Cameras should work as advertised out of the box without tweaking. If the camera doesn't have the features you want then buy a different camera.
Unless by hacking the camera I can reveal the ability to fine tune the exposure time or the arpeture of a point and shoot camera, I really don't care. And I highly doubt that a "cheap" point and shoot has the mechanics to support fractional to multiple second exposure times. Or the ability to have a greater brightness setting.
So, even if I could hack it, I couldn't do anything useful.
If I really want a professional camera that has such features, I just have to buy one.
There's just not enough that a camera does to warrent messing with what the company puts on it by default. The limitations of a digital camera are purely mechanical. Not software induced. You can't hack the software and get a better CCD or a better lens or better refresh time.
With Open Source the vast majority of the work is done by unpaid volunteers while the people at the top of the project get all the money. This is the way it is with communism. Those in charge get all the money/power while all the actual work is done by the masses for little to no pay.
With commercial software, those at the top make the most money but all those who work on it get paid a livable wage. This is how it is with captialism. There is no minimum wage for Open Source work. It can even cost people money out of their own pocket (negative income) to contribute. With closed source, the rich people at the top take the risk with the money, not the workers. With open source, it's the people on the bottom that take the risk.
This is one of the reasons why people consider Open Source communism. Whether or not it's a bad thing is up to those involved.
If you want to spend your own money to support an open source project and risk not getting it back, that's your business. If you want to work for no pay on a project that's valued at billions of dollars, that's your business.
There's been a slump in the computer sector due to the massive roll out around 2000. Not too many people buy a new computer within a couple years. It wouldn't surprise me if most people were still using the systems they bought 4 years ago. If they're using XP, it's a software upgrade only.
When XP came out my dad, a programmer for a large corporation, eventually bought a new computer from Dell with XP on it about a year ago. His previous system was a 350Mhz Dell. A programmer myself, my top system is a 1.2Ghz Duron running Win2K. I've had it for a couple years.
When Longhorn comes out it's time for an upgrade anyway and most people are going to buy prebuilt systems. Those prebuilt systems will have a (barely) sufficient graphics card.
GeForce FX 5500's are well under $100 already. In a couple years when Windows needs that kind of card to run, they'll be dirt cheap and onboard.
And it'll be just in time for when people are looking to upgrade their computer hardware anyway.
Complaining that MS is forcing upgrades is as silly as claiming ID Software forces hardware upgrades. I still use 2000, could use 98 if I wanted. I could also play Wolfenstein 3D and stick to a 386. Something needs to drive the market. If there was no need for better hardware, there'd be no better hardware. It's all artificially driven anyway. There's no objective reason why we need fancy pants graphics in any software. There's no objective reason we need high quality, drive space/CPU/Memory eating, audio/video.
In short, who cares that MS is making greater graphics demands for it's OS? They've done this with every release. Even Linux is making greater and greater demands. If you want the all the graphics pizzaz of Windows 3.11, use Windows 3.11. Some of us like an OS that looks "pretty."
If you want a plain text OS, then use DOS or ditch the GUI of Linux and have fun.
Kind of hard to keep a low profile with an @secretservice.gov e-mail account.
If you want to come off as just another guy on the net then you use common civilian services.
And it wouldn't surprise me if they use free e-mail accounts either. You can either hide in the shadows by running their own domains and whatnot or they can hide in the crowd and use popular e-mail services.
"Are Gov IT cutbacks so severe they have to turn to places like this to send messages?"
Yes because this is obviously the only service they use to send messages/sarcasm
The problem is putting the camera directly on the wire. This gives them an external IP address. Places should be using an internal network with a router to connect the cameras. That way the main systems used to watch the cameras can get on the internet and do whatever but the cameras have a 192.168.0.X or something IP that can only be accessed from the outside if the router is set up to foward the port.
Unless the cameras are intended for public viewing they should not be given an external IP.
I always type up all the personal information rebates demand and then staple all the pieces together. This way it's entirely readable and impossible to lose except as a complete package.
I've yet to not get a rebate using this method.
"I didn't think that would actually work (I was just very irritated), but I got my rebate a week later."
Companies that understand that pissed off customers should not be ignored are quite rare. NewEgg tried to screw me and then ignore me and it cost them almost $200 on that incident alone and nearly a blackmark with the Better Business Beurau. I havn't ordered anything from them since which is well over a year now. I don't think twice about warning people about them either.
I bought a low cost Bow Technology 1U server case and in less than a month the PSU died. Since I'd gone through NewEgg, I figured it'd be nice and easy. I called up, they said they'd be happy to let me just send in the PSU (there's no way I'm shutting down my business over a PSU and had already put a temporary ATX PSU in it's place). 2 Weeks later I hear nothing from them. They had told me to ship the PSU next day and they'd next day the replacement. I checked the RMA and it turns out they're expecting an ATX PSU for some reason. I pointed out the error and after multiple phone calls they finally changed the RMA but still no PSU. Now they want the whole case. I tell them no way and they give me some lie about not having the case in stock anymore (meanwhile the site clearly states the cases will be in stock in a couple days).
Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied." Uh, no I'm not. So we call the BBB and tell them we're not at all satisfied as we've got no refund and no PSU.
