Sure. Just use one of these optical processors that the media has said are just two or three years away for the last twenty.:-p
Once you've decompressed the audio, amplify the light (see LASER) in a fashion whereby each bit releases twice as much energy in the form of heat as the previous bit, then use that to heat and cool air in a nitrogen-cooled, sealed container--a coffee can, perhaps--causing the air inside to rapidly expand and contract.
Replace one end of the coffee can with a thin membrane. Attach a mechanical pickup to the membrane and route the sound out a horn. Behold, the photonic speaker.
Don't laugh. I've heard of worse.... (Plasma speakers, anyone?)
Yeah, the thought crossed my mind as well. You could use the CD's track length information as a "token" to prove that you own the CD. For every track on every CD you give up to this library, you get a token which can be used to check out any track you want. That way people can't just leech.
You then take advantage of broadband and basically do massive p2p (potentially distributed-source) audio streaming to allow you to play any song you want at any time, with the caveat that you can no longer (legally) play your physical CDs until you give up the tokens associated with them.
You don't have to have an unsecured wireless network. Just repeat to yourself "Wep is about as secure as a postcard" 1,000 times. Now can you say plausible deniability? Good. I thought you could.:-)
Actually, the right analogy would be Ford suing a car trader magazine for using the word "Ford" in conjunction with a list of the various models that Ford makes.
Trademark law specifically -=denies=- the right to sue for trademark infringement when the use in question involves selling or describing that company or organization's product. That's why sites criticising various companies exist. They are considered protected speech.
So long as the page has a disclaimer that says it is not associated with PCI-SIG, it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to pursue any sort of trademark infringement action against its author.
As has been stated elsewhere, the figures are installed size. Installer/tarball size is a useless metric, as it drastically impacts both the difference in cross-platform binary sie and the differences in various other non-binary storage (docs, etc.) which should really not be part of the comparison anyway. The binary sizes posted are, for PowerPC binaries, reasonable. I'm not going to go and verify them, but they're certainly in the right general vicinity.
To be fair, due to differences in instruction set, binaries on PowerPC typically take about twice as much space as an equivalent Intel binary. Phoenix should be around 25 megs on PPC. Just an approximation, of course. Could be 20, could be 30, or anywhere in-between.
PPC binaries are typically about twice as big as x86 binaries for the same code, at least when gcc is used as the compiler. Other compilers may perform slightly better or worse, but the PPC binary will always be much larger, in any case.
How many of you found it beneficial to expound on the virtues of open source software or the beauty of TCP/IP structure during a date?
In moderation, yeah, but maybe it's a skill to be able to make kernel programming sound fun. I dunno. The key, as with any line of work, is to make sure that you don't talk about work -too- much (or any other single topic, really).:-)
How about if the entire microsoft headquarters was set ablaze and all the states attorney generals got to roast marshmallows on the remains?
Nah. That only punishes the insurance companies. After all, they'd pay the Bill (pun intended). Now if it could be attributed to "acts of God"....;-)
Also, for a little bit of English trivia, the plural of "attorney general" is technically "attorneys general". Same for other such titles--poets laureate, postmasters general, etc. English is weird that way.
There's nothing stopping you from using your stack of vouchers to buy a Mac. Then instead of buying "Office X", run AppleWorks. Need better compatibility with Office? Run Apple's free X11 implementation and OpenOffice. Buy Apple's Keynote for those pesky PowerPoint files. Use Apple's Safari instead of MSIE. MacWorld was good for M$ bashers this year....
The fact that 95% of people will use the vouchers to buy more M$ crap doesn't mean that they have to. It's means that they don't -realize- just how completely and painlessly they can rid themselves of M$ products if they so desire. Spread the word.
Sure you can. Get DirecTV, then contact your cable company and change to subsistence cable. I think they're required to provide such a service. It generally amounts to channels 2-13, which are almost always your local channels. It's also often called "basic cable".... It's usually not much more than about twice what TiVo charges for local channels. In some places, it's free.
Alternately, there are some antennas that you can buy that neatly attach in a circle around your dish that might work, depending on how far you are from network affiliates....
