The FCC didn't assign 802.11b/g or cordless phones to 2.4GHz, it's an unlicensed band that anyone can do whatever they want in within certain limits on power and such.
Well, every time Rossi or his lackeys open their mouths, they look like bigger idiots, and now he's asking for taxpayers to pay $4 million for a revote, so that's not going to sit well with anyone.
They've already announced that they will be offering free time as well as accellerated experience gain. Why the slashdot summary ignored that is beyond me.
Speaking from my personal experience, it's easy in a household of five people to have a dual-tuner DVR saturated for 3-4 hours. No margin exists for this kind of crap.
Living in a non-right-to-work state, I find I have no right to work. That right is given to unions that are universally corrupt. So, I see nothing euphemistic about the term "right to work".
The only competitor to the iRiver HDD players for me was the Neuros, and it was an agonizing decision, but the Neuros is just too big and needs special software to operate properly. The iRivers present as perfectly ordinary USB mass storage devices, and the database created by the Windows driver is completely optional, allowing for cross-platform compatibility without needing to fiddle with anything.
I needed Ogg Vorbis support, I needed cross-platform compatibility, I needed small and light. The iRivers aren't perfect, but they're good, solid players, and met my needs.
Appropriate? It's their *job*. They're next in line. The district court applied Betamax, the decision was appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose job it is to *gasp* hear appeals. Whether or not the Supreme Court (or, for that matter, a hypothetical en banc 9th Circuit) would uphold is a totally separate question. There is thing "inappropriate" about what the court did here.
I bought an iPAQ 1945 in May for about the same price as the rz1715 is listing for.
The rz1715 has exactly one advantage over the 1940/1945: WM2003SE. I'm not impressed.
Everything else is measurably worse. Even the battery, although it's 100mAh bigger, is worse, since it's not user-replacable. Performance stinks, and it has *half* the RAM (the 1940/1945 has 64MB, this new rz1715 unit has 32MB). It doesn't even have built in Bluetooth (I don't use BT myself, but a number of people do).
I'd highly recommend the 1940/1945 (they're the exact same device, but one model number is sold through business retail outlets, the other through consumer outlets) for anyone looking for an entry-level PocketPC device. I'd recommend AGAINST the rz1715, you're getting far less for your money.
I'd rather use my PDA and an 802.11b card. Yeah, the keyboard sucks, and the screen is tiny, but it's a small price to pay for retaining security. It's also more convenient in some ways, not having to worry about whether there's going to be a terminal free, and being able to sit wherever the hell you want (like on a nice couch in a library instead of whatever horrid chair they might have at their terminals) and move around freely.
It's not really out of reach for most people, either, if they need a computer on the go. An iPAQ 1940 plus an SDIO 802.11b card will run you around $350 these days. A higher-end model with built-in 802.11b is around $400. Palm systems are even cheaper, of course, but you sacrifice some power and flexibility.
No, actually, worst case, a simple keylogger gets credit card numbers, correspondance between a person and their SO/lawyer/accountant, serves to break a pseudo-anonimity shield, etc. etc.
And note the "or worse" in my post. As someone else mentioned, once you're on, the session can be hijacked. Files can be accessed and copied. Anything can happen. Using untrusted hardware for anything sensitive is a terrible mistake, there are no precautions you can take to make it secure.
SRS, WOW, and TruBass are, in fact, real features. They do actual signal processing, not just blind boosting of certain frequencies, and it does make a big difference.
There isn't a way to make it secure. Untrusted hardware is untrusted hardware, and there is no way around it. You have no way of knowing that terminal you just walked up to doesn't have a keystroke logger (or worse) attached to it.
There was no crash. Some stuff made it into -testing sometime mid/late 2003 that screwed up several system libraries and some other packages (such as GCC). Wasn't really the first time, either, but it had never screwed the system over nearly so badly before.
I don't recall what, exactly, GCC was complaining about, only that it didn't work, and was seriously pissing me off.
Trying to clean the mess up only seemed to make it worse, so I gave up. BIND, ssh, and Perl still run (though obviously I don't actually allow SSH connections from the outside world to the box), but that's about it. Everything's since been moved to a new server running FreeBSD (without a single problem since the move in Feb.), and as soon as I can get a CD drive in the screwed-over box, FreeBSD is going on it.
