholders may be pleased. I'm not predicting that their stock price will rise with certainty, but I don't believe it's a foregone conclusion that this will tank it. Talk to a penny-stock promoter good at spinning publicity. He/she'll tell you that there's almost no such thing as bad publicity for an upstart. A piece of news (or even a rumor) like this that puts them on the map and on traders' tongues may be just what their stock price needed. Time will tell. Afterall, we only need to look to companies like Verisign with horrible, headline-making security and privacy goof-ups and deceptive practices to see that their rude actions and policies do not result in corporate suicide. (Unfortunately.)
If they've committed any type of "suicide", it's simply image-suicide in the eyes of a very small, elite crowd (ie, Slashdotters, privacy defenders, etc.) The market and shareholders may not care about this.
one area of interest -- a couple of the insects apparently were eaten during the the trip back.
One scientist was overheard to remark, "Mmmmph. Needs salt."
a Legion of Angelic Lawyers
If that's not an oxymoron...
Looking at the letter it is very unclear that you are signing up with a different registrar.
Okay, Verisign is a lousy registrar and their service sucks. But their letter is reasonably clear, I think. Click on the link to that letter and you'll quickly see:
1. A nice clear Verisign logo. (duh)
2. The words "Transfer Authorization" just above where you sign.
Anyone who can't see those two things in black & white simply isn't up to the responsibility of being the administrative contact for a domain. I still dislike and distrust Verisign, but if the person in charge of my domains didn't clearly see that as a TRANSFER to VERISIGN, then they'd be out of a job.
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that.
Check your high school physics notes again. Gravity has everything to do with mass. Gravity is the attraction of objects to each other because of their mass. Every object posessing mass has a gravitational field. The strength of that field is proportional to the amount of... wait for it... mass.
If you witness/measure less gravitational force in a system, you can conclude at least one of three things, according to the high school physics you speak of:
1. The universal gravitational constant has been reduced.
2. One or more masses in the system have been reduced.
3. The distance between the masses has been increased.
So this thing could transmit my entire mp3 collection in under a half second.
Engineer wanted for creation of 2.56Tb/s DRM system. Must be able to scan for copyright flags in data stream and deny transfer permission.
The theoretical maximum (for silica) I've heard quoted is 40Tbit/s, but I'm sure you could squeeze a bit more out.
Hmmm. I'll tell you how to squeeze more out... take whatever was giving you 40Tbit/s before. Lay down 7 more of those. In parallel. Presto! Now you've got 40TBYTES/s. Repeat as required.
"Buy 8 and I'll throw in a parity bit for free!"
If people order the Smartmedia card or Compact flash memory separate from the player, it wouldn't be taxed, right? (After all, you could be using it for your digital camera.)
I hope you're right. But consider the fact that removable media like CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVD-Rs, etc, will also be heavily taxed under this proposed legislation, despite the fact that there are lots of non-music uses for them.
In other words, Joe Consumer or Joe Business buys a pack of pure data CD-Rs (not "audio" labelled) for simple data backup purposes, and they will get hit with a significant tax per disc under this proposal.
I was pretty happy to read that they included consumer S/PDIF digital audio out. Then a little farther down in the specs, it says:
One S/PDIF out (optional and multiplex with RCA TV out)
Doh. That sucks. So I can't drive my (composite) TV and digital receiver simultaneously? Hopefully there's a way to split out the digital audio before the multiplexor and add another jack.
The point is that many Windows people will turn to Linux to find out how good "free" can be. They don't understand RMS yet. They don't understand the distinction between different "free" definitions. Can't blame them. It takes a little while for that kind of paradigm shift. Anyways, a typical Windows user has been lulled into such comfort that he doesn't have a hope of installing any Linux distro except maybe Mandrake. And now it seems to be going commercial like they perceive the Open/Free/Linux crowd says is so evil. I'm not saying this pereception is correct, but I believe it will happen and may be hard for a newbie to understand. Anyways, so perhaps they'll turn to something truly non-commercial like Debian, say, and have a really rough time at it and then just give up on Linux. Perhaps. I truly hope not. Just throwing out a prediction here and some reasoning behind it.
I see Mandrake as a fantastic Linux distro. I commonly recommend it above Red Hat and even above the otherwise really great (but more effortful to install) Debian. Definitely, it's what I suggest to my Windows colleagues for a taste of Linux.
Anyways, that's what's kind of ironic about their plea for a subscription-based Member Club. Their perfect niche is Linux newbies, but those newbies probably won't grok the concept of why they should subscribe monthly for their OS. (In fact, it tends to be the Linux crowd shouting at them to NOT buy into evil subscription models that are coming down the pipe by Microsoft.) And those of us that "get" it and recognize how important Mandrake could be are likely "move on" to other distros like Debian (for their social contract)), or maybe even dip into something like OpenBSD (for its priorities on security and robustness). Anyways, as I'm skipping around installing different distros for different purposes, it's hard for me to buy into a Membership for just one. Sigh.
Mandrake, your excellent installer has probably got you unfairly pigeonholed!
Understand you're [sic] point, consumer products are not a good example.
I think the consumer product example is good, because it displays a scale of increasingly stringent requirements as the implications of a product's failure increases. This keeps the end costs proportionate to how much we care.
