7.1. Burn new multisession CD-Extra disc with audio tracks and OGG files on it and file that away. Use 99min/900MB size CD-R if necessary. (Yes, they do exist.)
I always do this now because I can nuke a directory of OGGs if I don't really want to hear them and then easily find my custom cut CD again and copy them back easily without having to re-rip.
This is doubly valuable because when I make the backup CD, the audio tracks are from ripped WAVs. This means that all copy protection, autorun trojan horses, garbage, etc. are 100% removed and I have a clean backup in case the original gets damaged. Losing one out of production CD when the player malfunctioned was more than enough for me.
"Since the music industry is probably going to try stuff like this anyway, (as a consumer) I'm glad to see they're trying something that's supposed to play on everything."
Since the music industry is probably going to try stuff like this anyway, (as a consumer) I'm glad to see that Microsoft will have a chance to standardise it all. Given the company's track record, it will probably be like a plastic padlock and we will not really have our fair use rights inhibited.
"I'm American, so I don't know how big an area Bell Canada actually covers up there, but in the world of business travel, where its unusual to hit up the same city more than say, once every two weeks, how much is it really worth to be on the internet for an hour per visit?"
Bell Canada is frickin huge. They own practically all the phone line hardware all across the country. Almost everyone (at least 99% of people) get their local service from Bell because there is no other choice. Bell Canada also has nationwide long distance service, mobile phone service, dialup internet access, DSL access (with limited areas of course), Satellite access, Corporate class web hosting. They own a large amount of the canadian fiber backbones (BellNexxia). To summarise, Bell is everywhere and if all their payphones had WiFi, it would probably be the biggest WiFi network in the world.
"Under their "Worst Models Ever" I found a list of drives, almost all of which are old and long out of production. So, while drive failures still plague us, it doesn not appear to me that today's drives are less failure-prone than older drives."
I suggest you find the recent slashdot story about (under ask slashdot) about the death of newer Fujitsu drives across Europe and North America. And what about IBM's GXP drives? They're being sued over the 75 GB version due to excessive failures.
And about "worst models ever." It is impossible for a modern drive to appear in that list because it is still in use. Only after it has been obsoleted would you be able to tell if it was one of the worst ever.
" So show me some statistics to support your contention that today's drives are less reliable. No, I don't want to know some third-hand story about your wife's friend's brother who said his hard drive failed. I want real, statistically significant numbers."
"I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable."
True. If you look at older discs (1990s era) the two halves of plastic are glued all the way around. The 'new' floppies are only glued in the corners so lint, grease, etc can get in and wreck them more easily.
Try turning on the radio (i.e. the one that uses radio wave frequencies, not IP addresses) and find a not for profit station. They do exist. Then listen. You will hear music that you may like.
This is still how I find CDs to buy. (Net radio is rather difficult when you can only get 28.8 where you live.)
"Why do you need a chemistry set to go back to school? If you want to prep for school just get a nice book so you don't have a tough time grunting the equations (and then you'll be able to adequately enjoy the labs)."
Doing actual experiments is important for chemistry in particular because otherwise learning the nomenclature is next to impossible. This is not the case as much for intro physics.
When I was learning all that stuff, we had all these tables with the IUPAC naming conventions and such, and none of it really connected togething into something coherent. But once you actually get working with a dozen chemicals at once, you have to catalogue your results some how and then the real relationships between anions, cations, acids, bases, etc are made clear to you. It's even better if you to chemistry experiments with a friend helping. (Joke not intended;-) You have to coordinate your plans and communicate results to each other.
I know from experience that it is at least 10X easier to learn chemistry in terms of the nomenclature, methods, and overall properties of different structures by lab work than by reading.
And it works. It's been two years since I've had to take a chemistry course and I still know all my common anions (formula, charge, name) including the names for versions with up to one extra or two less oxygens off my heart.
"And in the price department, too. A few CPU cycles isn't enough for me to justify spending money at a browser, especially when great software like Galeon and Phoenix exists."
Good point, I guess that I've just gotten used to the banner in the free version.
"for the longest time. I would load up Moz if I was browsing in pop-up land, but it was slow and used a lot of memory (and my cpu sucks) so I used IE for my daily browsing. Then I discovered phoenix, holy crap."
If you haven't done it yet, check out Opera as well. Although I find phoenix very alluring, Opera is still king in the low resource / high speed / high efficiency department.
"Most Microsoft applications use the concept of resource to separate the text from the application, translating the application becomes then simply a matter of translating the strings in the resource and updating the binary."
Yeah, but this does not help when you are translating into german and the result in a 74 letter long word that can't fit in the little textbox.:-)
"Unless you burn and rake the ashes, don't count on your shredded information not being put back together again easily. I know people think nothing of doing a 700 piece jigsaw puzzle, so why is your vertically shredded garbage suddenly impossible to re-assemble?"
The principle is similar to strong, open encryption. It is possible to crack PGP, and there are probably classified hardware devices that do this owned by military organisations.
BUT if your information is encrypted, the time and resources it would take to decrypt everything and find something that may be valuable is probably less than the value of the information.
