maybe there needs to be some sort of QOS policy on the server. never allow more than x% of available bandwidth to be dedicated to rss feeds; that would allow sites to make sure they always give preferential treatment to real html page views. since rss aggregation happens mostly in the background, this wouldn't overly affect rss readers, while insuring that the people browsingthe website aren't being slowed down noticeably.
as far as i am aware, there is no way to do this with any current webserver software, unless you use separate programs or server instances to serve rss feeds and normal pages.
It may play off the hard drive, but you won't be able to copy it to another dvd, which is what the grandparent poster was saying. The parent poster was correct- you cannot make a bit perfect copy of an encrypted DVD. The guys at DVD/CCA may be a bit clueless overall, but they at least were smart enough not to make that obvious mistake.
[pedantic mode="math_terms"] That depends whether by average you mean the median, the mode, or the mean. Typically average is used interchangeably with mean, although it can be used to describe any of the three.
Half of any group will by definition be below the median. However, it is very easily possible for more or less than half of a group to be below the mean, which is usually called the average. [/pedantic]
(actual piracy, not the DMCA newspeak version of piracy)
you mean "actual piracy" where they sailed in on a ship flying the skull and crossbones, killed the employees and customers mercilessly, and stole everything of value off the store shelves before sinking the store?
pretty sure there wasn't any "actual piracy" going on.
As an aside, I think it's fine for high-schoolers to use something other than the latest-and-greatest to learn on; The idea behind teaching computers in school is to teach principles, not specifics.
I agree in general, but there is a limit beyond which being too far behind the times can cause problems.
My first programming class in high school was in 1994. The computers were 8088's running MS-DOS 3.3, and we learned to program in GWBasic, complete with line numbers and GOTO's. So, while I learned some of the very basic concepts of programming (conditional logic, loops) I also learned a lot of poor practices that I had to unlearn later on- GO TO statements, lack of any kind of functional modules, etc...
(although i must admit, when I eventually got to my assembly programming classes in college, everything made a lot more sense)
While I agree with everything you say from the third paragraph on, I think you are wrong on the first two. You don't have to trust the parents to be educated enough to teach the kids properly. But they do have to care about what and whether their children are learning. If they don't care than the odds are good that their children will be poor students.
If a child wants to learn, he should be able to accomplish that at school.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. 9 times out of 10, the second part of that sentence isn't the problem. The problem is that too many kids don't want to learn. The will to learn doesn't suddenly spring into existence when the child starts school- it has to come from somewhere. Usually (although not always) it has to come from the parents, who are by far the predominant influence on a child's worldview for at least the first eight years of the child's life.
Yes, there are kids who want to learn and don't get the opportunity to in school. But if they really want to learn, they will find a way. They are not the problem.
I had a friend who did some of her student teaching in one of the poorer areas of the Chicago south side. She had some really smart and talented kids who were terrible students. After a short while, she got so frustrated with these kids and their lack of interest that she asked the principal what she was doing wrong. The teacher told her that she was doing as much as she could, but the students came from families and neighborhoods where learning and intelligence were not regarded as important qualities, and were even looked down upon in some cases. As long as those kids lived in an environment like that, they would never have an interest in learning, no matter how much potential they had, and no matter how hard the teachers tried.
There is an emphasis on learning in college, but it has little to do with your course material. Most of what you really learn is how to jump through hoops, meet deadlines, manage time and money, etc. Yes, you can learn a lot from your classes if you want to, but the truth is you can pass most college courses without learning a thing if you don't care.