Oh, and how is the service in thunderstorms or other rainy conditions?
Do you work for a cable company or something?:-)
But seriously, the stability of a DirecTV dish in a storm is, in my experience, directly proportional to the stability of its mounting. If you install it sturdily, it "just works". In our worst storm of the season, I was watching it when the wind gusts were up around 50 mph. My TiVo was recording... almost constantly. In all that material, I only caught one glitch for about two seconds.
By contrast, back home in Tennessee, the cable company uses microwave relays on tall towers to forward local channels for "better reception". As soon as there's even a 10-15 mph wind gust, the microwave dishes won't line up correctly and the signal turns to mush, going out for several seconds at a time, and being down almost as it is up. Sometimes they'll even get knocked permanently out of alignment and the signal for a particular channel will be down for many, many hours. (Ever try convincing someone to climb a tall metal tower in lightning?)
So in my experience, DirecTV is substantially better than cable during storms. Your mileage may vary.
Still do make crappy products. I bought an RCA branded DSS dish (DirecTV) about six months ago, and man was it badly designed. Unlike the all-metal... I think Phillips... small dish that I started with, the RCA large dish was basically a giant piece of plastic.
Unfortunately, they designed the thing to be attached to the metal back with stove bolts, which promptly gouged out the square bottoms of the holes (resulting in the heads just sitting there spinning) long before I could get the nuts tightened down. I would have to have tightened them down another -inch- before they would have been tight....
I ended up sawing off the provided bolts with a hacksaw and replacing them with normal bolts, lock washers, and non-locking nuts just to get the thing put together.
And then there is their assertion that you should set the tilt and never be able to adjust it again. That would be fine except that the various manufacturers can't even agree on how to measure angle of tilt. Had I followed RCA's directions, I would not have been able to get a signal from both satellites. I'm so glad I realized their cluelessness before I used any more of their stupid lock nuts....
It took me less than thirty minutes to install my original Phillips dish, including aligning it. It took me three hours and almost $20 worth of additional parts and tools (hacksaw, etc.) to install my second.
Let's just say that I'll buy another RCA dish when they rip the hacksaw from my cold, dead fingers, and leave it at that.
Umm... I bought an 80 gig drive for about $80 almost a year ago on Pricewatch. $1 a gig is pretty expensive. Three months ago, some of the commodity drives (80 gigs or so) were running 85 cents a gig on PriceWatch. They've actually -increased- in price since then, and now they're coming back down again... The price just fluctuates.
At 80 gig capacity, the price has been about $1/gig for the better part of a year, maybe more. 80 gig drives are considered commodity drives -- the cutting edge is much larger, and the 80 gig size is purchased in large enough quantities by manufactureres that the R&D investment has been paid for, and the per unit cost has thus fallen commensurately.
The 100 and 120 gigs are just starting to fall into sufficiently high use (and be sufficiently dwarfed by newer drives) for their prices to fall to that level.
As for rebate deals, the Best Buy deals are almost always lousy. I got a 120 gig WD drive at Circuit City after thanksgiving for $90 after rebates. That's 75 cents a gig, if you're counting.
Re:This is still about fighting "terrorists"
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
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· Score: 1
Reality check. Even wth 128-bit WEP, a terrorist could gain access to a wireless AP in a matter of seconds as long as somebody else is using it legitimately at the time. Wireless networking is insecure, period.
The homeland security folks only prove their complete ignorance of technology when they whine about insecure wireless networks. The only way to make wireless networks secure is to replace then with wired networks. That's a cat that can't be put back in the bag.
Of course, due to WEP having fundamental weaknesses in its crypto scheme, even 128 bit WEP can be viewed in the same way. WiFi is inherently insecure short of putting it in its own network blackhole and requiring people to use VPN software to connect to the internet, which is a pain in the backside, so nobody does it.
This leaves us with two groups: the ones who "get it" and just leave their networks unprotected, knowing that it's a waste of time, and the ones who don't have the slightest clue, who put annoying security measures in which don't provide any real security benefit, and "feel safe", only to discover that they've been cracked fifteen times this weekend... so far.
