The PM guy should IMHO patent this thing. Nothing would prevent him from licensing the design to Nintendo and still make a fuckwad of money on that, in addition to his own direct sales. That's what patents are for, to extort money from others with your ideas.
Indeed, they might as well just drop the hammer in free-fall; gravity alone pulls harder than that, thus implying that this robot is actually pushing upwards to keep the hammer from falling faster than 3m/sec. Good old news reporters and their catatonic brains.
Are you the sort of person who tells a police officer giving you a traffic ticket that he should be out solving murders rather than worrying about your broken taillight?
Um, Yes? A cop doing radar is a cop wasting everybody's time and money, indeed there are much more severe crimes to be identified and punished than someone doing 30 over on a deserted highway at 5 a.m. Most police organisations have become fund raisers, instead of security agents. They will sit in their car and watch you get jumped by 3 guys, and then they arrest YOU for being a troublemaker. Police agents should inspire trust and safety in citizens, not fear.
Well no, not quite. Using Linux doesn't mean you'll get sued by Microsoft (as least not yet). Law is one thing, lawsuits are completely different. It's a battle fueled by money and lawyers, where common sense and productive discussion are nowhere to be found. Whoever has the most HPs (ca$h) wins in the end, no matter who's wrong or right.
Artist don't make money off of albums, they make money off of tours
Well, not quite. They do tours to promote the albums, which in turn sell by the buckets and make money. A big chunk of the tour money is blown on rentals and traveling expenses (and hookers and coke for the managers).
There really isn't a single aspect of big music production houses that doesn't reek of corruption. They own everything, they sell everything, and then they screw everyone. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. It's a flaky business model that's been cruelly mutated into something absurdly profitable. It used to be that a manager would get a cut, generally less than 20%. Nowadays it's the artist that gets a cut, that is more like 2%, the rest is wasted on promo and management.
Going indie might be scary, but remember you don't need to sell a million albums per year when you're making 60% profit on each sale. That leaves you plenty of cash to buy new gear too, or scale up to bigger and louder gigs that will reach out to more music enthusiasts. Other benefits include being able to produce whatever you want, not what your promoter thinks is "going to sell". More work, but it pays off tremendously if you love what you do.
A more plausible scenario in the Cue Cat case: a child takes one apart and chokes on one of the pieces.
That's not the Cue:Cat's fault, it's just plain old stupidity; not the kid's, but the parents'. Why did they let a young child tinker with such a 'dangerous' device ? Where the hell were they when he learned to use a screwdriver and took the thing apart ?
The reason I generally dislike the USA is because the legal system encourages people to blame others for their own faults. "I whacked my finger with a hammer. I'm suing the hammer manufacturer!" Up here in Canada, if you whack your own finger, the lawyer will merely sympathize with you and tell you to buy a fricking band-aid. If you were so foolish to present your case to a judge, he'd probably laugh his head off and have you thrown out.
Isn't the idea of suing Sony and M$ kind of STUPID, especially over something as frivolous and obviously retarded ? That's like a 4 year old trying to beat up a 200lb boxer, for a lollypop (let's assume the boxer is on heroin and doesn't mind killing kids - much like Sony).
Burning multiple discs at once does sound nice at first, but there is one thing you seem to have overlooked : bus contention. No matter how many hyperfast SCSI cards you put in there, they will all share the same PCI bus and they will all compete over whose data stream is most important. This leads to reduced total throughput and greatly increased latency.
One thing you could try instead is to just use a bunch of older P2-300's with IDE burners and stream the audio files from a fast NFS or SMB server. Burning at 8x requires about 1400 KB/sec, so good ole 100base-T could serve 4-5 clients without a hiccup. Throw in 3-4 nics and you could have yourself a burner-cluster for very cheap.
You're all stating that this optical link would be severely hampered by weather/birds/plywood, but what about using several laser beams all transmitting the same signal (or a slightly dephased variation of the same signal) ? Heck, if IR light has certain shortcomings, why not place a different wavelength-laser right next to it and let them complement each other's strengths and weaknesses ? I don't know squat about lasers but it's just a thought.
