The one occasion when I had a good time smashing computers was back in 1998 or so when I was working as a non-paid co-op in a tech gig at the local university.
My boss had around a dozen extremely old computers (complete with largely monochrome and/or failing monitors) and he told me to trash them. So I had a good time seeing how far the monitors would bounce when they hit the bottom of the dumpster.
Ah yes, good times. But really, old monitors and other computer parts should go to proper recycling facilities due to the heavy metals and other dangerous chemicals in them that should not be kept away from open landfills.
"It means metal detectors will find your passport cover. When I go through airport security, I get wanded and they look in my wallet, which bugs the heck out of me. I usually carry my passport and cash in a nylon neck pouch though, and that doesn't set off the metal detectors. I don't like the sound of this new wire mesh thing. Big Brother and for that matter any club or courthouse I might visit has no need to know whether I'm carrying a passport."
Actually tinfoil is not such a big issue. My wallet is lined with aluminium foil (because I put it there. Yes I am paranoid.) In the last year, I have taken four international flights to/from the US and two domestic US flights. My wallet went through the metal detector conveyor belt. The security guards never blinked.
And I'm a young 'brown' male with a Canadian passport who looks like he's from the Middle East.
"...Does anybody (and I mean in the large market of "normal" users) really want a Windows without Media Player? Does anybody care?"
The large market of 'normal' users just wants to click on the icon and see the video or hear the song play. Whether it is via WMP or some other tool is of little consequence.
"They're cartoons, and therefore for kids. That's a pretty definite correlation. If he wants the Japanese movie industry to be taken seriously like the American one, try making films with *real* actors and scenes. Oh, no, that would require a budget. Take a look at the movie listings at your local picture house... see any Japanese films? Nope... or maybe just one. Compare and contrast to the vast number of American films that make it out there."
An obvious troll. It's either that or he's just an ignorant fool.
"they can monitor everything they want, but it will be in vain. There are so many avenues for communcation they can't monitor everything.."
And when they realise this, the nations with enough PATRIOT-esque laws will simply shut off internet access in the name of national security. (They care for their citizens' best intrests of course!)
I can't remember now, which communist (?) nation was it that shut down all the country's coffee shops because they realised that they couldn't put a spy at every table?
I bought a new component video cable for the DVD player recently and it actually came with an instruction booklet. (No, this was not a Monster Cable. It was the Acoustic Research brand.) How in the world do you figure an instruction booklet is needed for an entry level cable!? Yes, that booklet went into the trash bin.
Thumbs up on the Lian Li. The high end ones are stupidly expensive (I paid CDN$300 for mine (photos),) but they are beautiful, functional and well designed.
"This can not be perceived as anything but a hostile takeover, and once again, EA is becoming the worst reputed games company of our day."
So if EA succeeds and they are the single ubiquitous supplier and their products are a POS, it sounds to me like that's a potential for the OSS gaming market to seize the day. It's IE being attacked by FF all over again.
Inkjet coated media is not some uncommon speciality thing made by one company for using only in a special kind of drive or brand of printer. It is very easily available online for only a slight premium (perhaps $2-3 per 100 discs) over the cost of regular media of the same brand.
"I just buy inkjet coated CDR/DVDRs now. Really cheap and full-color prints on my Epson R200 that can fool people into thinking they're stamped DVDs."
The only problem with this IMO is that the R200's inks are water soluble, meaning that they smudge if you handle the disc with damp hands. You can get fixative sprays used by artists to 'seal' the surface of the disc, but it could affect the disc's balance if the coat was uneven, and there could be bad chemical interactions. (Those sprays include acetone and xylene. I don't know if those will harm optical media.) Furthermore most CDR and DVDR instructions explicitly indicate that no coatings should be applied.
My plan for now is to keep my own R200-printed discs well away from water.
I don't see why this is such a great thing. Just get inkjet printable CD or DVD discs and print your own full colour custom label. Some of the ~$149 Epson printer support this now. Take a look at the cool stuff you can do! (Admittedly this is quite a simple design. I have done some much fancier ones more recently.)
