The power company will have to step up its monitoring to keep both services available.
Ah! You must have lived with a diesel generator for too long.
The utilities will just say "when computers aren't powered due to a power outage, they can't go on the internet anyway", and they'll keep providing bad service, and that'll be the extent of what they feel their new responsability is.
For every anti-DRM nerd out there, there are 50 (or more!) common people that just want to listen to music.
Yep, I agree, people are mindless drones who'll buy players, then will buy music, then will play music and not think twice about it.
Then one day, they'll change their player and the new one won't play the 3 year old music files they had bought, because the "standard" has changed, and since the previous standard was not open, they'll have to buy their music *again*. And that is when the drones wisen up and begin to hate the music industry and stick to older, more "illegal", but open file formats.
Quick! Everybody that's still using mp3 switch to Ogg !
And how much do you want to bet no player will ever support ogg? If it's the only open music format left, you can bet music player manufacturers will avoid it like the plague, because if they don't, they might attract the wrath of the music industry on them. And it's not a bunch of OSS enthusiasts who'll change anything. Not player manufacturer will go openly against the RIAA maffia ever. Period.
I can hear all the geeks screaming how ogg is the best thing on the planet. only problem is hardware support is almost nonexistent
Dude, you so don't understand the ogg philosophy.
See, ogg is the true geek music format: it is therefore *expected* not to be widely supported, otherwise it'd be taken over by big bad corporations, taken on by the music industry, and it'd become well-known and geeks couldn't go about preaching the good word on how good it is to the ordinary pleb.
Anyway, no need for ogg players, true geeks listen to Metallica just by reading the hex printout of the ogg files, printed with mpage -16.
Cnet News.com has a leading story saying that the venerable MP3 music format is getting a makeover aimed at blocking unauthorized copying.
And I have a shiny sixpence in my pocket that says people will avoid the new "improved" version like the plague and stick to the older, user-friendly, non-RIAA-bullshit-encumbered version of the standard.
On the one hand, it's cool when kids get to learn with the best equipment.
I'm afraid this is one of the greatest misconception in the world education. It's definitely not cool when kids get to learn with the best equipment : kids should learn the basics on simple, self-explanatory equipment. Complication and better equipment can come later, when the basics are understood.
That's the same reason why, after universities have taught CS students Java, C++ and Visual Basic before C and assembler, and churned out unfinished computer "engineers" for years, us low-level programmers still get high-paying jobs doing the old non-object-oriented, boring un-cool engineering the right way.
For cheap demo purposes, consider using the analog sound ports (line-in). I have had good success doing that for lower speed (44.1K).
That's not going to help you display DC and very low frequency signals. In fact, a soundcard's frequency response is un-linear enough that you really don't want to use one for demo purposes.
- Do you really need 40MHz for educational purposes? Unless this is a device to be used in a college or higher education class , you can display sub-10KHz signals to teach a class how to use a scope.
- When I was at school, I learned how to use a real scope, with knobs and buttons and a not-so-perfect green screen, and I reckon it was way better to touch these dials and controls and have a direct feel for what they did on the screen than set some virtual thing and grab perfect-looking samples, to understand how things actually worked.
In short, any old regular scope that's well explained by the teacher is probably better than any interface+software setup that "isolate" the student from whatever electrical phenomenon he's trying to expose.
apparently its content "...will be downloaded using a similar application, but will not be restricted by DRM, enabling people to re-edit it, or use it to make other programmes" - the content "will not be the complete BBC archive"
So in short: the BBC will put the "BBC Creative Archive" online, composed of BBC programs (well, slightly crippled, it's not all of the BBC's archive) using Microsoft's DRM technology (only a bit crippled, as the DRM part of the technology is disabled).
In short, it really seems the Beeb is crippled these days...
So in some ways, we've got a McDonald's No. 5 super-size offering that costs $2.99 and someone just wants a Diet Coke that costs 99 cents. So do we cut the entire super-size No. 5 down to 98 cents, or do we try to find a way to just give somebody the Diet Coke if that's what they want?
Linux isn't about offering less for cheaper, it's about doing things differently. In the above metaphor, Windows XX is a super-size BigMac (and it tastes just as gross and makes you just as sick in the stomach), the 99c Diet Coke is the Windows 'light' for Thailand, MacOS-X is a slightly tastier and less ubiquitous In-n-Out burger, and Linux/BSDs/... are a good solid helping of whatever healthy food you can find in good restaurants, predominantly outside the US, prepared by actual cooks and served by actual servers, who all prefer seeing you enjoy your meal than make you pay by the half-gram of beef patty present in the burger.