NewEgg finally pulls their head out of their butt and refunds the entire cost of the case. I had also got the shipping costs refunded for shipping the PSU to them. What's really pathetic is that we called Bow Technology and they had no idea what NewEgg was doing as BT is more than happy to eat the cost of the PSU. NewEgg had zero reason to try to give me the shaft. It wouldn't cost them a dime to replace the part.
NewEgg lost well over $100 on that stupidity alone and I've never bought another part from them. That was over a year ago. Fortunatly my ISP was really cool and allowed my colocated server to run with the top off and an ATX PSU towering over it. Other ISPs would not be so kind.
NewEgg may be nice when things go right but when things go wrong they're idiots. I've found that's the case with quite a few companies.
They're barely off my shit list only because they gave me more than I wanted (I just wanted the PSU), but I'll have to exhaust other options before shopping with them again. This entire episode lasted 3 months and didn't affect me at all. My server was only down from the time the PSU died till I put in the ATX PSU which was only a span of about 2 hours.
I've written dozens of tutorials on software rendering (and am writing more) and this is the license I use for the code:
--------------- This code is free as in freedom. Nobody had to die for it, true, but you are in no way restricted in what you do with the code. You can even reimplement the code and call it your own without worrying about violating some kind of imaginary rights you think I have. You can use this code without giving up your right to do as you please with your own code that you have written. You are not forced to deny the reality that everything you do is based on something and you do not have an automatic legal obligation to give credit to every source of ideas you come across in your lifetime.
You may freely use and distribute the code presented in these tutorials under any license EXCEPT the GPL or any other license which denies authors their right to do as they please with their own code. You will never have to disclose this source or any source based on this code. For example, if you use any of the code in these tutorials to make a product and you release the product under the GPL, that license is null and void and the code to your product will be PUBLIC DOMAIN until you come up with another license to release it under that does not violate the rights of another person who may come across your work and learn from it. This code may not be used in conjunction with any GPL (or similar license) code due to their restrictive nature that directly conflicts with this license agreement and what it is to be free.
Unless you make significant changes to the provided code such that it is unrecognizable as my own you must provide credit somewhere that is visible to the user. I imagine you've written at least one research paper and understand the difference between plagerism and expressing your own ideas based on what you learned from a source or few.
You may NOT redistribute the tutorials. They are Copyright Icarus Independent 2004. If you like what you see, please link to them. Do not copy them. You may only redistribute the source code presented as subject to the above terms. ------------
I have an 80(OS), 120(database) and 160GB(content) (all Seagate) drive in my home server and about half a million files that are being served up. The ringtone site alone is about 4GB with well over 100,000 files.
The 160GB drive took a massive beating (and promptly died) when the virus scan went nuts and was scanning 1 million files an hour. I was able to recover all the files from the drive using GetDataBack NTFS, format the drive and put it back into use.
Standard ATA drives are quite reliable for handling small (visitor count wise) sites. Having a single 500GB drive makes it real easy to do a complete backup of a large site spread out over smaller drives.
However, since Seagate drives have proven themselves the most resilient of all the drives I've used, I'll wait until a 500GB Seagate drive exists and is within my price range.
This is the flaw of "Gattaca." It assumes that all beautiful and intelligent people want the same thing. This is actually a myth propogated by universities that have a hard time accepting that smart people don't all want to go there and get "proper" jobs. As Kumar said "just because you're hung like a horse doesn't mean you want to work in porn." One kid actually is fighting a university to be able to become a pumber in Philedelphia because the pay is better than a programmer. The university is insisting he use his brains to be an engineer. As though plumbing isn't engineering and as simple as putting pipes together.
The intelligence level of a trucker varies from sub average to genius. Same with garbage truck drivers and plumbers. Gattaca is a dumb movie (besides ignoring decades of legislation concerning discrimination) that's an insult to the working man. It assumes that all people who don't have this "perfect job" are miserable and stupid.
Clue time, plumbers, garbage people, construction workers, sometimes actually like their job and are very intelligent. Not all beautiful people want to be models. Not all smart people want to work at NASA.
A kid I knew who's very bright ("A" student throughout high school and a skilled musican) went and drove an ice cream truck for awhile because he wanted to. I know a girl who could be a model who does flooring.
Stories like "Brave New World" fail to look at the world we live in and see very smart people who want to be a garbage name, raise children, maintain the water suppy and work the fields and in the real world, actually make that choice.
Only in fallacious imaginary words do all smart and beauitful people want the same thing.
I wish my stock (AVN) would split that often for no good reason. AVN gets good news from successful drug trials and barely budges.
Infinium looks like it might be good for day trading if you have money to throw away. When the stock is trading under $1 and losing money it's a really bad sign. It's also "over the counter" which means it's not actually being traded on the major markets.
I would need really good positive information before putting anything on it. At this point it's pure gambling since the value of the stock is based purely on investors and not on any sort of product and consumer market value. There's no product for people to buy to raise the value of the stock. The only product is the stock itself.
If some other browser gets the marketshare then MSN loses exposure which costs MS ad revenue.
FireFox doesn't offer anything that MS can't offer in IE. It's also far easier to recreate than to innovate. This is why they aren't too worried. It's simply an issue of economic viability as to whether or not MS will implement those features and push the updates out the door.
