Publishing an earnings report before the company announces it is still rude, even if it's not technically illegal. I hope this case is thrown out, so as not to set a precedent, but I think it was a lousy thing of Reuters to do. It's one thing to guess URL's and obtain advance information for your own personal use; it's quite another to publish it to the rest of the world.
This is not a troll; I'm serious in doubt as to why this product is useful.
Notepads are useful largely because they're essentially disposable; you can scribble as much as you want without worrying about running out of paper or about it costing too much. $10 for a replacement notebook is a bit steep. I usually pay $1 or so for my notebooks.
So I can get an image of my notebook pages... doesn't a $50 scanner do the same thing? Ok, so a scanner takes a little while and only handles a page at a time. Is that limitation worth $150 to that many people, especially with an extra $7 per notebook?
Cool technology, but I doubt this will be a successful product.
Might want to edit the page size in the source, and re-typeset. It'll kill the hand-tweaked paragraph flow, but printing on 8.5x11 will probably save a lot of paper.
Not sure exactly *what* effect it was, but we've seen around 7000 unique IP's in the past two days.
Hey, the more the better... but I wasn't expecting nearly that much traffic. The box has been/.'ed before, much harder, but Georgia Tech's network is pretty slow these days, mostly due to Kazaa and similar.
AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port, a very hackish specialization of the PCI bus for graphics devices. It is a master-to-target link, not a bus, per se. Its signalling rates are not be appropriate for a general-purpose bus (mobo manufacturers have enough trouble getting it right on the short runs to a single AGP port), and its optimizations are slanted toward squeezing performance out of bus traffic typical of graphics devices, not random access disk controllers and network devices.
Not to say that you *couldn't* have an AGP disk controller. But I doubt the performance improvement would be sufficient to justify the hassle and the lost AGP slot.
PCI-X is starting to come close to the lower AGP speeds in performance, and is a much cleaner and more general standard.
Maybe so. I'm kind of glad we're not stuck with the original C, or McCarthy's first version of Lisp. Both of those were pretty weak compared to ANSI C and Common Lisp.:)
It's interesting to see Fortran continue to evolve. Evidently a lot of people like it, for one reason or another.
Yet another language added to my list of things to learn at some point.:)
It's not nearly that simple. NVIDIA cards are unlike anything you've ever seen on the inside. It's not a simple matter of register banging like most hardware. And yes, there is quite a bit of proprietary/trade secret stuff in there, such that publishing the driver source or opening the hardware interface would be detrimental to NVIDIA.
As much as we all hate it, the tech industry is largely driven by trade secrets, patents, and lawsuits. I don't think anyone at NVIDIA really likes that, but it's the only way to survive given the broken state of IP laws in the world.
a) Many industry forces want to combat the rise in Internet copyright infringement through technological means.
b) These technological means would likely result in a considerable reduction in the flexibility of personal computers.
c) This "considerable reduction in flexibility" might preclude 100% open source operating systems, depending on the technology used. It stands to reason that open source and free software license compatibility is not the primary concern of the proponents of such legislation.
d) At the very least, this is likely to make it difficult to play movies and/or music with open source software, which will reduce the desirability of the software we've worked so hard to build.
e) This is unacceptable.
What are we going to do about it?
I can think of a few possibilities.
We could stop infringing copyrights, and convince the industry that the problem has been solved. Fat chance this'll happen.
We could implement a classic broad-based boycott, but history has shown that this only works until the next cool shiny DVD comes out.
We could convince our representatives to stop listening to the entertainment industry.
We could do nothing (or do things that amount to nothing, like sit around and gripe like I'm doing right now).
Something is going to happen, and it's probably going to suck unless we, a community of people who have a vested interest in preventing these things from happening, unite and implement an effective solution.
But aren't existing decoders (ones already distributed) clear of this nonsense?
Isn't it still entirely "legal" to use the decoder you already have installed to transcode your library to Ogg Vorbis?
(I put "legal" in quotes because I don't believe Fraunhofer has an ethical leg to stand on; they waited until the majority of online music content was encoded into their format, and then imposed a fee on decoding. That is absolutely wrong. I'm not going to think twice about ignoring their silly patent, personally.)