Time to dump your McAfee and Simantec stock as fast as possible.
Isn't that a brilliant scam? (1) Microsoft messes up and makes virus- and worm-prone products. (2) A whole industry develops around the Microsoft flaws like mold on cheese, (3) Microsoft takes over the Microsoft-problem-solving industry.
Brilliant, just brilliant. These guys never cease to amaze me.
Making money by having an expensive digital camera to disguise it as ATM chrome, grabbing PIN numbers and making yes-cards out of the process is dumb. The guy would probably have made more money setting his hacked camera in some lady's shower and selling the videos on the net. Or gee, even selling the hacked camera itself to would-be private-eyes, as most of these folks are willing to spend a lot of money on any spy-ish electronic device, and it would be legal too.
Time to buy my own UAV and find out what's really going on over there in Area 51
Hello John, I was glad to read your Slashdot article. Now, can you hear the knock on your door? Can you see the black vans with the engine running in the street? well, rejoice: you'll get to see a classified site very soon, and even visit it with a couple of muscular new friends, without even having to buy a UAV. I hope you'll enjoy your trip!
How strange, when something goes against the accepted way of thinking here on Slashdot, it's modded as troll. I'm not saying 911 wasn't horrible and grave, or that it was some conspiracy, but my opinion is that the US is overreacting to terrorist threat, or more precisely, isn't reacting properly. How's that a troll?
the author reports he is somewhat worried that all these tools could fall into wrong hands
Given how paranoid the US, its administration and its various police forces are these days, I think the problem is that the database is already in hands that can potentially go disturbingly wrong.
I'd be more impressed if China managed to provide a decent standard of living for all of its billion+ population. This is just me-too technology, the USSR did it (and its population suffered as a result, since it wasn't a rich country), the USA did it and more (and its population paid the price in taxes, but it could afford it, being a truly rich country), and now China is about to do just like the USSR and further starve its population to go up-diddly-up-up and perform stunts to impress other countries and amaze the press.
They're a bunch of circus clown, and putting priorities like that above their nation's welfare shows how much Chinese leaders are disconnected with the reality of their country.
Whatever sucking up EM fields is, it sure isn't theft, no matter what the french say
You shouldn't have slept through your EE classes.
Having a coil under the Eiffel tower is exactly similar to having a secondary coil in a transformer : whenever you have a load drawing current on the secondary coil, the primary coil (in this case, the Eiffel tower's antennas) have to provide that power, despite the fact that there's no physical connection between the 2 coils. So if you have antennas putting out 50kW and a coil drawing 10W nearby, that's 10 less Watts in radio power.
This guy's art also draws energy from the power line. The tubes don't light up for free do they?
But I'll tell you what : if sucking up EM fields isn't theft, tell me where you live and I'll coil a long copper wire around a mile-long stretch of the powerline that goes to your house and power my trailer with it. I'm sure you won't mind the higher bill from the power company in your mailbox, since I'm not stealing anything...
Does arrangements like that actually "steal" any power from the powerlines, or would it be lost anyway if it was just air instead of neon tubes?
They do draw energy from the line. If they weren't there, the voltage differential in the static field would stay high and no (or little) current would be sinked into the ground under the tube.
Another proof: assume each tube spits out the equivalent of 10W in light, there must be like 1000 tubes in that field, so they burn about 10kW all the time. I don't think the ground underneath normally sinks 10kW for each 100mx100m square : if it did, it would heat up, and very long lines would lose so much power over the distance that they would bankrupt the power companies.
Slashdot Mirror
The power company will have to step up its monitoring to keep both services available.
Ah! You must have lived with a diesel generator for too long.
The utilities will just say "when computers aren't powered due to a power outage, they can't go on the internet anyway", and they'll keep providing bad service, and that'll be the extent of what they feel their new responsability is.
I can't wait! I'm going to go tear a lamp cord off the lamp, fray the wires, and jam them into my modem port.
You can try it today : just solder a RJ-11 on your lamp cord and plug it to the modem. You'll get a really hot internet connection in no time flat!
Pretty soon I'll be surfing the way Al Gore meant us to!
Yes, the above method will allow you to do exactly that.
For every anti-DRM nerd out there, there are 50 (or more!) common people that just want to listen to music.
Yep, I agree, people are mindless drones who'll buy players, then will buy music, then will play music and not think twice about it.