Smart people find easy ways to do things,
on
What's Wrong with Unix?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
they don't keep whittling toothpicks out of redwoods because it makes them look like skilled carpenters. The cotton gin would never have been invented by a person such as you describe. They'd find great intellectual pride in doing the job by hand.
With open source software it's very rare that the product a) does exactly what you want and b) works perfectly out of the box. As a result, using OSS requires two primary considerations; what's missing and what's broken. You then have to consider the time it's going to take to fix the bugs and add in the custom features you need.
And time is money. I only consider my web-site profitable now because the costs are met by the revenue. This is mostly due to some clever rearranging of resources. However, the amount the site brings in doesn't come close to meeting what I make per hour at my job. If I claimed some kind of salary I'd be waaaay in the red. Instead of bobbing gently in the black.
Free time is a mostly fictional concept. There is always a cost associated with how you spend your time. Time you spend behind a computer costs you time you could be spending with friends and family. The only time I consider free are the hours from midnight to 10am. Only the time you cut from sleep I consider free time.
It's extra time to be alive and experience something that normally you'd be oblivious to.
That's the question you ask about penny stocks. I bought Avanir (AVN) at $1.76 way back in march because they have interesting products (their next big one is set to hit the market within 6 months) and their stock history shows a decent pattern of ups and downs. The stock is now worth ~$3.40
SCO got a very large burst when they started flaunting lawsuits and whatnot. But if that's all they've got in their bag they're screwed. If you look at their entire history is a straight line down. Then that little desperate gasp for air and now it's looking grim again.
They need a real product and quick. Otherwise it's not worth the risk to try to make 14% on their crap company.
My guess is that once they lose their current game, SCO will disolve. They're not doing anything interesting enough to make me take the risk. They need a product and quick.
This is however the type of thing to look for. You want to check out companies that are down on their luck. The key is determining if it's more likely that they'll rebound or die. And that requires lots of research before you plop down money screaming "hail mary!"
It's a stupid name regardless of who's offended
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 0, Troll
Apache's name came about because it was "a patchy" server. You actually have to do a bit of research to figure that out. The self deprication gets lost in the perfectly marketable name and pefectly unpatchy modern editions. Tortoise SVN is also a stupid unmarketable name. You have to use it find out that it's not actually slow like it advertises itself as being.
Prior to 2.0 a user could fire up GIMP and realize immediately that it's aptly named after trying to figure out how to use the interface. Things have improved greatly but I still use the name as an adjective for the product due to it's poor interface design.
I don't know who's the genious that decided you can't use the lighting tool and alpha channels on the same image. And you have to create a new image to define the gray scale lighting reference image for the primary image. Meanwhile Adobe Photoshop allows you to use alpha channels to define how the lighting will be applied which is actually logical. Alpha channels are not just for transparency. Gimp also doesn't allow you to go outside the bounds of a layer once defined, even if you move it around so the layer isn't lined up with the viewable canvas area and you want to paint to fill in the now transparent area. Another thing Photoshop has no problem with.
Ironic self depricating names can be overcome if the product can overcome them. In the GIMP's case, it hasn't yet. It's still a bit gimpy.
In fact, you need a browser to download FireFox. Windows also comes in handy for downloading Linux et al and burning them to CD to be installed over Windows.
So bundling IE with Windows makes it unnecessary to choose something else, and facilitates your choice if you choose to change. Likewise, prebundling Windows also facilitates your ability to choose something else.
People choose IE by not using it to replace itself with something else like FireFox. You can choose to build your own system and buy a Linux distro and skip Windows all together.
Not changing browsers due to lack of caring is a choice. You also choose which system you want to buy. If you choose to buy a prebuilt system or choose to buy Windows then you choose to start out your internet experience with IE.
Wolf5K is a Javascript clone of Wolf3D in 5Kbytes. I deobfuscated it and posted a series of tutorials on how it works here. There is also a C++ translation and enhancment series of tutorials here. Full ready to compile source is included for all tutorials.
The task of deobfuscating code is quite tedius but not too daunting. The main thing is getting the whitespace back in so you can see where all the functions begin and end. You then have to understand the language well enough that you can read the code and figure out what's going on without hints from comments or descriptive variables.
For Wolf5K I just started by working on the simple functions first and then by process of elimination worked my way through the code and finished with the raycasting function.
Translating it all to C++ was then quite easy because by then you have a very good grasp of how the code is suppost to work.
I wonder if they test marketed the ad on the Average Joe (not Average Joe Coder) before putting it in the NYT. They should have gotten testimonials from famous people. Not random people from around the world. "That guy in New Zealand says it's good" doesn't sell it to anybody. And may actually hurt the ad.
Anytime I see a random person quoted as claiming a movie is good in an ad, I know it's not. The amount that it's bad can be determined by how many times they mention the same person's name with different parts of his quote. We've all seen those "real movie goer reaction" ads and they're always used for less than stellar movies.
I think they should have gone from quotes from say people who work at IBM or Intel. Or other big names that people recognize.
Or just done away with the quotes and just make it informative.
Should we seek to lower the sentence for this crime or raise the sentence for murder?