"Uhh.. actually "Parliament" refers to BOTH houses, not "the upper house". The upper house is the Senate, which consists of a bunch of unelected old fogies who ratify legislation passed by the House of Commons."
Yeah I stand corrected on that. The Upper House is part of the Parliament, but Parliament is not the same as the Upper House.
" You are wrong, it means that Canadians cannot anymore hide behind a levies law.
It means that soon the floodstreams of lawsuits against illegal users will flow..."
No, it was ruled that the levies were illegal because only Parliament (the upper house) has the authority to enact such a levy, not the Copyright Board of Canada. Whether or not the levies make sense or are appropriate is not the issue. This ruling was simply about legal jurisdiction, and I am very sure we have not seen the end of this.
"I looked at the PNG linked to in the posting, and i have to say, I wasn't very impressed. It sounds like something written by a bunch of open source programmers."
That's also what I thought. The ad assumes you know the meaning of the terms web browser and open source. The only clue really is that they say it allows you to "surf faster and more efficiently, thus indicating its function to the uninitiated.
"Wow, based on all the slashdot articles I can concolude that Sony can't make any decent products anymore. First I learn that the new HDD walkman is junk, and now the PSP is junk."
It depends... the consumer stuff that Sony makes certainly is overpriced crap IMO. The high end pro stuff that Sony sells is overpriced, but performs well and lives long. How do you tell which product you're buying? The good stuff is "Made in Japan." The consumer crap is made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia or Mexico.
In related trivia, Sony also sells a line of high-end cosmetics (in Japan.)
""In Japan" (h0 h0) devices usually come out before their U.S. counterparts so that last-minute refinements are made before we boorish Americans get them and start throwing them to people and shit like that."
I wonder what the cultural connotations for things like this are in Japan. Do the Japanese have a higher tolerance for just accepting the defects than Europeans or North Americans? Would product with problems like this do better in Japan than in the US?
Ah good, so that means it is safe to get a current top of the line iPod without worrying that a new one will come out, and the one you just got will be available for $100 less the next month.
"I've had discs become unreadable from both TDK branded discs (about 1.50ukp each 5 or 6 years ago) and POS cheap discs."
Depending on what batch you buy, the TDK stuff is the identical to the cheap POS media. The latest TDK spindle I brought home was made by CMC Magnetics, which is one of the worst CDR manufacturers out there. (Their DVDR discs are better though.) The CDR spindle was returned to costco. As to what TDK was putting in their spindles 6 years ago in the UK, I really have no idea. It would be interesting if you were able to to post the Manufacturer ID codes from those discs here, which are retreivable using tools like Nero CDSpeed.
"It is not very many but a few.. however, if that few contains important data you have no other copy of, you're screwed (and I guess this is exactly the situation joe public is in). The bigger deal is probably that you just don't know which are going to fail, and unless you check them regularly you probably won't find out which are failing very quickly."
In that case, Joe Public is being screwed by his own ignorance. My digital photos are mirrored on two machines, a FW enclosure and DVDRw. It is unlikely that I will lose my collection anytime soon. As to not knowing which ones will fail, that's why multiple copies should be burned. Ignorance is no excuse in the face of proper data backup procedures.
"These days I use POS cheap discs for my backups coz they only have to last until the next backup is taken."
I use Rw for the same reason. And I don't fill landfills in the process. At least not as quickly.;-)
"With respect, thats only 8 years which isn't long in the grand scheme of things. Printed photos are still not bad (a bit faded) after 50 - 100 years - all evidence I've seen suggests that even the best CD-Rs won't last anywhere near that long."
CD-R technology is clearly much younger than printed photographs. In fact there is no digital storage method that's guaranteed to last 100 years. Still, I find it more desirable than keeping prints/negatives as my only copy because they don't preserve perfectly and I can't transfer them digitally perfectly to another medium before the first medium fails (and even the best CD-R will fail if you wait long enough.) My bet though is that I can get a few decades out of my T-Y at least before they degrade into unreadability. Regardless, I burn everything twice onto different batches of media just in case.
