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Do you wish she could run Linux ?
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Introducing the MPU : Mammary Processing Unit. Thanks to silicone-based transistors, your blonde bimbo can now harness the power of Linux using the processing power found inside her breast implants. The benefits are limitless: human-powered text-to-speech engine, self-powered design, intuitive touch-sensitive GUI, and don't forget our revolutionary S.L.U.T. module (Super Lightweight Undressing Terminal). Never again will you want to call your girlfriend a dumb whore once she gets a dual P3-Xeon installed on her ribs. And best of all, the MPU is available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes to fit all your business needs.
Call 1-888-GOAT-SEX now for more information
Fnarg is an equal opportunity satire.
Yes I know Silicon and Silicone aren't the same.. but hey, someone's gotta laugh!
Hacktivism is very real, although often it is misdirected and simply mindless defamation. Across all canadian governmental departments we've been warned of a crew of brazilian crackers that have been defacing our web sites in protest against the Health Ministry's embargo on brazilian meat, which has been found to carry diseases in the past few months. Although I personally think this isn't the right way to protest, it's how they choose to do it, and they do it without any class or professionalism. They just mess up our pages and write "Fuck canada and their racist people".. and of course we reply "Fuck brazil and their idiot crackers". I'm not saying hacktivism is always this bad, sometimes it truly is the best way to get a decent message out, especially when that message is being shunned "to protect the public" (read : because some rich fucker's got his hand up our asses). Defacing a high-visibility website won't change the world, but it will help inform people if the message is clear and positive. Whacking apple.com's entry page and writing "Steve Jobs licks goat nads" might seem funny, but it has no meaning or goal. It just pisses people off without any positive effect. That sort of activity certainly isn't "Robin Hood".
Next thing we'll know, this thing's gonna get stolen and we'll be seeing a psycho hanging around night clubs waiting for 50+ people to get in line, then FOOM! 50+ victims in one bullet.. The fallacy of ever-improving weaponry is that the guys holding the trigger (or worse, the funding) just don't get smarter. Now I'm all for research and I can imagine this has plenty of other uses besides railguns (small spacecraft launches perhaps), but people are still people, smart, dumb, genius, psycho, whatever. Some 21st century Saddam Hussein will find a way to make us regret this evolution, it's only a matter of time.
There is such a thing as metamoderation, which stands to punish the ignorant fools who moderate poorly. Wasn't there a mention in the moderation faq that suggests to "mod up or not at all", except in cases of abuse like boring first posts and whatnot ? Well some people don't bother reading that FAQ. Perhaps metamods should select an appropriate FAQ section to justify negative metamoderations, which would then be shoved in the accused moderator's face the next time he/she logs on. It is simply too open to abuse all over the table.
Success needs support, which was lacking for these products you mention. Laserdisc has garnered quite a following among the more purist among us. We even have Laserdisc movies in our local libraries by the thousands.
The plaguing factor for MD is its lossy compression. Granted, it is still very high quality and much better than tape, but at the time of its launch it was yet cheaper to obtain a home stereo cd recorder, and of course blank cd's have always been cheaper than proprietary MD media. Minidisc is nice in that it is very compact, but otherwise has no true benefit against convention CDs. It came around too late, too expensive.
As far as DAT are concerned, you're just aside the topic altogether. DAT is still immensely popular within music professionals because it is more convenient and reliable than CD recording. DAT tapes do eventually corrupt their data but it takes many years, and even then you can just re-record them, they don't just go bad or skip like recorded CDs. CD mastering plants still take DAT tapes even though home-recorded cd's are becoming quite popular, simply because DAT was the industry standard for so long.
Just because something isn't popular in the mainstream doesn't mean it's a failed product.
The DMCA wasn't instated to protect copyright holders, but rather the copyright lobbyists like the RIAA, MPAA, and other elliptic corporations. It is more to protect the illusion of copyright in the public eyee, which is what makes the most important difference on the bottom line of economy.
If they didn't do this, many (most) people would laugh at copyright and the incentive of creating a marketable product would soon be extinct.
