Maybe it defeats the purpose, maybe not. You must realize that everything has non-zero cost, including the potential to have an internal drive. At the $200, I'm sure there isn't much cash to spare for such things like larger chassis and extraneous connectors. (If one wants a real computer which includes such features, they're already available today for just very slightly more money than that.)
For my own purposes, I own three DVD recorders. One is in my daily-use laptop. Another is in my wife's computer. The third is an external USB 2.0 job which lives on my desk and connects with a long cable to whatever machine might need direct access to optical media (this turns out to almost always be the laptop, as its internal burner is somewhat lacking).
As a bonus, the enclosure it's in is fanless so there is essentially zero dust inside of the drive.
I keep thinking about buying a dedicated internal DVD burner for my primary desktop machine, but so far I have always come up with something better to spend $30 on instead.
It's the same with floppy drives. Some of my older computers still have them, but they never seem to work for the 1 or 2 times a year that I actually need one. So I have a single, cheap external USB floppy drive solves that problem neatly and, again, accumulates no dust.
CDs or DVDs just get in the way now days. Who needs them.
Who needs them? Almost everyone.
They're vastly cheaper, and for data that is both large and that you'd like to keep for a long time (a movie, an album, family photographs, recordings from your garage band, whatever) it makes more sense to archive it on a $1 CD or DVD and file it away neatly than it does to use a $20 SD card.
Plus, optical media doesn't suffer from problems with static, wayward USB ports, or anything similar. Stored properly, and it's good for at least a decade.
And, being inherently write protected, it prevents people from accidentally destroying their own stuff, or having their data attacked by a virus.
I can mail/give out a dozen DVDs to a dozen different random people without ever really thinking about the expense, but at current prices I'd never do such a thing with 4GB flash cards.
Booting from a USB CD-ROM is (still) special enough that a lot of in-the-field systems are still incapable of doing so. From the BIOS's perspective, it's totally different from booting a USB disk drive, which indeed is quite widely supported at this point.
It's a public forum, Dan. I didn't see his posting addressed to anyone, though it did contain verbiage which affects me personally.
As user 10998, I'd expect you to know how things tend to operate around here. If he were picking on black people, and I were black, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on Jews, and I were Jewish, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on Linux, and I were a Linux zealot, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on basketball, and I were just coming in from a game of 2 on 2, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on gay people, and I just happened to be gay, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on beer drinkers, and I were just opening a cold one, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally.
So on, so forth. The context of the original poster is important, of course, but it's not everything.
If it were, you wouldn't have bothered to reply -- I didn't see the name "Dan D." or "user 10998" anywhere in my post.
There aren't any private discussions here on Slashdot.
Yeah. Google Earth is a neat tool, but it doesn't exactly help.
How do I tell my car to turn left past the old Weller barn and head into the woods?
How do I tell my car to drive very slowly on that road over by the abandoned clay pits, so I can watch deer graze where the wheat field meets the trees at dusk? Do I really have to guide the fucking thing by voice, turn by turn, all the way there, or pick it out from aerial photographs? And, having gotten there, how do I maneuver my driverless car off the right side of the road at an angle so that I can illuminate the field? (I guess it won't matter: Since it's not on the way to anywhere, nobody's driverless car will ever happen across it. And since deer don't show up on Google Earth, everyone will forget about that spot in no time. It's not like anyone should ever find simple joy in watching native wildlife, anyway, right?)
How do I tell my car to park in the front yard at a party where the driveway is full?
How do I back my driverless car up to the front door of my house so that I can unload $random_heavy_object?
How do I instruct my driverless car to just go around the crackhead in the 1990 Dodge Caravan who is conducting business up ahead (and blocking a large portion of a one-way road)? Do I really have to fucking wait around in such a neighborhood?
Just as I'd rather walk than be pushed in a wheelchair, I'd rather drive than be driven.
I desire more than to merely be delivered to the requested address.
Driving for fun happens on small, seldom-traveled roads (sometimes just wide enough for one car, or unpaved), removed from the traffic of the main routes. Stuff like having some asshole cut you off doesn't happen, because there aren't any assholes, let alone anyone else.
I guess that, honestly, I'd be OK with my car going driverless as soon as it finds itself on an Interstate highway. Interstate driving, which is similar to what you're describing, is not fun, therefore there's little reason for me to participate in it.
Except for the fact that I doubt I'd ever buy such a car unless I had to, so I'd still probably be operating it myself.:)
You seem to indicate that your tax dollars are for making roads for the sole purpose of efficient and safe transportation.
Meanwhile, my own tax dollars are certainly in support of roads which allow independant (and perhaps destinationless) ambulation, whether for fun or for any other purpose.
I know I've certainly been sitting around on a lazy summer evening and decided to go for a nice drive in the country with my wife, even going so far as to drive in a random direction to see what there is to uncover, several times even making a whole weekend out of the randomness of it. There's lots of great things out there to discover which a computer-controlled car will never find.
I know it seems crazy/insane/unbelievable, but the vast majority of people in this country don't want the government funding things with taxpayer dollars merely for the efficiency of "some people". Especially when doing so eliminates a laundry list of enjoyable benefits to the country at large.
And I must ask: What do you suppose the meaning of life is, if not to enjoy our time here on this rock?
I mean, we're not just fucking ants or honeybees here, but real human beings. We have other needs beyond being productive, and I submit that most people would feel that a certain amount of entertainment is needed in life.
And, since you've made this personal by belittling one of my own small joys, please allow me to do the same: I suspect that you enjoy spending your days finding new and more efficient methods with which to conduct yourself. I also suspect that either you are very lonely, or if you are married, that your wife is (perhaps secretly).
Naw, it's an Inspiron 6000d which, despite being tossed about in my backpack several times each day, use in extreme conditions (places like tops of water towers in high wind with -5 temperatures), and occasionally being slammed around the trunk of my BMW as I drive through town, seems to generally work just fine.
