The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over.
Eh, 1.5 GB is just under three CD-Rs worth of storage. A new iPod holds 30 GB, twenty times the size of this storage box. Plus those hard drives are probably a whole lot cheaper than these will be.
I think these will be a good replacement for microdrives in, say, digital cameras, but not necessarily in mp3 players.
...remember that Apple has been planning its own online music-buying service for a while now, having announced it just last month. Obviously this is a BIG step towards making that successful for themselves.
Rampant piracy sure to follow fears Microsoft, so it's a safe assumption that their lawyers "would scour the Internet looking for the leaked code". The joy of closed source security at work."
Now, this is uncalled for. Why shouldn't MS keep an eye out for stolen copies of its software? Why should open source advocates be stealing it from them? The core idea of OSS is that of freedom.
If MS wants to embrace closed source, let them; if they want to spend kajillions of dollars keeping it closed, let them. "Scouring the Internet" will neither harm OSS nor those who prefer to use it.
You mean "isn't open source grand". When I can order a MythTV box to stick in my entertainment center that does everything this software can promise, it'll qualify as "competition".
The technology to do this is actually fairly old, as is the basic design. The TDP plant discussed here is new and important because instead of removing water from the second-stage waste by boiling it out, it moves it to a new chamber and rapidly depressurizes it. This keeps the carbon chains from breaking down too far to be useful.
The potential is to be able to break down any amount of carbon-based waste into oil, sterilized water, and useful minerals with only 15% energy loss. It's far-fetched right now, but I imagine the day when people will have small versions of these plants in their basement or, at the very least, on the outskirts of their community for shared use.
There was"Mighty Joe Young" from Disney not too many years ago. Similar enough, both in the original and the Disney remake, to "King Kong" to call it a re-interpretation of that classic.
A year before that, the kids had "Buddy" with special effects from Jim Henson's Workshop, and ten years before that, "Gorillas in the Mist". If you're counting gorillas in general, you may as well throw in Disney's 1999 "Tarzan" as well.
King Kong has been done to death; gorillas-as-victim-of-man's-inhumanity is a recurring theme in Hollywood. It'll be interesting to see how people react to a Jackson/Weta take on the original.
Perhaps it's time for a more long-term solution to the problem.
I thought the reason this was an issue was because mainframes were a long-term solution to a problem. They're dinosaurs, sure, but remember that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years before anything smaller or smarter could come take over. Mainframes are solid, reliable, and house very large amounts of very important data that would have been moved to other systems by now, if it were at all easy to do.
Sure it's easier to get help for newer systems, but it also involves paying for new hardware and software as well as that new help. Why should anyone do that in this economy when they can just pay twice as much for a skilled mainframe administrator and keep their current investment?
Me, I'm surprised that universities aren't training their students in these systems as well as everything else. If I could get AS/400 training as easily as I can get Oracle or Java training, I'd be pulling down twice the money I am now.
However, does this mean Adobe are going to start favouring Windows in terms of releases and support?
Ever since Adobe began emphasizing feature parity between Windows and Mac versions, they've been good about releasing software for both platforms at the same time. I shouldn't be worried about that.
It's more a security thing for littler kids who are at risk of abduction -- when they have to walk to and from school, for example, or run errands, or go outside to a friend's house. I can see this being a big seller for parents with the money to spare and who want to make sure their kids can enjoy a reasonable amount of freedom without watching them every single hour.
Amazon.com will be selling a triple pack of those three Ghibli films when they're released all at once, for $63 (instead of $90 separately at your local Suncoast).
I can only claim to have seen two of these, but I think I can say that "Lilo & Stitch" was the only worthwhile competition in this category. Still, it should rightly be considered remarkable that a dubbed foreign film won in this category, especially since Disney put almost no effort into promoting this film when it was released.
And on that note, it looks like Miyazaki's film "Castle in the Sky" will be released in the US on DVD at the same time as "Spirited Away", both of which should get a lot more attention from Disney now than they did last calendar year. Hey, whatever works....
Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.