(I want to make it clear I have nothing against *Linux*. Rather, my needs dictate a choice among Debian, Gentoo, and *BSD, and since I need something a bit more stable (in the stuff-doesn't-change-very-often sense) than Gentoo, and Debian has failed spectacularly to meet my needs, and of Free/Net/OpenBSD I know FreeBSD best, FreeBSD makes the most sense.)
> Then why not use Debian testing? It doesn't break that often and is relatively new.
I tried that on a server that needed to stay fairly recent with packages. Guess what? Within a couple months, it got to the point that it's completely unusable for anything except running BIND. Couldn't even get GCC to run. Switched to FreeBSD shortly thereafter.
I love Screen, and frequently use it, but mostly for keeping interactive processes (e.g. IRC clients) running on remote systems.
Unfortunately, even for people that operate primarily in text, Screen is not a perfect replacement for X (or another GUI). Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself).
Framebuffer support in Linux also isn't particularly great yet. Even on cards with decent framebuffer support in Linux, it's as yet often painfully slow. Even on upper-end systems it's noticable, and on low-mid and lower systems, I'd imagine it would be nearly unusuable.
And in the end, even command-line junkies often use graphical browsers.
I don't formally belong to any church, nor do I attend regularly, but the one I grew up in and retain some ties to (Seventh-Day Adventist) has a lot to do with my seemingly liberal beliefs. Any pastor in a major congregation that preached censorship and legislation of religion and morality would likely find himself looking for a new job.
Unfortunately, with a membership of something like 13 million world-wide (and I do mean world-wide, a ton of those people are *outside* the United States), the SDA church is quite small, and in the US is mostly known for its health care and to a lesser extent education systems, which make great ambassadors, but the people there have better things to do with their time than issue strongly-worded public statements, especially since they're already concerned about the mixing of politics and religion. Also, people often don't realize some places are SDA-operated unless they've actually been there for any amount of time (Loma Linda, for example).
As the anonymous poster noted, I just did. And I do so any time it comes up, though you'd have no way of knowing that.
Admittedly it doesn't seem like you often see those that share my beliefs speaking out. Part of the problem is that they often don't see what is happening. Another part is external pressure. Yet another is that a lot are better people than I am and spend much of their time helping others. The biggest problem though, is that we don't really have a voice.
Fundamentalists are loud -- very loud. And they get propped up by other fundamentalists in influential places. Moderate and liberal voices get drowned out by those screaming about how evil everyone else is.
Do you know who I am? No, because I'm basically nobody. I'm an 18-year-old primary-school-dropout sysadmin that writes Perl and runs an extremely tiny, 4-day-old web hosting company in southeastern Washington State (seventh level of hell, if you're wondering; I want to be back west of the Cascades). My biggest claim to fame is having written an automation system for webcomics in use by maybe half a dozen sites, none of them wildly popular.
You don't hear me because I'm not somebody one listens to. I don't grab media attention when I rant about Christian fundamentalists or come out in support of gay marriage. I have no influence.
You hear me now only because you looked in the right place at the right time. I'm afraid I don't know how to fix that.
As a Christian, I can tell you they can practice in peace, and many of us do; as do many Jews, Muslims, etc. In fact, important parts of my personal religious beliefs are that religion has no place in government, and that trying to force religion on others is inexcusable.
I have no explanation for you about those that do try to force their beliefs on others. All I can say is please don't paint us all with the same brush.
For what it's worth, aside from it not being my place to tell a company what it can or can't put in a game, I find the controversy generated by things like crosses in games to be fundamentally ridiculous. People are ascribing far too much importance to objects that lack inherent meaning. If I could say one thing to the people that get so worked up over it, I would ask them why they seem so much more concerned about earthly objects than their relationship with God.
No, "Independant" is just plain wrong, as is FOLDOC, and I'm sick of having to point it out just because some people can't stand to be corrected.
First of all, "Inexpensive" still applies and then some. It's much, much cheaper to assemble an array of disks adding up to more than a few hundred GB than to try building a single drive.