The right-hand display hinge gave up a few days ago -- the screws stripped themselves from the display side of the hinge. The bullet-proof 4-year warranty I bought the machine with finally paid for itself when the Dell rep sent new front and back bezels, a new hinge cover, a set of rubber bumpers, a free (gratis) black quicksnap cover (thanks!) and a new Samsung WUXGA display panel. Made the call at 6PM EST, had parts the next morning.
Previously, they also have replaced a power supply which died after having spent two days at the bottom of a river (that just happened to be flowing through the computer room), without question.
I hate extended warranties, but the next laptop is getting one also unless it is one of those $400 throwaway jobs (unlikely).
Anyway, a brief look at Dell's website didn't show me any current machines with 1920x1200 displays, but plugging "WUXGA" into Newegg's search box reveals a few potentially-good 15.4" laptops, including a Thinkpad or two.
Sure, they're FM quality rather than CD quality but if you're ripping to MP3 it doesn't matter anyway.
Yes, it does.
Both FM and MP3 are similar in that they can each sound anywhere from very bad to quite good.
But they're totally different kinds of bad.
Layer one on top of the other, and you get the worst of both worlds, not the best of one of them as you suggest.
FM radio is noisey, often has high harmonic and intermodulation distortion, is bandlimited, lacks good channel seperation, and almost always is stepped on until what comes out of the radio is only vaguely similar to the original recording (though this last part doesn't have to be that way).
MP3 noiseless, has very little distortion, is sometimes bandlimited, has no dynamic compression, but does suffer from codec-oriented compression artifacts (mostly on high-frequencies and fast aounds).
Combine both, and you get a noisey, distorted, poorly seperated, re-equalized and mixed, bandlimited thing, with all of the dynamics removed so that there are no loud nor soft parts anymore, which is then reduced down to a lowish-bitrate MP3 that isn't particularly good at encoding noise or distortion anyway, let alone noise AND music. To add to this insult, the music probably started out life as an MP3 or AAC file at the broadcast studio anyway, compounding the errors from the tandem lossy compressors.
Of course it matters -- it's a recipe for disaster UNLESS the original broadcast is of very high quality (it never is for pop stations) with no/minimal processing, the reciever well-tuned with strong reception, and the MP3 encoder carefully adjusted.
Maybe recording pop this way is good enough for you. Perhaps you even prefer the (wretched) sound. But please forget any comparison to "FM quality" or "CD quality" or similar, because what you're hearing has very little in common with either what the musicians and mastering engineeers heard in the studio and approved for the CD, or the potential for that CD to be heard on an FM radio.
These days, without any exception that I can find either locally or while travelling, commercial radio in the US all sounds like trash.
It is not as if they have a shortage of submissions. So why bother being kind to spammers who are more interested in self-promotion than producing content?
Funny thing, the Audio Home Recording Act (the same US law which brings us the "tape tax" which is referred to here) specifically exempts professional gear.
So it's really not the case that Alesis placed this restriction in order to follow the law, so much as they just made a turd of a product. (Which, as it happens, isn't very unusual for them.)
Since nearly every router can be presumed to have a wide-open (and likely quite fast) pipe to the Internet, there are plenty of ways to get around the need to have a central server. Some others are rather unknown, or even a bit old, but those reasons by themselves don't make them inapplicable to the role.
Storage for all of this can be a problem, but that's an easy one to solve: The small size that such a worm must be combined with the relatively large amount of bandwidth available on each infected host means that only a very small percentage of them need to be able to store a quantity of files for the rest of the network to consume. As luck will have it, a substantial portion of these routers will be connected by fast Ethernet to Windows share, which these days means that there's a good chance of having multiple gigabytes of storage available without anyone ever noticing, let alone anything being logged.
(And, of course, the routers will be able to share and relay different versions of the worm amongst themselves locally over WiFi -- just try tracking that.)
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the rest of the dots, so I won't bother.
An ambitious programmer of the caliber needed to devise such a beast to begin with wouldn't see much of an impediment with these vast resources. With careful and diverse seeding of the first round of infection, such a worm would be very hard to stop, let alone trace back to its originator.
There is nothing to stop nVidia or AMD from being complicit in the DRM game -- in fact, given their recent experience in developing such stuff in support of Vista, it seems likely that they'd find it relatively easy to do even if the drivers were totally open. There's no compelling reason why the whole thing could not be implemented totally in hardware.
It could even be simplified to such an extent that it'd be trivial for applications to support: The Unix way of doing things suggests implementing something like a/dev/drm, which one would simply feed encrypted video data into. Have this video decrypted in the GPU itself using some revocable, traceable, and unique key embedded in the video card. At the end of the day, the encryption side would act almost exactly like like HDCP, but across a PCI bus instead of a DVI or HDMI cable.
The userland side of playing a full-screen video might then be as simple as "cat encrypted.avi >/dev/drm", with optional extensions to control position, sizing, color, contrast, and (this is 2008) transparency. The kernel driver would simply munge the bits into a form that the GPU can understand, and pass the encrypted data along to the hardware, so there's no reason not to open-source that side of it.
Output would, of course, be either low-resolution or high-resolution HDCP encrypted, depending on the user's monitor.
They've probably got the harder parts (memory protection, key management, etc) of this in place in their hardware already. Putting the rest of it together seems like it'd just too easy.
(Somebody here had better file a patent, quickly, to prevent anything like this from ever happening.)
As soon as about an hour or so of actual news is clickable YouTube [...]
Unless I'm missing something, that's the problem with YouTube. You and I both, probably along with a number of other people, seem to just want to sit down and invest an hour (or so) into viewing independent news. But whatever the cause, the standard for production value at YouTube seems squarely focused on making exciting videos which are no more than three minutes long.
Even if this is enough time to cover a topic (it might be for some), the larger problem is that after those three minutes are up, it just stops. As a viewer, you're then forced to either studiously search out something else to look at, click on the (largely random) links displayed around the video, or move on to something more productive.
There no is coherence or cohesion. No good mechanism to tie in related pieces and cleanly present them together. No way to present ideas which aren't being actively sought by the viewer. And no concept of timeliness.