I spent most of the summer working on AGP driver bugs, so let me clarify a few things.
AGP was designed by Intel as an ad hoc solution to combat the problem of transferring large textures to a graphics card over the PCI bus. It's an extension to PCI, essentially, allowing fast, pipelined, ONE-WAY transfers. That should be repeated. AGP is PCI, with a different connector, and a bunch of extra pins and logic for pipelined transfers from system memory to the card. In fact, without "fast writes" enabled, CPU -> graphics card writes are plain PCI; only transfers requested BY THE CARD are accelerated.
There is nothing new about this. It's in the spec.
It is NOT meant to be a two-way bus. It it was never designed for offloading cinematic rendering to the card, for later recovery. AGP came out around 1997, before NVIDIA or ATI had shaders in hardware. PC rendering was nowhere near photorealistic at the time; that was the domain of software raytracers. Without AGP, video cards seriously hog the AGP bus with their texture streaming. That is ALL that AGP fixes.
The real solution is to come up with a new bus. I tend to like unified memory architecture designs, but they have disadvantages as well. The real trouble is getting the PC industry to agree on anything; if ATI came up with a new bus standard, for instance, I doubt NVIDIA or Matrox would adopt it, not wishing to appear to submit to their competitor.
Seriously... why look for a UNIX-compatible MP3 player when you can have an MP3 + Ogg + MOD player that *runs* UNIX?
I've been using my iPAQ (with Linux) as a portable music player for a while, and it works extremely well. Capacity is not enormous, but you can add compact flash cards (or even PCMCIA hard drives if you don't mind the bulk).
> We used to have parents deploring their > children's taste in books, or that they > didn't read at all, something I've always > found distressing: many of my friends at > university never seem to read anything; I > don't know what they fill that gap in > their lives with.
Large amounts of homework, campus activities, SLEEP, and (for some people) alcohol.
I wish I got around to reading more, but it was kind of a shock to think back and realize I hadn't read anything non-technical for the entire semester.
This is hitting amateur radio hard. Most hams purchase their equipment these days; it's nearly impossible to obtain modern levels of performance on home built transceivers. (Well, that's a generalization; antennas are often homebuilt, and some diehards do build their own rigs.)
Why would people trade images with SSTV (slow scan TV, basically a codec for TV-resolution images sent over the radio) when they can email jpegs? For the most part, the people who do it are just in it for entertainment, not utility.
There is still room for tweaking; in fact, the amateur radio community strongly encourages it. Radios still usually come with complete schematics (pages and pages of schematics, in the case of some of the larger units in the local radio club's shack). But it's pretty uncommon to pull out the soldering iron these days and work on the actual equipment.
Better or worse? Neither. There will always be a small segment of the population that finds any given field (astronomy, radio, etc) exciting. New technology will just change their focus, but the interest is unlikely to go away.
Yes, point taken. The Author's Guild does have every right to call for a boycott against Amazon. And we have every right to call them whiny brats for doing so.:)
I was simply responding to the undertone that implied Amazon was doing something wrong by offering used copies for sale, when in fact it seems to me that they're carrying on perfectly legal and ethical business.
This isn't to say, of course, that Amazon is the most respectable organization either... but in this case, they're just selling used books, and doing it efficiently. So are they supposed to intentionally make it more difficult to buy used books, or something?
I honestly don't see what the guild is kvetching about.
I'm an author. I have a book on Amazon, and although the used price on my book is still fairly close to the new price, there's a chance that used sales will start to cut into new sales at some point.
So, does Amazon have a right to sell used copies of a book, or not? If not, then they are breaking the law, and should be sued. If so, then the Author's Guild is interfering with legitimate business, and is exposing itself as a bunch of whiny brats.
Books are SOLD, *NOT LICENSED*. If you buy a book, YOU OWN IT. There is no contractual relationship; it is your book. You can sell it, rent it, burn it, or make paper airplanes out of it. The only things you can't do are copy it or claim its contents as your own, due to copyright law (which I mostly agree with, except for the DMCA). If the Author's Guild wants to claim that this is not true, then they have an uphill battle against hundreds of years of tradition. But frankly, I think they're just bitching, and should be ignored.