If you are an employer, and you see that somebody has a bachelor's degree on their resume, all that really tells you is that the person in question was adept enough at jumping through hoops to get their university to award them a degree. They may or may not have actually learned anything from their classes while they were there, unfortunately there is no way of really knowing that without talking to them.
slightly off topic, but on that note, the year i graduated high school, there was a big hoopla over the university of california schools ceasing to use affirmative action as a consideration in admissions.
what wasn't highly publicized was that the affirmative action programs were actually helping more white students get in, because under affirmative action they had to reject a large number of higher scoring asian students in order to keep the relative percentages of white, black, and hispanic students up.
actually, i suspect that schools exist to train blue collar laborers. employing teachers is a side benefit.
think about it. you spend about 7 hours a day doing pointless exercises over and over until you could so them in your sleep. and then, when you start a new school year- you start all over again. seriously, was i the only person who was incredibly annoyed that grade schools spend the first 2/3rds of every school year repeating the entire previous year in a slightly condensed format? that for 3 of the 5 years between 4th and 8th grade i studied american history from 1492-1945?
Why shouldn't I also be able to rely on an expert to teach my kids what I'm not really equipped or qualified for myself.
you should, but that's not really the issue. as another poster mentioned, many americans today see the school system as a free baby sitter program. by sending their kids off to school, they feel they are absolved of any responsibility for their kids' educations. unfortunately, things don't work that way. kids learn from their parents, whether the parents like it or admit it. they learn by emulation and observation. if the parents just see school as a way to not have to worry about their kids while the state educates them, then the kids won't care about doing well in school either. and sending your kid to a private school (in and of itself) won't help your kids either. one of the biggest reasons private schools tend to perform better than public schools is that the parents who are willing to send their kids to private schools are more likely actually care about the education their child is receiving, and impress that upon their children.
my parents are both teachers, and i know a lot of teachers both among friends my age and people who are old enough to have been one of my teachers. in general, students who do well in school are more likely to have parents who take an interest in what is going on in school, and poor students tend to have parents that could care less about what happens to their child from the time they leave for work in the morning until they get home.
however, my statement still holds if you substitute lamborghini, bugatti, audi, etc. for porsche. many high end cars are only made possible by the backing of a mass market car manufacturer.
not that i think any of this is necessarily likely. just an observation that it could be good for apple.
Although the p4 changed significantly architecturally from the p2 and p3, the core instruction set is the same, which i think is why they are still considered 686's.
i remember there was also an 8088 in there somewhere. i used them in my high school programming classes. (no, i'm not really that old, my school was just really cheap when it came to computers. the first pentiums were already out when i took that class.)
as to the parent's question, the first i686 was actaully the pentium pro. The PII was really just the addition of the MMX instructions to the PPro. i suppose i would be oversimplifying things to say that intel has kept the i686 label because they haven't really changed anything since then other than the speed, but i think that is the last time they changed the core instruction set.
over thanksgiving i was talking to a friend of mine who works on satellite components. a lot of the specialized pc hardware they use exists only on isa cards- he said the computer support guys there are constantly dumpster diving and scrounging around for 386's, 486's, and early pentiums, as anything newer usually only has one isa slot (if any).
Locale would work if for example you assume that an American has only other Americans in his phone book. However, this is not always the case- unlike dates, it would be possible to have several phone numbers all of which should follow a different format.
In this particular case, I think that if the parent wants consistently formatted phone numbers, he should a) enter them consistently. b) find a "format my phone numbers like x" plugin. I don't see why this has to be a part of the default install- the whole point of firefox and thunderbird was that they were supposed to be stripped down extensible alternatives to the mozilla suite.
It struck me as being a program designed by people who have never actually had to use that sort of software.
around the time gimp 1.1 was in development, i read an interview with one of the original GIMP developers where he stated that not only had he never used photoshop, he had only seen it once when a college buddy was using it to remove the clothes from (iirc) cindy crawford. the original developers haven't coded on the GIMP since pre-1.0, so i have not idea how much of that heritage still remains, but your impression is correct, or at least was at one point in time. i can't speak to the current state of the GIMP as i have not used it much since version 1.2.
'98 or so if my memory serves correctly. it was after i started using linux, so definitely sometime after 1996. and for the record, he was comparing linux to his irix o2, not to windows or a mac.