Then one day, they'll change their player and the new one won't play the 3 year old music files they had bought, because the "standard" has changed, and since the previous standard was not open, they'll have to buy their music *again*. And that is when the drones wisen up and begin to hate the music industry and stick to older, more "illegal", but open file formats.
Quick! Everybody that's still using mp3 switch to Ogg !
And how much do you want to bet no player will ever support ogg? If it's the only open music format left, you can bet music player manufacturers will avoid it like the plague, because if they don't, they might attract the wrath of the music industry on them. And it's not a bunch of OSS enthusiasts who'll change anything. Not player manufacturer will go openly against the RIAA maffia ever. Period.
Oooo I'm all for ogg however the 20gig portable i got 2 years ago this month only reads mp3 :(
...
Well, look at the bright side: there's also no chance that your 2 year old player will ever refuse to play some DRMey mp3.
In fact, better start keeping those old devices preciously, since surely the new ones will eventually flat out refuse to play "unprotected" mp3s
I can hear all the geeks screaming how ogg is the best thing on the planet. only problem is hardware support is almost nonexistent
Dude, you so don't understand the ogg philosophy.
See, ogg is the true geek music format: it is therefore *expected* not to be widely supported, otherwise it'd be taken over by big bad corporations, taken on by the music industry, and it'd become well-known and geeks couldn't go about preaching the good word on how good it is to the ordinary pleb.
Anyway, no need for ogg players, true geeks listen to Metallica just by reading the hex printout of the ogg files, printed with mpage -16.
Cnet News.com has a leading story saying that the venerable MP3 music format is getting a makeover aimed at blocking unauthorized copying.
And I have a shiny sixpence in my pocket that says people will avoid the new "improved" version like the plague and stick to the older, user-friendly, non-RIAA-bullshit-encumbered version of the standard.
On the one hand, it's cool when kids get to learn with the best equipment.
I'm afraid this is one of the greatest misconception in the world education. It's definitely not cool when kids get to learn with the best equipment : kids should learn the basics on simple, self-explanatory equipment. Complication and better equipment can come later, when the basics are understood.
That's the same reason why, after universities have taught CS students Java, C++ and Visual Basic before C and assembler, and churned out unfinished computer "engineers" for years, us low-level programmers still get high-paying jobs doing the old non-object-oriented, boring un-cool engineering the right way.
For cheap demo purposes, consider using the analog sound ports (line-in). I have had good success doing that for lower speed (44.1K).
That's not going to help you display DC and very low frequency signals. In fact, a soundcard's frequency response is un-linear enough that you really don't want to use one for demo purposes.
Two thoughts about your question:
- Do you really need 40MHz for educational purposes? Unless this is a device to be used in a college or higher education class , you can display sub-10KHz signals to teach a class how to use a scope.
- When I was at school, I learned how to use a real scope, with knobs and buttons and a not-so-perfect green screen, and I reckon it was way better to touch these dials and controls and have a direct feel for what they did on the screen than set some virtual thing and grab perfect-looking samples, to understand how things actually worked.
In short, any old regular scope that's well explained by the teacher is probably better than any interface+software setup that "isolate" the student from whatever electrical phenomenon he's trying to expose.
Using the same physics principles as submarines, a new company is planning a fuelless air ship.
Isn't a fuelless air submarine usually called a "balloon"?
the BBC doesn't exactly have a great track record of keeping its own archives, having wiped a great many programmes from its own archives.
Well no, those records were naturally wiped out when Lister found them after his million-year stasis.
apparently its content "...will be downloaded using a similar application, but will not be restricted by DRM, enabling people to re-edit it, or use it to make other programmes" - the content "will not be the complete BBC archive"
So in short: the BBC will put the "BBC Creative Archive" online, composed of BBC programs (well, slightly crippled, it's not all of the BBC's archive) using Microsoft's DRM technology (only a bit crippled, as the DRM part of the technology is disabled).
In short, it really seems the Beeb is crippled these days...
Ah crap... when I read his McDonald's analogy I just blew mountain dew all over my "diet coke" workstation.
:-)
Is that how you call your girlfriend? Indeed the sure sign of a true geek
So in some ways, we've got a McDonald's No. 5 super-size offering that costs $2.99 and someone just wants a Diet Coke that costs 99 cents. So do we cut the entire super-size No. 5 down to 98 cents, or do we try to find a way to just give somebody the Diet Coke if that's what they want?