Killing ? I didn't say anything about killing. I'd rather give them a daily beating for the rest of their lives. That's for filling our heads with false needs and retail obsessions.
Or we could just not watch and let their revenue stream dwindle down. Being shallow capitalists, that would probably hurt them more then a few broken bones.
I know I'm biased (and ignorant), but Google is probably the best general-purpose search engine out there, with truly innovative quality filtering like PageRank(tm) and other very neat tricks. They have been around long enough that even the weakest of minds know Google. If this new retail product is as efficient and clean as their websearch, and well supported, they're going to make a killing! I really hope they find huge success, they've earned it.
TRAM is just non-volatile solid-state. Slow, but not as slow as a hard drive. Bah.
A cleaner solution to this person's problem would be more robust 'uninstall' functionality in Debian's package manager, to make it clean up its own mess. To 'rollback' a hard drive would not only be time-consuming, but it would require exclusive access to the hard drive for the duration of the rollback. Might as well just make a disk image once everything is running smooth, and rebuild it whenever there are significant changes.
If people want to ruin the Olympics, maybe then I'll start watching TV. Call me a passive terrorist or whatever the label they've given to rebels, but like many of you I'm sick of all this mass-media bullshit. The olympics are just another parade of fake people getting richer, and honest people getting shafted, just like movie and music awards ceremonies.
Remember folks, we're all paying for this crap every time we spend a single penny in a world megacorp (and when we pay taxes). The olympics aren't about sports anymore (have they ever been ?); they're about the sheep effect : if you can convince enough weak minds to see and hear your crap, a whole bunch of other people will blindly follow them around and soon you have a worldwide mob of brainwashed credit-card-carrying fools. TV, music, fast-food and religion, it's all the same.
Quit the whining. Anyone above room-temperature IQ can write long meaningless ramblings designed to provoke people, especially the/. crowd. Please go milk a senator instead, if you can get THEM to think, then we'll all be in awe and you won't be such a doofus anymore.
The big problem is that the BSA is a third party. Let's make a simplified example :
I, Billco, jump into the blooming business of busting software pirates. I sign written agreements with local software houses and go on a witch hunt. I have no legal right to walk into anyone's offices and demand licenses. Not even the lead programmer of the infriged-upon software can do that. Just like you can't (legally) go to a thief's house and reclaim your goods. You have to let the cops do it.
If I were to receive a threat from the BSA, I'd have my lawyer send them a hasty answer: "Fuck Off and Die." Even if it were Microsoft signing that letter, I'd tell them the same. Until they send an RCMP agent with a legal warrant (not just a fake like they often use in scare-tactics), then I will comply to no one and I will present receipts to no one.
The law is to be handled by law enforcement entities and no one else.
If you ever find a broadband provider that lets people up-and-download generously for a low monthly fee, drop me a line. I'm seriously looking at T1 solutions right now, because cable just doesn't cut my mustard and business plans have very low quotas for the absurd prices they charge.
I am a bandwidth hog. The problem is that bandwidth shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. It should be a commodity resource. I wouldn't mind paying-as-I-go if it was 25cents a gig, but not 5 bucks.
I estimate that I throw around 4-5gigs daily on average, most of it being 16/24-bit audio files (lossless compression = lots bigger than MP3) and a bunch of ISO images. The bulk of this data is usually sent within a 50km radius to my buddies, not the whole world. If cable companies would show some honesty and not charge for the intra-network traffic, then all would be fine, collaboration would be unhindered. I've seen onle ONE local DSL provider that offered this, but of course I'd be the only guy in my group with this DSL, since it's a little more expensive and a bit slower than our 3.8mbit cable. Life just sucks.
I don't know where you've been getting your information, but it is very possible to boot DVD-R discs in a modded PS2, however the technique is just a little awkward with the currently modchips (a double swap is required). I used to own an A03 (until the thing died and the shop had no stock to replace it - ugh!), and I've tried a few copies on my unit, they work fine.