Yes, they do ask for donations, so technically Mandrake may not be free as in beer. More like "drop $1 in the bucket if you take a beer; honor system."
But it's definitely free as in speech, which is much more important, in my opinion. You can install Mandrake on all your systems, reconfigure it in any way you want, recompile it, reverse engineer it, publish performance benchmarks (I still can't believe some EULA's ban that), burn a CD for a friend, etc. All that's asked is that, in return, you help support Mandrake.
Sure, I'll pay $20 or whatever to make sure that kind of freedom remains economically viable. What we're seeing is the collision of a non-idealist system (capitalism) with an idealist one (free software), and there will by definition be some dissonance.
One of the privileges of an amateur radio license is modifying radio equipment with the intent of operating it on amateur frequency ranges. This is why amateur radio requires a license -- if you don't know what you're doing, you can cause serious problems. The FCC places a lot of trust in ham operators by essentially giving them a blank check for experimentation.
So yes, hams are allowed to hack wireless cards to work on their frequencies. They're expected to know what frequencies they may use, how much power they're putting out, how to resolve any resulting interference, and so forth.
BTW, it is not very difficult to get a ham license. Contact your local radio club, or have a look at http://www.arrl.org. Just takes a bit of reading, $10, and a 35-question multiple choice exam.
Amateur radio has had a system called APRS for a while. This protocol, based on AX.25, periodically broadcasts the user's callsign and present coordinates. It's a really cool system; it's fun to watch a computer track the APRS coordinates of everyone in the city.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishing an earnings report before the company announces it is still rude, even if it's not technically illegal. I hope this case is thrown out, so as not to set a precedent, but I think it was a lousy thing of Reuters to do. It's one thing to guess URL's and obtain advance information for your own personal use; it's quite another to publish it to the rest of the world.
-John
Apache server status page
Note that Webalyzer updates at 6am, so today's stats aren't yet posted.
This isn't a front page slashdotting; I've had that happen before, with a CGI script no less, and it brought my box to an absolute crawl.
-John
Now you know why the server is in YOUR room and not MINE. :)
-John
This is not a troll; I'm serious in doubt as to why this product is useful.
Notepads are useful largely because they're essentially disposable; you can scribble as much as you want without worrying about running out of paper or about it costing too much. $10 for a replacement notebook is a bit steep. I usually pay $1 or so for my notebooks.
So I can get an image of my notebook pages... doesn't a $50 scanner do the same thing? Ok, so a scanner takes a little while and only handles a page at a time. Is that limitation worth $150 to that many people, especially with an extra $7 per notebook?
Cool technology, but I doubt this will be a successful product.
-John
Install TeX, then 'make clean pdf'.
-John
Might want to edit the page size in the source, and re-typeset. It'll kill the hand-tweaked paragraph flow, but printing on 8.5x11 will probably save a lot of paper.
-John
Not sure exactly *what* effect it was, but we've seen around 7000 unique IP's in the past two days.
/.'ed before, much harder, but Georgia Tech's network is pretty slow these days, mostly due to Kazaa and similar.
Hey, the more the better... but I wasn't expecting nearly that much traffic. The box has been
-John
AGP is Accelerated Graphics Port, a very hackish specialization of the PCI bus for graphics devices. It is a master-to-target link, not a bus, per se. Its signalling rates are not be appropriate for a general-purpose bus (mobo manufacturers have enough trouble getting it right on the short runs to a single AGP port), and its optimizations are slanted toward squeezing performance out of bus traffic typical of graphics devices, not random access disk controllers and network devices.
Not to say that you *couldn't* have an AGP disk controller. But I doubt the performance improvement would be sufficient to justify the hassle and the lost AGP slot.
PCI-X is starting to come close to the lower AGP speeds in performance, and is a much cleaner and more general standard.
-John
Maybe so. I'm kind of glad we're not stuck with the original C, or McCarthy's first version of Lisp. Both of those were pretty weak compared to ANSI C and Common Lisp. :)
:)
It's interesting to see Fortran continue to evolve. Evidently a lot of people like it, for one reason or another.
Yet another language added to my list of things to learn at some point.