The whole thing comes across as if it were designed solely to focus on catering to an audience suffering from ADD, and it takes a very concerted effort to work against that. Talk about wasted effort: Imagine millions of people independently assembling what would be (essentially) the same hours' worth of news footage. One would probably spend 20% of that hour searching news topics, 60% evaluating and skipping mindless "Hahaha! I've got a cameraphone!!! Hahaha!" videos, and (if very lucky) perhaps 20% of it actually taking in meaningful news.
An obvious improvement would be to permit arbitrary people to link together several videos into one, so that they'd all play in sequence -- that way, whoever might be motivated to do so can assemble a daily/weekly/whatever program for others to consume.
But that functionality either doesn't exist, or I haven't been able to find it.
And so, as things stand (as far as I can tell), YouTube makes a rather lousy format for displaying news. The concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts seems to be completely lost by whoever it is that decided not to make this functionality available, easy, and on the main page.
Either you get personalized service, or you get anonymous generic service. And if you opt for anonymous generic service, you're not going to be in a position to negotiate terms that are in your interest. To get a contract with terms that are actually favorable to YOU, where they can't change it on you at their whim, you'll need to be more involved with your service than 'click here to agree'. The best your going to get is 30 days notice by email. Its just that simple.
Indeed, it is that simple.
You must realize by now that the main point of all of this verbiage is that I'm simply attempting to convey that I'm perfectly happy with Google, and their terms of service. Their long history of not doing evil things provides strong reinforcement of the notion that they won't be doing evil things in the future.
I mean: They might be bloody huge, at this point, but they've so far never acted even a little bit like Apple, Microsoft, or SCO.
For these reasons, I feel rather comfortable with the fact that Google can change the terms at their whim, though I doubt that I would be with most other companies.
This level of trust, in combination with my refusal to pay for people to needlessly exist, counts very positively toward Google's offering in my own opinion.
I think the primary reason that we seem to disagree here is that you don't understand their terms of service, yourself.
I'll refer back to an earlier posting provided by you:
You said: Google on the other hand may tell any one it wants, publish it in lists, show screenshots of it, incorporate the customers brand marks in presentations, etc.
They've retained for themselves a very limited right to my brand marks for announcements and publications, sure, but they'll never use it. It's for bragging rights: To publish a client list, or to proclaim that even $big_entity (as recognized by their logo) uses the service. And so what? If I had, say, IBM as a staple client of my own business, I'd sure want to use their logo in my promotional material, and I'd be kicking myself if I hadn't included such a clause in my initial agreement with them.
As it stands, my own marks provide them with zero value. If it turns out that they might have value in the future (after I become insanely rich, or something), more power to 'em.
You said: Google shall own all rights, title, and interest, without limitation all IP rights... including but not limited to all technology, information, CONTENT....
To which I can only rebut by putting it into context:
Google and its licensors shall own all right, title and interest, including without limitation all Intellectual Property Rights (as defined below) relating to the Service (and any derivative works or enhancements thereof), including but not limited to, all software, technology, information, content, materials, guidelines, and documentation. Customer shall not acquire any right, title, or interest therein, except for the limited use rights expressly set forth in the Agreement. Any rights not expressly granted herein are deemed withheld. "Intellectual Property Rights" means any and all rights existing from time to time under patent law, copyright law, semiconductor chip protection law, moral rights law, trade secret law, trademark law, unfair competition law, publicity rights law, privacy rights law, and any and all other proprietary rights, and any and all applications, renewals, extensions and restorations thereof, now or hereafter in force and effect worldwide. Google does not own third party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service. Title, ownership rights, and Intellectual Property Rights in and to the content accessed through the Service are the property of the applicable content owner and may be protected by applicable copyright or other law. Customer agrees not to, or to allow others to: (i) adapt, translate, or modify the Software; (ii) decipher, decompil
I'm not going to invest the time or the money in finding a local provider and negotiating a contract for the dozen or so personal emails I handle daily. It's just not going to happen.
Besides, I don't need a human being to hold my hand while explaining to me the features and services offered by their fucking IMAP server, nor to do me the favor of "setting up my account". As you know, none of this is rocket science.
I also don't want a human being to be there for me in tech support. I just want them to keep their side of things to working and communicate outwardly when stuff breaks, so that I don't need to call technical support just to tell them that their stuff is broken, which is the only reason I'd ever call them anyway.
And I don't even want a human being to discuss billing problems with. In fact, I don't want a bill at all.
So, I see no reason to pay for these warm bodies, as they have nothing to offer me.
Some background: I'm also not a very big fan of welfare, I buy almost all of my computer-related stuff from largely human-less operations like Newegg, and I order pizza online instead of over the phone because I can usually save a couple of dollars by doing so.
Even in matters that must involve a salesman, like buying a new range, I will negotiate away as much of his commission as possible and gladly walk away from a deal if I feel he's being paid too much for his disservice. I don't need nor want to be sold to; I need left the fuck alone while I select my appliance. All I need a salesman for is to say "Yes," "No," or "Sign here," none of which are acts worthy of a tall commission.
I'd be perfectly happy if there were a credit card reader next to each appliance, instead of a bunch of bored salespeople hanging around like vultures. Slide the card through, and a little screen would ask what day you'd like it to be delivered.
Current trends indicate that I am not alone in this mindset.
I also firmly believe that any company professing to provide any manner of "Internet Service" ought to have a substantial amount of information about such service available on the Internet. Any company which, as we roll into 2008, has not yet figured out how to do this reeks completely of not fucking getting it, and deserves none of my money.
But at least, there's finally some hope for your argument. "ync.net" == something other than hand-waving. That wasn't so hard, now was it?
But even then, two weeks' notice is insufficient, IMO -- there's still potential for evil within the fact that the contract still can be changed without any discussion, and that through inaction a user will be bound by the new terms.
Though it looks like a friendly enough company today, that can always change. It might even be headed south right now; I found this gem in ync's ToS:
User is prohibited from soliciting any of ISP's users to become users of other competitive services. Aw, shucks. Now one can't even freely discuss different ISP/web hosts/colos/backup providers without being fired by one.
Google also looks like a friendly enough company today, and if that ever changes, it will only take me a few minutes to switch the domain over to my Dreamhost account while I find it a more permanent home.