Well, Porsche would be nowhere these days without Volkswagen. If you look at it from that perspective, it makes sense.
Apple sells the "Porsches"- the more expensive consumer systems featuring Apple's famous attention to design and detail.
IBM sells the "VWs"- average gray low cost business workstations with a more corporate look and feel (that now is free of the need for a MS supplied OS)
The market for VWs is 20 times the size of the market for Porsches. While Apple may be quite happy to occupy Porsche's position in the computer market, they could do much better with a VW to support them, as the much higher profits that result from volume selling of a VW can be used to finance the technological enhancements in the next generation Porsche.
my wife uses shutterfly for printing her pictures, and is pretty happy with it. I think as long as you order at least a dozen or so pictures at a time, the price per print (including shipping) is comparable to getting a regular roll of film developed. Plus since it's digital, you only have to pay to get the good pictures developed, instead of all of them.
You can keep albums online there too, but I'm not sure what their limitations are in terms of how many pictures you can store online at a time.
Whether or not you have a degree is going to be far more relevant than were it is from to most employers. If you are in CS, there are only about 5-10 schools whose names would really stand out to most employers. If you are not trying to transfer into one of those 5-10 schools, you are completely wasting your time. Even if you are looking into one of those schools, the benfit you see will most likely be marginal, unless maybe you want to get into research or teaching.
When you graduate, your work experience will mean far more to most employers than the name of the school on your diploma. Rather than filling out applications and jumping through the hoops required to transfer to a new school, your time would be much more wisely invested looking for internships and summer job opportunities, which will have much more impact on your abilities to find a job when you graduate.
This, by the way, applies regardless of your degree. I knew several mechanical engineers who had a really hard time finding work when they graduated even though they finished near the top of their class at a respected engineering school, because they didn't have any work experience. One took a sh*t job doing Java programming at Accenture before eventually moving into a much better job, another did substitute teaching for a while before becomming a stay-at-home mom.
The thing is, most people don't watch DVD's on a standalone 'home theater'. Most people watch DVD's on a plain old ordinary twenty-something inch TV. Alot of them don't even have a surround sound stereo system. They *gasp* use the speakers built into the TV!!
DVD took over the VCR's marketshare relatively quickly, not because of the higher quality, but because it offered a large number of convenient features that are not possible on video cassettes. Most people will ook at HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and ask, "Why should i pay more money for this? What's wrong with DVD?" Yes, there are some people who care. And slowly but surely people will buy the new players as their old DVD players start to have problems (as long as the new players still play their DVD's) but I don't see critical mass coming any time soon. I predict that DVD's will outnumber discs of whatever new format is introduced on store shelves for at least the next ~5 years.
And s-video? My dvd player is hooked up to the TV with a plain old composite cable. I do have component connections on my DVD player and TV, but I don't use them- mainly because my wife (and before that my roomates) never understood why, in addition to changing the input selector on the stereo for dvd/vcr/cable/playstation, you also had to switch the TV to Video1 for DVD and Video2 for everything else. It's much easier just to leave it on Video1 all the time and be done with it.
That's just it. You purchased a licence for the product. That licence has conditions. If content providers want these conditions, they need to be upfront and not hidden in legalese, and there cannot be any "we can change this at any time" clauses (which should be illegal to begin with).
I did not buy a license- I bought a shiny silver disk. And I did not see anywhere on any of the dozens of those shiny disks a license agreement. None of them ever said that I was not allowed to play them with my dvd player hooked up to the VCR instead of the TV. And while they may have made brief mention of the region coding on the case (I've never looked) it's definitely not prominent enough to be considered an agreeement that a user must agree to in order to use the product.
trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.
really, until we get a matrix style jack in the back of our head where movies can be pumped directly into our brain, there will always be some point at which the data is not encrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe there needs to be some sort of QOS policy on the server. never allow more than x% of available bandwidth to be dedicated to rss feeds; that would allow sites to make sure they always give preferential treatment to real html page views. since rss aggregation happens mostly in the background, this wouldn't overly affect rss readers, while insuring that the people browsingthe website aren't being slowed down noticeably.
as far as i am aware, there is no way to do this with any current webserver software, unless you use separate programs or server instances to serve rss feeds and normal pages.