-John
It's not nearly that simple.
NVIDIA cards are unlike anything you've ever seen on the inside. It's not a simple matter of register banging like most hardware. And yes, there is quite a bit of proprietary/trade secret stuff in there, such that publishing the driver source or opening the hardware interface would be detrimental to NVIDIA.
As much as we all hate it, the tech industry is largely driven by trade secrets, patents, and lawsuits. I don't think anyone at NVIDIA really likes that, but it's the only way to survive given the broken state of IP laws in the world.
-John (having contributed to the driver)
a) Many industry forces want to combat the rise in Internet copyright infringement through technological means.
b) These technological means would likely result in a considerable reduction in the flexibility of personal computers.
c) This "considerable reduction in flexibility" might preclude 100% open source operating systems, depending on the technology used. It stands to reason that open source and free software license compatibility is not the primary concern of the proponents of such legislation.
d) At the very least, this is likely to make it difficult to play movies and/or music with open source software, which will reduce the desirability of the software we've worked so hard to build.
e) This is unacceptable.
What are we going to do about it?
I can think of a few possibilities.
We could stop infringing copyrights, and convince the industry that the problem has been solved. Fat chance this'll happen.
We could implement a classic broad-based boycott, but history has shown that this only works until the next cool shiny DVD comes out.
We could convince our representatives to stop listening to the entertainment industry.
We could do nothing (or do things that amount to nothing, like sit around and gripe like I'm doing right now).
Something is going to happen, and it's probably going to suck unless we, a community of people who have a vested interest in preventing these things from happening, unite and implement an effective solution.
What'll it be?
-John
"But I don't *want* a web-accessible clothes dryer! Beeeewwwwweeept!"
But aren't existing decoders (ones already distributed) clear of this nonsense?
Isn't it still entirely "legal" to use the decoder you already have installed to transcode your library to Ogg Vorbis?
(I put "legal" in quotes because I don't believe Fraunhofer has an ethical leg to stand on; they waited until the majority of online music content was encoded into their format, and then imposed a fee on decoding. That is absolutely wrong. I'm not going to think twice about ignoring their silly patent, personally.)
-John
I spent most of the summer working on AGP driver bugs, so let me clarify a few things.
AGP was designed by Intel as an ad hoc solution to combat the problem of transferring large textures to a graphics card over the PCI bus. It's an extension to PCI, essentially, allowing fast, pipelined, ONE-WAY transfers. That should be repeated. AGP is PCI, with a different connector, and a bunch of extra pins and logic for pipelined transfers from system memory to the card. In fact, without "fast writes" enabled, CPU -> graphics card writes are plain PCI; only transfers requested BY THE CARD are accelerated.
There is nothing new about this. It's in the spec.
It is NOT meant to be a two-way bus. It it was never designed for offloading cinematic rendering to the card, for later recovery. AGP came out around 1997, before NVIDIA or ATI had shaders in hardware. PC rendering was nowhere near photorealistic at the time; that was the domain of software raytracers. Without AGP, video cards seriously hog the AGP bus with their texture streaming. That is ALL that AGP fixes.
The real solution is to come up with a new bus. I tend to like unified memory architecture designs, but they have disadvantages as well. The real trouble is getting the PC industry to agree on anything; if ATI came up with a new bus standard, for instance, I doubt NVIDIA or Matrox would adopt it, not wishing to appear to submit to their competitor.
-John
Seriously... why look for a UNIX-compatible MP3 player when you can have an MP3 + Ogg + MOD player that *runs* UNIX?
I've been using my iPAQ (with Linux) as a portable music player for a while, and it works extremely well. Capacity is not enormous, but you can add compact flash cards (or even PCMCIA hard drives if you don't mind the bulk).
-John
> We used to have parents deploring their
> children's taste in books, or that they
> didn't read at all, something I've always
> found distressing: many of my friends at
> university never seem to read anything; I
> don't know what they fill that gap in
> their lives with.
Large amounts of homework, campus activities, SLEEP, and (for some people) alcohol.
I wish I got around to reading more, but it was kind of a shock to think back and realize I hadn't read anything non-technical for the entire semester.