Don't be silly, paying for things that used to be free is how the internet economy survived to become the thriving, economic powerhouse it is... um... today... er, that is....
Long gone are the days where one could buy a simple 'Turbo' this or 'Visual' that compiler for $99.95. And along with that, goes much of the supportive development by independent programmers and small companies.
Good. The shareware archives at Tucows and Download.com are filled to the gills with badly-written, badly-designed "applications" created by people who think a Microsoft wizard is the best way to create software. IMO, writing any application (at least one that's meant to be used by people other than you, on your PC) SHOULD require a few thousand dollars, a two-year class in programming, or the skill to debug and compile from the command line -- if not all three.
Creating any amount of computer code ought to be difficult, in direct proportion to the amount of damage it can inflict. The last thing we need is yet another screen saver showing nude photos of America's latest "it" girl while it quietly reformats the user's hard drive.
I've always found it strange that people complain about remembering "all those digits". 90% of the phone numbers I memorize break down into just four numbers: the three-digit area code, the three-digit prefix (both of which are often reused) and two two-digit numbers (i.e. forty-five and sixty-seven instead of four-five-six-seven). Add a number one at the beginning and that's only five numbers to memorize.
It's easier than it sounds. New Yorkers will have to memorize only, what, three or four area codes? Which they've probably memorized already. Most three-digit prefixes are reused often, and those that aren't can be broken into a one-digit and two-digit number. Two-digit numbers are easy to remember if you think of them as years ('45 = 1945) and associate them with some event in that year, like a birthday or some larger historical occurrence.
Of course, I know that it's sooooooo painful to type those extra four digits every time you want to call someone. Geez louise, did people whine this much when cable networks began using three-digit channel numbers?
NPR is the best thing in radio today, as far as I'm concerned. I know that most of the public radio stations in existence are classical programming, but out of Peoria and Bloomington, IL I can get a superb jazz station. Five days a week I get news during rush hour and jazz in the morning and most of the evenings, plus blues and a little more variety on the weekends. The classical NPR station nearby plays jazz programming on the weekends as well. And except during their biannual fundraising drives, they're commercial-free.
It's not like XM where I have dozens of choices of formats, but at least it's the one format I enjoy the most. I'd much rather pay them my $10/month than XM, if only because they're that much more likely to be around three years from now.
Imagine constructing a bridge out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of custom-fabricated tiny parts that have to fit together exactly right or the whole thing collapses.
Sounds like the Golden Gate to me. Or the Tacoma Narrows, which is as good an analogy to Microsoft server software as I can possibly imagine.
People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?'
Because they're not analogous. Bridges are designed to be used for decades, if not centuries, by hundreds and thousands of people and vehicles without anything more than routine maintenance. The closest equivalent in the technology industry would be the mainframe computer.
"Ordinary" software, the kind meant to be used by consumers on their current PC which will be constantly upgraded, routinely unsecured and replaced within five years at best, is more like a gravel-top driveway with grass growing underneath.
On one occasion an expert in system administration stood up to test Linus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to obtain 99.9999% uptime?"
"What is written in the FAQ?" Linus replied. "How do you read it?"
He answered: "'Keep your kernel constantly patched, and secure your unused ports, and always keep an off-site backup'; and, 'Always share your code freely with your fellow developers.'"
"You have answered correctly," Linus replied. "Do this and your system will remain up."
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Linus, "And who is my fellow developer?"
In reply Linus said: "A man was going down from Seattle to San Francisco to an open source conference, when he fell into the hands of wardrivers. They stripped him of his firewall, formatted his system disk and went away, leaving him unable to access even his webmail.
"An MCSE-certified consultant happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he flashed his headlights and passed by in the other lane.
"So too, an Oracle salesman, when he came to the place and saw him, accelerated his BMW and passed by in the other lane.
"But a Unix developer, as he traveled, came to where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and reinstalled his kernel, pulling out book floppys and data restore CDs. Then he put the man on his own wireless network, took him to SourceForge and upgraded his firewall.
"The next day (for it was a slow network connection) he took out two silver CD-Rs and gave them to the man. 'It is a custom distribution,' he said, 'and should keep you up and running until you can get to your own restore tapes. And here is my SMS number if you need any help on how to install it.'
