I'm curious here. What if you married that 16 year old and brought her into the US ? Could you still be arrested (out of pure idiocy on behalf of the lawmakers) ?
I agree with your first reason, privacy has always been of top importance for these matters, but #2 ? I don't know, but how much could a lowly citizen vote be worth these days when there are a bazillion other rednecks all voting at random ? The real corruption and vote cheating lies with organised crime and their many senate friends. Always has been, always will be. They don't need a webcam to prove their vote.
Isn't it possible to work around those patents ? If there's something I've learned from these mindless debates here on/. , it's that the process itself can be patented, but not the result. If the Gimp can be extended to perform color separation without blindly copying someone else's code or process, yet still yield good results, then those patent lawyers can't do a damn thing about it, right ?
Fact: most people don't care about space programs and would like to see NASA go back to being a 3-geek university wing in exchange for a nationwide health care program.
Space is cute'n'all, but until we discover/develop more efficient and cost-effective ways to get there and poke around, it will remain a very expensive venture of bullshit and speculation with ZERO investment returns for the time being.
Well I don't know about you, but if I were doing something that I knew wouldn't pay off, I'd minimize the expenses as much as possible, or stop altogether. That's not being cheap, that's being practical and prioritizing the needs. What's the use in space exploration if we can't even live well on our own planet ?
If home connectivity improves like this, then it is only fair to assume that the ISP's end will also get a kick in the pants. Bandwidth must not only be made more plentiful, it must also become cheaper as the demand increases. We can't have nazi-esque ISP's charging 5$/gig surcharge when you bust the cap, especially not at such speeds when it becomes insanely easy to do so. Everything has to become cheaper, else we just won't be able to afford the luxury.
This sniper tracing is nice and fancy, but to find the sniper, he/she must have already fired off a shot. There's little sense in starting a lengthy trajectory analysis if the sniper's already done his job and packed his bags.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the M.I.T. institution sue Microsoft over the Mobile Internet Tools' acronym? M.I.T. is of course a bastion of knowledge sharing and open research. I just love the idea.
Re:A couple possible technical differences
on
DVD-Audio on PC's?
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid you're wrong there. 10 megabits makes sense.. as single-speed DVD drives transfer something like 1.3 megaBYTES per second.. nothing fancy really.
Bah.. I think he was going for "disturbed". Yes Napster is disturbed. It's like a zombie, everyone's abandoned it and jumped on OpenNap servers, yet the central corporation still thinks it can steal our eyeballs after it's pushed us away. I think it's funny.
I don't see what all you people are jumping up and down about. I haven't seen this thing in action, but from what I can gather, it doesn't have anything to do with the BIOS _at all_. It's a gadget that comes on the motherboard's driver disc, that you install in Win98. Probably the only thing it does with the BIOS is grab some activation code, just to keep non-Phoenix users from using the software, so they can license the "technology" to other makers.
The BIOS doesn't know TCP/IP (if you're on cable/DSL), nor does it know your ISP's phone number. Just like a winmodem is really just a sound chip with an RJ11 jack, and needs a windows driver to do the real work; this PhoenixNet thing is just some placeholder-data in the BIOS, with a windows driver that does everything.
At the prices they charge, I sure damn hope they permit servers. Up here in Canada we may very well have shitty support, but we do have great speed for half the price. I get a steady 2.8 mbit down (but only 128kbit up - ick), for what equates to about 22 american dollars. Compared to that, Speakeasy seems nice but pricey compared to our commercial offerings up here.
Insightful because it's the sad yet ironic truth. The supposedly most popular distro is the most pokey of them all. I don't know shit about linux aside from awkwardly setting up Apache and a few mods, yet it's easy to see that RedHat is patchwork-quality when compared to any other distro. Heck, Mandrake's modus operandi is to take RedHat's offering and clean it up, make it nicer. That sure tells alot about RH.
I don't see what's so exciting about having a 20gb zip-drive successor that costs 200$ per 20gb cartridge when you can buy a standard 40gb hard drive for half the price. Just throw in a good removable rack thing and you've got your portable storage right there, without the need for an expensive disk reader. IDE hard drives have become so damned cheap they're practically disposable these days. I'd sooner buy a DVD-R than yet another expensive Iomega "Innovation" that will click and die in a year or two.