Why produce "music" (the product, not the art) if everybody copies and only a small ignorant bunch pays ? Although it would somewhat benefit true artists by chomping away at the cloud of fluff and glut that covers the true gems, it would be a crippling blow to international economy and a truly awful trend-setter for other things to come. Although the DMCA was very poorly fleshed out and implemented, the basic idea is something essential to the survival, whether we like it or not, of the whoring glut market, which in turn amasses funding for the not-so-whoring artists who still give a damn. A vicious circle, no more, no less.
If you wanna know how fast a mhz-less chip is, just count the fps in Quake. DU-UH!
But seriously, even supposing we could come out with a retail clockless cpu, wouldn't it require a plethora of equally clockless peripherals like video cards and ide controllers and whatnot ? Otherwise it would need a clock to drive these "external" devices (external from the cpu's view, that is), and then we fall back into the same pit. The concept is fascinating but ill-fated I'm afraid.
Counterpoint: The market won't force anything. The recording industry doesn't give a flying fsck about the market, it is an international cartel that imposes its own dictatorial grip on pricing and distribution. If the RIAA decides that we should all pay 50$ per cd, then that's what they will start charging in stores worldwide. They've heard of supply-vs-demand, and they bought it out with capitalism.
Why doesn't someone just take a P4-2ghz and remark it as 10ghz ? That's basically what Intel's going to do since they have lost the true definition of performance anyways. Just look at MMX, MultiMedia eXtensions; more like Masturbatory Marketing eXperiment. They will come out with another gimmick that runs at 40 bazillion hertz yet takes 500 clocks to do an XOR thanks to wait states.
At this point, instead of increasing cpu speed, I feel it would be better to focus on SMP and tweaking the other parts of a PC. A faster northbridge and better system bus would relieve important bottlenecks in the PC architecture with a much greater impact than processor speed alone. Just look at all the speed freaks (myself included) who prefer to keep an older cpu but upgrade everything else.
Here's my personal example : I have a Celeron 566 @ 850. Slow according to today's standards, but good enough for everything I do and it runs every game out there. On the other hand, I've got a Geforce2 GTS, 512mb ram, IDE-Raid 80gb, 8x Plextor cdr, Boomslang mouse, yadda yadda. My main CPU is just decent but I cranked everything else to the max. Instead of having a fast cpu that just spends more time waiting for the hardware, I have fast hardware that lets me work and play faster without needing to stay on the bleeding edge of AMD/Intel wars. Sure, I could visit my little chinese dude and his grotty parts shop to pick up an Athlon-C 1.2ghz with mobo and pc266 ram, and my Q3 framerate might jump from 110 to 130, but overall will I get anything done faster ? Only marginally, since the cpu will spend more time snoring while every other component chugs along as the same speeds since 1994. On the other hand I'll be the first guy in town to get my hands on a Geforce3, not because I'm a gamer, but because it will make a more noticeable _perceptive_ difference than spending the same amount on a CPU. I don't care what the benchmarks say, my PC feels just as slow as my P200 did three years ago, and my 486 before that. It's everything else that's been steadily progressing over the years; video, disk, memory, sound. That's what really makes a difference to my eyes and ears. GHz-wars just look good on paper and in Intel's bank account, nowhere else.
Reminds me of the current mindset on marijuana here. You can practically smoke it in front of your favorite police officer, but possessing it in small ziploc bags is a crime (because they expect you to sell it). So what do we see now ? pre-rolled joints being sold in public sight. It's so stupid but that's how the law works.
My point is this : so it's illegal to sell the modchip, but is it illegal to sell a pre-chipped playstation in a store ? Just say "it's a pre-owned pre-chipped playstation". I don't quite expect shop owners to crack open the used playstations they buy off customers just to see if it's chipped or not, so it might be safe under the law. Sorta like how pawnshops can claim immunity for having one of their henchmen bust up a guy and steal his tv. "We didn't know it was stolen *snicker*". Well "We didn't know it was chipped" should be just as valid.
Personally i'd stay away from the army. In all common sense, while you work for them, they _own_ you. It _can_ be nice, if you're lucky, or it can be just as depressing as working in a McDonalds, except you can quit McDonalds without getting harassed and lynched. You'll be better off getting a braindead job in the government and applying your true knowledge and talent to contract work on the side. You get all the benefits plus the peace of mind that you can just act like a common mediocre techie during your day job and go home stress-free. It took me a few years to learn that, but it finally pays off to just hide among the sheep.