The real problem, therefore, is that the government falls into the latter group and villifies the former, which basically boils down to government-mandated ignorance. I guess I should have expected no less from our President, though....:-|
If you've ever run your own mail server and looked at the logs, you'll find that they, in fact, -do- try to guess usernames. You'd be amazed at how many people try to send email to steve@mklinux.org. There has never been such a user. They guess common names and try them. They don't try very many -- maybe a couple dozen bogus recipients for every known good one -- but they do deliberately guess email addresses, and if those addresses don't get rejected, they get added to a database and get spammed. Always pick a username that isn't trivially guessable. Never use just a first or last name.:-)
Funny, I got a -lot- of spam -- hundreds of messages a week -- and I don't have a single ISP address in there anywhere (that I use). All are private domains except a couple of.edu accounts (that get virtually no spam).
Then I installed TMDA. I don't get spam anymore.:-)
I accidentally did this once. That's when I found out that MacAddict sold my name (whether directly or indirectly) to Playboy. No joke. I think I still have the advert around here somewhere with the bogus street number.... The funny thing was, since the address was bogus, campus mail services tried to figure out how to deliver it and ended up delivering it to the mailbox in my department.
The folks at MacAddict had better be damn glad I have a sense of humor.... I ended up using the playboy mailer to write down a list of IP numbers that I needed for later that afternoon. Best use I've gotten out of porn spam ever.
Most people can do the math and realize that the great grandparent poster's proposed $5/month is $60/year, which means that after just a few years, you've paid for the price of a low-end TiVo and the lifetime service contract to go with it, but unlike with the TiVo, you're still paying $5/month. The real question becomes whether you'll get periodic hardware upgrades for that $5/month. If so, then maybe it's interesting. Otherwise, you're just paying more for less.
The ads don't reduce your TV viewing costs. If people don't buy more products based on advertising, the value of the advertising goes down, meaning the ad revenue goes down. You could have a billion people watch an ad, and if only three people bought the product, it really didn't matter that a billion people watched the ad. The obvious exceptions are, of course, prestige items like BMWs where the advertisements increase the prestige, and allow the manufacturer to charge more money for that prestige factor. However, those exceptions are pretty rare.
The average consumer pays for the cost of television production by buying products shown in the ads. For those people, the ads serve a purpose. Those people are also probably not skipping the ads in any quantity.
By contrast, I didn't pay any significant amount of the cost of most television even when I watched ads, because I don't buy most of the products that are advertised, and because I'm never swayed to buy products I don't need. Thus, the ads are costing the advertisers money for no reason.
So of course someone will chime in and say "but targetted advertising fixes that." No, it doesn't. The only things I buy in any quantity are food (whatever comes in single-serving packages at CostCo), toiletries (whatever is cheapest), computers (Mac), and computer parts (again, whatever is cheapest). With the obvious exception of food, these come after searching for the best deal, which is precisely the primary thing advertisements are designed to prevent.
Huh? What's that? Yeah. The primary purpose of advertisement is to encourage people to impuse buy. By buying whatever they've seen advertised, they don't take time to research it, and end up generally paying more for less. For people who make it a point to darn near never impulse buy, advertisements are a waste, even if they are for products you might buy. If anything, they annoy you, and you reply with "yeah, but I can get it for half that from foo.com". This is why I've almost completely stopped buying anything of significant cost at Fry's.:-)
The people who say that skipping commercials is "stealing" clearly don't understand that the viewer who skips the commercials would never have bought the products they're advertising to begin with, and that as such, they aren't impacted financially in any way by the viewer skipping the ads. However, by skipping the ads, the viewer will enjoy the program more, and will be more likely to tell others about the show -- others who might be more likely to be influenced by ads. In short, as long as most of the PVRs are owned by geeks, commercial skipping is of a net benefit to advertisers and the TV industry. Seems counter-intuitive, but when you think about it hard enough, it makes perfect sense.:-)
... consider the difference in damage between a dirty bomb and a conventional one. It may not be very likely that the terrorists would use one, but the consequences are far, far greater.
