The notion that I could record 24/96 audio on my 'pod with a "regular mic" is ludicrous. I have a pair of Core Sound binaural microphones, however. Provided I had the disk space, am I wrong in thinking that might make a sweet kit for bootlegging concerts?
I've been able to get reliably decent boots on my ancient (as in, bought in '98) Sharp MiniDisc, even considering how lossy ATRAC is. By clipping the mics to the ends of the bows of my glasses -- i.e., an inch away from my ear canals -- I get a recording that's damned near exactly what I heard live. Using my iPod instead would be ideal. AFAICT, the recording wouldn't be compressed, the bit- and sample-rates are vastly higher, I'd be able to extract it digitally by mounting the device as a disk and venue security probably wouldn't look twice at an iPod.
If you're running GNOME, a KDE app, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice, you've got at least four major libraries now sitting in your memory, all doing the same things but with different code, implementing their own GUI widgets.
And when I used Windows, between Office, Visual Studio, Internet Explorer and plain ol' Windows, I had four different implementations of most of the common controls, too, "all doing the same things but with different code, implementing their own GUI widgets".
Take a look at his LiveJournal, for example. Well nigh every other post is an ego-wank of a calibre to make even DJB shake his head in shame. Bram's right and everyone else in the world is a moron.
Some years ago, I was on a mailing list with him. During a discussion on building crypto-using apps, a few posters were arguing in favor of making sure apps used parameterizable encryption a/o hashing algorithms -- so when, say, a weakness is discovered in MD5 (hmm... soundsfamiliar, no?), you weren't hosed. Bram disagreed, suggesting that merely the app's version number was somehow sufficient for getting around the problem. You just push out an upgrade that uses a new algorithm.
His response to perfectly civil -- oh yeah, and valid, sound, convincing argument that his suggestion was bunk, such as that you can't force users to upgrade, how will new versions play nicely with old, &c, was "Fuck you" and name-calling.
Nice.
I'll still use his protocol, and even donate, because it's about the best we've got right now for what it does, and I appreciate that. But I don't -- and don't have to -- like or respect him.
By what critera can a programmer know if the program he is writing is illegal?
Well, obviously, the programmer should ask the **AA for their permission, endorsement, blessings, and kindly to take possession of the programmer's soul, first through nth children, yea unto umpteen generations, copyright on and any and all profit, goodwill and positive (but not negative) repute derived from all such programs for which permission is given and souls, &c, are taken, and... his neighbor's dog, too. Just for good measure.
the internet and free software and so forth aren't anything *new* they just take a few knobs and crank them toward zero.
And as time goes on, more and more knobs will get cranked towards, even to zero. What happens to the market then? Capitalism works on the basis of scarcity. Goods are scarce, services are things you'd rather, for whatever reason, not do yourself (hence, scarcity of willingness, as it were), money is fluid and can be used in exchange for goods and services, making money the reward for work which produces goods and provides services to meet those scarcities, blah, blah, blah, &c, &c, ad nauseum.
As technology progresses, goods become more and more commodity, and even replace services. (Where once you hired a maid to come vacuum your floor, now you can buy a Roomba; where once you used the Roomba on your carpet, now you can install metabolic carpet that simply eats the dirt.) Consider the Recording industry and its fight against inevitablity. Why's it fighting so hard? Because its business model is based solely on the scarcity of physical media to store music on and control over distribution of those media. With P2P, that scarcity is obsolete.
Simply, it's incumbent upon businesses to reduce costs, one means of which comes from increased efficiency. Increased efficiency means lower cost per unit produced, which means either more units produced per unit cost, or fewer units produced -- another artificial scarcity. Seeing any knobs inevitably cranking towards zero here?
This is going to happen everywhere, even in our vaunted technology sector, where we're -- were -- paid the "big bucks" because we understood all this high-tech shit. Well, it's been demonstrated that genetic algorithms and such can, ultimately, design faster, more efficient, more powerful, &c chips than humans can. As that technology progresses, we'll have programs writing programs, too. We've got prototype Mickey-D's that don't have any humans at the counter: swipe your card, push some buttons, and then, finally, a person hands you your McNuggets or whatever -- and those humans are replaceable, too. It will, eventually, be cheaper to have some sort of robotic contraption flip your burger, wrap it up and hand it to you than it is to keep bodies on staff.