Meanwhile, Google's own ToS says very plainly that my stuff will remain my stuff: Google does not own third party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service. Title, ownership rights, and Intellectual Property Rights in and to the content accessed through the Service are the property of the applicable content owner and may be protected by applicable copyright or other law. (Emphasis added.)
I guess that I am still unconvinced that Google is substantially more evil than anything else out there within reason.
You'll pay for it of course, but you can have a personalized contract with set SLA levels, stating the terms, with pretty much any decent provider, even most of the big ones.
If I can't get a contract that promises not to change without having one written one up special, then the option may as well as not exist. E-mail will never be a substantial portion of my personal spending.
And its not that hard to find a reasonable service that will at least agree to not ever use your data except to deliver / host it for you, and to give you written notice 30 days prior to a change in the terms of service.
Uh-huh.
Everyone keeps saying that. I've asked for specifics two times now, and all I get in return is this sort of postulate hand-waving. So I guess it doesn't exist.
But nevermind that: If the they can always change the terms whenever they want, then what fucking difference does it make what the they are today?
The point is, that with such language, all companies might as well all be equally evil. These contracts can all be summarized as: "We agree to handle your email, unless we change our minds. You agree to follow our rules, which we can create at a whim. Meanwhile, we'll be doing whatever the fuck else we want, although we might decide to let you know first."
I'll stick with Google. Same evil clause, plus excellent pricing and good service.
Vista seems to have some interesting tricks in this regard, apparently by not only making the text bigger, but the graphics and layout as well, such that the entire dialog box simply gets bigger. This could obviously cause a few problems, but it's way more functional than the old, broken method you talked about.
Also, in Vista, some other applications, which apparently understand how to handle arbitrary DPI settings, are left alone to handle things on their own. It's not clear to me if this is based on a whitelist, or if it is an API setting, or what. It seems to guess correctly, though.
I've not used this feature extensively, because I'd always rather fit more on the screen than make things bigger. But I don't remember finding anything very hateful about it. It just sort of worked.
The 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200 in non-marketroid-speak) display in my Dell laptop is something close to 150DPI.
It is nearly 3 years old and is, for all purposes so far, plenty good enough in terms of pixel resolution, though its rather limited color space does leave something else to be desired.
I'd love to have something like this (or with even more tightly-packed pixels) in desktop form factor, but it doesn't seem to exist.
Raised floors for the positive-pressure side of the cooling system? Sure.
It's not as backwards as you think: Heat wants to rise. Why fight it? By injecting copious amounts of cold air into the bottom of the rack, you can just let the heat travel up and out of the top. Convection is your friend.
The biggest problem in my opinion with such an arrangement is that there will always be a temptation to run cables through the raised floor. This will require plenum-rated cable, which varies in additional pain from simply being more expensive, to being totally unavailable. If raised-floor cooling is used, make sure that nobody ever plans to run cable through it (it's generally an ugly cabling technique, anyway).
I also have some other things for the original poster to consider, in no particular order:
Noise. There's tons of comments here about isolating the work area from the server room to protect your sanity, but don't forget about noise in the server room. Try though you might, but you'll still end up spending considerable time every now and then tending to the servers in person or working with wiring. It's hell trying to troubleshoot cabling with a 2-way radio or a telephone, trying to shout over the constant whine of a dozen or more large Papst ball-bearing fans exhausting hot air from the racks.
Installing sound-absorbing melamine panels on the walls will cure a lot of this, by limiting reverberation inside of the server room. Done properly, and you'll mostly just hear the noise which is directly radiated by the fans and servers, and very little of the huge amounts of noise which would normally be bouncing around between the walls. (Melamine is a lot more expensive than traditional self-extinguishing polyurethane foam products like Sonex, but withstands fire far, far better.)
And, for isolation, don't go cheap. Install at least double-thickness 5/8" drywall between the server room and any other space in the building which is intended to be quiet. This will help control the spread of fire, either into or out of the server room, but will also substantially reduce the amount of noise being transmitted through the wall.
And, no matter what, at least insulate the stud cavities with fiberglass -- it costs so little that it ought to be a foregone conclusion. The climate will be easier to control, and noise will be further reduced.
Build the drywall all the way up to the structural ceiling; don't just stop at a typical 8 feet. Again, the reason is fireproofing, but it will also cut down on noise.
Run all cabling into or out of the server room through metal conduit. It doesn't have to be very long; just a few inches past each side of the wall. Seal between the conduit (and any HVAC penetrations) with fireproof caulking, and stuff the inside of the pipe (at both ends) with fireproof rock wool insulation or fire caulk once the cable is installed. This will help keep fire from traveling along a wire into or out of your server room, and is neither as hard nor as inconvenient as it sounds.
For fire suppression, you'll want to use halon (or similar) if you want your servers to survive, along with some manner of automatic kill switch for the electricity. If this is out your budget, then at least keep a large-ish portable halon extinguisher near the exit door. I've never seen a server flame out, but I've seen the remains of plenty of small fires inside of things like power supplies and network switches that could have easily gone out of hand. (ABC dry chemical extinguisher also work fine for putting out small server-room fires, but tend to destroy any plastics that they come in contact with. Including, of course, cabling.)
Racks. For smaller configurations (like yours), it can be nice to have racks with smoked glass doors on the front and the back, with fans exhausting hot air from the top and vents allowing cool air to flow from underneath. The doors should be easily removable, but there should also be plenty of room
If there is a substantially less-evil provider (and, no, the local mom-n-pops don't count) out there, whose agreement includes NO language stating that the terms are subject to change at any time, then I'm still waiting to hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it defeats the purpose, maybe not. You must realize that everything has non-zero cost, including the potential to have an internal drive. At the $200, I'm sure there isn't much cash to spare for such things like larger chassis and extraneous connectors. (If one wants a real computer which includes such features, they're already available today for just very slightly more money than that.)
For my own purposes, I own three DVD recorders. One is in my daily-use laptop. Another is in my wife's computer. The third is an external USB 2.0 job which lives on my desk and connects with a long cable to whatever machine might need direct access to optical media (this turns out to almost always be the laptop, as its internal burner is somewhat lacking).