I have to agree, interesting ads regularly obtain my attention. Without advertising I would never have heard of many sites which I visit regularly, or certain products that are innovative and that I wouldn't have looked for on my own (software/hardware/whatever). However there is at least one type of ads I truly hate, the misleading ones that are made to look like a clickable form or those damned scrollbar things. Although I'm not fooled by these mock ups, i'm sure many others can't tell the difference, the non-technical ones especially. That's pure deception and it's just shy of fraud.
The stupid part about this is that the price of blank media jumps 50% because of this. Yep, I pay 40c per blank disc, add 21c for the levy and that's up to 61c per disc. It's nice to know that the levy money is going to the same crooks who are pushing pathetic artists by the truckload. I don't even turn on the radio in my car anymore because I'm tired of the crap they play. At least when I pay income taxes and whatnot, I know my money's being used (in part) for the benefit of the population (which includes myself). In the case of this levy, the only people benefitting from it are the already-rich crooks who run the whole whoring entertainment business. Democracy for money, that's what it is.
Surprisingly most pizza shacks up here (Quebec/Ontario Canada) usually carry most drinks from Coke, Pepsi and Wet Planet, which means you can order your pepperoni cheese slice with a pepsi while your hyperactive buddy washes down his meatlover slice with a swig of Powerade. I guess the only semi-credible explanation for this is that Canadians are more religious about their drinks:) I personally don't care, my personal opinion is that pepsi is more syrupy while coke is more acidic.. either one goes fine with pizza though:)
I don't understand why a retail establishment would allow this sort of practice, although I don't know a thing about marketing. Assuming this did improve sales of Product-X, and I believe it does work, then it would have the inverse impact on Products Y and Z. The store wouldn't sell more products (maybe just a little), it would just keep selling the same stuff and eventually be stuck with obsolete hardware from the other brand names.
As an example, picture this : Say your local pizza shack gets a Coca-Cola consultant "donated" to their business, who then takes orders on the phone. That guy will naturally sell much more Coke than Pepsi (or other Pepsi-brand drinks). The result is that for those who actually tell the Coke guy to fsck off and get their Pepsi, it will be a very flat Pepsi since it's been on the shelves for much longer than the other drinks. Still, the pizza shack doesn't sell many more drinks in total. Sure, Coca-Cola would be bribing them, but that probably doesn't make much of a difference.
I don't see what's so amazing about this, they've been researching dolphin communication for decades. I remember one time they were using DSP gadgetry to convert human syllables into dolphin-like squeals, and had managed to develop a reliable communication path with the dolphins by studying the dolphins' reactions to each syllable. This practice dates back from the mid 70's, back when that DSP processor took up a whole room. I'm afraid I don't have refences to back it up, but all I can say is that I saw this as a little kid on PBS or something.
Well honestly, I sometimes wish Katz would follow suit and never post either. It's quite easy to hate a commercial icon who's disrupting an open community in order to gain attention. If he didn't have such a one-track bullshit capitalist mind, nobody would have noticed him.
If these things become mainstream (thus a popular nuisance), someone will come up with a workaround, such as a personal GPS jamming device that will simply bullshit the regionlocked phone/vcr/doohicky into believing it's still in its native region.
If the telco is forced to ditch the encryption, or just give the police the decryption keys, then someone will just have to come up with a phone mod that encrypts on its own, and that requires the receiver to have the same crypt chip in order to communicate. If their target is organised crime then this would be trivial for them to implement. They already have good electronics people on their side and encryption info can be found all over the place. For every crack, there is a counter-crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have a very dumb bimbo girlfriend ?
Do you find yourself hiding her in the closet when your family comes around ?
Do you wish she could run Linux ?
Well now she can thanks to Fnarg
Introducing the MPU : Mammary Processing Unit. Thanks to silicone-based transistors, your blonde bimbo can now harness the power of Linux using the processing power found inside her breast implants. The benefits are limitless: human-powered text-to-speech engine, self-powered design, intuitive touch-sensitive GUI, and don't forget our revolutionary S.L.U.T. module (Super Lightweight Undressing Terminal). Never again will you want to call your girlfriend a dumb whore once she gets a dual P3-Xeon installed on her ribs. And best of all, the MPU is available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes to fit all your business needs.