"Which of these three do you think was a fellow developer to the man who fell into the hands of the wardrivers?"
The expert in system administration replied, "The one who shared his distribution without cost or consulting fees."
I'm waiting for the day when someone decides to threaten the software security agencies into silence, claiming "it's a feature, not a bug" and the DMCA gives them the right to silence public discussion about how to exploit the flaw.
Hey, if Wal-Mart can invoke it because people are pre-announcing their sale prices....
Re:Since "abductions" are really ...
on
Spielberg's Taken
·
· Score: 2
There's a theory that abductions are hypnagogic sleep paralysis but to say it as an undeniable fact it just bad science tied to arrogance.
All right: by combining Occam's Razor with the fact that evidence of alien abductions are anecdotal at best, while HSP is well-researched and documented, we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that most or all reports of alien abductions, aren't.
Satisfied?
Re:Since "abductions" are really ...
on
Spielberg's Taken
·
· Score: 2
Denibian slime worms would more interesting.
Considering how much time our university employees spend researching every last minutae of terrestrial life, archaeology, biology, chemistry, etc. etc., I can accept this as plausible.
Why should we assume the entire alien species is interested in us? These are probably just some interplanetary grad students out to get their Ph.D. completed as quickly as possible so they can get on with their careers.
Myself, I was rather appauled by the use of Steven Speilberg so prominently. Each of these episodes was directed by a different director, then Speilberg looked it over and tried to alter it ever so slightly IN THE POST PRODUCTION!
As I understand it, the miniseries was basically Spielberg's brainchild. Even if he wasn't responsible for the actual directing, it still came from his head. Credit is due.
Slashdot Mirror
That outside of the register and slashdot there's no mention of this bug?
Maybe all the other sites use MS Word to compose their HTML pages.
The days of cramming bulky 2.5" disks into mp3 players may finally be over.
Eh, 1.5 GB is just under three CD-Rs worth of storage. A new iPod holds 30 GB, twenty times the size of this storage box. Plus those hard drives are probably a whole lot cheaper than these will be.
I think these will be a good replacement for microdrives in, say, digital cameras, but not necessarily in mp3 players.
...remember that Apple has been planning its own online music-buying service for a while now, having announced it just last month. Obviously this is a BIG step towards making that successful for themselves.
Rampant piracy sure to follow fears Microsoft, so it's a safe assumption that their lawyers "would scour the Internet looking for the leaked code". The joy of closed source security at work."
Now, this is uncalled for. Why shouldn't MS keep an eye out for stolen copies of its software? Why should open source advocates be stealing it from them? The core idea of OSS is that of freedom.
If MS wants to embrace closed source, let them; if they want to spend kajillions of dollars keeping it closed, let them. "Scouring the Internet" will neither harm OSS nor those who prefer to use it.
Isn't competition grand!
You mean "isn't open source grand". When I can order a MythTV box to stick in my entertainment center that does everything this software can promise, it'll qualify as "competition".
The technology to do this is actually fairly old, as is the basic design. The TDP plant discussed here is new and important because instead of removing water from the second-stage waste by boiling it out, it moves it to a new chamber and rapidly depressurizes it. This keeps the carbon chains from breaking down too far to be useful.
The potential is to be able to break down any amount of carbon-based waste into oil, sterilized water, and useful minerals with only 15% energy loss. It's far-fetched right now, but I imagine the day when people will have small versions of these plants in their basement or, at the very least, on the outskirts of their community for shared use.
...Taco must reeeeeeeally hate the ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org server, in order to slashdot it four times in six hours.
There was "Mighty Joe Young" from Disney not too many years ago. Similar enough, both in the original and the Disney remake, to "King Kong" to call it a re-interpretation of that classic.
A year before that, the kids had "Buddy" with special effects from Jim Henson's Workshop, and ten years before that, "Gorillas in the Mist". If you're counting gorillas in general, you may as well throw in Disney's 1999 "Tarzan" as well.