As a bonus, the enclosure it's in is fanless so there is essentially zero dust inside of the drive.
I keep thinking about buying a dedicated internal DVD burner for my primary desktop machine, but so far I have always come up with something better to spend $30 on instead.
It's the same with floppy drives. Some of my older computers still have them, but they never seem to work for the 1 or 2 times a year that I actually need one. So I have a single, cheap external USB floppy drive solves that problem neatly and, again, accumulates no dust.
CDs or DVDs just get in the way now days. Who needs them.
Who needs them? Almost everyone.
They're vastly cheaper, and for data that is both large and that you'd like to keep for a long time (a movie, an album, family photographs, recordings from your garage band, whatever) it makes more sense to archive it on a $1 CD or DVD and file it away neatly than it does to use a $20 SD card.
Plus, optical media doesn't suffer from problems with static, wayward USB ports, or anything similar. Stored properly, and it's good for at least a decade.
And, being inherently write protected, it prevents people from accidentally destroying their own stuff, or having their data attacked by a virus.
I can mail/give out a dozen DVDs to a dozen different random people without ever really thinking about the expense, but at current prices I'd never do such a thing with 4GB flash cards.
So on, and so forth.
CDs and DVDs are still very useful items, indeed.
Booting from a USB CD-ROM is (still) special enough that a lot of in-the-field systems are still incapable of doing so. From the BIOS's perspective, it's totally different from booting a USB disk drive, which indeed is quite widely supported at this point.
FWIW.
I've heard of appget before, so this question might have an answer which is obvious to some, but:
What prevents me (or anyone else) from submitting bogus and/or malicious download links?
Heh.
It's a public forum, Dan. I didn't see his posting addressed to anyone, though it did contain verbiage which affects me personally.
As user 10998, I'd expect you to know how things tend to operate around here. If he were picking on black people, and I were black, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on Jews, and I were Jewish, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on Linux, and I were a Linux zealot, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on basketball, and I were just coming in from a game of 2 on 2, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on gay people, and I just happened to be gay, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally. If he were picking on beer drinkers, and I were just opening a cold one, I'd be offended and might be inclined to take it personally.
So on, so forth. The context of the original poster is important, of course, but it's not everything.
If it were, you wouldn't have bothered to reply -- I didn't see the name "Dan D." or "user 10998" anywhere in my post.
There aren't any private discussions here on Slashdot.
Yeah. Google Earth is a neat tool, but it doesn't exactly help.
How do I tell my car to turn left past the old Weller barn and head into the woods?
How do I tell my car to drive very slowly on that road over by the abandoned clay pits, so I can watch deer graze where the wheat field meets the trees at dusk? Do I really have to guide the fucking thing by voice, turn by turn, all the way there, or pick it out from aerial photographs? And, having gotten there, how do I maneuver my driverless car off the right side of the road at an angle so that I can illuminate the field? (I guess it won't matter: Since it's not on the way to anywhere, nobody's driverless car will ever happen across it. And since deer don't show up on Google Earth, everyone will forget about that spot in no time. It's not like anyone should ever find simple joy in watching native wildlife, anyway, right?)
How do I tell my car to park in the front yard at a party where the driveway is full?
How do I back my driverless car up to the front door of my house so that I can unload $random_heavy_object?
How do I instruct my driverless car to just go around the crackhead in the 1990 Dodge Caravan who is conducting business up ahead (and blocking a large portion of a one-way road)? Do I really have to fucking wait around in such a neighborhood?
Just as I'd rather walk than be pushed in a wheelchair, I'd rather drive than be driven.
I desire more than to merely be delivered to the requested address.
What you describe isn't fun.
:)
Driving for fun happens on small, seldom-traveled roads (sometimes just wide enough for one car, or unpaved), removed from the traffic of the main routes. Stuff like having some asshole cut you off doesn't happen, because there aren't any assholes, let alone anyone else.
I guess that, honestly, I'd be OK with my car going driverless as soon as it finds itself on an Interstate highway. Interstate driving, which is similar to what you're describing, is not fun, therefore there's little reason for me to participate in it.
Except for the fact that I doubt I'd ever buy such a car unless I had to, so I'd still probably be operating it myself.
Hmm.
I think we have a difference of fact, here.
You seem to indicate that your tax dollars are for making roads for the sole purpose of efficient and safe transportation.
Meanwhile, my own tax dollars are certainly in support of roads which allow independant (and perhaps destinationless) ambulation, whether for fun or for any other purpose.
I know I've certainly been sitting around on a lazy summer evening and decided to go for a nice drive in the country with my wife, even going so far as to drive in a random direction to see what there is to uncover, several times even making a whole weekend out of the randomness of it. There's lots of great things out there to discover which a computer-controlled car will never find.
I know it seems crazy/insane/unbelievable, but the vast majority of people in this country don't want the government funding things with taxpayer dollars merely for the efficiency of "some people". Especially when doing so eliminates a laundry list of enjoyable benefits to the country at large.
And I must ask: What do you suppose the meaning of life is, if not to enjoy our time here on this rock?
I mean, we're not just fucking ants or honeybees here, but real human beings. We have other needs beyond being productive, and I submit that most people would feel that a certain amount of entertainment is needed in life.
And, since you've made this personal by belittling one of my own small joys, please allow me to do the same: I suspect that you enjoy spending your days finding new and more efficient methods with which to conduct yourself. I also suspect that either you are very lonely, or if you are married, that your wife is (perhaps secretly).
I eagerly await your retort.
Naw, it's an Inspiron 6000d which, despite being tossed about in my backpack several times each day, use in extreme conditions (places like tops of water towers in high wind with -5 temperatures), and occasionally being slammed around the trunk of my BMW as I drive through town, seems to generally work just fine.
The right-hand display hinge gave up a few days ago -- the screws stripped themselves from the display side of the hinge. The bullet-proof 4-year warranty I bought the machine with finally paid for itself when the Dell rep sent new front and back bezels, a new hinge cover, a set of rubber bumpers, a free (gratis) black quicksnap cover (thanks!) and a new Samsung WUXGA display panel. Made the call at 6PM EST, had parts the next morning.