Call 1-888-GOAT-SEX now for more information
Fnarg is an equal opportunity satire.
Yes I know Silicon and Silicone aren't the same.. but hey, someone's gotta laugh!
Hacktivism is very real, although often it is misdirected and simply mindless defamation. Across all canadian governmental departments we've been warned of a crew of brazilian crackers that have been defacing our web sites in protest against the Health Ministry's embargo on brazilian meat, which has been found to carry diseases in the past few months. Although I personally think this isn't the right way to protest, it's how they choose to do it, and they do it without any class or professionalism. They just mess up our pages and write "Fuck canada and their racist people".. and of course we reply "Fuck brazil and their idiot crackers". I'm not saying hacktivism is always this bad, sometimes it truly is the best way to get a decent message out, especially when that message is being shunned "to protect the public" (read : because some rich fucker's got his hand up our asses). Defacing a high-visibility website won't change the world, but it will help inform people if the message is clear and positive. Whacking apple.com's entry page and writing "Steve Jobs licks goat nads" might seem funny, but it has no meaning or goal. It just pisses people off without any positive effect. That sort of activity certainly isn't "Robin Hood".
Next thing we'll know, this thing's gonna get stolen and we'll be seeing a psycho hanging around night clubs waiting for 50+ people to get in line, then FOOM! 50+ victims in one bullet.. The fallacy of ever-improving weaponry is that the guys holding the trigger (or worse, the funding) just don't get smarter. Now I'm all for research and I can imagine this has plenty of other uses besides railguns (small spacecraft launches perhaps), but people are still people, smart, dumb, genius, psycho, whatever. Some 21st century Saddam Hussein will find a way to make us regret this evolution, it's only a matter of time.
Just get rid of karma and people will quit being so childish.
Anonymous... cowards.. no... penis.. must.. troll.. blargh.
Seriously, I'd rather see a provocative post than a useless post like that one.
There is such a thing as metamoderation, which stands to punish the ignorant fools who moderate poorly. Wasn't there a mention in the moderation faq that suggests to "mod up or not at all", except in cases of abuse like boring first posts and whatnot ? Well some people don't bother reading that FAQ. Perhaps metamods should select an appropriate FAQ section to justify negative metamoderations, which would then be shoved in the accused moderator's face the next time he/she logs on. It is simply too open to abuse all over the table.
Success needs support, which was lacking for these products you mention. Laserdisc has garnered quite a following among the more purist among us. We even have Laserdisc movies in our local libraries by the thousands.
The plaguing factor for MD is its lossy compression. Granted, it is still very high quality and much better than tape, but at the time of its launch it was yet cheaper to obtain a home stereo cd recorder, and of course blank cd's have always been cheaper than proprietary MD media. Minidisc is nice in that it is very compact, but otherwise has no true benefit against convention CDs. It came around too late, too expensive.
As far as DAT are concerned, you're just aside the topic altogether. DAT is still immensely popular within music professionals because it is more convenient and reliable than CD recording. DAT tapes do eventually corrupt their data but it takes many years, and even then you can just re-record them, they don't just go bad or skip like recorded CDs. CD mastering plants still take DAT tapes even though home-recorded cd's are becoming quite popular, simply because DAT was the industry standard for so long.
Just because something isn't popular in the mainstream doesn't mean it's a failed product.
The DMCA wasn't instated to protect copyright holders, but rather the copyright lobbyists like the RIAA, MPAA, and other elliptic corporations. It is more to protect the illusion of copyright in the public eyee, which is what makes the most important difference on the bottom line of economy.
If they didn't do this, many (most) people would laugh at copyright and the incentive of creating a marketable product would soon be extinct.
Why produce "music" (the product, not the art) if everybody copies and only a small ignorant bunch pays ? Although it would somewhat benefit true artists by chomping away at the cloud of fluff and glut that covers the true gems, it would be a crippling blow to international economy and a truly awful trend-setter for other things to come. Although the DMCA was very poorly fleshed out and implemented, the basic idea is something essential to the survival, whether we like it or not, of the whoring glut market, which in turn amasses funding for the not-so-whoring artists who still give a damn. A vicious circle, no more, no less.