"Stick them on CD-R (Urk - I've got stacks of CD-Rs that are bitrotten after only a few years - these poor sods are going to come back to their photos in 10 years to find them unrecoverable!)."
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly. Please be aware that there are only something like 12 companies in the world that manufacture CDR discs, and everything else is a rebrand of those. (i.e. There is no such thing as a Memorex or Sony CDR factory. These companies rebrand from multiple other companies, some with quality and some with POS media. (Sony doesn't make its own burners either. It rebrands from Lite-on. I'm not sure who makes the Memorex burners, though I can guarantee you they are rebranded OEM's.) Memorex is a particularly bad offender though because you can often find media from different factories on the same Memorex branded spindle, even though it all looks the same to the naked eye.) The correct course of action, of course, is to invest in some genuine Taiyo Yuden media (and watch out, because there are plenty of fakes,) and then burn multiple copies of your data and then store them in a dark, cool area with low humidity and constant environmental conditions. This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
My boss had around a dozen extremely old computers (complete with largely monochrome and/or failing monitors) and he told me to trash them. So I had a good time seeing how far the monitors would bounce when they hit the bottom of the dumpster.
Ah yes, good times. But really, old monitors and other computer parts should go to proper recycling facilities due to the heavy metals and other dangerous chemicals in them that should not be kept away from open landfills.
Actually tinfoil is not such a big issue. My wallet is lined with aluminium foil (because I put it there. Yes I am paranoid.) In the last year, I have taken four international flights to/from the US and two domestic US flights. My wallet went through the metal detector conveyor belt. The security guards never blinked.
And I'm a young 'brown' male with a Canadian passport who looks like he's from the Middle East.
Then we should be complaining about basketball monopolies, not software monopolies.
-My former co-worker who was from Poland.
The large market of 'normal' users just wants to click on the icon and see the video or hear the song play. Whether it is via WMP or some other tool is of little consequence.
An obvious troll. It's either that or he's just an ignorant fool.
You have to spoof your referrer or actually visit the page to download those files.
And when they realise this, the nations with enough PATRIOT-esque laws will simply shut off internet access in the name of national security. (They care for their citizens' best intrests of course!)
I can't remember now, which communist (?) nation was it that shut down all the country's coffee shops because they realised that they couldn't put a spy at every table?
I bought a new component video cable for the DVD player recently and it actually came with an instruction booklet. (No, this was not a Monster Cable. It was the Acoustic Research brand.) How in the world do you figure an instruction booklet is needed for an entry level cable!? Yes, that booklet went into the trash bin.
Thumbs up on the Lian Li. The high end ones are stupidly expensive (I paid CDN$300 for mine (photos),) but they are beautiful, functional and well designed.
So if EA succeeds and they are the single ubiquitous supplier and their products are a POS, it sounds to me like that's a potential for the OSS gaming market to seize the day. It's IE being attacked by FF all over again.
So 66% of all net traffic is P2P. Astonishing.
(35%)/(0.53) = 66%
How how much is spam and how much is the rest of the net?
Inkjet coated media is not some uncommon speciality thing made by one company for using only in a special kind of drive or brand of printer. It is very easily available online for only a slight premium (perhaps $2-3 per 100 discs) over the cost of regular media of the same brand.
The only problem with this IMO is that the R200's inks are water soluble, meaning that they smudge if you handle the disc with damp hands. You can get fixative sprays used by artists to 'seal' the surface of the disc, but it could affect the disc's balance if the coat was uneven, and there could be bad chemical interactions. (Those sprays include acetone and xylene. I don't know if those will harm optical media.) Furthermore most CDR and DVDR instructions explicitly indicate that no coatings should be applied.
My plan for now is to keep my own R200-printed discs well away from water.
I don't see why this is such a great thing. Just get inkjet printable CD or DVD discs and print your own full colour custom label. Some of the ~$149 Epson printer support this now. Take a look at the cool stuff you can do! (Admittedly this is quite a simple design. I have done some much fancier ones more recently.)
Yeah I stand corrected on that. The Upper House is part of the Parliament, but Parliament is not the same as the Upper House.