"Look at us. We're expensive. We're eccentric. We 'think different'. A more expensive computer is bound to be better than that taiwanese bargain junk you'd find at a thousand other shops. Buy Mac, buy better."
Yes yes, go ahead and mod me down. Karma is vaporous.
Anyways, 2500$ for a simple monitor is about 7 times what I paid for my same-sized CRT that kicks 1920x1536 @ 75hz. No fuzz, no artifacting, just pure luminous ecstacy. If only Apple offered choice, then maybe I'd bash them less, but they prefer to tell the user what they should want. "You sir, need a 1000$ iMac to surf the web and read email." When they could be saying "Look at our competitive low-end desktop at 500$" like every damned PC retailer on the planet. Sure, their boxen are cute, but they're about twice as expensive as any equally performant PC-based system, and you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone to help you out if your expensive piece of transistor art starts acting funny.
I don't mean to bash Macs, really they're fine machines with a clean, idiot-proof OS, but the problem is marketing. If they'd just quit the stupid beggar's act and try being competitive for a change, maybe they'd gain enough market share to be recognized as a decent corporate standard, instead of losing it all to Dell and their pathetic unstable bastardized PC's, print shops excluded of course. Heck, I'd love to see a bunch of Macs at my workplace (as long as they're not on my desk of course). It would make my job a hell of a lot easier, I wouldn't be spending hours every day telling people to "Reboot" or "Right-click" or "clean your temp files". The only way that could happen is for Apple to stop flashing absurd pricetags and start chasing more 3rd party software alliances. I'm no economist but this stuff is too damned obvious to get wrong.
Solution : Have the best of both (OS) worlds, Use Wine! Office2k works quite well under the latest Wine builds. Or if you want to be a whore, have your manager buy VMware for your workstation and have a blast (in slow-motion of course).
This makes me think of the recent stream of Hybris virii for Windows. What if this supposedly beneficial worm had jazzy code to update itself from a newsgroup or freenet, and eventually morphed into a weapon of pure evil ? We all know that for every intelligent foreward-thinking geek there are hundreds of idiots, and those idiots would be just the type to leave such a thing on their systems because "It's not doing any damage so it's not a priority"... and then.. BAM! the worm goes postal! A scary thought, is it not ?
The problem is that PC developers seem afraid of the console game style. Why oh why must I install half a gig for every game I want to play, when the same game runs on my PS2 that has no hard drive of its own ?
Installing a game should be optional, for example to let that avid quake/UT/tribes freak jump into the deathmatch a few seconds earlier because his HD is a bit quicker than his cd-rom, but for the rest of us, we don't mind waiting those extra seconds if it means we can have 500mb more usable space on our PC. Sure, hard drive space is a commodity, but that doesn't mean we should abuse it as much as we do.
Not so long ago people had 200mb drives, yet we had cd-roms and the games had FMV (sometimes nothing else). Games like Full Throttle simply installed a main executable and config files, everything else ran straight off the CD and it ran pretty damned fine on my old 2x cdrom. The first Diablo also only installed a few smallish things, totalling around 20mb IIRC, but then its loading times were disastrous if you were still toting around your 486 in those days. Still, it gave you time to heed nature's urges in-between levels.
Nostalgia aside, the PC game developers need to take a hint from their console-based cousins. It's modestly safe to assume that if your software requires at least a TNT2 or Voodoo3 to run, then it's a safe bet that your targeted gamers will have a half-decent cdrom drive as well. Heck, my PS2 probably has only an 8x or 10x drive in there, yet the games load in a reasonable amount of time and everything looks and plays great. 8x cdrom drives were commonplace in 1997, yet they're still sufficient for these expensive consoles and their fancy games. Why can't the common 32x drive push a PC game just as well if not better ?
If the developers can eliminate the installation process, then they will open themselves up to a whole arena of users who were either limited by their disk space (the 6 giggers who can only hold a couple games at any one time), or they're simply afraid of installing stuff because they don't know how to reinstall Windows if it goes zonkers. Heck, even I get tired of waiting for that lame installshield script to finish copying those zillions upon zillions of 4kb geometry files.