We're all aware of UL and CSA, but the previous poster said that they don't really care, in the context of how much more the DOT (for cars) and FAA (for aircraft) care. A bathroom lightbulb is an imprecise, low-quality, highly unpredictable piece of garbage compared to an airplane wing bulb, and UL (or whoever) don't really care. Nor should they!
there's nothing magic about Lisp that will make your enemies behave more intelligently, a dumb loop in lisp is still a dumb loop
LOL. A loop? If you find yourself writing a loop in Lisp, well... maybe it's time to stick to imperative languages until you've seen the functional light.
Do plumbers carry around Palm Pilots with cellphones attached? No. They have those old 1993 Motorola pagers that cost $3.95 a month. So my advice is, stop trying to upgrade to the latest greatest toy and get to work.
Um, I do work. And my work doesn't involve crawling around flooded basements, displaying butt cleavage, or sticking my arms into shit-plugged toilets. To each their own, I guess, but I don't generally look up to plumbers for lifestyle advice.
My tree parser took six lines in C. Doncha just luve recursion! Some guys took over a day to write their parser in fortran.
If you want to learn more about recursive Fortran programming, check here or here.
If your classmates were using a strictly conforming Fortran 77 compiler (like GNU), that might explain why their parsers were more difficult to write (ie, without recursion). Most 77 compilers (and anything recent) will let you write recursion just fine.
What does the MS trial have to do with wends, sorbs, or trees in the rose family?
what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do
I did a CS degree many years ago. At my school, Apple had a strangle-lock on on supplying all the general purpose computing labs with gear. There were a few IBMs, but lots of Pascal, C, and of course all spreadsheeting, word processing, and presentation preparations were done on Apple hardware. This near-monopoly went on for a very long time. Additionally, on the computing-specific side of campus, Sun had a monopoly on the programming lab hardware. Actually, there were a bunch of NeXT cubes there also. But absolutely NO Microsoft OSs. So I did a lot of Mac and Unix programming, and only touched a PC once for an OS course (ie, didn't even use DOS). Did it make me want to program Macs (or Unix) when I got out? No. I learned the concepts of software design, and if anything, I wanted to apply those principles to different hardware and OSs than I'd been exposed to thus far. So I went towards proprietary game consoles and PCs (DOS at the time, followed by all flavours of Windows). There was a little bit of Unix work in there, but I've never professionally created an app on Apple hardware. I had a huge grad class in CS and I'm not aware of anybody that went on to create Apple applications despite 4-5 years of exposure and programming on them.
Maybe the "what they learn at school is what they go on to do" theory works at community colleges or vocational schools where training is very specific and more resume-based rather than fundamental-based.
Take off!
To the Great White North.
Take off!
It's a beauty way to go.
See if you can get the Freest Poosters to pay for THAT privelege!
You can still pay absolutely nothing and read all the stories and/or comments. Nothing is changing about that.
That remains to be seen. CmdrTaco's article clearly says: we intend to offer additional features to subscribers, and one of the possibilities he gives is the abilility to read articles that non-paying subscribers can't read (the rejected stories bin). You can look at kuro5hin for a taste of this. kuro5hin has its own problems, mind you. And obviously in these post-dot-bomb times, finances could end up driving access to content on that site also.
My bad. A BeOS story got posted soon after the paid Slashdot story and I replied to the BeOS story instead. Totally my fault. There goes my karma! Anyways, the correct posting is here. It's most definitely on-topic there. Please read it!
CmdrTaco, I have a question.. Will there be true freedoms for paid users who moderate? I haven't really tracked the "official" policy, but I understand that many high-karma users (including myself) have had their moderation privileges revoked because of some posting or moderating or meta-moderating action they performed. (ie, modding up something controversial the editors didn't like, supporting controversial posters with meta-mods, etc.)
To be honest, I'm not sure at what point I lost my mod priveleges, but I haven't had them for quite some time. Yet I continue to try to post informative or insightful or funny things.
To CmdrTaco... what is your position going to be on revoking mod priveleges to paying subscribers? If I pay, will I be able to freely post and mod and meta-mod like I thought I could before?
I haven't really tracked the "official" decision, but I understand that many high-karma users (including myself) have had their moderation privileges revoked because of some posting or moderating or meta-moderating action they performed. (ie, modding up something controversial the editors didn't like, supporting controversial posters with meta-mods, etc.)
To be honest, I'm not sure at what point I lost my mod priveleges, but I haven't had them for quite some time. Yet I continue to try to post informative or insightful or funny things.
To CmdrTaco... what is your position going to be on revoking mod priveleges to paying subscribers? If I pay, will I be able to freely post and mod and meta-mod like I thought I could before?
If this happens with monetary incentives, many people will DEFINITELY pull the old Karma-whoring tricks like a single user using multiple freely registered accounts to alternate posting and modding each other until one of those accounts hits the Karma discount level. There are other techniques. Smart people, these /. readers; they'll rise to the challenge.
Okay, using your anti-criteria for news... Winchester touts their rifles' abilities to fire ammunition extremely accurately with immense force as one of their selling points. So when a person uses one to kill a president or a few dozen schoolchildren, is it newsworthy?
/.
Someone has discovered a new, ironic, and devious way to use an iPod for piracy. It's funny. And nerdy. And newsworthy. Especially on