One of the problems with murder sentences is that it depends on who you kill. I'd imagine that most murder happens in the inner city between waring gangs.
If a gang member kills another gang member society sees it as a plus for them so they throw a lighter sentence on the guy who pulled the trigger. If they even bother catching the guy and putting him through the court system. However if anyone kills a child or someone deemed pretty by society (see: Laci Peterson), you can bet that the killer is going to get the book thrown at them. Unless the killer is highly sympathetic themselves.
There are just very few "celebrity" murders in the scheme of things and so the average sentence isn't much.
The other problem is the insanity defense. It makes it very difficult to convict someone of murder and get the full sentence if anything at all.
You can't plead temporary insanity for a time period when you were fully capable of hacking into a computer system.
I think 9 years is sufficient and we should start taking murder more seriously and stop feeding loopholes (such as lame excuses about being "temporarily" insane) into the system. Then the average sentence for murder will go up. We try real hard not to throw the book at murderers. 9 year sentences for criminal hackers will also go down fast once it becomes common place and legal excuses are dreamed up by lawyers to get their clients off.
They're going after people who supply illegal torrents. So yes, they're going to win a lot a lawsuits.
BitTorrent has many legal uses. Illegal trackers have exactly one, thouroughly illegal purpose. And those who host them have control over hosting them. It's not a common carrier issue. People who host illegal trackers are directly and deliberatly assisting people in a crime. It's not "just a pointer." If I started going around telling people very publically where to go buy drugs I'd get myself arrested. A pointer is telling people where the gas station is. A criminal pointer is advertising and assisting in finding and aquireing illegal goods.
I don't know where people get this rediculous idea that going after people who publish illegal trackers is an attack on BitTorrent itself. It's not illegal to tell people where the gas station is and nobody pushing these cases is pretending it is.
I guess it just makes it all the more sensational though when people say they are.
The tracker sites are knowningly assisting people who break the law. And an illegal torrent tracker is good only for one single illegal purpose. It's not like Kazaa where the owners of the network have no way to control what gets shared so the RIAA/MPAA go after those who are hosting the files. Tracker sites have direct control regarding which torrents they post and have the ability to remove torrents for illegal files and the ability to screen files. Hosting the torrent is just as bad (or at least bad enough) as hosting the file itself.
And that's why the MPAA/RIAA have legal legs to stand on to shut down torrent sites that operate in the US.
This is no way affects the whole BitTorrent concept. Just don't host torrents for illegal files. I don't know why the article submitter is pretending it does. The MPAA/RIAA aren't attacking the network. They're attacking specific trackers which point at specific files. This is exactly what they should be doing.
"That's like saying let's put the gun in prison instead of the guy that fired it"
False analogy due to not understanding the point of this. This is like putting the guy in prison who hired the hitman who fired the gun.
In high school you aren't using any math that's so advanced you need a computer to do it for you. High school is the time to learn how to do things yourself. College is when you get to start finding tools to do the stuff you used to do by hand by computer to reduce tedium since the object isn't to learn how to solve an algebraic equation for another variable.
High School (especially math) text books are designed to be used with graphing calculators. The book explains what is going on, expects you to do it by hand and then tells you, "oh by the way, these are the buttons you push to do it on a calculator a zillion times faster." If you don't understand what's going on inside the blackbox then you won't know how or when to use it.
It's kind of hard to take a test with a laptop at your desk, much less a desktop loaded with a bunch of software just so the student doesn't have to solve 2+2 on their own. That's why high schools advertise graphing calculators to students.
Stop hurting the students with technology that only cripples their learning experience. If you give them X piece of software and let them use it like a crutch they're only going to know how to do things with X piece of software and be completely lost in the real world.
If you want to be use technology to improve their education, only let them use mathematical tools that they themselves write or only after they demonstrate mastery of the technique with paper and pencil. I understood linear algebra quite a bit better when I personally wrote software that implemented things I was doing by hand. Same with statistics. I learned statistics by writing a very powerful statistics package from scratch using only equations I found on various math web-sites.
Otherwise you're just hiding things they need to know behind black boxes.
Regardless of your political affiliations (this was taken at Bank One Ball Park at the Republican Rally) The Bush Family walking onto the field.
This is an excellent shot for a "cheap" camera and a pair of binoculars. I was sitting in the nose bleeds behind home plate a couple hundred feet from the president.
Before the Pres showed up I was playing around and managed to get a full frame picture of the cop at the opposite end of the ballpark.
I also got the camera to work with a telescope and found it can get crisp images of the moon. It's not sensitive enough to take low light shots so night objects need to be well lit.
My objection to this "review" it the big giant ad for very expensive point and shoot cameras which is unnecessary. I don't know who the audience is for that review or even if the author knows. Digital SLRs can be had for $500 or less. Quality point and shoots can be had for under $200. The A330 is about $180.
The review would have been less junk if the author had bothered to compare pictures taken with various cameras. I know why my old point and shoot sucked (Vivitar something or other). I have plenty of images to showcase where it went wrong. But also a lot to show where it worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Cameras should work as advertised out of the box without tweaking. If the camera doesn't have the features you want then buy a different camera.