Secondly, there is nothing "independant" about the disks in a RAID. The closest you come is in straight mirroring configurations (which are highly unusual for an array of any significant size), and they still don't operate independantly.
I'm not sure it's GPL-compatible, nor do I particularly care if it is or not, but this isn't the same as the original BSD advertising clause at all, and is nowhere near as annoying.
Here's the original BSD clause:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of
California, Berkeley and its contributors.
And here's the new XFree86 clause:
3. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution, if any, must include the following acknowledgment: "This product includes software developed by The XFree86 Project, Inc (http://www.xfree86.org/) and its contributors", in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments. Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself, in the same form and location as other such third-party acknowledgments.
The problem with the original clause 3 of the BSD license is that it could lead to massive lists of acknowledgements tacked on to an advertisement meant to be fairly compact (e.g. a leaflette, banner ad, sign, billboard, whatever). This isn't the case with the new XFree86 license clause 3, where it only requires acknowledgement in the documentation or the software itself. While keeping track of those acknowledgements might prove difficult at times, it has nowhere NEAR the practical problems that the original BSD license had.
Just hazarding a wild guess here: you can't play those DRM'd files on your linux jukebox anyway, because the industry you're praising can't be bothered to support anything other than Windows and, if we're lucky, MacOS. And even if they did, heaven help you if you want to be able to upgrade to the latest version of whatever distribution you're using. The propriatory (you think they'd make it open source? HAH!) plugin (IF you're lucky enough to get a plugin for whatever player you're using instead of having to use an entirely different and propriatory application) may not even run, and if it does, you'll be lucky if it does so without noticable problems.
I'd also love to know exactly how I could play the DRM'd files on my portable CD/mp3 player without having to buy an entirely new one. This one sure as hell ain't broken, and I'll be damned if I'm going to blow a bunch of money on a new one and gain nothing but the ability to play crippled files.
Slashdot Mirror
The FCC didn't assign 802.11b/g or cordless phones to 2.4GHz, it's an unlicensed band that anyone can do whatever they want in within certain limits on power and such.
Well, every time Rossi or his lackeys open their mouths, they look like bigger idiots, and now he's asking for taxpayers to pay $4 million for a revote, so that's not going to sit well with anyone.
They've already announced that they will be offering free time as well as accellerated experience gain. Why the slashdot summary ignored that is beyond me.
Speaking from my personal experience, it's easy in a household of five people to have a dual-tuner DVR saturated for 3-4 hours. No margin exists for this kind of crap.
I've been using mplayer and mencoder on a win2k box for months without cygwin, they work just fine.
h tm l
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.
Note fourth entry in the table under "Source and Binaries".
Living in a non-right-to-work state, I find I have no right to work. That right is given to unions that are universally corrupt. So, I see nothing euphemistic about the term "right to work".
The iPod is a joke at its price range.
:)
The only competitor to the iRiver HDD players for me was the Neuros, and it was an agonizing decision, but the Neuros is just too big and needs special software to operate properly. The iRivers present as perfectly ordinary USB mass storage devices, and the database created by the Windows driver is completely optional, allowing for cross-platform compatibility without needing to fiddle with anything.
I needed Ogg Vorbis support, I needed cross-platform compatibility, I needed small and light. The iRivers aren't perfect, but they're good, solid players, and met my needs.
They've also got *really* cool remotes.
Appropriate? It's their *job*. They're next in line. The district court applied Betamax, the decision was appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose job it is to *gasp* hear appeals. Whether or not the Supreme Court (or, for that matter, a hypothetical en banc 9th Circuit) would uphold is a totally separate question. There is thing "inappropriate" about what the court did here.
I bought an iPAQ 1945 in May for about the same price as the rz1715 is listing for.
The rz1715 has exactly one advantage over the 1940/1945: WM2003SE. I'm not impressed.
Everything else is measurably worse. Even the battery, although it's 100mAh bigger, is worse, since it's not user-replacable. Performance stinks, and it has *half* the RAM (the 1940/1945 has 64MB, this new rz1715 unit has 32MB). It doesn't even have built in Bluetooth (I don't use BT myself, but a number of people do).
