Just out of curiosity, do you get any benefit from this setup? I'm probably just not getting it, but what advantage is there to having both your NICs share the same MAC?
Saying the Sega Saturn was superior to the Sony Playstation is somewhat like saying Vipers are better than the Concord. They were two systems created with two seperate goals in mind.
The Sega Saturn was one of the best machines for 2D graphics that has been made. Sega basically took the gamble that gamers would prefer to have beautiful 2D masterpieces than these "newfangled" 3D games. It should also be noted that programming for a multiprocessor system is often more difficult that programming for a single processor system, and the Saturn was notorious among game developers for it's difficulty to program. (That's the reason why the Dreamcast went with a moderately simple architecture and was compatible with WinCE, but that's another story)
Sony, on the other hand, felt that 3D was the way to go. The system was designed with playing 3D games in mind, and was fairly good at that (for it's time). 2D games on the PSX looked worse than their Saturn counterparts, and 3D games on the Saturn were rarely anything to brag about.
The end result? New 3D games that looked better (or only ran) on the PSX were preferred by gamers to 2D games that ran better on the Saturn, but often ran on both systems. Certainly marketing's influence on the situation cannot be ignored, but a well marketed system with no good games will still be simply a system with no good games (Jaguar, anyone?)
Man, it's like the editors of Slashdot are posting this story as bait for every troll to come out and post a goatse.cx link.
Or the hordes of people posting the old adage of "All advances in technology are driving by a desire for easier access to pornography."
So be warned, any link that a post in this thread links to could conceivably redirect you to a dreaded goatse.cx link. Click on things at your own risk.
Actually, there's another quasi-legal use for these various p2p services. Fansubbed anime.
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, to put it simply, anime is basically a catch-all word for cartoons made in Japan, and many of them have a very big following in America. Often, an American translation company will license anime from it's creator in Japan, translate it, and sell it here. But not every anime gets translated (or some just take a really long time before they're licensed), and so the fans take it upon themselves to do the translations. For the most part, distributing these fansubs for an anime that has not been licensed for American release is considered ok.
Of course, these are fans doing the translations, and they very rarely have the money for full-time servers, and massive amounts of bandwidth, to allow everyone to download from their own servers. So these get distributed via p2p services (and IRC, too), which is fairly cheap and easy.
So remember: just because you don't see any legal uses for a program/service/technology, doesn't mean legal uses exist. I'm sure there are other examples, but this is one that I am familiar with.
If you read the article, you will see quite clearly that Windows is not the only thing blamed for the errors. First and foremost were the problems by the people running the polls. Apparently the ones in the county that had the most problems (only one county, not all of them) hadn't had all the training necessary to operate these machines.
Also note that the machines that had the problems had not received the most recent updates from the vendor, whereas the machines that worked well did have the most recent updates. So the fact is, the company must be doing some good QA work to get the upgrades ready in time, but upgrading machines across a whole state, and training workers across a whole state, takes time.
And lastly, the person who blames the problems on Windows was not a spokesperson for the company; he was a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office. I highly doubt he's qualified to make any sort of pronouncement as to the technical cause of these problems. Hell, he may have just been told that there were problems with the unpatched versions of the software running the machines, and assumed that the software running the machines was Windows. Nowhere do I see an official for the company that makes these machines blaming Windows, although I agree with a previous poster in that Windows is probably overkill for a situation like this.
Also, I think a receipt would be a good idea, with both the voter and the polls office keeping a copy so a manual count can be performed if necessary. That would make a good intermediate step before going to a totally paperless voting system.
Here are some other numbers that your perspective employee may or may not answer:
69: If they choose this number, only hire them if you are running a pornography business.
666: If they choose this number, immediately hire them, and send them to your legal department. Many companies are already following this same practice. (As a side note, you may also want to send some of these people to your accounting department, as in the case of WorldCom and Enron)
Any number greater than the salary you are planning on offering them: Laugh, and then tell them that only the people in management get those kind of salaries, not the programmers!