So if there is no reason for someone to desperately need the papers in your garbage in particular, shredding is sufficient because reassembly of it all is more expensive than the net potential gain. But if people know that you have the numbers of swiss bank accounts worth millions of dollars in your trash, then you would be stupid to not have those documents properly destroyed (burning, professional crosscut shredding service, etc.)
Ultimately, it's simply a matter of the value of obtaining the information vs. the value of the information.
"But what if this program hadn't come along? I would have had to call MS tech support to figure out why it was that their program was denying me the right to read a book I purchased. Can you imagine having to do that for every book you wait a week to read?"
This exact thing happenned to my mother but with an adobe e-book. Needless to say, Dmitry was the hero of the hour at home;-)
"Update: 12/31 22:50 GMT by T: Karen Sohl of Linksys writes to say that despite the slip in dates, "Linksys is shipping our line of Wireless-G products. We have been shipping since last week. Honestly not large volume by any means-- but by the end of this week we'll have shipped over 10,000 units to distribution -- Ingram Micro and Tech Data." That's where even large retailers (think Amazon) buy their stock."
Having worked for some years in computer reselling, I have dealt with Ingram Micro from time to time. I must say that they are not to be trusted. More than one time we received something from them where it was supposed to be brand new but it had clearly been shipped back and forth from repair shops, as shown by the stickers on the packaging. Don't trust them unless losing your business would mean a significant ($millions) loss in business for them.
"Really cared about the security of your garbage, you wouldn't set it on the curb so a guy who makes $7.50 an hour can come by and take it with him."
Get a shredder. Seriously, anything that is going into the garbage where I live that has a name/address or any kind of personally identifiable info on it, passes through the shredded before it lands in the trash.
NB: Garbage disposal people make a lot more than $7.5 per hour.
"How about the phones that are thrown out when someone changes plans and the new service provider forces them to buy one of their phones?"
This is stupid. When you change phones / plans, you should get a credit for the old hardware. On telus mobility in Canada, my dad just bought a new phone to replace his really ancient one from ~1996 because the display was failing. He still got a $25 credit for it and the phone went to proper disposal and recovery of recoverable parts.
"Not too far from the truth: the article mentions that people (women?) would sometimes urinate on pay phones. And I can rmember a movie or two where the protagonist would always pull out a hankie to handle a pay phone handset with."
Maybe my imagination is not so vivid or something, but can anyone please explain exactly how the idea to urinate on a public phone would enter someone's mind, and why they would do it on a phone as opposed to, say bushes, or in a washroom? It just seems completely illogical.
"Add it all up and what you have is a company that, at the least, displays a profound level of arrogance coupled with the unshakable belief that they have not only the ability, but the right to dictate to the rest of the world, from charities to corporations, how the world should look."
"Thus it is important that we (the open/free community) develop a free/open engine management system such as those sold for $3000 by haltech, so we can remove the factory computer and install our own."
An engineering professor at the Canadian university where I am a student (not waterloo) is a player in the industry of developing these monitoring devices. He started a company that develops these things I have seen one prototype which monitors the effects of a crash on every major car component. It takes a 360 degree photo all around the car at the moment of impact. The state of the different car controls are all saved as well. It's the size of a single, fairly large, PCI card.
This talk of highway safety is garbage. The technology is made to be useful from the point of view of INSURANCE COMPANIES. These devices help when picking up the pieces AFTER an automobile collision. Using the built in sensors, the insurance companies can more quikly resolve cases by using facts as opposed to fragile human recollections to determine what really happenned.
Privacy issues have been considered for some time now. If you thing that there are 'issues' with what is currently in the works, you should have heard about earlier versions. These things had the ability to measure the heart rate of the driver (by sensors in the steering wheel measuring pulse? I am not sure) and look at how fast they were blinking, thereby determining how tired they were. These things were removed from later revisions because of privacy concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
Three words: you cannot count.
You forgot:
7.1. Burn new multisession CD-Extra disc with audio tracks and OGG files on it and file that away. Use 99min/900MB size CD-R if necessary. (Yes, they do exist.)
I always do this now because I can nuke a directory of OGGs if I don't really want to hear them and then easily find my custom cut CD again and copy them back easily without having to re-rip.
This is doubly valuable because when I make the backup CD, the audio tracks are from ripped WAVs. This means that all copy protection, autorun trojan horses, garbage, etc. are 100% removed and I have a clean backup in case the original gets damaged. Losing one out of production CD when the player malfunctioned was more than enough for me.
Since the music industry is probably going to try stuff like this anyway, (as a consumer) I'm glad to see that Microsoft will have a chance to standardise it all. Given the company's track record, it will probably be like a plastic padlock and we will not really have our fair use rights inhibited.
Bell Canada is frickin huge. They own practically all the phone line hardware all across the country. Almost everyone (at least 99% of people) get their local service from Bell because there is no other choice. Bell Canada also has nationwide long distance service, mobile phone service, dialup internet access, DSL access (with limited areas of course), Satellite access, Corporate class web hosting. They own a large amount of the canadian fiber backbones (BellNexxia). To summarise, Bell is everywhere and if all their payphones had WiFi, it would probably be the biggest WiFi network in the world.