King Kong has been done to death; gorillas-as-victim-of-man's-inhumanity is a recurring theme in Hollywood. It'll be interesting to see how people react to a Jackson/Weta take on the original.
Perhaps it's time for a more long-term solution to the problem.
I thought the reason this was an issue was because mainframes were a long-term solution to a problem. They're dinosaurs, sure, but remember that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years before anything smaller or smarter could come take over. Mainframes are solid, reliable, and house very large amounts of very important data that would have been moved to other systems by now, if it were at all easy to do.
Sure it's easier to get help for newer systems, but it also involves paying for new hardware and software as well as that new help. Why should anyone do that in this economy when they can just pay twice as much for a skilled mainframe administrator and keep their current investment?
Me, I'm surprised that universities aren't training their students in these systems as well as everything else. If I could get AS/400 training as easily as I can get Oracle or Java training, I'd be pulling down twice the money I am now.
However, does this mean Adobe are going to start favouring Windows in terms of releases and support?
Ever since Adobe began emphasizing feature parity between Windows and Mac versions, they've been good about releasing software for both platforms at the same time. I shouldn't be worried about that.
It's more a security thing for littler kids who are at risk of abduction -- when they have to walk to and from school, for example, or run errands, or go outside to a friend's house. I can see this being a big seller for parents with the money to spare and who want to make sure their kids can enjoy a reasonable amount of freedom without watching them every single hour.
Amazon.com will be selling a triple pack of those three Ghibli films when they're released all at once, for $63 (instead of $90 separately at your local Suncoast).
For those who didn't watch: Ice Age, Lilo & Stitch, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Treasure Planet.
I can only claim to have seen two of these, but I think I can say that "Lilo & Stitch" was the only worthwhile competition in this category. Still, it should rightly be considered remarkable that a dubbed foreign film won in this category, especially since Disney put almost no effort into promoting this film when it was released.
And on that note, it looks like Miyazaki's film "Castle in the Sky" will be released in the US on DVD at the same time as "Spirited Away", both of which should get a lot more attention from Disney now than they did last calendar year. Hey, whatever works....
Any solution that involves paying for something that used to be "free" is not going to catch on.
Don't be silly, paying for things that used to be free is how the internet economy survived to become the thriving, economic powerhouse it is... um... today... er, that is....
Well, maybe you're right.
Just as In Soviet Russia, when the system fails to work it's ALWAYS a matter of the inadequacy and weaknesses of the human users.
In Soviet Russia, computer software debugs YOU!
Long gone are the days where one could buy a simple 'Turbo' this or 'Visual' that compiler for $99.95. And along with that, goes much of the supportive development by independent programmers and small companies.
Good. The shareware archives at Tucows and Download.com are filled to the gills with badly-written, badly-designed "applications" created by people who think a Microsoft wizard is the best way to create software. IMO, writing any application (at least one that's meant to be used by people other than you, on your PC) SHOULD require a few thousand dollars, a two-year class in programming, or the skill to debug and compile from the command line -- if not all three.
Creating any amount of computer code ought to be difficult, in direct proportion to the amount of damage it can inflict. The last thing we need is yet another screen saver showing nude photos of America's latest "it" girl while it quietly reformats the user's hard drive.
I've always found it strange that people complain about remembering "all those digits". 90% of the phone numbers I memorize break down into just four numbers: the three-digit area code, the three-digit prefix (both of which are often reused) and two two-digit numbers (i.e. forty-five and sixty-seven instead of four-five-six-seven). Add a number one at the beginning and that's only five numbers to memorize.
It's easier than it sounds. New Yorkers will have to memorize only, what, three or four area codes? Which they've probably memorized already. Most three-digit prefixes are reused often, and those that aren't can be broken into a one-digit and two-digit number. Two-digit numbers are easy to remember if you think of them as years ('45 = 1945) and associate them with some event in that year, like a birthday or some larger historical occurrence.
Of course, I know that it's sooooooo painful to type those extra four digits every time you want to call someone. Geez louise, did people whine this much when cable networks began using three-digit channel numbers?