I'd highly recommend the 1940/1945 (they're the exact same device, but one model number is sold through business retail outlets, the other through consumer outlets) for anyone looking for an entry-level PocketPC device. I'd recommend AGAINST the rz1715, you're getting far less for your money.
I'd rather use my PDA and an 802.11b card. Yeah, the keyboard sucks, and the screen is tiny, but it's a small price to pay for retaining security. It's also more convenient in some ways, not having to worry about whether there's going to be a terminal free, and being able to sit wherever the hell you want (like on a nice couch in a library instead of whatever horrid chair they might have at their terminals) and move around freely.
It's not really out of reach for most people, either, if they need a computer on the go. An iPAQ 1940 plus an SDIO 802.11b card will run you around $350 these days. A higher-end model with built-in 802.11b is around $400. Palm systems are even cheaper, of course, but you sacrifice some power and flexibility.
No, actually, worst case, a simple keylogger gets credit card numbers, correspondance between a person and their SO/lawyer/accountant, serves to break a pseudo-anonimity shield, etc. etc.
And note the "or worse" in my post. As someone else mentioned, once you're on, the session can be hijacked. Files can be accessed and copied. Anything can happen. Using untrusted hardware for anything sensitive is a terrible mistake, there are no precautions you can take to make it secure.
SRS, WOW, and TruBass are, in fact, real features. They do actual signal processing, not just blind boosting of certain frequencies, and it does make a big difference.
Combine this:
http://www.canesta.com/products.htm
and this:
http://www.mvis.com/nomad/index.html
and you're good.
There isn't a way to make it secure. Untrusted hardware is untrusted hardware, and there is no way around it. You have no way of knowing that terminal you just walked up to doesn't have a keystroke logger (or worse) attached to it.
First thought that went through my head was "What rock have these guys been living under?"
Incidentally, anyone in the market for an HDD player, look seriously at the iRivers. They're great.
There was no crash. Some stuff made it into -testing sometime mid/late 2003 that screwed up several system libraries and some other packages (such as GCC). Wasn't really the first time, either, but it had never screwed the system over nearly so badly before.
I don't recall what, exactly, GCC was complaining about, only that it didn't work, and was seriously pissing me off.
Trying to clean the mess up only seemed to make it worse, so I gave up. BIND, ssh, and Perl still run (though obviously I don't actually allow SSH connections from the outside world to the box), but that's about it. Everything's since been moved to a new server running FreeBSD (without a single problem since the move in Feb.), and as soon as I can get a CD drive in the screwed-over box, FreeBSD is going on it.
(I want to make it clear I have nothing against *Linux*. Rather, my needs dictate a choice among Debian, Gentoo, and *BSD, and since I need something a bit more stable (in the stuff-doesn't-change-very-often sense) than Gentoo, and Debian has failed spectacularly to meet my needs, and of Free/Net/OpenBSD I know FreeBSD best, FreeBSD makes the most sense.)
> Then why not use Debian testing? It doesn't break that often and is relatively new.
I tried that on a server that needed to stay fairly recent with packages. Guess what? Within a couple months, it got to the point that it's completely unusable for anything except running BIND. Couldn't even get GCC to run. Switched to FreeBSD shortly thereafter.
I love Screen, and frequently use it, but mostly for keeping interactive processes (e.g. IRC clients) running on remote systems.
Unfortunately, even for people that operate primarily in text, Screen is not a perfect replacement for X (or another GUI). Perhaps the biggest issue is that it lacks facilities for having multiple terminals visible at the same time, which is a requirement for many people (including myself).
Framebuffer support in Linux also isn't particularly great yet. Even on cards with decent framebuffer support in Linux, it's as yet often painfully slow. Even on upper-end systems it's noticable, and on low-mid and lower systems, I'd imagine it would be nearly unusuable.
And in the end, even command-line junkies often use graphical browsers.
Not only did you not RTFA, you didn't read the *slashdot* article:
"between a host at the Luleå University of Technology and a host connected to a Sprint PoP in San Jose, CA, USA."
This wasn't across Sweden, it was across the Atlantic Ocean and North America.