It may play off the hard drive, but you won't be able to copy it to another dvd, which is what the grandparent poster was saying. The parent poster was correct- you cannot make a bit perfect copy of an encrypted DVD. The guys at DVD/CCA may be a bit clueless overall, but they at least were smart enough not to make that obvious mistake.
[pedantic mode="math_terms"]
That depends whether by average you mean the median, the mode, or the mean. Typically average is used interchangeably with mean, although it can be used to describe any of the three.
Half of any group will by definition be below the median. However, it is very easily possible for more or less than half of a group to be below the mean, which is usually called the average.
[/pedantic]
(actual piracy, not the DMCA newspeak version of piracy)
you mean "actual piracy" where they sailed in on a ship flying the skull and crossbones, killed the employees and customers mercilessly, and stole everything of value off the store shelves before sinking the store?
pretty sure there wasn't any "actual piracy" going on.
As an aside, I think it's fine for high-schoolers to use something other than the latest-and-greatest to learn on; The idea behind teaching computers in school is to teach principles, not specifics.
I agree in general, but there is a limit beyond which being too far behind the times can cause problems.
My first programming class in high school was in 1994. The computers were 8088's running MS-DOS 3.3, and we learned to program in GWBasic, complete with line numbers and GOTO's. So, while I learned some of the very basic concepts of programming (conditional logic, loops) I also learned a lot of poor practices that I had to unlearn later on- GO TO statements, lack of any kind of functional modules, etc...
(although i must admit, when I eventually got to my assembly programming classes in college, everything made a lot more sense)
While I agree with everything you say from the third paragraph on, I think you are wrong on the first two. You don't have to trust the parents to be educated enough to teach the kids properly. But they do have to care about what and whether their children are learning. If they don't care than the odds are good that their children will be poor students.
If a child wants to learn, he should be able to accomplish that at school.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. 9 times out of 10, the second part of that sentence isn't the problem. The problem is that too many kids don't want to learn. The will to learn doesn't suddenly spring into existence when the child starts school- it has to come from somewhere. Usually (although not always) it has to come from the parents, who are by far the predominant influence on a child's worldview for at least the first eight years of the child's life.
Yes, there are kids who want to learn and don't get the opportunity to in school. But if they really want to learn, they will find a way. They are not the problem.
I had a friend who did some of her student teaching in one of the poorer areas of the Chicago south side. She had some really smart and talented kids who were terrible students. After a short while, she got so frustrated with these kids and their lack of interest that she asked the principal what she was doing wrong. The teacher told her that she was doing as much as she could, but the students came from families and neighborhoods where learning and intelligence were not regarded as important qualities, and were even looked down upon in some cases. As long as those kids lived in an environment like that, they would never have an interest in learning, no matter how much potential they had, and no matter how hard the teachers tried.
There is an emphasis on learning in college, but it has little to do with your course material. Most of what you really learn is how to jump through hoops, meet deadlines, manage time and money, etc. Yes, you can learn a lot from your classes if you want to, but the truth is you can pass most college courses without learning a thing if you don't care.