If you wanna know how fast a mhz-less chip is, just count the fps in Quake. DU-UH!
But seriously, even supposing we could come out with a retail clockless cpu, wouldn't it require a plethora of equally clockless peripherals like video cards and ide controllers and whatnot ? Otherwise it would need a clock to drive these "external" devices (external from the cpu's view, that is), and then we fall back into the same pit. The concept is fascinating but ill-fated I'm afraid.
Counterpoint: The market won't force anything. The recording industry doesn't give a flying fsck about the market, it is an international cartel that imposes its own dictatorial grip on pricing and distribution. If the RIAA decides that we should all pay 50$ per cd, then that's what they will start charging in stores worldwide. They've heard of supply-vs-demand, and they bought it out with capitalism.
Why doesn't someone just take a P4-2ghz and remark it as 10ghz ? That's basically what Intel's going to do since they have lost the true definition of performance anyways. Just look at MMX, MultiMedia eXtensions; more like Masturbatory Marketing eXperiment. They will come out with another gimmick that runs at 40 bazillion hertz yet takes 500 clocks to do an XOR thanks to wait states.
At this point, instead of increasing cpu speed, I feel it would be better to focus on SMP and tweaking the other parts of a PC. A faster northbridge and better system bus would relieve important bottlenecks in the PC architecture with a much greater impact than processor speed alone. Just look at all the speed freaks (myself included) who prefer to keep an older cpu but upgrade everything else.
Here's my personal example : I have a Celeron 566 @ 850. Slow according to today's standards, but good enough for everything I do and it runs every game out there. On the other hand, I've got a Geforce2 GTS, 512mb ram, IDE-Raid 80gb, 8x Plextor cdr, Boomslang mouse, yadda yadda. My main CPU is just decent but I cranked everything else to the max. Instead of having a fast cpu that just spends more time waiting for the hardware, I have fast hardware that lets me work and play faster without needing to stay on the bleeding edge of AMD/Intel wars. Sure, I could visit my little chinese dude and his grotty parts shop to pick up an Athlon-C 1.2ghz with mobo and pc266 ram, and my Q3 framerate might jump from 110 to 130, but overall will I get anything done faster ? Only marginally, since the cpu will spend more time snoring while every other component chugs along as the same speeds since 1994. On the other hand I'll be the first guy in town to get my hands on a Geforce3, not because I'm a gamer, but because it will make a more noticeable _perceptive_ difference than spending the same amount on a CPU. I don't care what the benchmarks say, my PC feels just as slow as my P200 did three years ago, and my 486 before that. It's everything else that's been steadily progressing over the years; video, disk, memory, sound. That's what really makes a difference to my eyes and ears. GHz-wars just look good on paper and in Intel's bank account, nowhere else.
Reminds me of the current mindset on marijuana here. You can practically smoke it in front of your favorite police officer, but possessing it in small ziploc bags is a crime (because they expect you to sell it). So what do we see now ? pre-rolled joints being sold in public sight. It's so stupid but that's how the law works.
My point is this : so it's illegal to sell the modchip, but is it illegal to sell a pre-chipped playstation in a store ? Just say "it's a pre-owned pre-chipped playstation". I don't quite expect shop owners to crack open the used playstations they buy off customers just to see if it's chipped or not, so it might be safe under the law. Sorta like how pawnshops can claim immunity for having one of their henchmen bust up a guy and steal his tv. "We didn't know it was stolen *snicker*". Well "We didn't know it was chipped" should be just as valid.
Personally i'd stay away from the army. In all common sense, while you work for them, they _own_ you. It _can_ be nice, if you're lucky, or it can be just as depressing as working in a McDonalds, except you can quit McDonalds without getting harassed and lynched. You'll be better off getting a braindead job in the government and applying your true knowledge and talent to contract work on the side. You get all the benefits plus the peace of mind that you can just act like a common mediocre techie during your day job and go home stress-free. It took me a few years to learn that, but it finally pays off to just hide among the sheep.