No, it was ruled that the levies were illegal because only Parliament (the upper house) has the authority to enact such a levy, not the Copyright Board of Canada. Whether or not the levies make sense or are appropriate is not the issue. This ruling was simply about legal jurisdiction, and I am very sure we have not seen the end of this.
That's also what I thought. The ad assumes you know the meaning of the terms web browser and open source. The only clue really is that they say it allows you to "surf faster and more efficiently, thus indicating its function to the uninitiated.
Shouldn't that kind of site be registered under .ho ?
Trillian's product is superior to Yahoo's product.
Apple's product is superior to Real's product.
It depends ... the consumer stuff that Sony makes certainly is overpriced crap IMO. The high end pro stuff that Sony sells is overpriced, but performs well and lives long. How do you tell which product you're buying? The good stuff is "Made in Japan." The consumer crap is made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia or Mexico.
In related trivia, Sony also sells a line of high-end cosmetics (in Japan.)
I wonder what the cultural connotations for things like this are in Japan. Do the Japanese have a higher tolerance for just accepting the defects than Europeans or North Americans? Would product with problems like this do better in Japan than in the US?
2005/Q3?
Ah good, so that means it is safe to get a current top of the line iPod without worrying that a new one will come out, and the one you just got will be available for $100 less the next month.
Depending on what batch you buy, the TDK stuff is the identical to the cheap POS media. The latest TDK spindle I brought home was made by CMC Magnetics, which is one of the worst CDR manufacturers out there. (Their DVDR discs are better though.) The CDR spindle was returned to costco. As to what TDK was putting in their spindles 6 years ago in the UK, I really have no idea. It would be interesting if you were able to to post the Manufacturer ID codes from those discs here, which are retreivable using tools like Nero CDSpeed.
"It is not very many but a few.. however, if that few contains important data you have no other copy of, you're screwed (and I guess this is exactly the situation joe public is in). The bigger deal is probably that you just don't know which are going to fail, and unless you check them regularly you probably won't find out which are failing very quickly."
In that case, Joe Public is being screwed by his own ignorance. My digital photos are mirrored on two machines, a FW enclosure and DVDRw. It is unlikely that I will lose my collection anytime soon. As to not knowing which ones will fail, that's why multiple copies should be burned. Ignorance is no excuse in the face of proper data backup procedures.
"These days I use POS cheap discs for my backups coz they only have to last until the next backup is taken."
I use Rw for the same reason. And I don't fill landfills in the process. At least not as quickly. ;-)
"With respect, thats only 8 years which isn't long in the grand scheme of things. Printed photos are still not bad (a bit faded) after 50 - 100 years - all evidence I've seen suggests that even the best CD-Rs won't last anywhere near that long."
CD-R technology is clearly much younger than printed photographs. In fact there is no digital storage method that's guaranteed to last 100 years. Still, I find it more desirable than keeping prints/negatives as my only copy because they don't preserve perfectly and I can't transfer them digitally perfectly to another medium before the first medium fails (and even the best CD-R will fail if you wait long enough.) My bet though is that I can get a few decades out of my T-Y at least before they degrade into unreadability. Regardless, I burn everything twice onto different batches of media just in case.
If your CDR backups are failing within a couple of years, you are either using POS cheap media and/or not storing them correctly. Please be aware that there are only something like 12 companies in the world that manufacture CDR discs, and everything else is a rebrand of those. (i.e. There is no such thing as a Memorex or Sony CDR factory. These companies rebrand from multiple other companies, some with quality and some with POS media. (Sony doesn't make its own burners either. It rebrands from Lite-on. I'm not sure who makes the Memorex burners, though I can guarantee you they are rebranded OEM's.) Memorex is a particularly bad offender though because you can often find media from different factories on the same Memorex branded spindle, even though it all looks the same to the naked eye.) The correct course of action, of course, is to invest in some genuine Taiyo Yuden media (and watch out, because there are plenty of fakes,) and then burn multiple copies of your data and then store them in a dark, cool area with low humidity and constant environmental conditions. This WILL last for a long time. I have T-Y dating back to 1996 and it's still perfect.