Previously, they also have replaced a power supply which died after having spent two days at the bottom of a river (that just happened to be flowing through the computer room), without question.
I hate extended warranties, but the next laptop is getting one also unless it is one of those $400 throwaway jobs (unlikely).
Anyway, a brief look at Dell's website didn't show me any current machines with 1920x1200 displays, but plugging "WUXGA" into Newegg's search box reveals a few potentially-good 15.4" laptops, including a Thinkpad or two.
Good luck.
Sure, they're FM quality rather than CD quality but if you're ripping to MP3 it doesn't matter anyway.
Yes, it does.
Both FM and MP3 are similar in that they can each sound anywhere from very bad to quite good.
But they're totally different kinds of bad.
Layer one on top of the other, and you get the worst of both worlds, not the best of one of them as you suggest.
FM radio is noisey, often has high harmonic and intermodulation distortion, is bandlimited, lacks good channel seperation, and almost always is stepped on until what comes out of the radio is only vaguely similar to the original recording (though this last part doesn't have to be that way).
MP3 noiseless, has very little distortion, is sometimes bandlimited, has no dynamic compression, but does suffer from codec-oriented compression artifacts (mostly on high-frequencies and fast aounds).
Combine both, and you get a noisey, distorted, poorly seperated, re-equalized and mixed, bandlimited thing, with all of the dynamics removed so that there are no loud nor soft parts anymore, which is then reduced down to a lowish-bitrate MP3 that isn't particularly good at encoding noise or distortion anyway, let alone noise AND music. To add to this insult, the music probably started out life as an MP3 or AAC file at the broadcast studio anyway, compounding the errors from the tandem lossy compressors.
Of course it matters -- it's a recipe for disaster UNLESS the original broadcast is of very high quality (it never is for pop stations) with no/minimal processing, the reciever well-tuned with strong reception, and the MP3 encoder carefully adjusted.
Maybe recording pop this way is good enough for you. Perhaps you even prefer the (wretched) sound. But please forget any comparison to "FM quality" or "CD quality" or similar, because what you're hearing has very little in common with either what the musicians and mastering engineeers heard in the studio and approved for the CD, or the potential for that CD to be heard on an FM radio.
These days, without any exception that I can find either locally or while travelling, commercial radio in the US all sounds like trash.
It's not over yet.
But I don't care which one "wins."
All I care about, as a consumer, is that something wins, so that the economy of scale can kick in and let the content and the players get cheap.
And all I care about, as a thief, is that something wins, so that the economy of scale can kick in and let burners and decryption software get cheap.
Why?
It is not as if they have a shortage of submissions. So why bother being kind to spammers who are more interested in self-promotion than producing content?
Ha.
Hundreds of lives.
Hundreds.
Billions of dollars to save hundreds of lives.
Amazing.
Thanks for the humorous diversion. Can we get back to spending my money on something more productive, now?
Sincerely,
Taxpayer
Funny thing, the Audio Home Recording Act (the same US law which brings us the "tape tax" which is referred to here) specifically exempts professional gear.
So it's really not the case that Alesis placed this restriction in order to follow the law, so much as they just made a turd of a product. (Which, as it happens, isn't very unusual for them.)
Not necessarily.
Since nearly every router can be presumed to have a wide-open (and likely quite fast) pipe to the Internet, there are plenty of ways to get around the need to have a central server. Some others are rather unknown, or even a bit old, but those reasons by themselves don't make them inapplicable to the role.
Storage for all of this can be a problem, but that's an easy one to solve: The small size that such a worm must be combined with the relatively large amount of bandwidth available on each infected host means that only a very small percentage of them need to be able to store a quantity of files for the rest of the network to consume. As luck will have it, a substantial portion of these routers will be connected by fast Ethernet to Windows share, which these days means that there's a good chance of having multiple gigabytes of storage available without anyone ever noticing, let alone anything being logged.
(And, of course, the routers will be able to share and relay different versions of the worm amongst themselves locally over WiFi -- just try tracking that.)
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the rest of the dots, so I won't bother.
An ambitious programmer of the caliber needed to devise such a beast to begin with wouldn't see much of an impediment with these vast resources. With careful and diverse seeding of the first round of infection, such a worm would be very hard to stop, let alone trace back to its originator.
I couldn't agree more.
/dev/drm, which one would simply feed encrypted video data into. Have this video decrypted in the GPU itself using some revocable, traceable, and unique key embedded in the video card. At the end of the day, the encryption side would act almost exactly like like HDCP, but across a PCI bus instead of a DVI or HDMI cable.
/dev/drm", with optional extensions to control position, sizing, color, contrast, and (this is 2008) transparency. The kernel driver would simply munge the bits into a form that the GPU can understand, and pass the encrypted data along to the hardware, so there's no reason not to open-source that side of it.
There is nothing to stop nVidia or AMD from being complicit in the DRM game -- in fact, given their recent experience in developing such stuff in support of Vista, it seems likely that they'd find it relatively easy to do even if the drivers were totally open. There's no compelling reason why the whole thing could not be implemented totally in hardware.
It could even be simplified to such an extent that it'd be trivial for applications to support: The Unix way of doing things suggests implementing something like a
The userland side of playing a full-screen video might then be as simple as "cat encrypted.avi >
Output would, of course, be either low-resolution or high-resolution HDCP encrypted, depending on the user's monitor.
They've probably got the harder parts (memory protection, key management, etc) of this in place in their hardware already. Putting the rest of it together seems like it'd just too easy.
(Somebody here had better file a patent, quickly, to prevent anything like this from ever happening.)
As soon as about an hour or so of actual news is clickable YouTube [...]
Unless I'm missing something, that's the problem with YouTube. You and I both, probably along with a number of other people, seem to just want to sit down and invest an hour (or so) into viewing independent news. But whatever the cause, the standard for production value at YouTube seems squarely focused on making exciting videos which are no more than three minutes long.
Even if this is enough time to cover a topic (it might be for some), the larger problem is that after those three minutes are up, it just stops. As a viewer, you're then forced to either studiously search out something else to look at, click on the (largely random) links displayed around the video, or move on to something more productive.