Linux isn't about offering less for cheaper, it's about doing things differently. In the above metaphor, Windows XX is a super-size BigMac (and it tastes just as gross and makes you just as sick in the stomach), the 99c Diet Coke is the Windows 'light' for Thailand, MacOS-X is a slightly tastier and less ubiquitous In-n-Out burger, and Linux/BSDs/... are a good solid helping of whatever healthy food you can find in good restaurants, predominantly outside the US, prepared by actual cooks and served by actual servers, who all prefer seeing you enjoy your meal than make you pay by the half-gram of beef patty present in the burger.
Microsoft Beta Includes Built-in Virus Scanner
Time to dump your McAfee and Simantec stock as fast as possible.
Isn't that a brilliant scam? (1) Microsoft messes up and makes virus- and worm-prone products. (2) A whole industry develops around the Microsoft flaws like mold on cheese, (3) Microsoft takes over the Microsoft-problem-solving industry.
Brilliant, just brilliant. These guys never cease to amaze me.
Making money by having an expensive digital camera to disguise it as ATM chrome, grabbing PIN numbers and making yes-cards out of the process is dumb. The guy would probably have made more money setting his hacked camera in some lady's shower and selling the videos on the net. Or gee, even selling the hacked camera itself to would-be private-eyes, as most of these folks are willing to spend a lot of money on any spy-ish electronic device, and it would be legal too.
End users who purchase this license are granted the right to use the SCO IP in Linux in binary format only.
/dev/null as SCO's...
Oh okay then, that's fine, I use the stock Linux kernel as-is. I never need any SCO IP in binary format in it.
Unless you count the output of
SCO is also sympathetic to the end-user's predicament
in other words, "SCO is also sympathetic to the end-user predicament created by SCO".
I beat my dog every day but I really feel for the poor thing too. Right. Who are they kidding?
Time to buy my own UAV and find out what's really going on over there in Area 51
Hello John, I was glad to read your Slashdot article. Now, can you hear the knock on your door? Can you see the black vans with the engine running in the street? well, rejoice: you'll get to see a classified site very soon, and even visit it with a couple of muscular new friends, without even having to buy a UAV. I hope you'll enjoy your trip!
Regards,
-- J. Ashcroft (johnny_the_poo@dhs.gov)
How strange, when something goes against the accepted way of thinking here on Slashdot, it's modded as troll. I'm not saying 911 wasn't horrible and grave, or that it was some conspiracy, but my opinion is that the US is overreacting to terrorist threat, or more precisely, isn't reacting properly. How's that a troll?
the author reports he is somewhat worried that all these tools could fall into wrong hands
Given how paranoid the US, its administration and its various police forces are these days, I think the problem is that the database is already in hands that can potentially go disturbingly wrong.
I'd be more impressed if China managed to provide a decent standard of living for all of its billion+ population. This is just me-too technology, the USSR did it (and its population suffered as a result, since it wasn't a rich country), the USA did it and more (and its population paid the price in taxes, but it could afford it, being a truly rich country), and now China is about to do just like the USSR and further starve its population to go up-diddly-up-up and perform stunts to impress other countries and amaze the press.
They're a bunch of circus clown, and putting priorities like that above their nation's welfare shows how much Chinese leaders are disconnected with the reality of their country.
Whatever sucking up EM fields is, it sure isn't theft, no matter what the french say
You shouldn't have slept through your EE classes.
Having a coil under the Eiffel tower is exactly similar to having a secondary coil in a transformer : whenever you have a load drawing current on the secondary coil, the primary coil (in this case, the Eiffel tower's antennas) have to provide that power, despite the fact that there's no physical connection between the 2 coils. So if you have antennas putting out 50kW and a coil drawing 10W nearby, that's 10 less Watts in radio power.
This guy's art also draws energy from the power line. The tubes don't light up for free do they?
But I'll tell you what : if sucking up EM fields isn't theft, tell me where you live and I'll coil a long copper wire around a mile-long stretch of the powerline that goes to your house and power my trailer with it. I'm sure you won't mind the higher bill from the power company in your mailbox, since I'm not stealing anything...
Does arrangements like that actually "steal" any power from the powerlines, or would it be lost anyway if it was just air instead of neon tubes?
They do draw energy from the line. If they weren't there, the voltage differential in the static field would stay high and no (or little) current would be sinked into the ground under the tube.
Another proof: assume each tube spits out the equivalent of 10W in light, there must be like 1000 tubes in that field, so they burn about 10kW all the time. I don't think the ground underneath normally sinks 10kW for each 100mx100m square : if it did, it would heat up, and very long lines would lose so much power over the distance that they would bankrupt the power companies.