I suggest you find the recent slashdot story about (under ask slashdot) about the death of newer Fujitsu drives across Europe and North America. And what about IBM's GXP drives? They're being sued over the 75 GB version due to excessive failures.
And about "worst models ever." It is impossible for a modern drive to appear in that list because it is still in use. Only after it has been obsoleted would you be able to tell if it was one of the worst ever.
Most brands should be avoided except in the SCSI department.
True. If you look at older discs (1990s era) the two halves of plastic are glued all the way around. The 'new' floppies are only glued in the corners so lint, grease, etc can get in and wreck them more easily.
And microsoft said that those claims that its applications would go on linux were all balderdash. This is just the first step.
This is still how I find CDs to buy. (Net radio is rather difficult when you can only get 28.8 where you live.)
Doing actual experiments is important for chemistry in particular because otherwise learning the nomenclature is next to impossible. This is not the case as much for intro physics.
When I was learning all that stuff, we had all these tables with the IUPAC naming conventions and such, and none of it really connected togething into something coherent. But once you actually get working with a dozen chemicals at once, you have to catalogue your results some how and then the real relationships between anions, cations, acids, bases, etc are made clear to you. It's even better if you to chemistry experiments with a friend helping. (Joke not intended ;-) You have to coordinate your plans and communicate results to each other.
I know from experience that it is at least 10X easier to learn chemistry in terms of the nomenclature, methods, and overall properties of different structures by lab work than by reading.
And it works. It's been two years since I've had to take a chemistry course and I still know all my common anions (formula, charge, name) including the names for versions with up to one extra or two less oxygens off my heart.
Good point, I guess that I've just gotten used to the banner in the free version.
If you haven't done it yet, check out Opera as well. Although I find phoenix very alluring, Opera is still king in the low resource / high speed / high efficiency department.
Yeah, but this does not help when you are translating into german and the result in a 74 letter long word that can't fit in the little textbox. :-)
</joke>
186,000 Miles per Second. It's not just a good idea. IT'S THE LAW.
The principle is similar to strong, open encryption. It is possible to crack PGP, and there are probably classified hardware devices that do this owned by military organisations.
BUT if your information is encrypted, the time and resources it would take to decrypt everything and find something that may be valuable is probably less than the value of the information.
So if there is no reason for someone to desperately need the papers in your garbage in particular, shredding is sufficient because reassembly of it all is more expensive than the net potential gain. But if people know that you have the numbers of swiss bank accounts worth millions of dollars in your trash, then you would be stupid to not have those documents properly destroyed (burning, professional crosscut shredding service, etc.)
Ultimately, it's simply a matter of the value of obtaining the information vs. the value of the information.
Either gullible or a big volume buyer.
This exact thing happenned to my mother but with an adobe e-book. Needless to say, Dmitry was the hero of the hour at home ;-)
Having worked for some years in computer reselling, I have dealt with Ingram Micro from time to time. I must say that they are not to be trusted. More than one time we received something from them where it was supposed to be brand new but it had clearly been shipped back and forth from repair shops, as shown by the stickers on the packaging. Don't trust them unless losing your business would mean a significant ($millions) loss in business for them.
Get a shredder. Seriously, anything that is going into the garbage where I live that has a name/address or any kind of personally identifiable info on it, passes through the shredded before it lands in the trash.
NB: Garbage disposal people make a lot more than $7.5 per hour.
FYI: Motorola has sold hand-winding chargers for some phones (eg the v.6X series) for at least several months now.
This is stupid. When you change phones / plans, you should get a credit for the old hardware. On telus mobility in Canada, my dad just bought a new phone to replace his really ancient one from ~1996 because the display was failing. He still got a $25 credit for it and the phone went to proper disposal and recovery of recoverable parts.
Maybe my imagination is not so vivid or something, but can anyone please explain exactly how the idea to urinate on a public phone would enter someone's mind, and why they would do it on a phone as opposed to, say bushes, or in a washroom? It just seems completely illogical.
Reminds me of Dubyah.
Or a lava lamp?
Or those little artificial christmas trees with fiber optic stands built into them that dynamically emit changing colours?
I think that this has been done before.
An engineering professor at the Canadian university where I am a student (not waterloo) is a player in the industry of developing these monitoring devices. He started a company that develops these things I have seen one prototype which monitors the effects of a crash on every major car component. It takes a 360 degree photo all around the car at the moment of impact. The state of the different car controls are all saved as well. It's the size of a single, fairly large, PCI card.
This talk of highway safety is garbage. The technology is made to be useful from the point of view of INSURANCE COMPANIES. These devices help when picking up the pieces AFTER an automobile collision. Using the built in sensors, the insurance companies can more quikly resolve cases by using facts as opposed to fragile human recollections to determine what really happenned.
Privacy issues have been considered for some time now. If you thing that there are 'issues' with what is currently in the works, you should have heard about earlier versions. These things had the ability to measure the heart rate of the driver (by sensors in the steering wheel measuring pulse? I am not sure) and look at how fast they were blinking, thereby determining how tired they were. These things were removed from later revisions because of privacy concerns.