I don't formally belong to any church, nor do I attend regularly, but the one I grew up in and retain some ties to (Seventh-Day Adventist) has a lot to do with my seemingly liberal beliefs. Any pastor in a major congregation that preached censorship and legislation of religion and morality would likely find himself looking for a new job.
Unfortunately, with a membership of something like 13 million world-wide (and I do mean world-wide, a ton of those people are *outside* the United States), the SDA church is quite small, and in the US is mostly known for its health care and to a lesser extent education systems, which make great ambassadors, but the people there have better things to do with their time than issue strongly-worded public statements, especially since they're already concerned about the mixing of politics and religion. Also, people often don't realize some places are SDA-operated unless they've actually been there for any amount of time (Loma Linda, for example).
As the anonymous poster noted, I just did. And I do so any time it comes up, though you'd have no way of knowing that.
Admittedly it doesn't seem like you often see those that share my beliefs speaking out. Part of the problem is that they often don't see what is happening. Another part is external pressure. Yet another is that a lot are better people than I am and spend much of their time helping others. The biggest problem though, is that we don't really have a voice.
Fundamentalists are loud -- very loud. And they get propped up by other fundamentalists in influential places. Moderate and liberal voices get drowned out by those screaming about how evil everyone else is.
Do you know who I am? No, because I'm basically nobody. I'm an 18-year-old primary-school-dropout sysadmin that writes Perl and runs an extremely tiny, 4-day-old web hosting company in southeastern Washington State (seventh level of hell, if you're wondering; I want to be back west of the Cascades). My biggest claim to fame is having written an automation system for webcomics in use by maybe half a dozen sites, none of them wildly popular.
You don't hear me because I'm not somebody one listens to. I don't grab media attention when I rant about Christian fundamentalists or come out in support of gay marriage. I have no influence.
You hear me now only because you looked in the right place at the right time. I'm afraid I don't know how to fix that.
As a Christian, I can tell you they can practice in peace, and many of us do; as do many Jews, Muslims, etc. In fact, important parts of my personal religious beliefs are that religion has no place in government, and that trying to force religion on others is inexcusable.
I have no explanation for you about those that do try to force their beliefs on others. All I can say is please don't paint us all with the same brush.
For what it's worth, aside from it not being my place to tell a company what it can or can't put in a game, I find the controversy generated by things like crosses in games to be fundamentally ridiculous. People are ascribing far too much importance to objects that lack inherent meaning. If I could say one thing to the people that get so worked up over it, I would ask them why they seem so much more concerned about earthly objects than their relationship with God.
No, "Independant" is just plain wrong, as is FOLDOC, and I'm sick of having to point it out just because some people can't stand to be corrected.
First of all, "Inexpensive" still applies and then some. It's much, much cheaper to assemble an array of disks adding up to more than a few hundred GB than to try building a single drive.
Secondly, there is nothing "independant" about the disks in a RAID. The closest you come is in straight mirroring configurations (which are highly unusual for an array of any significant size), and they still don't operate independantly.
Here's the original BSD clause:
And here's the new XFree86 clause:
The problem with the original clause 3 of the BSD license is that it could lead to massive lists of acknowledgements tacked on to an advertisement meant to be fairly compact (e.g. a leaflette, banner ad, sign, billboard, whatever). This isn't the case with the new XFree86 license clause 3, where it only requires acknowledgement in the documentation or the software itself. While keeping track of those acknowledgements might prove difficult at times, it has nowhere NEAR the practical problems that the original BSD license had.
Just hazarding a wild guess here: you can't play those DRM'd files on your linux jukebox anyway, because the industry you're praising can't be bothered to support anything other than Windows and, if we're lucky, MacOS. And even if they did, heaven help you if you want to be able to upgrade to the latest version of whatever distribution you're using. The propriatory (you think they'd make it open source? HAH!) plugin (IF you're lucky enough to get a plugin for whatever player you're using instead of having to use an entirely different and propriatory application) may not even run, and if it does, you'll be lucky if it does so without noticable problems.
I'd also love to know exactly how I could play the DRM'd files on my portable CD/mp3 player without having to buy an entirely new one. This one sure as hell ain't broken, and I'll be damned if I'm going to blow a bunch of money on a new one and gain nothing but the ability to play crippled files.