There no is coherence or cohesion. No good mechanism to tie in related pieces and cleanly present them together. No way to present ideas which aren't being actively sought by the viewer. And no concept of timeliness.
The whole thing comes across as if it were designed solely to focus on catering to an audience suffering from ADD, and it takes a very concerted effort to work against that. Talk about wasted effort: Imagine millions of people independently assembling what would be (essentially) the same hours' worth of news footage. One would probably spend 20% of that hour searching news topics, 60% evaluating and skipping mindless "Hahaha! I've got a cameraphone!!! Hahaha!" videos, and (if very lucky) perhaps 20% of it actually taking in meaningful news.
An obvious improvement would be to permit arbitrary people to link together several videos into one, so that they'd all play in sequence -- that way, whoever might be motivated to do so can assemble a daily/weekly/whatever program for others to consume.
But that functionality either doesn't exist, or I haven't been able to find it.
And so, as things stand (as far as I can tell), YouTube makes a rather lousy format for displaying news. The concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts seems to be completely lost by whoever it is that decided not to make this functionality available, easy, and on the main page.
Either you get personalized service, or you get anonymous generic service. And if you opt for anonymous generic service, you're not going to be in a position to negotiate terms that are in your interest. To get a contract with terms that are actually favorable to YOU, where they can't change it on you at their whim, you'll need to be more involved with your service than 'click here to agree'. The best your going to get is 30 days notice by email. Its just that simple.
Indeed, it is that simple.
You must realize by now that the main point of all of this verbiage is that I'm simply attempting to convey that I'm perfectly happy with Google, and their terms of service. Their long history of not doing evil things provides strong reinforcement of the notion that they won't be doing evil things in the future.
I mean: They might be bloody huge, at this point, but they've so far never acted even a little bit like Apple, Microsoft, or SCO.
For these reasons, I feel rather comfortable with the fact that Google can change the terms at their whim, though I doubt that I would be with most other companies.
This level of trust, in combination with my refusal to pay for people to needlessly exist, counts very positively toward Google's offering in my own opinion.
I think the primary reason that we seem to disagree here is that you don't understand their terms of service, yourself.
I'll refer back to an earlier posting provided by you:
You said: Google on the other hand may tell any one it wants, publish it in lists, show screenshots of it, incorporate the customers brand marks in presentations, etc.
They've retained for themselves a very limited right to my brand marks for announcements and publications, sure, but they'll never use it. It's for bragging rights: To publish a client list, or to proclaim that even $big_entity (as recognized by their logo) uses the service. And so what? If I had, say, IBM as a staple client of my own business, I'd sure want to use their logo in my promotional material, and I'd be kicking myself if I hadn't included such a clause in my initial agreement with them.
As it stands, my own marks provide them with zero value. If it turns out that they might have value in the future (after I become insanely rich, or something), more power to 'em.
You said: Google shall own all rights, title, and interest, without limitation all IP rights... including but not limited to all technology, information, CONTENT....
To which I can only rebut by putting it into context:
Google and its licensors shall own all right, title and interest, including without limitation all Intellectual Property Rights (as defined below) relating to the Service (and any derivative works or enhancements thereof), including but not limited to, all software, technology, information, content, materials, guidelines, and documentation. Customer shall not acquire any right, title, or interest therein, except for the limited use rights expressly set forth in the Agreement. Any rights not expressly granted herein are deemed withheld. "Intellectual Property Rights" means any and all rights existing from time to time under patent law, copyright law, semiconductor chip protection law, moral rights law, trade secret law, trademark law, unfair competition law, publicity rights law, privacy rights law, and any and all other proprietary rights, and any and all applications, renewals, extensions and restorations thereof, now or hereafter in force and effect worldwide. Google does not own third party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service. Title, ownership rights, and Intellectual Property Rights in and to the content accessed through the Service are the property of the applicable content owner and may be protected by applicable copyright or other law. Customer agrees not to, or to allow others to: (i) adapt, translate, or modify the Software; (ii) decipher, decompil
I'm not going to invest the time or the money in finding a local provider and negotiating a contract for the dozen or so personal emails I handle daily. It's just not going to happen.
Besides, I don't need a human being to hold my hand while explaining to me the features and services offered by their fucking IMAP server, nor to do me the favor of "setting up my account". As you know, none of this is rocket science.
I also don't want a human being to be there for me in tech support. I just want them to keep their side of things to working and communicate outwardly when stuff breaks, so that I don't need to call technical support just to tell them that their stuff is broken, which is the only reason I'd ever call them anyway.
And I don't even want a human being to discuss billing problems with. In fact, I don't want a bill at all.
So, I see no reason to pay for these warm bodies, as they have nothing to offer me.
Some background: I'm also not a very big fan of welfare, I buy almost all of my computer-related stuff from largely human-less operations like Newegg, and I order pizza online instead of over the phone because I can usually save a couple of dollars by doing so.
Even in matters that must involve a salesman, like buying a new range, I will negotiate away as much of his commission as possible and gladly walk away from a deal if I feel he's being paid too much for his disservice. I don't need nor want to be sold to; I need left the fuck alone while I select my appliance. All I need a salesman for is to say "Yes," "No," or "Sign here," none of which are acts worthy of a tall commission.
I'd be perfectly happy if there were a credit card reader next to each appliance, instead of a bunch of bored salespeople hanging around like vultures. Slide the card through, and a little screen would ask what day you'd like it to be delivered.
Current trends indicate that I am not alone in this mindset.
I also firmly believe that any company professing to provide any manner of "Internet Service" ought to have a substantial amount of information about such service available on the Internet. Any company which, as we roll into 2008, has not yet figured out how to do this reeks completely of not fucking getting it, and deserves none of my money.
But at least, there's finally some hope for your argument. "ync.net" == something other than hand-waving. That wasn't so hard, now was it?
But even then, two weeks' notice is insufficient, IMO -- there's still potential for evil within the fact that the contract still can be changed without any discussion, and that through inaction a user will be bound by the new terms.