Threaten to move 'zig'. But seriously, do apply for work elsewhere, but under a pseudonym.
:)
-"Aren't you Larry Ellison of ex-Oracle fame ?"
-"Ahem *cough* of course not. I'm Gary Ellison, and I'm better than that Oracle guy."
Heck.. it's so friggin' stupid it might be worth a try
I suggest we call it bigband.
(What do you call a piece of black tape patching a hole in coax shielding ? a broadbandage.)
I have to agree, interesting ads regularly obtain my attention. Without advertising I would never have heard of many sites which I visit regularly, or certain products that are innovative and that I wouldn't have looked for on my own (software/hardware/whatever). However there is at least one type of ads I truly hate, the misleading ones that are made to look like a clickable form or those damned scrollbar things. Although I'm not fooled by these mock ups, i'm sure many others can't tell the difference, the non-technical ones especially. That's pure deception and it's just shy of fraud.
I'd like to see someone sue the store chain for illegally boycotting the competitors' products :)
The stupid part about this is that the price of blank media jumps 50% because of this. Yep, I pay 40c per blank disc, add 21c for the levy and that's up to 61c per disc. It's nice to know that the levy money is going to the same crooks who are pushing pathetic artists by the truckload. I don't even turn on the radio in my car anymore because I'm tired of the crap they play. At least when I pay income taxes and whatnot, I know my money's being used (in part) for the benefit of the population (which includes myself). In the case of this levy, the only people benefitting from it are the already-rich crooks who run the whole whoring entertainment business. Democracy for money, that's what it is.
Surprisingly most pizza shacks up here (Quebec/Ontario Canada) usually carry most drinks from Coke, Pepsi and Wet Planet, which means you can order your pepperoni cheese slice with a pepsi while your hyperactive buddy washes down his meatlover slice with a swig of Powerade. I guess the only semi-credible explanation for this is that Canadians are more religious about their drinks :) I personally don't care, my personal opinion is that pepsi is more syrupy while coke is more acidic.. either one goes fine with pizza though :)
I don't understand why a retail establishment would allow this sort of practice, although I don't know a thing about marketing. Assuming this did improve sales of Product-X, and I believe it does work, then it would have the inverse impact on Products Y and Z. The store wouldn't sell more products (maybe just a little), it would just keep selling the same stuff and eventually be stuck with obsolete hardware from the other brand names.
As an example, picture this : Say your local pizza shack gets a Coca-Cola consultant "donated" to their business, who then takes orders on the phone. That guy will naturally sell much more Coke than Pepsi (or other Pepsi-brand drinks). The result is that for those who actually tell the Coke guy to fsck off and get their Pepsi, it will be a very flat Pepsi since it's been on the shelves for much longer than the other drinks. Still, the pizza shack doesn't sell many more drinks in total. Sure, Coca-Cola would be bribing them, but that probably doesn't make much of a difference.
I don't see what's so amazing about this, they've been researching dolphin communication for decades. I remember one time they were using DSP gadgetry to convert human syllables into dolphin-like squeals, and had managed to develop a reliable communication path with the dolphins by studying the dolphins' reactions to each syllable. This practice dates back from the mid 70's, back when that DSP processor took up a whole room. I'm afraid I don't have refences to back it up, but all I can say is that I saw this as a little kid on PBS or something.
Well honestly, I sometimes wish Katz would follow suit and never post either. It's quite easy to hate a commercial icon who's disrupting an open community in order to gain attention. If he didn't have such a one-track bullshit capitalist mind, nobody would have noticed him.
If people complain aboue the noise, start pressuring your boss to give you a closed office :)
If these things become mainstream (thus a popular nuisance), someone will come up with a workaround, such as a personal GPS jamming device that will simply bullshit the regionlocked phone/vcr/doohicky into believing it's still in its native region.
If the telco is forced to ditch the encryption, or just give the police the decryption keys, then someone will just have to come up with a phone mod that encrypts on its own, and that requires the receiver to have the same crypt chip in order to communicate. If their target is organised crime then this would be trivial for them to implement. They already have good electronics people on their side and encryption info can be found all over the place. For every crack, there is a counter-crack.