Well, if the performance was ruined by one person's cell phone going off, then it probably wasn't that great to begin with. Seriously, if you've just seen a play/musical/movie, and the only thing memorable about it was the guy who's cellphone went off 30 minutes into the show, then it wasn't a good show to begin with.
You should be thanking that guy, at least he made sure SOMETHING was memorable about the show!
It appears very few people like to follow your advice about avoiding 3d shooters while drunk. And, according to this article, the ones who aren't playing drunk are playing stoned/rolling/on speed/etc.
What about that new game I've heard about that's put out by the US Army? From what I've heard, the killing that IS involved isn't very gory, and the emphasis is much more on strategy and working together to accomplish mission objectives, rather than the typical "shoot everything that moves" FPS. And, seeing as it's made by the US Army, it seems like parents would be less likely to complain. It's also free (as in beer).
Of course, I've never actually played the game, so it might not be any fun, which is the most important factor in any game.
Really, just what does qualify as having a French language version of the page? Assuming the page doesn't have a whole lot of text within picture files, would they be able to just provide a link that would run their page through Babelfish? It might not necessarily be the best translation, but usually Babelfish manages to get the point across. And they don't really even care how good the translation is, seeing as their target customer are English speakers, the only people who will see the translation will be these "Tongue Troops" who will probably just do a short check to make sure that there is a French-language version.
However, if the page is heavy on text-in-pictures, or the Babelfish translation is ruled to be unacceptable, then this really is unfair. Small businesses can rarely afford to do time-consuming tasks (like translation), especially when this will provide no additional revenue.
I am going to be entering college next year, and within the next few months I will have to make a decision as to where I will go. How can I go about finding out about these network policies? What about policies that are on the books vs. policies that are actually enforced? Who should I ask, and what questions should I ask?
Aside from asking people at the college, are there other outside organizations I can check with who keep track of these things?
This is now only going to encourage MORE piracy in France. Once people realize they're basically already paying a fine to compensate artists for piracy. So if they're already giving money to the artists for that, there's no reason to give money to the artists again. Now those few people who felt it was morally wrong to download songs from Napster will no longer have a moral objection. No one's gonna pay for something twice if they can get away with only paying for it once.
Yet another brilliant move by the French government
Yes, those things exist (one's sitting in my closet right now) They were fairly common, but they're kind of old now; if you call a few stores that specialize in old games, you'll likely find one.
As for wiring it up, that's really easy, because it's already been done. Check out the SNESpad website, which has all the instructions one needs to wire up a nes or snes or almost any other type of console controller for use as a regular joystick, as well as drivers, I believe they mention a linux driver as well. The connection is extremely simple to do.
Using something like this, it should not be too difficult to very cheaply allow yourself a few extra buttons you can use with your feet.
Most people have posted saying this is copy protection, but that doesn't make sense: the guy says this only happens on widescreen dvds; if it were copy protection, it should appear on ALL dvds.
Of course, I don't have any other idea what might be causing the problem. Have you tried watching the problematic dvds with your card under windows or linux or any other OS? Could just be a problem with the BeOS driver, I guess.
There are currently two ways which MP3 players are claiming to be SDMI compliant. The first is, as stated above, to require that the user upgrade the firmware the first time an SDMI watermarked file is loaded into the player.
The other way players are currently being made SDMI Compliant is to make sure that files can only be transferred one way; you can download your mp3s to your player all you want, but you're not allowed to upload those back to your (or someone elses) computer. In the case of the common 64 meg players, this wouldn't be too much of an issue; zip drives/other removable media/cdrs/broadband etc are slowly but surely becoming common enough so that there are better ways to move those mp3s around.