I don't see why I couldn't just concoct a PS2Linux-based DVD-R with custom software, it should be fairly trivial.
True, but for the weak-minded of us who haven't tried tackling emacs or vi, the Notepad metaphor still reigns. Heck, I used to work with EdLin and "copy con:" in DOS, so anything that lets me use the arrow keys is enough luxury for me.
I'll try to present my opinion. I'd generally be considered a common software pirate (or fraud artist, or any other negative tag). I'll probably never pay for Windows or Office because I can get my hands on corporate-licensed installation media that needs no product activation. I use Photoshop regularly, yet that's another thing I'll never blow 1000$ on. And then on the other hand, I've got a bunch of shareware products with my name branded into them, whose authors regularly email me with updates or just general tech chat. Impulse Tracker, WinRAR, FruityLoops, are just a sample of the inexpensive top-quality software I've registered and paid for.
I'm nowhere near rich, I've got debts up the colon, but I found the money to pay these authors for their passionate work. The justification probably isn't worth squat, but being an occasional shareware producer myself, I find satisfaction in knowing that my money is going straight to the person who slaved over the product, instead of being absorbed by a dozen different departments of a large corporation.
Let's take everyone's favorite example: Windows XP. I buy the box at Future Shop, 300$. FS keeps its cut, say 20%. Of the 240$ left, another 25% goes to the distributor. 190$ goes to Microsoft, which then puts it in the bank since its employees are salaried and don't receive royalties.
Now what if I took that 300$ and bought a bunch of shareware titles ? It will indeed make a difference, not to the bank, not to the IRS, but to the creators of the software, the ones who did the real work. Now THAT is a good feeling. It's like the difference between going to McDonalds or eating at a chipwagon. To your own wallet the result is the same, but at the receiving end you will make a big difference in helping the small guys.
I have to second this opinion. Allaire Homesite (now bought by Macromedia I believe) is easy to use yet bursting with time-saving features. Just steer clear of its 'design mode', it's as quirky as Frontpage, although the editor does at least try to clean up the HTML clutter afterward (smart filters/optimizer, works quite well).
All in all, an excellent product if you're not afraid of dropping a few dollars on a quality tool. If you're looking for something free, well you might as well stick to Notepad++ because that's probably the most you'll get for 0.00$
Why struggle to have one expensive PC serve 2 users, when it would be trivial to just get 2 cheap boxen and run Cat-5 between them, like we've always done ?
Sure, the concept is neat, but I don't see how practical this really is. If the person can afford this whiz-bang SGI box, they can probably afford two lesser SGI boxen instead. I don't expect the added space taken by the case to be a major issue, SGIs are usually quite slim.
2000 and XP are both quite excellent as far as stability is concerned. The problem is when you start adding 3rd party software written by cretins, such as Nero Burning Rom, who claim full NT/2k/XP compatibility yet you find yourself installing 98 on a spare partition because ironically, the software is more stable on 98 than it is on 2k. The problem is that Microsoft has made a fair effort to render them all compatible to a certain degree, which hides the fact that some things that work wonders in one OS won't necessarily be as efficient in the others.
Legacy compatibility is a crutch, not a means to an end. Developers should be strongly encouraged (read: whipped and beaten) to use the newer, specially tailored API's proper to the target platform. 2k/XP have a new cd-recording API built right into the core OS that handles most features of cd-burners old and new. Why kludge over it with Adaptec's proven-flaky ASPI drivers ? Reinventing the wheel is fine for CS classes, but in the real world it just creates another problem for everyone to support.
Slashdot Mirror
The PM guy should IMHO patent this thing. Nothing would prevent him from licensing the design to Nintendo and still make a fuckwad of money on that, in addition to his own direct sales. That's what patents are for, to extort money from others with your ideas.