Unless by hacking the camera I can reveal the ability to fine tune the exposure time or the arpeture of a point and shoot camera, I really don't care. And I highly doubt that a "cheap" point and shoot has the mechanics to support fractional to multiple second exposure times. Or the ability to have a greater brightness setting.
So, even if I could hack it, I couldn't do anything useful.
If I really want a professional camera that has such features, I just have to buy one.
There's just not enough that a camera does to warrent messing with what the company puts on it by default. The limitations of a digital camera are purely mechanical. Not software induced. You can't hack the software and get a better CCD or a better lens or better refresh time.
With Open Source the vast majority of the work is done by unpaid volunteers while the people at the top of the project get all the money. This is the way it is with communism. Those in charge get all the money/power while all the actual work is done by the masses for little to no pay.
With commercial software, those at the top make the most money but all those who work on it get paid a livable wage. This is how it is with captialism. There is no minimum wage for Open Source work. It can even cost people money out of their own pocket (negative income) to contribute. With closed source, the rich people at the top take the risk with the money, not the workers. With open source, it's the people on the bottom that take the risk.
This is one of the reasons why people consider Open Source communism. Whether or not it's a bad thing is up to those involved.
If you want to spend your own money to support an open source project and risk not getting it back, that's your business. If you want to work for no pay on a project that's valued at billions of dollars, that's your business.
There's been a slump in the computer sector due to the massive roll out around 2000. Not too many people buy a new computer within a couple years. It wouldn't surprise me if most people were still using the systems they bought 4 years ago. If they're using XP, it's a software upgrade only.
When XP came out my dad, a programmer for a large corporation, eventually bought a new computer from Dell with XP on it about a year ago. His previous system was a 350Mhz Dell. A programmer myself, my top system is a 1.2Ghz Duron running Win2K. I've had it for a couple years.
When Longhorn comes out it's time for an upgrade anyway and most people are going to buy prebuilt systems. Those prebuilt systems will have a (barely) sufficient graphics card.
GeForce FX 5500's are well under $100 already. In a couple years when Windows needs that kind of card to run, they'll be dirt cheap and onboard.
And it'll be just in time for when people are looking to upgrade their computer hardware anyway.
Complaining that MS is forcing upgrades is as silly as claiming ID Software forces hardware upgrades. I still use 2000, could use 98 if I wanted. I could also play Wolfenstein 3D and stick to a 386. Something needs to drive the market. If there was no need for better hardware, there'd be no better hardware. It's all artificially driven anyway. There's no objective reason why we need fancy pants graphics in any software. There's no objective reason we need high quality, drive space/CPU/Memory eating, audio/video.
In short, who cares that MS is making greater graphics demands for it's OS? They've done this with every release. Even Linux is making greater and greater demands. If you want the all the graphics pizzaz of Windows 3.11, use Windows 3.11. Some of us like an OS that looks "pretty."
If you want a plain text OS, then use DOS or ditch the GUI of Linux and have fun.
Kind of hard to keep a low profile with an @secretservice.gov e-mail account.
/sarcasm
If you want to come off as just another guy on the net then you use common civilian services.
And it wouldn't surprise me if they use free e-mail accounts either. You can either hide in the shadows by running their own domains and whatnot or they can hide in the crowd and use popular e-mail services.
"Are Gov IT cutbacks so severe they have to turn to places like this to send messages?"
Yes because this is obviously the only service they use to send messages
The problem is putting the camera directly on the wire. This gives them an external IP address. Places should be using an internal network with a router to connect the cameras. That way the main systems used to watch the cameras can get on the internet and do whatever but the cameras have a 192.168.0.X or something IP that can only be accessed from the outside if the router is set up to foward the port.
Unless the cameras are intended for public viewing they should not be given an external IP.
I always type up all the personal information rebates demand and then staple all the pieces together. This way it's entirely readable and impossible to lose except as a complete package.
I've yet to not get a rebate using this method.
"I didn't think that would actually work (I was just very irritated), but I got my rebate a week later."
Companies that understand that pissed off customers should not be ignored are quite rare. NewEgg tried to screw me and then ignore me and it cost them almost $200 on that incident alone and nearly a blackmark with the Better Business Beurau. I havn't ordered anything from them since which is well over a year now. I don't think twice about warning people about them either.
I bought a low cost Bow Technology 1U server case and in less than a month the PSU died. Since I'd gone through NewEgg, I figured it'd be nice and easy. I called up, they said they'd be happy to let me just send in the PSU (there's no way I'm shutting down my business over a PSU and had already put a temporary ATX PSU in it's place). 2 Weeks later I hear nothing from them. They had told me to ship the PSU next day and they'd next day the replacement. I checked the RMA and it turns out they're expecting an ATX PSU for some reason. I pointed out the error and after multiple phone calls they finally changed the RMA but still no PSU. Now they want the whole case. I tell them no way and they give me some lie about not having the case in stock anymore (meanwhile the site clearly states the cases will be in stock in a couple days).
Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied." Uh, no I'm not. So we call the BBB and tell them we're not at all satisfied as we've got no refund and no PSU.