If you are an employer, and you see that somebody has a bachelor's degree on their resume, all that really tells you is that the person in question was adept enough at jumping through hoops to get their university to award them a degree. They may or may not have actually learned anything from their classes while they were there, unfortunately there is no way of really knowing that without talking to them.
slightly off topic, but on that note, the year i graduated high school, there was a big hoopla over the university of california schools ceasing to use affirmative action as a consideration in admissions.
what wasn't highly publicized was that the affirmative action programs were actually helping more white students get in, because under affirmative action they had to reject a large number of higher scoring asian students in order to keep the relative percentages of white, black, and hispanic students up.
actually, i suspect that schools exist to train blue collar laborers. employing teachers is a side benefit.
think about it. you spend about 7 hours a day doing pointless exercises over and over until you could so them in your sleep. and then, when you start a new school year- you start all over again. seriously, was i the only person who was incredibly annoyed that grade schools spend the first 2/3rds of every school year repeating the entire previous year in a slightly condensed format? that for 3 of the 5 years between 4th and 8th grade i studied american history from 1492-1945?
Why shouldn't I also be able to rely on an expert to teach my kids what I'm not really equipped or qualified for myself.
you should, but that's not really the issue. as another poster mentioned, many americans today see the school system as a free baby sitter program. by sending their kids off to school, they feel they are absolved of any responsibility for their kids' educations. unfortunately, things don't work that way. kids learn from their parents, whether the parents like it or admit it. they learn by emulation and observation. if the parents just see school as a way to not have to worry about their kids while the state educates them, then the kids won't care about doing well in school either. and sending your kid to a private school (in and of itself) won't help your kids either. one of the biggest reasons private schools tend to perform better than public schools is that the parents who are willing to send their kids to private schools are more likely actually care about the education their child is receiving, and impress that upon their children.
my parents are both teachers, and i know a lot of teachers both among friends my age and people who are old enough to have been one of my teachers. in general, students who do well in school are more likely to have parents who take an interest in what is going on in school, and poor students tend to have parents that could care less about what happens to their child from the time they leave for work in the morning until they get home.
apparently not. my mistake. sorry....
however, my statement still holds if you substitute lamborghini, bugatti, audi, etc. for porsche. many high end cars are only made possible by the backing of a mass market car manufacturer.
not that i think any of this is necessarily likely. just an observation that it could be good for apple.
Although the p4 changed significantly architecturally from the p2 and p3, the core instruction set is the same, which i think is why they are still considered 686's.
i remember there was also an 8088 in there somewhere. i used them in my high school programming classes. (no, i'm not really that old, my school was just really cheap when it came to computers. the first pentiums were already out when i took that class.)
as to the parent's question, the first i686 was actaully the pentium pro. The PII was really just the addition of the MMX instructions to the PPro. i suppose i would be oversimplifying things to say that intel has kept the i686 label because they haven't really changed anything since then other than the speed, but i think that is the last time they changed the core instruction set.
over thanksgiving i was talking to a friend of mine who works on satellite components. a lot of the specialized pc hardware they use exists only on isa cards- he said the computer support guys there are constantly dumpster diving and scrounging around for 386's, 486's, and early pentiums, as anything newer usually only has one isa slot (if any).
Locale would work if for example you assume that an American has only other Americans in his phone book. However, this is not always the case- unlike dates, it would be possible to have several phone numbers all of which should follow a different format.
In this particular case, I think that if the parent wants consistently formatted phone numbers, he should a) enter them consistently. b) find a "format my phone numbers like x" plugin. I don't see why this has to be a part of the default install- the whole point of firefox and thunderbird was that they were supposed to be stripped down extensible alternatives to the mozilla suite.
It struck me as being a program designed by people who have never actually had to use that sort of software.
around the time gimp 1.1 was in development, i read an interview with one of the original GIMP developers where he stated that not only had he never used photoshop, he had only seen it once when a college buddy was using it to remove the clothes from (iirc) cindy crawford. the original developers haven't coded on the GIMP since pre-1.0, so i have not idea how much of that heritage still remains, but your impression is correct, or at least was at one point in time. i can't speak to the current state of the GIMP as i have not used it much since version 1.2.
'98 or so if my memory serves correctly. it was after i started using linux, so definitely sometime after 1996. and for the record, he was comparing linux to his irix o2, not to windows or a mac.