Radioactive material is extremely heavy, and thus does not tend to disperse in air. In various studies on the subject of so-called "dirty" bombs, the spread of radioactive material was found to be minimal, and almost entirely confined to the initial blast radius.
Based on that, saying "far far greater" is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it's a pain in the backside to clean up, since maybe half a city block would be sufficiently radioactive to be rangerous, and since the cleanup crews would be concentrating that material for disposal, but apart from the need for extra radiation measures for the localized cleanup, the impact of a "dirty" bomb is not significantly greater than that of a "clean" one.
You say that these people shouldn't be strip-searched, forced to carry papers, or banned from public transportation. I agree with the third statement, but unless security has a way to detect what is causing the radiation, what do you suggest we use as the litmus test for these individuals? Their word? How do you propose the source of radiation be located?
A hand-held geiger counter? Have them take off any bags/purses/jackets, then sweep it across the person, find where the point source is, and do a pat-down search. That's all that is really necessary, as if the material really is inside them, it really doesn't matter why it's there -- they aren't going to be doing anything with it any time soon -- and if it isn't inside them, it shouldn't be too hard to localize by feel....
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Sure. Just use one of these optical processors that the media has said are just two or three years away for the last twenty.
Once you've decompressed the audio, amplify the light (see LASER) in a fashion whereby each bit releases twice as much energy in the form of heat as the previous bit, then use that to heat and cool air in a nitrogen-cooled, sealed container--a coffee can, perhaps--causing the air inside to rapidly expand and contract.
Replace one end of the coffee can with a thin membrane. Attach a mechanical pickup to the membrane and route the sound out a horn. Behold, the photonic speaker.
Don't laugh. I've heard of worse.... (Plasma speakers, anyone?)
Yeah, the thought crossed my mind as well. You could use the CD's track length information as a "token" to prove that you own the CD. For every track on every CD you give up to this library, you get a token which can be used to check out any track you want. That way people can't just leech.
You then take advantage of broadband and basically do massive p2p (potentially distributed-source) audio streaming to allow you to play any song you want at any time, with the caveat that you can no longer (legally) play your physical CDs until you give up the tokens associated with them.
Makes me wish I still had time to code.
You don't have to have an unsecured wireless network. Just repeat to yourself "Wep is about as secure as a postcard" 1,000 times. Now can you say plausible deniability? Good. I thought you could.
Actually, the right analogy would be Ford suing a car trader magazine for using the word "Ford" in conjunction with a list of the various models that Ford makes.
Trademark law specifically -=denies=- the right to sue for trademark infringement when the use in question involves selling or describing that company or organization's product. That's why sites criticising various companies exist. They are considered protected speech.
So long as the page has a disclaimer that says it is not associated with PCI-SIG, it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to pursue any sort of trademark infringement action against its author.
Do you know of any business with rouge servers? Last I checked, most of them were beige, or occasionally black.... :-)
As has been stated elsewhere, the figures are installed size. Installer/tarball size is a useless metric, as it drastically impacts both the difference in cross-platform binary sie and the differences in various other non-binary storage (docs, etc.) which should really not be part of the comparison anyway. The binary sizes posted are, for PowerPC binaries, reasonable. I'm not going to go and verify them, but they're certainly in the right general vicinity.
To be fair, due to differences in instruction set, binaries on PowerPC typically take about twice as much space as an equivalent Intel binary. Phoenix should be around 25 megs on PPC. Just an approximation, of course. Could be 20, could be 30, or anywhere in-between.
PPC binaries are typically about twice as big as x86 binaries for the same code, at least when gcc is used as the compiler. Other compilers may perform slightly better or worse, but the PPC binary will always be much larger, in any case.
In moderation, yeah, but maybe it's a skill to be able to make kernel programming sound fun. I dunno. The key, as with any line of work, is to make sure that you don't talk about work -too- much (or any other single topic, really). :-)
Nah. That only punishes the insurance companies. After all, they'd pay the Bill (pun intended). Now if it could be attributed to "acts of God".... ;-)
Also, for a little bit of English trivia, the plural of "attorney general" is technically "attorneys general". Same for other such titles--poets laureate, postmasters general, etc. English is weird that way.