Intentionally or no, technology obsoletes scarcity, the fundamental thing upon which even the need for capital is based; everything's simply there. Without scarcity, what good is money? The very knob which needs to be cranked up for capitalism to be useful and, to the extent it is, beneficial to society is progressively, unstoppably being cranked down towards zero.
What happens then? Because either it's going to hit zero, or the next Dinosaur Killer's going to strike first, in which case it's all moot anyway. Foregoing the latter, WTF point will capitalism serve?
Now, I'm not remotely arguing that it's been unnecessary all along; we wouldn't be where we are unless the world had turned out exactly as it did. But we're only just beginning the creep into the post-scarcity age. What happens then? One way or another, there will always be some things that are scarce no matter what, but the fundamental fact is, scarcity is, itself, becoming scarce.
And, FTR, communism and socialism have always failed not because there's a market underneath, struggling to get out, but simply because of human greed, be it for wealth, power or whatever else. In a post-scarcity world, does greed even make sense?
as I know how ten hours of marathon gaming can kill my hands
During normal typing, your hands -- hell, your entire body -- are nowhere near as tense as during marathon or any other gaming. When I bother firing up a game on my peecee (I haven't a console, so I can't make any comparisons there), I'm leaning forward, I'm tense, I'm on edge waiting for the next baddy; I have to get him before he gets me, after all. When I'm typing, though, I'm leaning back, I'm chill, I'm kickin' it. I expect there'd be much the same difference between using this device and a control pad/joystick/whatever.
From the looks of it, your wrists would be positioned much more naturally than they are using a flat keyboard. Having to rotate your wrists to type is a major component of RSI. Much more so, to my knowledge, than gripping something. (I may be wrong there; my RSI affects the cubital, not carpal tunnel.) I already have a trackball so my wrist is stationary when mousing. I imagine this device would offer much the same sort of benefit. And with it, I wouldn't even have to switch back and forth between mouse and keyboard. Better off all around, I'd think.
After a period of adjustment, of course (which would probably involve throwing it across the room in frustration a time or three...).
I just got a phish email "from" Citibank (with whom I haven't had an account in several years; that was my first hint...), and forwarded it on to emailfraud@citigroup.com and uce@ftc.gov.
Flip back to and refresh/. to see that almost a third of email users don't have the third of a clue it would take to recognize this crap for what it is. "We has noticed a high level of suspishous attemtpts to access your account and brute force your PIN..."? Um. Okay.
Doesn't the click-wrap license agreement stipulate that you agree to "indemnify and hold harmless" (or however it's phrased) Microsoft, such that you don't have recourse to lawsuit? IANAL, but that's my reading of it.
Leaving aside whether or not click-wrap licenses are actually enforceable, I suggest that all the folks who aren't using any MS products at all (myself included) -- and as such haven't agreed to any such nonsense -- band together to join a class action suit against them. Whether it's for all the time we're stuck burning, having to fix the Windows PCs our friends, family, &c constantly need fixed, network outages caused by virii that use Windows exploits as a vector (my ISP [cable] was more or less buried under the overload in traffic from MyDoom and Welchia or whatever they were called, to the point that their only recourse was turning off infected users' connections).
Does "people who don't use a product but are still inconvenienced, put out and may even have suffered financial loss (as did a friend of mine when our ISP choked on virus traffic) because of its foreseeable and preventable problems" consitute a class?
With SQL, if either X or Y or both are NULL, then any expression evaluating it is false.
Actually, if if any members of the set (X, Y) are NULL, any comparison involving those members evaluates to NULL, not false.
The easiest way to define NULL is that it's equal to another NULL value, but not equal to anything else. Then I don't need any special 'is null' clause either.