Take the best things about consoles, adopt them on a PC, and you've just eradicated the console market in one big blow. It's almost as cheap to build a decent little gaming PC than it is to buy that latest console that does (n+1)^2 bit graphics on your ugly-ass tv screen, and as a bonus the PC games are usually cheaper than their console counterparts because of the licensing and royalty issues. Anyone can do the math.
I think this should bring light on the true role of schools : to get kids used to being repressed and censored. Either you bend over and let them rape you like a hand puppet, or you get pushed aside and realize that today's society rejects individuals. Fit in or fuck off, and fuck off he did.
The problem goes much beyond the school principals, the entire philosophy behind these schools is the root of it all : "Stay in line, or be punished." We're not teaching our kids how to read/write/count, we're teaching them how to survive in this mock communism we live in, and not caring at all about their psychological well-being. Then something like this happens and we all get upset: "How shameful! What is the world coming to ?". Well i'll tell you, it's coming to right-wing fanatism. Murder happens every day in every school on this planet, murder of free thought, and we pay the hefty bill to submit our own offspring to these masters of deceit. Well shut up and swallow the pill. This kid's dead because of society's near-sightedness, there are thousands of others just like him and there will be thousands more until we strike them down and start over with a clean slate.
Who the hell needs help implementing CDDB client access ? Almost every damned CD player developed in the last 3 years has had some form of CDDB query functionality. Roxio probably didn't deal with Gracenote at all on this thing, else we would have heard about it much sooner. It seems like one of Gracenote's execs just happened to leech CD Creator off the newsgroups and found out it was using FreeDB at that point.
Retard. Go look up rogue in the dictionary. Kevin Mitnick was nowhere near rogue. He was meticulous.. a rogue is someone who acts wildly and randomly, fueled by strong emotions (fear, love, whatever).
Certainly, burn-proof is a nice (if horribly belated) feature. Too bad it wasn't around 6 years ago when I was pushing a 2x CD-R with a 486/66, but more importantly when all the groundwork was done regarding CD-R technology and software models. Last I heard, Burn-proof required software support (at least to toggle the bit in the command sequence). This still causes trouble if the IDE bus locks up for too long (such as when my stupid Maxtor drives recalibrate when they get hot). In the case of an operating system, a buffer underrun would still mean a rather nasty crash with no means to recover (aside from formatting the CD-RW and reinstalling). Heck, hard drives crash fairly often and they're not nearly as fragile as CD burners.
Why spend hours searching and hundreds of dollars on a fancy-schmancy case when you could just stop by your uncle's attic full of junk, pick up a dead stereo cd player, take out all the electronics and and install everything inside its sleek black aluminum casing ?
Just customize the cabling, perhaps use a dremel to poke a few holes for a network jack and video outport, then rig up a motherboard with a square-angle PCI riser and your favorite sound/tv-out cards. Add a hard drive and fit the cd player's tray into the existing door slot, and POOF! near-instant stereo component PC.
(note to self : stop answering trivial ask-slashdot questions)
I'm afraid such a thing would be possible but severely impractical. Firstly, reading from a cdrom is standardized (as far as ATAPI/SCSI goes), but writing involves vendor and even model-specific commands (MMC isn't quite complete).
Another catch is that it would require some read/write caching since a CD-RW drive isn't quite suited for writing 512-byte blocks.
There's also the need for a steady data stream when writing. Operating systems are meant to run off a hard drive, which doesn't really care how fast the data arrives in the buffer, as long as it gets there. CD recording software uses strict timing and big buffers in order to maintain a steady flow, often giving high priority to the buffering thread. This is bound to give trouble, especially during the boot sequence.
#3 is that most operating systems rely on fast disk access; for example, Windows peeks inside each executable file in a folder to grab its icon. Since CD-Rom accesses are much slower than a hard drive, browsing through a file tree would be very slow and annoying. Windows just wasn't designed for slow data rates. Linux however (and to a certain extent, X) would probably shine in this area since it's been built with compactness in mind from day one.
There are surely more obstacles, I just have better things to do than think about them.
Why not attack it the redneck way ? Just buy a truckload of molex extensions and chain them together until you have about 12ft of unshielded power wires dangling around.. that way you could hide the case away and screw the cdroms and tape drives directly onto your desk thanks to the extra long power connections.. as a bonus it will automatically kill your roommate's cat in seconds as soon as it sinks its teeth into it.