The only time the inability to upload really becomes an issue is with the hard drive based, 6 gigabyte mp3 players. Those make a great way to give your favorite mp3s to a friend, and of course the RIAA doesn't want that. Of course, with 6 gigs of mp3s, it doesn't seem too farfetched that one would delete some files from your computer after loading up the mp3 player, and only later would the user realize that, *surprise*, they can't get those back on their computer from the mp3 player.
The point that was being made had nothing to do with what operating system was being used. The point was, going after the OS and ftp server software is the same logic that the RIAA has in going after Napster rather than the users of Napster.
Re:Given how cheap DVD drives are, does this matte
on
Copying A DVD To A CD?
·
· Score: 1
Well, I can only really think of two uses for this, and only one is arguably legit. First, some could say they want to back up their dvds. Since DVD-r's aren't common or cheap, this is much more affordable. Nearly every ad for a computer I've seen ships with a dvd drive and a cd-rw drive. I've heard (although I may be wrong, I don't own a dvd drive/player) that dvds are much more succeptable to scratches than cds are, so it may be good to have a cd backup.
The other use is what it will undoubtedly be used more for, and that's quite obviously to do what the MPAA said all along was going to be the use of DeCSS: to illegally copy movies. I sure can see going to blockbuster, renting a few movies, and making a copy of them, although it's still not as useful or as easy as just making a copy of a vhs tape.
While I certainly can't tell you their exact reasoning behind this, I can come up with a few possibilities.
Lets say a particular movie was extremely popular in America, but was not nearly as popular somewhere else, let's say Europe. So in America, they charge as much as they can (of course, actually setting the prices would be illegal, so they charge the retailers more), because people will pay the prices. However, in Europe, they are still trying to promote this movie, because the sequel is coming out in a couple of months. So you provide the movie much more cheaply over there. The only way they can get away with this is if the copy they sell in Europe won't work here.
Another possibility is that when translating a movie, there is content that generally speaking is acceptable in one culture, but wouldn't be acceptable in another. So they want to make sure the movie is culturally acceptable in the places where it is seen. After all, wouldn't want some American reporter to see a movie from some other region, and report it as being the worst movie they've ever seen, because of cultural differences. So even though there are individuals within the culture who would want to see the complete, original movie, they aren't allowed to because the possible bad press of an unacceptable movie would hurt sales too much.
I don't know if either of these are actually their reasoning, but it seems logical to me.
I'm a high school student, and I can think of plenty of projects I'd enjoy doing at school, many of which have been mentioned on Slashdot. I don't know if these would be appropriate for your class, but they're interesting computer-related projects:
WWWPic2 mentioned here a few weeks ago. This would also include building the Picprog Pic programmer.
We all know that "Box" is a synonym for Cube. For years, Be has sold their BeBox, and Microsoft will soon be selling their X-Box. Both of these are obviously infringing upon Cobolt's trademark
If Cobolt does somehow manage to win or at least get a settlement, it could provide a reason for Be to sue Microsoft over the X "Box"
Slashdot Mirror
Just outta curiousity, did you send /. a bill for the time it took you to write up that post?
On second thought, you probably shouldn't reply to this...I'm a poor college student, and I doubt I can afford the reply.
Is there an acronym for "Get a sense of humor"? If not, I propose we use "GASOH", unless anyone has any better suggestions.
Just out of curiosity, do you get any benefit from this setup? I'm probably just not getting it, but what advantage is there to having both your NICs share the same MAC?
But seriously though, Linus should take into consideration the fact that he is not mortal...
Now lots of Linux fanboys are going to mod you up because they won't get any further than that line in your comment.
If I hack into a server running one of these, am I a Dragon Warrior?
Better yet, if I run Windows on one and it crashes, does that make me a Dragon Slayer?
Saying the Sega Saturn was superior to the Sony Playstation is somewhat like saying Vipers are better than the Concord. They were two systems created with two seperate goals in mind.