No, the easiest way to define NULL is that you don't know what it is; it's unknown. It can't be equal, not equal, whatever to anything, even another NULL, for that very reason.
An example: I'm thinking of a number. Tell me, is it greater than 13? Unknown. Less? Unknown. &c. Try
select (NULL = NULL)::boolean;
(PostgreSQL syntax; substitute however it works for your favorite [O]RDBMS). If it's not brain-damaged, you'll get NULL. (Even MS SQL gets this one right, folks.)
The very definition of "b0rken" is people railing -- incorrectly, even -- against something they don't understand. The very definition of irony is when the thing in question is SQL NULL.
The RocketRaid 1820 is an 8-channel SATA PCI-X RAID controller going for, last I checked, $202. It doesn't have a DIMM slot for on-board cache, but *ATA RAID is all about bulk storage; if you want speed, go SCSI, or better (as I do at home), Fibre Channel.
I have no idea what its performance characteristics are, beyond the specs offered on the first link, but it certainly sounds tasty. I'm considering this card for my MythTV backend. 8x160G drives in RAID-5 is just a hair over a terabyte.
B5 was never actually cancelled. Every season, negotiations dragged right up to the do-or-die point for the next season, but came through in time every time except for the fifth season. That's why the First Ones and secession plotlines wrapped up so abruptly by the end of S4, leaving entirely too little material for S5.
According to JMS, had S5 been picked up in time, the last ep of S4 would actually have been Intersections in Real Time.
Typical Stallman. "It's either the way I think it should be, or it's Wrong." Sorry, RMS, but freedom only being Freedom when it uses your definition is a little too NewSpeak for my tastes.
When I have a choice between F/OSS and proprietary I tend to choose the former, like a good little Unix-Beard Pinko. I finally managed to get our DBA here at work to switch from MS SQL on Win2k to PostgreSQL on Linux (though I'd prefer it were running on FreeBSD)--and he's even starting to like it. I've gotten numerous friends and will eventually even get Mom to switch to, or at least try Linux/BSD (oh, wait; BSD isn't Free).
For RMS to malign me, question my morality and suggest I don't value freedom because I happen to use "Indonesia" and run the "Invidious" binary driver is ludicrous on its face. You have to pick your battles. I think I've done a fair job thus far of winning the ones I choose. In the end, that will do a hell of a lot better a job of spreading F/OSS than "You're either Free (according to my definition) or you're morally impure". That smacks of "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists", if you ask me.
Single-mindedness and zealotry is a losing quality, in whomever it's found.
As you say, SpamCop is fine; it's the ISPs that you need to worry about. A while back, I was running a mail server (forwards for a hundred-odd users, plus my own mail) off my DSL service. One of my users, playing the good little netizen, reported a batch of her spam to SpamCop, who, since my machine was in the headers, reported to my ISP--who promptly turned me off. No investigation, no "Hey, what's going on here?", not even a "Why are you spamming?". Lather, rinse, repeat, until the ISP ended up turning me off permamently. (And then, promptly, went out of business, shorting me nearly six months of my prepaid contract.)
Had they taken the thirty seconds to actually look at the headers, it'd've been obvious that I was, effectively, as much a victim of the spam as my user.
A "disconnect first, ask questions later" policy is fine, assuming you bother to ever actually ask.
I can imagine cases where it might matter, but it certainly doesn't have to. We have a couple of students interning here at my $orkplace, and they're eminently as capable and competent as many of the so-called professionals alongside them. Moreso in a few notable cases.
I think, ultimately (barring, of course, the pathological case of outright prejudice), it comes down to whether or not you know WTF you're doing. If you do, and can demonstrate it, age matters not one whit. If you don't, trying to pass it off as ageism is a weak-assed copout, at best.
Slashdot Mirror
(Yes, yes, bootlegging's naughty, blah, blah, blah.)