Indeed, they might as well just drop the hammer in free-fall; gravity alone pulls harder than that, thus implying that this robot is actually pushing upwards to keep the hammer from falling faster than 3m/sec. Good old news reporters and their catatonic brains.
Are you the sort of person who tells a police officer giving you a traffic ticket that he should be out solving murders rather than worrying about your broken taillight?
Um, Yes? A cop doing radar is a cop wasting everybody's time and money, indeed there are much more severe crimes to be identified and punished than someone doing 30 over on a deserted highway at 5 a.m. Most police organisations have become fund raisers, instead of security agents. They will sit in their car and watch you get jumped by 3 guys, and then they arrest YOU for being a troublemaker. Police agents should inspire trust and safety in citizens, not fear.
Well no, not quite. Using Linux doesn't mean you'll get sued by Microsoft (as least not yet). Law is one thing, lawsuits are completely different. It's a battle fueled by money and lawyers, where common sense and productive discussion are nowhere to be found. Whoever has the most HPs (ca$h) wins in the end, no matter who's wrong or right.
Artist don't make money off of albums, they make money off of tours
Well, not quite. They do tours to promote the albums, which in turn sell by the buckets and make money. A big chunk of the tour money is blown on rentals and traveling expenses (and hookers and coke for the managers).
There really isn't a single aspect of big music production houses that doesn't reek of corruption. They own everything, they sell everything, and then they screw everyone. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. It's a flaky business model that's been cruelly mutated into something absurdly profitable. It used to be that a manager would get a cut, generally less than 20%. Nowadays it's the artist that gets a cut, that is more like 2%, the rest is wasted on promo and management.
Going indie might be scary, but remember you don't need to sell a million albums per year when you're making 60% profit on each sale. That leaves you plenty of cash to buy new gear too, or scale up to bigger and louder gigs that will reach out to more music enthusiasts. Other benefits include being able to produce whatever you want, not what your promoter thinks is "going to sell". More work, but it pays off tremendously if you love what you do.
A more plausible scenario in the Cue Cat case: a child takes one apart and chokes on one of the pieces.
That's not the Cue:Cat's fault, it's just plain old stupidity; not the kid's, but the parents'. Why did they let a young child tinker with such a 'dangerous' device ? Where the hell were they when he learned to use a screwdriver and took the thing apart ?
The reason I generally dislike the USA is because the legal system encourages people to blame others for their own faults. "I whacked my finger with a hammer. I'm suing the hammer manufacturer!" Up here in Canada, if you whack your own finger, the lawyer will merely sympathize with you and tell you to buy a fricking band-aid. If you were so foolish to present your case to a judge, he'd probably laugh his head off and have you thrown out.
A lawyer isn't a substitute for common sense.
Isn't the idea of suing Sony and M$ kind of STUPID, especially over something as frivolous and obviously retarded ? That's like a 4 year old trying to beat up a 200lb boxer, for a lollypop (let's assume the boxer is on heroin and doesn't mind killing kids - much like Sony).
KO in one round, I say.
Burning multiple discs at once does sound nice at first, but there is one thing you seem to have overlooked : bus contention. No matter how many hyperfast SCSI cards you put in there, they will all share the same PCI bus and they will all compete over whose data stream is most important. This leads to reduced total throughput and greatly increased latency.
One thing you could try instead is to just use a bunch of older P2-300's with IDE burners and stream the audio files from a fast NFS or SMB server. Burning at 8x requires about 1400 KB/sec, so good ole 100base-T could serve 4-5 clients without a hiccup. Throw in 3-4 nics and you could have yourself a burner-cluster for very cheap.
You're all stating that this optical link would be severely hampered by weather/birds/plywood, but what about using several laser beams all transmitting the same signal (or a slightly dephased variation of the same signal) ? Heck, if IR light has certain shortcomings, why not place a different wavelength-laser right next to it and let them complement each other's strengths and weaknesses ? I don't know squat about lasers but it's just a thought.
Killing ? I didn't say anything about killing. I'd rather give them a daily beating for the rest of their lives. That's for filling our heads with false needs and retail obsessions.