There's nothing stopping you from using your stack of vouchers to buy a Mac. Then instead of buying "Office X", run AppleWorks. Need better compatibility with Office? Run Apple's free X11 implementation and OpenOffice. Buy Apple's Keynote for those pesky PowerPoint files. Use Apple's Safari instead of MSIE. MacWorld was good for M$ bashers this year....
The fact that 95% of people will use the vouchers to buy more M$ crap doesn't mean that they have to. It's means that they don't -realize- just how completely and painlessly they can rid themselves of M$ products if they so desire. Spread the word.
Sure you can. Get DirecTV, then contact your cable company and change to subsistence cable. I think they're required to provide such a service. It generally amounts to channels 2-13, which are almost always your local channels. It's also often called "basic cable".... It's usually not much more than about twice what TiVo charges for local channels. In some places, it's free.
Alternately, there are some antennas that you can buy that neatly attach in a circle around your dish that might work, depending on how far you are from network affiliates....
Do you work for a cable company or something? :-)
But seriously, the stability of a DirecTV dish in a storm is, in my experience, directly proportional to the stability of its mounting. If you install it sturdily, it "just works". In our worst storm of the season, I was watching it when the wind gusts were up around 50 mph. My TiVo was recording... almost constantly. In all that material, I only caught one glitch for about two seconds.
By contrast, back home in Tennessee, the cable company uses microwave relays on tall towers to forward local channels for "better reception". As soon as there's even a 10-15 mph wind gust, the microwave dishes won't line up correctly and the signal turns to mush, going out for several seconds at a time, and being down almost as it is up. Sometimes they'll even get knocked permanently out of alignment and the signal for a particular channel will be down for many, many hours. (Ever try convincing someone to climb a tall metal tower in lightning?)
So in my experience, DirecTV is substantially better than cable during storms. Your mileage may vary.
Still do make crappy products. I bought an RCA branded DSS dish (DirecTV) about six months ago, and man was it badly designed. Unlike the all-metal... I think Phillips... small dish that I started with, the RCA large dish was basically a giant piece of plastic.
Unfortunately, they designed the thing to be attached to the metal back with stove bolts, which promptly gouged out the square bottoms of the holes (resulting in the heads just sitting there spinning) long before I could get the nuts tightened down. I would have to have tightened them down another -inch- before they would have been tight....
I ended up sawing off the provided bolts with a hacksaw and replacing them with normal bolts, lock washers, and non-locking nuts just to get the thing put together.
And then there is their assertion that you should set the tilt and never be able to adjust it again. That would be fine except that the various manufacturers can't even agree on how to measure angle of tilt. Had I followed RCA's directions, I would not have been able to get a signal from both satellites. I'm so glad I realized their cluelessness before I used any more of their stupid lock nuts....
It took me less than thirty minutes to install my original Phillips dish, including aligning it. It took me three hours and almost $20 worth of additional parts and tools (hacksaw, etc.) to install my second.
Let's just say that I'll buy another RCA dish when they rip the hacksaw from my cold, dead fingers, and leave it at that.
Umm... I bought an 80 gig drive for about $80 almost a year ago on Pricewatch. $1 a gig is pretty expensive. Three months ago, some of the commodity drives (80 gigs or so) were running 85 cents a gig on PriceWatch. They've actually -increased- in price since then, and now they're coming back down again... The price just fluctuates.
At 80 gig capacity, the price has been about $1/gig for the better part of a year, maybe more. 80 gig drives are considered commodity drives -- the cutting edge is much larger, and the 80 gig size is purchased in large enough quantities by manufactureres that the R&D investment has been paid for, and the per unit cost has thus fallen commensurately.
The 100 and 120 gigs are just starting to fall into sufficiently high use (and be sufficiently dwarfed by newer drives) for their prices to fall to that level.
As for rebate deals, the Best Buy deals are almost always lousy. I got a 120 gig WD drive at Circuit City after thanksgiving for $90 after rebates. That's 75 cents a gig, if you're counting.