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I'm curious here. What if you married that 16 year old and brought her into the US ? Could you still be arrested (out of pure idiocy on behalf of the lawmakers) ?
I agree with your first reason, privacy has always been of top importance for these matters, but #2 ? I don't know, but how much could a lowly citizen vote be worth these days when there are a bazillion other rednecks all voting at random ? The real corruption and vote cheating lies with organised crime and their many senate friends. Always has been, always will be. They don't need a webcam to prove their vote.
Isn't it possible to work around those patents ? If there's something I've learned from these mindless debates here on /. , it's that the process itself can be patented, but not the result. If the Gimp can be extended to perform color separation without blindly copying someone else's code or process, yet still yield good results, then those patent lawyers can't do a damn thing about it, right ?
Fact: most people don't care about space programs and would like to see NASA go back to being a 3-geek university wing in exchange for a nationwide health care program.
Space is cute'n'all, but until we discover/develop more efficient and cost-effective ways to get there and poke around, it will remain a very expensive venture of bullshit and speculation with ZERO investment returns for the time being.
Well I don't know about you, but if I were doing something that I knew wouldn't pay off, I'd minimize the expenses as much as possible, or stop altogether. That's not being cheap, that's being practical and prioritizing the needs. What's the use in space exploration if we can't even live well on our own planet ?
If home connectivity improves like this, then it is only fair to assume that the ISP's end will also get a kick in the pants. Bandwidth must not only be made more plentiful, it must also become cheaper as the demand increases. We can't have nazi-esque ISP's charging 5$/gig surcharge when you bust the cap, especially not at such speeds when it becomes insanely easy to do so. Everything has to become cheaper, else we just won't be able to afford the luxury.
This sniper tracing is nice and fancy, but to find the sniper, he/she must have already fired off a shot. There's little sense in starting a lengthy trajectory analysis if the sniper's already done his job and packed his bags.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the M.I.T. institution sue Microsoft over the Mobile Internet Tools' acronym? M.I.T. is of course a bastion of knowledge sharing and open research. I just love the idea.
I'm afraid you're wrong there. 10 megabits makes sense.. as single-speed DVD drives transfer something like 1.3 megaBYTES per second.. nothing fancy really.
Bah.. I think he was going for "disturbed". Yes Napster is disturbed. It's like a zombie, everyone's abandoned it and jumped on OpenNap servers, yet the central corporation still thinks it can steal our eyeballs after it's pushed us away. I think it's funny.
I don't see what all you people are jumping up and down about. I haven't seen this thing in action, but from what I can gather, it doesn't have anything to do with the BIOS _at all_. It's a gadget that comes on the motherboard's driver disc, that you install in Win98. Probably the only thing it does with the BIOS is grab some activation code, just to keep non-Phoenix users from using the software, so they can license the "technology" to other makers.
The BIOS doesn't know TCP/IP (if you're on cable/DSL), nor does it know your ISP's phone number. Just like a winmodem is really just a sound chip with an RJ11 jack, and needs a windows driver to do the real work; this PhoenixNet thing is just some placeholder-data in the BIOS, with a windows driver that does everything.
At the prices they charge, I sure damn hope they permit servers. Up here in Canada we may very well have shitty support, but we do have great speed for half the price. I get a steady 2.8 mbit down (but only 128kbit up - ick), for what equates to about 22 american dollars. Compared to that, Speakeasy seems nice but pricey compared to our commercial offerings up here.
Insightful because it's the sad yet ironic truth. The supposedly most popular distro is the most pokey of them all. I don't know shit about linux aside from awkwardly setting up Apache and a few mods, yet it's easy to see that RedHat is patchwork-quality when compared to any other distro. Heck, Mandrake's modus operandi is to take RedHat's offering and clean it up, make it nicer. That sure tells alot about RH.
I don't see what's so exciting about having a 20gb zip-drive successor that costs 200$ per 20gb cartridge when you can buy a standard 40gb hard drive for half the price. Just throw in a good removable rack thing and you've got your portable storage right there, without the need for an expensive disk reader. IDE hard drives have become so damned cheap they're practically disposable these days. I'd sooner buy a DVD-R than yet another expensive Iomega "Innovation" that will click and die in a year or two.
Who wants to bet that H2K2's net uplink will be "experiencing technical difficulties" again ?