The Sega Saturn was one of the best machines for 2D graphics that has been made. Sega basically took the gamble that gamers would prefer to have beautiful 2D masterpieces than these "newfangled" 3D games. It should also be noted that programming for a multiprocessor system is often more difficult that programming for a single processor system, and the Saturn was notorious among game developers for it's difficulty to program. (That's the reason why the Dreamcast went with a moderately simple architecture and was compatible with WinCE, but that's another story)
Sony, on the other hand, felt that 3D was the way to go. The system was designed with playing 3D games in mind, and was fairly good at that (for it's time). 2D games on the PSX looked worse than their Saturn counterparts, and 3D games on the Saturn were rarely anything to brag about.
The end result? New 3D games that looked better (or only ran) on the PSX were preferred by gamers to 2D games that ran better on the Saturn, but often ran on both systems. Certainly marketing's influence on the situation cannot be ignored, but a well marketed system with no good games will still be simply a system with no good games (Jaguar, anyone?)
Man, it's like the editors of Slashdot are posting this story as bait for every troll to come out and post a goatse.cx link.
Or the hordes of people posting the old adage of "All advances in technology are driving by a desire for easier access to pornography."
So be warned, any link that a post in this thread links to could conceivably redirect you to a dreaded goatse.cx link. Click on things at your own risk.
Actually, there's another quasi-legal use for these various p2p services. Fansubbed anime.
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, to put it simply, anime is basically a catch-all word for cartoons made in Japan, and many of them have a very big following in America. Often, an American translation company will license anime from it's creator in Japan, translate it, and sell it here. But not every anime gets translated (or some just take a really long time before they're licensed), and so the fans take it upon themselves to do the translations. For the most part, distributing these fansubs for an anime that has not been licensed for American release is considered ok.
Of course, these are fans doing the translations, and they very rarely have the money for full-time servers, and massive amounts of bandwidth, to allow everyone to download from their own servers. So these get distributed via p2p services (and IRC, too), which is fairly cheap and easy.
So remember: just because you don't see any legal uses for a program/service/technology, doesn't mean legal uses exist. I'm sure there are other examples, but this is one that I am familiar with.
If you read the article, you will see quite clearly that Windows is not the only thing blamed for the errors. First and foremost were the problems by the people running the polls. Apparently the ones in the county that had the most problems (only one county, not all of them) hadn't had all the training necessary to operate these machines.
Also note that the machines that had the problems had not received the most recent updates from the vendor, whereas the machines that worked well did have the most recent updates. So the fact is, the company must be doing some good QA work to get the upgrades ready in time, but upgrading machines across a whole state, and training workers across a whole state, takes time.
And lastly, the person who blames the problems on Windows was not a spokesperson for the company; he was a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office. I highly doubt he's qualified to make any sort of pronouncement as to the technical cause of these problems. Hell, he may have just been told that there were problems with the unpatched versions of the software running the machines, and assumed that the software running the machines was Windows. Nowhere do I see an official for the company that makes these machines blaming Windows, although I agree with a previous poster in that Windows is probably overkill for a situation like this.
Also, I think a receipt would be a good idea, with both the voter and the polls office keeping a copy so a manual count can be performed if necessary. That would make a good intermediate step before going to a totally paperless voting system.
69: If they choose this number, only hire them if you are running a pornography business.
666: If they choose this number, immediately hire them, and send them to your legal department. Many companies are already following this same practice.
(As a side note, you may also want to send some of these people to your accounting department, as in the case of WorldCom and Enron)
Any number greater than the salary you are planning on offering them: Laugh, and then tell them that only the people in management get those kind of salaries, not the programmers!
Well, if the performance was ruined by one person's cell phone going off, then it probably wasn't that great to begin with. Seriously, if you've just seen a play/musical/movie, and the only thing memorable about it was the guy who's cellphone went off 30 minutes into the show, then it wasn't a good show to begin with.
You should be thanking that guy, at least he made sure SOMETHING was memorable about the show!