I've been able to get reliably decent boots on my ancient (as in, bought in '98) Sharp MiniDisc, even considering how lossy ATRAC is. By clipping the mics to the ends of the bows of my glasses -- i.e., an inch away from my ear canals -- I get a recording that's damned near exactly what I heard live. Using my iPod instead would be ideal. AFAICT, the recording wouldn't be compressed, the bit- and sample-rates are vastly higher, I'd be able to extract it digitally by mounting the device as a disk and venue security probably wouldn't look twice at an iPod.
I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.
but does it run on Linux?
And when I used Windows, between Office, Visual Studio, Internet Explorer and plain ol' Windows, I had four different implementations of most of the common controls, too, "all doing the same things but with different code, implementing their own GUI widgets".
And that's from one bloody vendor.
Your point?
Take a look at his LiveJournal, for example. Well nigh every other post is an ego-wank of a calibre to make even DJB shake his head in shame. Bram's right and everyone else in the world is a moron.
Some years ago, I was on a mailing list with him. During a discussion on building crypto-using apps, a few posters were arguing in favor of making sure apps used parameterizable encryption a/o hashing algorithms -- so when, say, a weakness is discovered in MD5 (hmm ... sounds familiar, no?), you weren't hosed. Bram disagreed, suggesting that merely the app's version number was somehow sufficient for getting around the problem. You just push out an upgrade that uses a new algorithm.
His response to perfectly civil -- oh yeah, and valid, sound, convincing argument that his suggestion was bunk, such as that you can't force users to upgrade, how will new versions play nicely with old, &c, was "Fuck you" and name-calling.
Nice.
I'll still use his protocol, and even donate, because it's about the best we've got right now for what it does, and I appreciate that. But I don't -- and don't have to -- like or respect him.
In nomine Stallman, et Emacs, et FSF sancti. Amen.
100% valid CSS and XHTML continues to crash IE.
"Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again."
One cats crazy; name: Five.
Um, dd if=/dev/partition bs=1m | bzip2 > ghost.bz2, maybe?
As technology progresses, goods become more and more commodity, and even replace services. (Where once you hired a maid to come vacuum your floor, now you can buy a Roomba; where once you used the Roomba on your carpet, now you can install metabolic carpet that simply eats the dirt.) Consider the Recording industry and its fight against inevitablity. Why's it fighting so hard? Because its business model is based solely on the scarcity of physical media to store music on and control over distribution of those media. With P2P, that scarcity is obsolete.
Simply, it's incumbent upon businesses to reduce costs, one means of which comes from increased efficiency. Increased efficiency means lower cost per unit produced, which means either more units produced per unit cost, or fewer units produced -- another artificial scarcity. Seeing any knobs inevitably cranking towards zero here?
This is going to happen everywhere, even in our vaunted technology sector, where we're -- were -- paid the "big bucks" because we understood all this high-tech shit. Well, it's been demonstrated that genetic algorithms and such can, ultimately, design faster, more efficient, more powerful, &c chips than humans can. As that technology progresses, we'll have programs writing programs, too. We've got prototype Mickey-D's that don't have any humans at the counter: swipe your card, push some buttons, and then, finally, a person hands you your McNuggets or whatever -- and those humans are replaceable, too. It will, eventually, be cheaper to have some sort of robotic contraption flip your burger, wrap it up and hand it to you than it is to keep bodies on staff.
Intentionally or no, technology obsoletes scarcity, the fundamental thing upon which even the need for capital is based; everything's simply there. Without scarcity, what good is money? The very knob which needs to be cranked up for capitalism to be useful and, to the extent it is, beneficial to society is progressively, unstoppably being cranked down towards zero.
What happens then? Because either it's going to hit zero, or the next Dinosaur Killer's going to strike first, in which case it's all moot anyway. Foregoing the latter, WTF point will capitalism serve?
Now, I'm not remotely arguing that it's been unnecessary all along; we wouldn't be where we are unless the world had turned out exactly as it did. But we're only just beginning the creep into the post-scarcity age. What happens then? One way or another, there will always be some things that are scarce no matter what, but the fundamental fact is, scarcity is, itself, becoming scarce.
And, FTR, communism and socialism have always failed not because there's a market underneath, struggling to get out, but simply because of human greed, be it for wealth, power or whatever else. In a post-scarcity world, does greed even make sense?