"Look at us. We're expensive. We're eccentric. We 'think different'. A more expensive computer is bound to be better than that taiwanese bargain junk you'd find at a thousand other shops. Buy Mac, buy better."
Yes yes, go ahead and mod me down. Karma is vaporous.
Anyways, 2500$ for a simple monitor is about 7 times what I paid for my same-sized CRT that kicks 1920x1536 @ 75hz. No fuzz, no artifacting, just pure luminous ecstacy. If only Apple offered choice, then maybe I'd bash them less, but they prefer to tell the user what they should want. "You sir, need a 1000$ iMac to surf the web and read email." When they could be saying "Look at our competitive low-end desktop at 500$" like every damned PC retailer on the planet. Sure, their boxen are cute, but they're about twice as expensive as any equally performant PC-based system, and you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone to help you out if your expensive piece of transistor art starts acting funny.
I don't mean to bash Macs, really they're fine machines with a clean, idiot-proof OS, but the problem is marketing. If they'd just quit the stupid beggar's act and try being competitive for a change, maybe they'd gain enough market share to be recognized as a decent corporate standard, instead of losing it all to Dell and their pathetic unstable bastardized PC's, print shops excluded of course. Heck, I'd love to see a bunch of Macs at my workplace (as long as they're not on my desk of course). It would make my job a hell of a lot easier, I wouldn't be spending hours every day telling people to "Reboot" or "Right-click" or "clean your temp files". The only way that could happen is for Apple to stop flashing absurd pricetags and start chasing more 3rd party software alliances. I'm no economist but this stuff is too damned obvious to get wrong.
Solution : Have the best of both (OS) worlds, Use Wine! Office2k works quite well under the latest Wine builds. Or if you want to be a whore, have your manager buy VMware for your workstation and have a blast (in slow-motion of course).
This makes me think of the recent stream of Hybris virii for Windows. What if this supposedly beneficial worm had jazzy code to update itself from a newsgroup or freenet, and eventually morphed into a weapon of pure evil ? We all know that for every intelligent foreward-thinking geek there are hundreds of idiots, and those idiots would be just the type to leave such a thing on their systems because "It's not doing any damage so it's not a priority"... and then.. BAM! the worm goes postal! A scary thought, is it not ?
The problem is that PC developers seem afraid of the console game style. Why oh why must I install half a gig for every game I want to play, when the same game runs on my PS2 that has no hard drive of its own ?
Installing a game should be optional, for example to let that avid quake/UT/tribes freak jump into the deathmatch a few seconds earlier because his HD is a bit quicker than his cd-rom, but for the rest of us, we don't mind waiting those extra seconds if it means we can have 500mb more usable space on our PC. Sure, hard drive space is a commodity, but that doesn't mean we should abuse it as much as we do.
Not so long ago people had 200mb drives, yet we had cd-roms and the games had FMV (sometimes nothing else). Games like Full Throttle simply installed a main executable and config files, everything else ran straight off the CD and it ran pretty damned fine on my old 2x cdrom. The first Diablo also only installed a few smallish things, totalling around 20mb IIRC, but then its loading times were disastrous if you were still toting around your 486 in those days. Still, it gave you time to heed nature's urges in-between levels.
Nostalgia aside, the PC game developers need to take a hint from their console-based cousins. It's modestly safe to assume that if your software requires at least a TNT2 or Voodoo3 to run, then it's a safe bet that your targeted gamers will have a half-decent cdrom drive as well. Heck, my PS2 probably has only an 8x or 10x drive in there, yet the games load in a reasonable amount of time and everything looks and plays great. 8x cdrom drives were commonplace in 1997, yet they're still sufficient for these expensive consoles and their fancy games. Why can't the common 32x drive push a PC game just as well if not better ?
If the developers can eliminate the installation process, then they will open themselves up to a whole arena of users who were either limited by their disk space (the 6 giggers who can only hold a couple games at any one time), or they're simply afraid of installing stuff because they don't know how to reinstall Windows if it goes zonkers. Heck, even I get tired of waiting for that lame installshield script to finish copying those zillions upon zillions of 4kb geometry files.