Or we could just not watch and let their revenue stream dwindle down. Being shallow capitalists, that would probably hurt them more then a few broken bones.
I know I'm biased (and ignorant), but Google is probably the best general-purpose search engine out there, with truly innovative quality filtering like PageRank(tm) and other very neat tricks. They have been around long enough that even the weakest of minds know Google. If this new retail product is as efficient and clean as their websearch, and well supported, they're going to make a killing! I really hope they find huge success, they've earned it.
TRAM is just non-volatile solid-state. Slow, but not as slow as a hard drive. Bah.
A cleaner solution to this person's problem would be more robust 'uninstall' functionality in Debian's package manager, to make it clean up its own mess. To 'rollback' a hard drive would not only be time-consuming, but it would require exclusive access to the hard drive for the duration of the rollback. Might as well just make a disk image once everything is running smooth, and rebuild it whenever there are significant changes.
If people want to ruin the Olympics, maybe then I'll start watching TV. Call me a passive terrorist or whatever the label they've given to rebels, but like many of you I'm sick of all this mass-media bullshit. The olympics are just another parade of fake people getting richer, and honest people getting shafted, just like movie and music awards ceremonies.
Remember folks, we're all paying for this crap every time we spend a single penny in a world megacorp (and when we pay taxes). The olympics aren't about sports anymore (have they ever been ?); they're about the sheep effect : if you can convince enough weak minds to see and hear your crap, a whole bunch of other people will blindly follow them around and soon you have a worldwide mob of brainwashed credit-card-carrying fools. TV, music, fast-food and religion, it's all the same.
Quit the whining. Anyone above room-temperature IQ can write long meaningless ramblings designed to provoke people, especially the /. crowd. Please go milk a senator instead, if you can get THEM to think, then we'll all be in awe and you won't be such a doofus anymore.
The big problem is that the BSA is a third party. Let's make a simplified example :
I, Billco, jump into the blooming business of busting software pirates. I sign written agreements with local software houses and go on a witch hunt. I have no legal right to walk into anyone's offices and demand licenses. Not even the lead programmer of the infriged-upon software can do that. Just like you can't (legally) go to a thief's house and reclaim your goods. You have to let the cops do it.
If I were to receive a threat from the BSA, I'd have my lawyer send them a hasty answer: "Fuck Off and Die." Even if it were Microsoft signing that letter, I'd tell them the same. Until they send an RCMP agent with a legal warrant (not just a fake like they often use in scare-tactics), then I will comply to no one and I will present receipts to no one.
The law is to be handled by law enforcement entities and no one else.
If you ever find a broadband provider that lets people up-and-download generously for a low monthly fee, drop me a line. I'm seriously looking at T1 solutions right now, because cable just doesn't cut my mustard and business plans have very low quotas for the absurd prices they charge.
I am a bandwidth hog. The problem is that bandwidth shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. It should be a commodity resource. I wouldn't mind paying-as-I-go if it was 25cents a gig, but not 5 bucks.
I estimate that I throw around 4-5gigs daily on average, most of it being 16/24-bit audio files (lossless compression = lots bigger than MP3) and a bunch of ISO images. The bulk of this data is usually sent within a 50km radius to my buddies, not the whole world. If cable companies would show some honesty and not charge for the intra-network traffic, then all would be fine, collaboration would be unhindered. I've seen onle ONE local DSL provider that offered this, but of course I'd be the only guy in my group with this DSL, since it's a little more expensive and a bit slower than our 3.8mbit cable. Life just sucks.
I don't know where you've been getting your information, but it is very possible to boot DVD-R discs in a modded PS2, however the technique is just a little awkward with the currently modchips (a double swap is required). I used to own an A03 (until the thing died and the shop had no stock to replace it - ugh!), and I've tried a few copies on my unit, they work fine.
I don't see why I couldn't just concoct a PS2Linux-based DVD-R with custom software, it should be fairly trivial.