NPR is the best thing in radio today, as far as I'm concerned. I know that most of the public radio stations in existence are classical programming, but out of Peoria and Bloomington, IL I can get a superb jazz station. Five days a week I get news during rush hour and jazz in the morning and most of the evenings, plus blues and a little more variety on the weekends. The classical NPR station nearby plays jazz programming on the weekends as well. And except during their biannual fundraising drives, they're commercial-free. It's not like XM where I have dozens of choices of formats, but at least it's the one format I enjoy the most. I'd much rather pay them my $10/month than XM, if only because they're that much more likely to be around three years from now.
Imagine constructing a bridge out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of custom-fabricated tiny parts that have to fit together exactly right or the whole thing collapses.
Sounds like the Golden Gate to me. Or the Tacoma Narrows, which is as good an analogy to Microsoft server software as I can possibly imagine.
People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?'
Because they're not analogous. Bridges are designed to be used for decades, if not centuries, by hundreds and thousands of people and vehicles without anything more than routine maintenance. The closest equivalent in the technology industry would be the mainframe computer.
"Ordinary" software, the kind meant to be used by consumers on their current PC which will be constantly upgraded, routinely unsecured and replaced within five years at best, is more like a gravel-top driveway with grass growing underneath.
On one occasion an expert in system administration stood up to test Linus. "Teacher," he asked, "what must I do to obtain 99.9999% uptime?"
"What is written in the FAQ?" Linus replied. "How do you read it?"
He answered: "'Keep your kernel constantly patched, and secure your unused ports, and always keep an off-site backup'; and, 'Always share your code freely with your fellow developers.'"
"You have answered correctly," Linus replied. "Do this and your system will remain up."
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Linus, "And who is my fellow developer?"
In reply Linus said: "A man was going down from Seattle to San Francisco to an open source conference, when he fell into the hands of wardrivers. They stripped him of his firewall, formatted his system disk and went away, leaving him unable to access even his webmail.
"An MCSE-certified consultant happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he flashed his headlights and passed by in the other lane.
"So too, an Oracle salesman, when he came to the place and saw him, accelerated his BMW and passed by in the other lane.
"But a Unix developer, as he traveled, came to where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and reinstalled his kernel, pulling out book floppys and data restore CDs. Then he put the man on his own wireless network, took him to SourceForge and upgraded his firewall.
"The next day (for it was a slow network connection) he took out two silver CD-Rs and gave them to the man. 'It is a custom distribution,' he said, 'and should keep you up and running until you can get to your own restore tapes. And here is my SMS number if you need any help on how to install it.'
"Which of these three do you think was a fellow developer to the man who fell into the hands of the wardrivers?"
The expert in system administration replied, "The one who shared his distribution without cost or consulting fees."
Linus told him, "Go and do likewise."
Luke 10:25-37, Revised Internet Version
I'm waiting for the day when someone decides to threaten the software security agencies into silence, claiming "it's a feature, not a bug" and the DMCA gives them the right to silence public discussion about how to exploit the flaw.
Hey, if Wal-Mart can invoke it because people are pre-announcing their sale prices....
There's a theory that abductions are hypnagogic sleep paralysis but to say it as an undeniable fact it just bad science tied to arrogance.
All right: by combining Occam's Razor with the fact that evidence of alien abductions are anecdotal at best, while HSP is well-researched and documented, we can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that most or all reports of alien abductions, aren't.
Satisfied?
Denibian slime worms would more interesting.
Considering how much time our university employees spend researching every last minutae of terrestrial life, archaeology, biology, chemistry, etc. etc., I can accept this as plausible.
Why should we assume the entire alien species is interested in us? These are probably just some interplanetary grad students out to get their Ph.D. completed as quickly as possible so they can get on with their careers.
Myself, I was rather appauled by the use of Steven Speilberg so prominently. Each of these episodes was directed by a different director, then Speilberg looked it over and tried to alter it ever so slightly IN THE POST PRODUCTION!
As I understand it, the miniseries was basically Spielberg's brainchild. Even if he wasn't responsible for the actual directing, it still came from his head. Credit is due.