Well, Porsche would be nowhere these days without Volkswagen. If you look at it from that perspective, it makes sense.
Apple sells the "Porsches"- the more expensive consumer systems featuring Apple's famous attention to design and detail.
IBM sells the "VWs"- average gray low cost business workstations with a more corporate look and feel (that now is free of the need for a MS supplied OS)
The market for VWs is 20 times the size of the market for Porsches. While Apple may be quite happy to occupy Porsche's position in the computer market, they could do much better with a VW to support them, as the much higher profits that result from volume selling of a VW can be used to finance the technological enhancements in the next generation Porsche.
ABM
I think I speak for us all when I say I would love to see a movie based on "A Boy and his Blob."
Wait, you said high profile?
my wife uses shutterfly for printing her pictures, and is pretty happy with it. I think as long as you order at least a dozen or so pictures at a time, the price per print (including shipping) is comparable to getting a regular roll of film developed. Plus since it's digital, you only have to pay to get the good pictures developed, instead of all of them.
You can keep albums online there too, but I'm not sure what their limitations are in terms of how many pictures you can store online at a time.
Whether or not you have a degree is going to be far more relevant than were it is from to most employers. If you are in CS, there are only about 5-10 schools whose names would really stand out to most employers. If you are not trying to transfer into one of those 5-10 schools, you are completely wasting your time. Even if you are looking into one of those schools, the benfit you see will most likely be marginal, unless maybe you want to get into research or teaching.
When you graduate, your work experience will mean far more to most employers than the name of the school on your diploma. Rather than filling out applications and jumping through the hoops required to transfer to a new school, your time would be much more wisely invested looking for internships and summer job opportunities, which will have much more impact on your abilities to find a job when you graduate.
This, by the way, applies regardless of your degree. I knew several mechanical engineers who had a really hard time finding work when they graduated even though they finished near the top of their class at a respected engineering school, because they didn't have any work experience. One took a sh*t job doing Java programming at Accenture before eventually moving into a much better job, another did substitute teaching for a while before becomming a stay-at-home mom.
The thing is, most people don't watch DVD's on a standalone 'home theater'. Most people watch DVD's on a plain old ordinary twenty-something inch TV. Alot of them don't even have a surround sound stereo system. They *gasp* use the speakers built into the TV!!
DVD took over the VCR's marketshare relatively quickly, not because of the higher quality, but because it offered a large number of convenient features that are not possible on video cassettes. Most people will ook at HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and ask, "Why should i pay more money for this? What's wrong with DVD?" Yes, there are some people who care. And slowly but surely people will buy the new players as their old DVD players start to have problems (as long as the new players still play their DVD's) but I don't see critical mass coming any time soon. I predict that DVD's will outnumber discs of whatever new format is introduced on store shelves for at least the next ~5 years.
And s-video? My dvd player is hooked up to the TV with a plain old composite cable. I do have component connections on my DVD player and TV, but I don't use them- mainly because my wife (and before that my roomates) never understood why, in addition to changing the input selector on the stereo for dvd/vcr/cable/playstation, you also had to switch the TV to Video1 for DVD and Video2 for everything else. It's much easier just to leave it on Video1 all the time and be done with it.
That's just it. You purchased a licence for the product. That licence has conditions. If content providers want these conditions, they need to be upfront and not hidden in legalese, and there cannot be any "we can change this at any time" clauses (which should be illegal to begin with).
I did not buy a license- I bought a shiny silver disk. And I did not see anywhere on any of the dozens of those shiny disks a license agreement. None of them ever said that I was not allowed to play them with my dvd player hooked up to the VCR instead of the TV. And while they may have made brief mention of the region coding on the case (I've never looked) it's definitely not prominent enough to be considered an agreeement that a user must agree to in order to use the product.
bruce schneier said it best:
trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.
really, until we get a matrix style jack in the back of our head where movies can be pumped directly into our brain, there will always be some point at which the data is not encrypted.