NewEgg finally pulls their head out of their butt and refunds the entire cost of the case. I had also got the shipping costs refunded for shipping the PSU to them. What's really pathetic is that we called Bow Technology and they had no idea what NewEgg was doing as BT is more than happy to eat the cost of the PSU. NewEgg had zero reason to try to give me the shaft. It wouldn't cost them a dime to replace the part.
NewEgg lost well over $100 on that stupidity alone and I've never bought another part from them. That was over a year ago. Fortunatly my ISP was really cool and allowed my colocated server to run with the top off and an ATX PSU towering over it. Other ISPs would not be so kind.
NewEgg may be nice when things go right but when things go wrong they're idiots. I've found that's the case with quite a few companies.
They're barely off my shit list only because they gave me more than I wanted (I just wanted the PSU), but I'll have to exhaust other options before shopping with them again. This entire episode lasted 3 months and didn't affect me at all. My server was only down from the time the PSU died till I put in the ATX PSU which was only a span of about 2 hours.
I've written dozens of tutorials on software rendering (and am writing more) and this is the license I use for the code:
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This code is free as in freedom. Nobody had to die for it, true, but you are in no way restricted in what you do with the code. You can even reimplement the code and call it your own without worrying about violating some kind of imaginary rights you think I have. You can use this code without giving up your right to do as you please with your own code that you have written. You are not forced to deny the reality that everything you do is based on something and you do not have an automatic legal obligation to give credit to every source of ideas you come across in your lifetime.
You may freely use and distribute the code presented in these tutorials under any license EXCEPT the GPL or any other license which denies authors their right to do as they please with their own code. You will never have to disclose this source or any source based on this code. For example, if you use any of the code in these tutorials to make a product and you release the product under the GPL, that license is null and void and the code to your product will be PUBLIC DOMAIN until you come up with another license to release it under that does not violate the rights of another person who may come across your work and learn from it. This code may not be used in conjunction with any GPL (or similar license) code due to their restrictive nature that directly conflicts with this license agreement and what it is to be free.
Unless you make significant changes to the provided code such that it is unrecognizable as my own you must provide credit somewhere that is visible to the user. I imagine you've written at least one research paper and understand the difference between plagerism and expressing your own ideas based on what you learned from a source or few.
You may NOT redistribute the tutorials. They are Copyright Icarus Independent 2004. If you like what you see, please link to them. Do not copy them. You may only redistribute the source code presented as subject to the above terms.
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That's freedom.
I have an 80(OS), 120(database) and 160GB(content) (all Seagate) drive in my home server and about half a million files that are being served up. The ringtone site alone is about 4GB with well over 100,000 files.
The 160GB drive took a massive beating (and promptly died) when the virus scan went nuts and was scanning 1 million files an hour. I was able to recover all the files from the drive using GetDataBack NTFS, format the drive and put it back into use.
Standard ATA drives are quite reliable for handling small (visitor count wise) sites. Having a single 500GB drive makes it real easy to do a complete backup of a large site spread out over smaller drives.
However, since Seagate drives have proven themselves the most resilient of all the drives I've used, I'll wait until a 500GB Seagate drive exists and is within my price range.
This is the flaw of "Gattaca." It assumes that all beautiful and intelligent people want the same thing. This is actually a myth propogated by universities that have a hard time accepting that smart people don't all want to go there and get "proper" jobs. As Kumar said "just because you're hung like a horse doesn't mean you want to work in porn." One kid actually is fighting a university to be able to become a pumber in Philedelphia because the pay is better than a programmer. The university is insisting he use his brains to be an engineer. As though plumbing isn't engineering and as simple as putting pipes together.
The intelligence level of a trucker varies from sub average to genius. Same with garbage truck drivers and plumbers. Gattaca is a dumb movie (besides ignoring decades of legislation concerning discrimination) that's an insult to the working man. It assumes that all people who don't have this "perfect job" are miserable and stupid.
Clue time, plumbers, garbage people, construction workers, sometimes actually like their job and are very intelligent. Not all beautiful people want to be models. Not all smart people want to work at NASA.
A kid I knew who's very bright ("A" student throughout high school and a skilled musican) went and drove an ice cream truck for awhile because he wanted to. I know a girl who could be a model who does flooring.
Stories like "Brave New World" fail to look at the world we live in and see very smart people who want to be a garbage name, raise children, maintain the water suppy and work the fields and in the real world, actually make that choice.
Only in fallacious imaginary words do all smart and beauitful people want the same thing.
I wish my stock (AVN) would split that often for no good reason. AVN gets good news from successful drug trials and barely budges.
Infinium looks like it might be good for day trading if you have money to throw away. When the stock is trading under $1 and losing money it's a really bad sign. It's also "over the counter" which means it's not actually being traded on the major markets.
I would need really good positive information before putting anything on it. At this point it's pure gambling since the value of the stock is based purely on investors and not on any sort of product and consumer market value. There's no product for people to buy to raise the value of the stock. The only product is the stock itself.
Currently the default page for IE is www.msn.com
If some other browser gets the marketshare then MSN loses exposure which costs MS ad revenue.