True, but for the weak-minded of us who haven't tried tackling emacs or vi, the Notepad metaphor still reigns. Heck, I used to work with EdLin and "copy con:" in DOS, so anything that lets me use the arrow keys is enough luxury for me.
I'll try to present my opinion. I'd generally be considered a common software pirate (or fraud artist, or any other negative tag). I'll probably never pay for Windows or Office because I can get my hands on corporate-licensed installation media that needs no product activation. I use Photoshop regularly, yet that's another thing I'll never blow 1000$ on. And then on the other hand, I've got a bunch of shareware products with my name branded into them, whose authors regularly email me with updates or just general tech chat. Impulse Tracker, WinRAR, FruityLoops, are just a sample of the inexpensive top-quality software I've registered and paid for.
I'm nowhere near rich, I've got debts up the colon, but I found the money to pay these authors for their passionate work. The justification probably isn't worth squat, but being an occasional shareware producer myself, I find satisfaction in knowing that my money is going straight to the person who slaved over the product, instead of being absorbed by a dozen different departments of a large corporation.
Let's take everyone's favorite example: Windows XP. I buy the box at Future Shop, 300$. FS keeps its cut, say 20%. Of the 240$ left, another 25% goes to the distributor. 190$ goes to Microsoft, which then puts it in the bank since its employees are salaried and don't receive royalties.
Now what if I took that 300$ and bought a bunch of shareware titles ? It will indeed make a difference, not to the bank, not to the IRS, but to the creators of the software, the ones who did the real work. Now THAT is a good feeling. It's like the difference between going to McDonalds or eating at a chipwagon. To your own wallet the result is the same, but at the receiving end you will make a big difference in helping the small guys.
I have to second this opinion. Allaire Homesite (now bought by Macromedia I believe) is easy to use yet bursting with time-saving features. Just steer clear of its 'design mode', it's as quirky as Frontpage, although the editor does at least try to clean up the HTML clutter afterward (smart filters/optimizer, works quite well).
All in all, an excellent product if you're not afraid of dropping a few dollars on a quality tool. If you're looking for something free, well you might as well stick to Notepad++ because that's probably the most you'll get for 0.00$
Why struggle to have one expensive PC serve 2 users, when it would be trivial to just get 2 cheap boxen and run Cat-5 between them, like we've always done ?
Sure, the concept is neat, but I don't see how practical this really is. If the person can afford this whiz-bang SGI box, they can probably afford two lesser SGI boxen instead. I don't expect the added space taken by the case to be a major issue, SGIs are usually quite slim.
Bah.. the French are harmless.. it should have read "Be careful of the Quebecois".. ma crisse de gang d'estis d'anglais d'enfants d'chiennes!
I'm sure when the IT department heads hear that Oracle runs Linux, they'll drop Oracle in favor of some half-assed system like Sybase or *gasp* MSSQL.
2000 and XP are both quite excellent as far as stability is concerned. The problem is when you start adding 3rd party software written by cretins, such as Nero Burning Rom, who claim full NT/2k/XP compatibility yet you find yourself installing 98 on a spare partition because ironically, the software is more stable on 98 than it is on 2k. The problem is that Microsoft has made a fair effort to render them all compatible to a certain degree, which hides the fact that some things that work wonders in one OS won't necessarily be as efficient in the others.
Legacy compatibility is a crutch, not a means to an end. Developers should be strongly encouraged (read: whipped and beaten) to use the newer, specially tailored API's proper to the target platform. 2k/XP have a new cd-recording API built right into the core OS that handles most features of cd-burners old and new. Why kludge over it with Adaptec's proven-flaky ASPI drivers ? Reinventing the wheel is fine for CS classes, but in the real world it just creates another problem for everyone to support.
Australians say that New Zealanders sleep with sheep.
New Zealanders say Australians sleep with sheep.
and Canadians say everyone's fucked anyway.
(hey, I hit the Karma cap, what else is there left to do than troll ? Lord Taco, nix the cap please!)