Take the best things about consoles, adopt them on a PC, and you've just eradicated the console market in one big blow. It's almost as cheap to build a decent little gaming PC than it is to buy that latest console that does (n+1)^2 bit graphics on your ugly-ass tv screen, and as a bonus the PC games are usually cheaper than their console counterparts because of the licensing and royalty issues. Anyone can do the math.
I think this should bring light on the true role of schools : to get kids used to being repressed and censored. Either you bend over and let them rape you like a hand puppet, or you get pushed aside and realize that today's society rejects individuals. Fit in or fuck off, and fuck off he did.
The problem goes much beyond the school principals, the entire philosophy behind these schools is the root of it all : "Stay in line, or be punished." We're not teaching our kids how to read/write/count, we're teaching them how to survive in this mock communism we live in, and not caring at all about their psychological well-being. Then something like this happens and we all get upset: "How shameful! What is the world coming to ?". Well i'll tell you, it's coming to right-wing fanatism. Murder happens every day in every school on this planet, murder of free thought, and we pay the hefty bill to submit our own offspring to these masters of deceit. Well shut up and swallow the pill. This kid's dead because of society's near-sightedness, there are thousands of others just like him and there will be thousands more until we strike them down and start over with a clean slate.
Who the hell needs help implementing CDDB client access ? Almost every damned CD player developed in the last 3 years has had some form of CDDB query functionality. Roxio probably didn't deal with Gracenote at all on this thing, else we would have heard about it much sooner. It seems like one of Gracenote's execs just happened to leech CD Creator off the newsgroups and found out it was using FreeDB at that point.
Retard. Go look up rogue in the dictionary. Kevin Mitnick was nowhere near rogue. He was meticulous.. a rogue is someone who acts wildly and randomly, fueled by strong emotions (fear, love, whatever).
Just ask the grammar nazi.
Certainly, burn-proof is a nice (if horribly belated) feature. Too bad it wasn't around 6 years ago when I was pushing a 2x CD-R with a 486/66, but more importantly when all the groundwork was done regarding CD-R technology and software models. Last I heard, Burn-proof required software support (at least to toggle the bit in the command sequence). This still causes trouble if the IDE bus locks up for too long (such as when my stupid Maxtor drives recalibrate when they get hot). In the case of an operating system, a buffer underrun would still mean a rather nasty crash with no means to recover (aside from formatting the CD-RW and reinstalling). Heck, hard drives crash fairly often and they're not nearly as fragile as CD burners.
Why spend hours searching and hundreds of dollars on a fancy-schmancy case when you could just stop by your uncle's attic full of junk, pick up a dead stereo cd player, take out all the electronics and and install everything inside its sleek black aluminum casing ?
Just customize the cabling, perhaps use a dremel to poke a few holes for a network jack and video outport, then rig up a motherboard with a square-angle PCI riser and your favorite sound/tv-out cards. Add a hard drive and fit the cd player's tray into the existing door slot, and POOF! near-instant stereo component PC.
(note to self : stop answering trivial ask-slashdot questions)
I'm afraid such a thing would be possible but severely impractical. Firstly, reading from a cdrom is standardized (as far as ATAPI/SCSI goes), but writing involves vendor and even model-specific commands (MMC isn't quite complete).
Another catch is that it would require some read/write caching since a CD-RW drive isn't quite suited for writing 512-byte blocks.
There's also the need for a steady data stream when writing. Operating systems are meant to run off a hard drive, which doesn't really care how fast the data arrives in the buffer, as long as it gets there. CD recording software uses strict timing and big buffers in order to maintain a steady flow, often giving high priority to the buffering thread. This is bound to give trouble, especially during the boot sequence.
#3 is that most operating systems rely on fast disk access; for example, Windows peeks inside each executable file in a folder to grab its icon. Since CD-Rom accesses are much slower than a hard drive, browsing through a file tree would be very slow and annoying. Windows just wasn't designed for slow data rates. Linux however (and to a certain extent, X) would probably shine in this area since it's been built with compactness in mind from day one.
There are surely more obstacles, I just have better things to do than think about them.
Why not attack it the redneck way ? Just buy a truckload of molex extensions and chain them together until you have about 12ft of unshielded power wires dangling around.. that way you could hide the case away and screw the cdroms and tape drives directly onto your desk thanks to the extra long power connections.. as a bonus it will automatically kill your roommate's cat in seconds as soon as it sinks its teeth into it.