FireFox doesn't offer anything that MS can't offer in IE. It's also far easier to recreate than to innovate. This is why they aren't too worried. It's simply an issue of economic viability as to whether or not MS will implement those features and push the updates out the door.
they don't keep whittling toothpicks out of redwoods because it makes them look like skilled carpenters. The cotton gin would never have been invented by a person such as you describe. They'd find great intellectual pride in doing the job by hand.
I'd think the person a complete fool.
Closed source has to be an exact fit or you have to cater to it.
This is why, where possible, open source is prefered or custom tools are created from scratch.
The main point being that nothing, not even open source is free. Unless your time is worth nothing.
if your time is worth nothing.
With open source software it's very rare that the product a) does exactly what you want and b) works perfectly out of the box. As a result, using OSS requires two primary considerations; what's missing and what's broken. You then have to consider the time it's going to take to fix the bugs and add in the custom features you need.
And time is money. I only consider my web-site profitable now because the costs are met by the revenue. This is mostly due to some clever rearranging of resources. However, the amount the site brings in doesn't come close to meeting what I make per hour at my job. If I claimed some kind of salary I'd be waaaay in the red. Instead of bobbing gently in the black.
Free time is a mostly fictional concept. There is always a cost associated with how you spend your time. Time you spend behind a computer costs you time you could be spending with friends and family. The only time I consider free are the hours from midnight to 10am. Only the time you cut from sleep I consider free time.
It's extra time to be alive and experience something that normally you'd be oblivious to.
Will they find a way to be marketable again?
That's the question you ask about penny stocks. I bought Avanir (AVN) at $1.76 way back in march because they have interesting products (their next big one is set to hit the market within 6 months) and their stock history shows a decent pattern of ups and downs. The stock is now worth ~$3.40
SCO got a very large burst when they started flaunting lawsuits and whatnot. But if that's all they've got in their bag they're screwed. If you look at their entire history is a straight line down. Then that little desperate gasp for air and now it's looking grim again.
They need a real product and quick. Otherwise it's not worth the risk to try to make 14% on their crap company.
My guess is that once they lose their current game, SCO will disolve. They're not doing anything interesting enough to make me take the risk. They need a product and quick.
This is however the type of thing to look for. You want to check out companies that are down on their luck. The key is determining if it's more likely that they'll rebound or die. And that requires lots of research before you plop down money screaming "hail mary!"
Apache's name came about because it was "a patchy" server. You actually have to do a bit of research to figure that out. The self deprication gets lost in the perfectly marketable name and pefectly unpatchy modern editions. Tortoise SVN is also a stupid unmarketable name. You have to use it find out that it's not actually slow like it advertises itself as being.
Prior to 2.0 a user could fire up GIMP and realize immediately that it's aptly named after trying to figure out how to use the interface. Things have improved greatly but I still use the name as an adjective for the product due to it's poor interface design.
I don't know who's the genious that decided you can't use the lighting tool and alpha channels on the same image. And you have to create a new image to define the gray scale lighting reference image for the primary image. Meanwhile Adobe Photoshop allows you to use alpha channels to define how the lighting will be applied which is actually logical. Alpha channels are not just for transparency. Gimp also doesn't allow you to go outside the bounds of a layer once defined, even if you move it around so the layer isn't lined up with the viewable canvas area and you want to paint to fill in the now transparent area. Another thing Photoshop has no problem with.
Ironic self depricating names can be overcome if the product can overcome them. In the GIMP's case, it hasn't yet. It's still a bit gimpy.
And that's why it needs a new name.
In fact, you need a browser to download FireFox. Windows also comes in handy for downloading Linux et al and burning them to CD to be installed over Windows.
So bundling IE with Windows makes it unnecessary to choose something else, and facilitates your choice if you choose to change. Likewise, prebundling Windows also facilitates your ability to choose something else.
People choose IE by not using it to replace itself with something else like FireFox. You can choose to build your own system and buy a Linux distro and skip Windows all together.
Not changing browsers due to lack of caring is a choice. You also choose which system you want to buy. If you choose to buy a prebuilt system or choose to buy Windows then you choose to start out your internet experience with IE.
Wolf5K is a Javascript clone of Wolf3D in 5Kbytes. I deobfuscated it and posted a series of tutorials on how it works here. There is also a C++ translation and enhancment series of tutorials here. Full ready to compile source is included for all tutorials.
The task of deobfuscating code is quite tedius but not too daunting. The main thing is getting the whitespace back in so you can see where all the functions begin and end. You then have to understand the language well enough that you can read the code and figure out what's going on without hints from comments or descriptive variables.
For Wolf5K I just started by working on the simple functions first and then by process of elimination worked my way through the code and finished with the raycasting function.
Translating it all to C++ was then quite easy because by then you have a very good grasp of how the code is suppost to work.
I wonder if they test marketed the ad on the Average Joe (not Average Joe Coder) before putting it in the NYT. They should have gotten testimonials from famous people. Not random people from around the world. "That guy in New Zealand says it's good" doesn't sell it to anybody. And may actually hurt the ad.
Anytime I see a random person quoted as claiming a movie is good in an ad, I know it's not. The amount that it's bad can be determined by how many times they mention the same person's name with different parts of his quote. We've all seen those "real movie goer reaction" ads and they're always used for less than stellar movies.
I think they should have gone from quotes from say people who work at IBM or Intel. Or other big names that people recognize.