-John
This is hitting amateur radio hard. Most hams purchase their equipment these days; it's nearly impossible to obtain modern levels of performance on home built transceivers. (Well, that's a generalization; antennas are often homebuilt, and some diehards do build their own rigs.)
Why would people trade images with SSTV (slow scan TV, basically a codec for TV-resolution images sent over the radio) when they can email jpegs? For the most part, the people who do it are just in it for entertainment, not utility.
There is still room for tweaking; in fact, the amateur radio community strongly encourages it. Radios still usually come with complete schematics (pages and pages of schematics, in the case of some of the larger units in the local radio club's shack). But it's pretty uncommon to pull out the soldering iron these days and work on the actual equipment.
Better or worse? Neither. There will always be a small segment of the population that finds any given field (astronomy, radio, etc) exciting. New technology will just change their focus, but the interest is unlikely to go away.
-John, KG4RUO
Yes, point taken. The Author's Guild does have every right to call for a boycott against Amazon. And we have every right to call them whiny brats for doing so. :)
I was simply responding to the undertone that implied Amazon was doing something wrong by offering used copies for sale, when in fact it seems to me that they're carrying on perfectly legal and ethical business.
-John
This isn't to say, of course, that Amazon is the most respectable organization either... but in this case, they're just selling used books, and doing it efficiently. So are they supposed to intentionally make it more difficult to buy used books, or something?
-John
I honestly don't see what the guild is kvetching about.
I'm an author. I have a book on Amazon, and although the used price on my book is still fairly close to the new price, there's a chance that used sales will start to cut into new sales at some point.
So, does Amazon have a right to sell used copies of a book, or not? If not, then they are breaking the law, and should be sued. If so, then the Author's Guild is interfering with legitimate business, and is exposing itself as a bunch of whiny brats.
Books are SOLD, *NOT LICENSED*. If you buy a book, YOU OWN IT. There is no contractual relationship; it is your book. You can sell it, rent it, burn it, or make paper airplanes out of it. The only things you can't do are copy it or claim its contents as your own, due to copyright law (which I mostly agree with, except for the DMCA). If the Author's Guild wants to claim that this is not true, then they have an uphill battle against hundreds of years of tradition. But frankly, I think they're just bitching, and should be ignored.
-John
The notion that legislation banning certain electronic devices (800 MHz receivers) somehow protects people from eavesdropping is patently absurd.
-John
Yes, they do ask for donations, so technically Mandrake may not be free as in beer. More like "drop $1 in the bucket if you take a beer; honor system."
But it's definitely free as in speech, which is much more important, in my opinion. You can install Mandrake on all your systems, reconfigure it in any way you want, recompile it, reverse engineer it, publish performance benchmarks (I still can't believe some EULA's ban that), burn a CD for a friend, etc. All that's asked is that, in return, you help support Mandrake.
Sure, I'll pay $20 or whatever to make sure that kind of freedom remains economically viable. What we're seeing is the collision of a non-idealist system (capitalism) with an idealist one (free software), and there will by definition be some dissonance.
-John
You can go across the Atlantic on 1 watt of power under the right conditions. Power helps, but a good antenna helps MUCH more.
:)
Broadcast 1500 watts on a wireless card, and you'll probably fry any receiving card in the same building.
-John, KG4RUO
One of the privileges of an amateur radio license is modifying radio equipment with the intent of operating it on amateur frequency ranges. This is why amateur radio requires a license -- if you don't know what you're doing, you can cause serious problems. The FCC places a lot of trust in ham operators by essentially giving them a blank check for experimentation.
So yes, hams are allowed to hack wireless cards to work on their frequencies. They're expected to know what frequencies they may use, how much power they're putting out, how to resolve any resulting interference, and so forth.
BTW, it is not very difficult to get a ham license. Contact your local radio club, or have a look at http://www.arrl.org. Just takes a bit of reading, $10, and a 35-question multiple choice exam.
-John, KG4RUO
Amateur radio has had a system called APRS for a while. This protocol, based on AX.25, periodically broadcasts the user's callsign and present coordinates. It's a really cool system; it's fun to watch a computer track the APRS coordinates of everyone in the city.
-John
(KG4RUO)