It appears very few people like to follow your advice about avoiding 3d shooters while drunk. And, according to this article, the ones who aren't playing drunk are playing stoned/rolling/on speed/etc.
Hrm, maybe they're on to something....
Of course, I've never actually played the game, so it might not be any fun, which is the most important factor in any game.
However, if the page is heavy on text-in-pictures, or the Babelfish translation is ruled to be unacceptable, then this really is unfair. Small businesses can rarely afford to do time-consuming tasks (like translation), especially when this will provide no additional revenue.
Aside from asking people at the college, are there other outside organizations I can check with who keep track of these things?
Yet another brilliant move by the French government
It's time to start hoarding cd-r's now? Hrm...guess I should take some cash and buy a few hundred blank cds from the local CompUSA.
As for wiring it up, that's really easy, because it's already been done. Check out the SNESpad website, which has all the instructions one needs to wire up a nes or snes or almost any other type of console controller for use as a regular joystick, as well as drivers, I believe they mention a linux driver as well. The connection is extremely simple to do.
Using something like this, it should not be too difficult to very cheaply allow yourself a few extra buttons you can use with your feet.
Of course, I don't have any other idea what might be causing the problem. Have you tried watching the problematic dvds with your card under windows or linux or any other OS? Could just be a problem with the BeOS driver, I guess.
Good luck figuring out what's wrong.
The other way players are currently being made SDMI Compliant is to make sure that files can only be transferred one way; you can download your mp3s to your player all you want, but you're not allowed to upload those back to your (or someone elses) computer. In the case of the common 64 meg players, this wouldn't be too much of an issue; zip drives/other removable media/cdrs/broadband etc are slowly but surely becoming common enough so that there are better ways to move those mp3s around.
The only time the inability to upload really becomes an issue is with the hard drive based, 6 gigabyte mp3 players. Those make a great way to give your favorite mp3s to a friend, and of course the RIAA doesn't want that. Of course, with 6 gigs of mp3s, it doesn't seem too farfetched that one would delete some files from your computer after loading up the mp3 player, and only later would the user realize that, *surprise*, they can't get those back on their computer from the mp3 player.
The point that was being made had nothing to do with what operating system was being used. The point was, going after the OS and ftp server software is the same logic that the RIAA has in going after Napster rather than the users of Napster.
The other use is what it will undoubtedly be used more for, and that's quite obviously to do what the MPAA said all along was going to be the use of DeCSS: to illegally copy movies. I sure can see going to blockbuster, renting a few movies, and making a copy of them, although it's still not as useful or as easy as just making a copy of a vhs tape.
Lets say a particular movie was extremely popular in America, but was not nearly as popular somewhere else, let's say Europe. So in America, they charge as much as they can (of course, actually setting the prices would be illegal, so they charge the retailers more), because people will pay the prices. However, in Europe, they are still trying to promote this movie, because the sequel is coming out in a couple of months. So you provide the movie much more cheaply over there. The only way they can get away with this is if the copy they sell in Europe won't work here.
Another possibility is that when translating a movie, there is content that generally speaking is acceptable in one culture, but wouldn't be acceptable in another. So they want to make sure the movie is culturally acceptable in the places where it is seen. After all, wouldn't want some American reporter to see a movie from some other region, and report it as being the worst movie they've ever seen, because of cultural differences. So even though there are individuals within the culture who would want to see the complete, original movie, they aren't allowed to because the possible bad press of an unacceptable movie would hurt sales too much.
I don't know if either of these are actually their reasoning, but it seems logical to me.
WWWPic2 mentioned here a few weeks ago. This would also include building the Picprog Pic programmer.
Or what about building the Flash Carts for Gameboy, mentioned here.
Do the students at your school use TI-8x calculators? If so, there's lots of oppurtunities at Ticalc.org.
I hope you find some of these ideas useful.
If Cobolt does somehow manage to win or at least get a settlement, it could provide a reason for Be to sue Microsoft over the X "Box"