Or just done away with the quotes and just make it informative.
Should we seek to lower the sentence for this crime or raise the sentence for murder?
One of the problems with murder sentences is that it depends on who you kill. I'd imagine that most murder happens in the inner city between waring gangs.
If a gang member kills another gang member society sees it as a plus for them so they throw a lighter sentence on the guy who pulled the trigger. If they even bother catching the guy and putting him through the court system. However if anyone kills a child or someone deemed pretty by society (see: Laci Peterson), you can bet that the killer is going to get the book thrown at them. Unless the killer is highly sympathetic themselves.
There are just very few "celebrity" murders in the scheme of things and so the average sentence isn't much.
The other problem is the insanity defense. It makes it very difficult to convict someone of murder and get the full sentence if anything at all.
You can't plead temporary insanity for a time period when you were fully capable of hacking into a computer system.
I think 9 years is sufficient and we should start taking murder more seriously and stop feeding loopholes (such as lame excuses about being "temporarily" insane) into the system. Then the average sentence for murder will go up. We try real hard not to throw the book at murderers. 9 year sentences for criminal hackers will also go down fast once it becomes common place and legal excuses are dreamed up by lawyers to get their clients off.
They're going after people who supply illegal torrents. So yes, they're going to win a lot a lawsuits.
BitTorrent has many legal uses. Illegal trackers have exactly one, thouroughly illegal purpose. And those who host them have control over hosting them. It's not a common carrier issue. People who host illegal trackers are directly and deliberatly assisting people in a crime. It's not "just a pointer." If I started going around telling people very publically where to go buy drugs I'd get myself arrested. A pointer is telling people where the gas station is. A criminal pointer is advertising and assisting in finding and aquireing illegal goods.
I don't know where people get this rediculous idea that going after people who publish illegal trackers is an attack on BitTorrent itself. It's not illegal to tell people where the gas station is and nobody pushing these cases is pretending it is.
I guess it just makes it all the more sensational though when people say they are.
The tracker sites are knowningly assisting people who break the law. And an illegal torrent tracker is good only for one single illegal purpose. It's not like Kazaa where the owners of the network have no way to control what gets shared so the RIAA/MPAA go after those who are hosting the files. Tracker sites have direct control regarding which torrents they post and have the ability to remove torrents for illegal files and the ability to screen files. Hosting the torrent is just as bad (or at least bad enough) as hosting the file itself.
And that's why the MPAA/RIAA have legal legs to stand on to shut down torrent sites that operate in the US.
This is no way affects the whole BitTorrent concept. Just don't host torrents for illegal files. I don't know why the article submitter is pretending it does. The MPAA/RIAA aren't attacking the network. They're attacking specific trackers which point at specific files. This is exactly what they should be doing.
"That's like saying let's put the gun in prison instead of the guy that fired it"
False analogy due to not understanding the point of this. This is like putting the guy in prison who hired the hitman who fired the gun.
In high school you aren't using any math that's so advanced you need a computer to do it for you. High school is the time to learn how to do things yourself. College is when you get to start finding tools to do the stuff you used to do by hand by computer to reduce tedium since the object isn't to learn how to solve an algebraic equation for another variable.
High School (especially math) text books are designed to be used with graphing calculators. The book explains what is going on, expects you to do it by hand and then tells you, "oh by the way, these are the buttons you push to do it on a calculator a zillion times faster." If you don't understand what's going on inside the blackbox then you won't know how or when to use it.
It's kind of hard to take a test with a laptop at your desk, much less a desktop loaded with a bunch of software just so the student doesn't have to solve 2+2 on their own. That's why high schools advertise graphing calculators to students.
Stop hurting the students with technology that only cripples their learning experience. If you give them X piece of software and let them use it like a crutch they're only going to know how to do things with X piece of software and be completely lost in the real world.
If you want to be use technology to improve their education, only let them use mathematical tools that they themselves write or only after they demonstrate mastery of the technique with paper and pencil. I understood linear algebra quite a bit better when I personally wrote software that implemented things I was doing by hand. Same with statistics. I learned statistics by writing a very powerful statistics package from scratch using only equations I found on various math web-sites.
Otherwise you're just hiding things they need to know behind black boxes.
Regardless of your political affiliations (this was taken at Bank One Ball Park at the Republican Rally)
The Bush Family walking onto the field.
This is an excellent shot for a "cheap" camera and a pair of binoculars. I was sitting in the nose bleeds behind home plate a couple hundred feet from the president.
Before the Pres showed up I was playing around and managed to get a full frame picture of the cop at the opposite end of the ballpark.
I also got the camera to work with a telescope and found it can get crisp images of the moon. It's not sensitive enough to take low light shots so night objects need to be well lit.
My objection to this "review" it the big giant ad for very expensive point and shoot cameras which is unnecessary. I don't know who the audience is for that review or even if the author knows. Digital SLRs can be had for $500 or less. Quality point and shoots can be had for under $200. The A330 is about $180.
The review would have been less junk if the author had bothered to compare pictures taken with various cameras. I know why my old point and shoot sucked (Vivitar something or other). I have plenty of images to showcase where it went wrong. But also a lot to show where it worked.
Ben