Though it looks like a friendly enough company today, that can always change. It might even be headed south right now; I found this gem in ync's ToS:
User is prohibited from soliciting any of ISP's users to become users of other competitive services. Aw, shucks. Now one can't even freely discuss different ISP/web hosts/colos/backup providers without being fired by one.
Google also looks like a friendly enough company today, and if that ever changes, it will only take me a few minutes to switch the domain over to my Dreamhost account while I find it a more permanent home.
Meanwhile, Google's own ToS says very plainly that my stuff will remain my stuff: Google does not own third party content used as part of the Service, including the content of communications appearing on the Service. Title, ownership rights, and Intellectual Property Rights in and to the content accessed through the Service are the property of the applicable content owner and may be protected by applicable copyright or other law. (Emphasis added.)
I guess that I am still unconvinced that Google is substantially more evil than anything else out there within reason.
You'll pay for it of course, but you can have a personalized contract with set SLA levels, stating the terms, with pretty much any decent provider, even most of the big ones.
If I can't get a contract that promises not to change without having one written one up special, then the option may as well as not exist. E-mail will never be a substantial portion of my personal spending.
And its not that hard to find a reasonable service that will at least agree to not ever use your data except to deliver / host it for you, and to give you written notice 30 days prior to a change in the terms of service.
Uh-huh.
Everyone keeps saying that. I've asked for specifics two times now, and all I get in return is this sort of postulate hand-waving. So I guess it doesn't exist.
But nevermind that: If the they can always change the terms whenever they want, then what fucking difference does it make what the they are today?
The point is, that with such language, all companies might as well all be equally evil. These contracts can all be summarized as: "We agree to handle your email, unless we change our minds. You agree to follow our rules, which we can create at a whim. Meanwhile, we'll be doing whatever the fuck else we want, although we might decide to let you know first."
I'll stick with Google. Same evil clause, plus excellent pricing and good service.
Vista seems to have some interesting tricks in this regard, apparently by not only making the text bigger, but the graphics and layout as well, such that the entire dialog box simply gets bigger. This could obviously cause a few problems, but it's way more functional than the old, broken method you talked about.
Also, in Vista, some other applications, which apparently understand how to handle arbitrary DPI settings, are left alone to handle things on their own. It's not clear to me if this is based on a whitelist, or if it is an API setting, or what. It seems to guess correctly, though.
I've not used this feature extensively, because I'd always rather fit more on the screen than make things bigger. But I don't remember finding anything very hateful about it. It just sort of worked.
The 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200 in non-marketroid-speak) display in my Dell laptop is something close to 150DPI.
It is nearly 3 years old and is, for all purposes so far, plenty good enough in terms of pixel resolution, though its rather limited color space does leave something else to be desired.
I'd love to have something like this (or with even more tightly-packed pixels) in desktop form factor, but it doesn't seem to exist.
Raised floors for the positive-pressure side of the cooling system? Sure.
It's not as backwards as you think: Heat wants to rise. Why fight it? By injecting copious amounts of cold air into the bottom of the rack, you can just let the heat travel up and out of the top. Convection is your friend.
The biggest problem in my opinion with such an arrangement is that there will always be a temptation to run cables through the raised floor. This will require plenum-rated cable, which varies in additional pain from simply being more expensive, to being totally unavailable. If raised-floor cooling is used, make sure that nobody ever plans to run cable through it (it's generally an ugly cabling technique, anyway).
I also have some other things for the original poster to consider, in no particular order:
Noise. There's tons of comments here about isolating the work area from the server room to protect your sanity, but don't forget about noise in the server room. Try though you might, but you'll still end up spending considerable time every now and then tending to the servers in person or working with wiring. It's hell trying to troubleshoot cabling with a 2-way radio or a telephone, trying to shout over the constant whine of a dozen or more large Papst ball-bearing fans exhausting hot air from the racks.
Installing sound-absorbing melamine panels on the walls will cure a lot of this, by limiting reverberation inside of the server room. Done properly, and you'll mostly just hear the noise which is directly radiated by the fans and servers, and very little of the huge amounts of noise which would normally be bouncing around between the walls. (Melamine is a lot more expensive than traditional self-extinguishing polyurethane foam products like Sonex, but withstands fire far, far better.)
And, for isolation, don't go cheap. Install at least double-thickness 5/8" drywall between the server room and any other space in the building which is intended to be quiet. This will help control the spread of fire, either into or out of the server room, but will also substantially reduce the amount of noise being transmitted through the wall.
And, no matter what, at least insulate the stud cavities with fiberglass -- it costs so little that it ought to be a foregone conclusion. The climate will be easier to control, and noise will be further reduced.
Build the drywall all the way up to the structural ceiling; don't just stop at a typical 8 feet. Again, the reason is fireproofing, but it will also cut down on noise.
Run all cabling into or out of the server room through metal conduit. It doesn't have to be very long; just a few inches past each side of the wall. Seal between the conduit (and any HVAC penetrations) with fireproof caulking, and stuff the inside of the pipe (at both ends) with fireproof rock wool insulation or fire caulk once the cable is installed. This will help keep fire from traveling along a wire into or out of your server room, and is neither as hard nor as inconvenient as it sounds.
For fire suppression, you'll want to use halon (or similar) if you want your servers to survive, along with some manner of automatic kill switch for the electricity. If this is out your budget, then at least keep a large-ish portable halon extinguisher near the exit door. I've never seen a server flame out, but I've seen the remains of plenty of small fires inside of things like power supplies and network switches that could have easily gone out of hand. (ABC dry chemical extinguisher also work fine for putting out small server-room fires, but tend to destroy any plastics that they come in contact with. Including, of course, cabling.)
Racks. For smaller configurations (like yours), it can be nice to have racks with smoked glass doors on the front and the back, with fans exhausting hot air from the top and vents allowing cool air to flow from underneath. The doors should be easily removable, but there should also be plenty of room
Yep.
If there is a substantially less-evil provider (and, no, the local mom-n-pops don't count) out there, whose agreement includes NO language stating that the terms are subject to change at any time, then I'm still waiting to hear about it.