From the looks of it, your wrists would be positioned much more naturally than they are using a flat keyboard. Having to rotate your wrists to type is a major component of RSI. Much more so, to my knowledge, than gripping something. (I may be wrong there; my RSI affects the cubital, not carpal tunnel.) I already have a trackball so my wrist is stationary when mousing. I imagine this device would offer much the same sort of benefit. And with it, I wouldn't even have to switch back and forth between mouse and keyboard. Better off all around, I'd think.
After a period of adjustment, of course (which would probably involve throwing it across the room in frustration a time or three...).
Flip back to and refresh /. to see that almost a third of email users don't have the third of a clue it would take to recognize this crap for what it is. "We has noticed a high level of suspishous attemtpts to access your account and brute force your PIN..."? Um. Okay.
Leaving aside whether or not click-wrap licenses are actually enforceable, I suggest that all the folks who aren't using any MS products at all (myself included) -- and as such haven't agreed to any such nonsense -- band together to join a class action suit against them. Whether it's for all the time we're stuck burning, having to fix the Windows PCs our friends, family, &c constantly need fixed, network outages caused by virii that use Windows exploits as a vector (my ISP [cable] was more or less buried under the overload in traffic from MyDoom and Welchia or whatever they were called, to the point that their only recourse was turning off infected users' connections).
Does "people who don't use a product but are still inconvenienced, put out and may even have suffered financial loss (as did a friend of mine when our ISP choked on virus traffic) because of its foreseeable and preventable problems" consitute a class?
An example: I'm thinking of a number. Tell me, is it greater than 13? Unknown. Less? Unknown. &c. Try
(PostgreSQL syntax; substitute however it works for your favorite [O]RDBMS). If it's not brain-damaged, you'll get NULL. (Even MS SQL gets this one right, folks.)The very definition of "b0rken" is people railing -- incorrectly, even -- against something they don't understand. The very definition of irony is when the thing in question is SQL NULL.
I have no idea what its performance characteristics are, beyond the specs offered on the first link, but it certainly sounds tasty. I'm considering this card for my MythTV backend. 8x160G drives in RAID-5 is just a hair over a terabyte.
According to JMS, had S5 been picked up in time, the last ep of S4 would actually have been Intersections in Real Time.
Oh, you mean like Babylon 5?
$ cat ChangeLog-2.6.1 | grep @ | grep -v " " | sort | uniq | wc
117 117 2636
Still.
Well, it's not exactly scientific, but...
$ cat ChangeLog-2.6.1 | grep @ | grep -v " " | uniq | wc
254 254 5702
Does that qualify as an order-of-magnitude error?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/
When I have a choice between F/OSS and proprietary I tend to choose the former, like a good little Unix-Beard Pinko. I finally managed to get our DBA here at work to switch from MS SQL on Win2k to PostgreSQL on Linux (though I'd prefer it were running on FreeBSD)--and he's even starting to like it. I've gotten numerous friends and will eventually even get Mom to switch to, or at least try Linux/BSD (oh, wait; BSD isn't Free).
For RMS to malign me, question my morality and suggest I don't value freedom because I happen to use "Indonesia" and run the "Invidious" binary driver is ludicrous on its face. You have to pick your battles. I think I've done a fair job thus far of winning the ones I choose. In the end, that will do a hell of a lot better a job of spreading F/OSS than "You're either Free (according to my definition) or you're morally impure". That smacks of "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists", if you ask me.
Single-mindedness and zealotry is a losing quality, in whomever it's found.
Had they taken the thirty seconds to actually look at the headers, it'd've been obvious that I was, effectively, as much a victim of the spam as my user.
A "disconnect first, ask questions later" policy is fine, assuming you bother to ever actually ask.
I think, ultimately (barring, of course, the pathological case of outright prejudice), it comes down to whether or not you know WTF you're doing. If you do, and can demonstrate it, age matters not one whit. If you don't, trying to pass it off as ageism is a weak-assed copout, at best.