Reality check. Even wth 128-bit WEP, a terrorist could gain access to a wireless AP in a matter of seconds as long as somebody else is using it legitimately at the time. Wireless networking is insecure, period.
The homeland security folks only prove their complete ignorance of technology when they whine about insecure wireless networks. The only way to make wireless networks secure is to replace then with wired networks. That's a cat that can't be put back in the bag.
This leaves us with two groups: the ones who "get it" and just leave their networks unprotected, knowing that it's a waste of time, and the ones who don't have the slightest clue, who put annoying security measures in which don't provide any real security benefit, and "feel safe", only to discover that they've been cracked fifteen times this weekend... so far.
The real problem, therefore, is that the government falls into the latter group and villifies the former, which basically boils down to government-mandated ignorance. I guess I should have expected no less from our President, though.... :-|
Then I installed TMDA. I don't get spam anymore. :-)
The folks at MacAddict had better be damn glad I have a sense of humor.... I ended up using the playboy mailer to write down a list of IP numbers that I needed for later that afternoon. Best use I've gotten out of porn spam ever.
Most people can do the math and realize that the great grandparent poster's proposed $5/month is $60/year, which means that after just a few years, you've paid for the price of a low-end TiVo and the lifetime service contract to go with it, but unlike with the TiVo, you're still paying $5/month. The real question becomes whether you'll get periodic hardware upgrades for that $5/month. If so, then maybe it's interesting. Otherwise, you're just paying more for less.
The average consumer pays for the cost of television production by buying products shown in the ads. For those people, the ads serve a purpose. Those people are also probably not skipping the ads in any quantity.
By contrast, I didn't pay any significant amount of the cost of most television even when I watched ads, because I don't buy most of the products that are advertised, and because I'm never swayed to buy products I don't need. Thus, the ads are costing the advertisers money for no reason.
So of course someone will chime in and say "but targetted advertising fixes that." No, it doesn't. The only things I buy in any quantity are food (whatever comes in single-serving packages at CostCo), toiletries (whatever is cheapest), computers (Mac), and computer parts (again, whatever is cheapest). With the obvious exception of food, these come after searching for the best deal, which is precisely the primary thing advertisements are designed to prevent.
Huh? What's that? Yeah. The primary purpose of advertisement is to encourage people to impuse buy. By buying whatever they've seen advertised, they don't take time to research it, and end up generally paying more for less. For people who make it a point to darn near never impulse buy, advertisements are a waste, even if they are for products you might buy. If anything, they annoy you, and you reply with "yeah, but I can get it for half that from foo.com". This is why I've almost completely stopped buying anything of significant cost at Fry's. :-)
The people who say that skipping commercials is "stealing" clearly don't understand that the viewer who skips the commercials would never have bought the products they're advertising to begin with, and that as such, they aren't impacted financially in any way by the viewer skipping the ads. However, by skipping the ads, the viewer will enjoy the program more, and will be more likely to tell others about the show -- others who might be more likely to be influenced by ads. In short, as long as most of the PVRs are owned by geeks, commercial skipping is of a net benefit to advertisers and the TV industry. Seems counter-intuitive, but when you think about it hard enough, it makes perfect sense. :-)
Radioactive material is extremely heavy, and thus does not tend to disperse in air. In various studies on the subject of so-called "dirty" bombs, the spread of radioactive material was found to be minimal, and almost entirely confined to the initial blast radius.
Based on that, saying "far far greater" is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it's a pain in the backside to clean up, since maybe half a city block would be sufficiently radioactive to be rangerous, and since the cleanup crews would be concentrating that material for disposal, but apart from the need for extra radiation measures for the localized cleanup, the impact of a "dirty" bomb is not significantly greater than that of a "clean" one.
A hand-held geiger counter? Have them take off any bags/purses/jackets, then sweep it across the person, find where the point source is, and do a pat-down search. That's all that is really necessary, as if the material really is inside them, it really doesn't matter why it's there -- they aren't going to be doing anything with it any time soon -- and if it isn't inside them, it shouldn't be too hard to localize by feel....