That is when I scratch my head and ask why the hell they are not using cable or DSL.
Newsflash: Not everyone cares about surfing the Net enough to want to pay for the extra $30/40 for cable. And those who care enough to spend the extra $20 for an extra phone line, still do get the use of an extra phone line when they're not online. Not everyone is online more than 30 minutes a day.
As to whether or not you should ditch AOL just because cable is cnot that much more expensive, if you do that you don't GET AOL, which many people still enjoy having; you just get Internet access. In fact, many people pay for AOL's service whereby you can use AOL from another ISP, often broadband. That goes to show you that people who CAN afford to pay for broadband, often also choose to pay for AOL's service, and not their connectivity.
Some of the laws that are emerging to regulate accessibility look positively scary
These laws are not only scary, they are crazy. If serving people with disabilities is so important, then I'll do it, because it makes financial sense for me to do so. But if these people are largely irrelevant to my target market (say, I run a website for bird-watchers or target-shooting enthusiasts - should I be obligated to put up a version readable by vision-impaired people ?), I should have the right to ignore this segment of the market - at my own peril, of course.
If they're going to legislate me into putting in 'assistive technology' into my websites, why don't they force magazines to put out Braille versions, or make them supply audio-cassettes or CDs with the contents transcribed ? Why don't they widen airplane and car and bus seats so morbidly obese people can sit in them ?
I'd say that they miss to point out that Microsofts Office suite combined with VBA scripting makes Windows more insecure than anything I've ever seen
That would be a good point if not for the fact that 1) Microsoft Office is not part of Windows, and 2) a lot more people would switch to Linux on their desktop if Microsoft Office (and not some pale imitation) were available on Linux. But it isn't, is it ?
which is already present in newer games...all this will do is frustrate the average joe trying to make legit copies
You know, the claims that some music CD user owner will want to make a legit rip/copy of some CD he bought is plausible. But how many game owners make backup copies of his game CDs ? And do people really want to argue that the majority of game CDs burned are for legitimate reasons ?
Please, someone tell us what the XBOx license is, if any, so we can stop this navel-gazing about what we 'should' and 'should not' be able to do with someone's X-Box.
If there's a license attached to it, and it prohibits X, then you shouldn't be able to do X, and if you want to do X, you shouldn't buy the XBox. Deal with it.
This is like the GPL, I might believe I should be able to do WHATEVER I want with source code (a la BSD licensing), including redistributing and/or selling modified versions without source code, but if the GPL puts restrictions on me that I don't like, then I shouldn't use GPL'ed code.
People have a choice - to use or not use something with a particular license. Just because someone might not like a license does not mean they can supercede it unilaterally with terms THEY deem reasonable.
Many non-profit companies thrive & make a ton of bucks (Underwriters Labs, for ex), but they do not distribute dividends to shareholders. "Profit" is reinvested in the company.
The profitability of a company is not determined by the dividends it does or does not pay out. A company can be highly profitable and yet retain these profits. It all boils down to the company's decision as to whether paying out a dividend or not is best in the shareholder's interest - with all this engenders. A company in a high-growth industry might decide to retain its profits because it can earn a higher rate of return that the shareholder could on a risk-adjusted basis. A company in a low-growth industry might decide to pay out some of its profits.
I cannot believe the other countries involved in the ISS are tolerating the Russians sending up every Tom, Dick and Harry that can front $20M, indirectly or directly. What about the safety issues presented by an incompetent civilian in an environment where a screw-up could jeopardize the lives of all the people on board ?
The Russians are making a mockery of the other nations' investments, jeopardizing lives, and compromising the amount of scientific work that can get done. For the amount and value of work that can get done by a single (competent) astronaut on the station, and for the cost of launching a ship to the station, you'd think it'd almost be worth it for some other nation to just PAY the Russians $20M just so the Russians can taxi one of their own stronauts up to the ISS.
...that a website (/.) that itself is well known for being down, is speculating about what OTHER (far more heavily trafficked) sites should do ? I have to wonder how/. would do if IT were under the same sort of traffic that CNN's or BBC's website experienced on 9/11 ??
"apparently, it's ok for Americans to break Russian law if they're in the U.S., but not ok for Russians to break U.S. law, even while in Russia."
You complain about the discipling of the Russian hackers, yet call for the government officials to be disciplined for the same thing ?
The only people who can say that the government officials broke the law is the Russian judicial system. If they think the US broke their laws, they should go and prosecute them.
I had the same game and I loved it. I remember once, when I was sick with the chicken pox I spend days at home practicing said shooting game, and being so proud of the scores I could rack up- until I realized I was getting 100% accuracy even when the gun was pointed AWAY FROM THE SCREEN. Not sure why, but the game lost a lot after that revelation.
You Americans might not care that much, but I'm reading this book because it is being published in Britain... No where on the cover does it say Illustrated History of Electronic Games played by Americans.
So the reviewer complains about no mention of machines like the Sinclair, but all the games he described were Apple II games or arcade games ? Jeez, if the Sinclair was so important to his own personal gaming history you'd think he'd reminisce about a game on this platform, wouldn't you ?
There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard. So why mention it in any history of the genre ?
I have never been able to tolerate the self-important, judgemental nature of these awards. Who are they to determine what is and is not of merit ? Basic science, especially, is FULL of research which seems largely irrelevant to many and is easy to ridicule when described out of context.
The annals of basic science are full of findings that seemed irrelevant at one point, only until they were interpreted later from another framework or in light of other findings.
Basic science is all about asking questions for the sake of asking questions, because it would be arrogant for ANYONE to presuppose they know what is and is not going to be 'of scientific merit'. The people who run these awards, and the ones who snicker at the recipients, are arrogant in the extreme.
It's a simple fact that 95% of "attacks" are quite harmless game-playing by "script kiddies", against which there's no need to defend.
Virtually all of the remaining five percent are the work of honorable hackers
Kindly provide us with the statistics that support this simple fact, so that the rest of the world can dispense with its bigotry.
The "I love you" and "melissa" viruses were written by little more than a script kiddies. Are you telling me there is no reason to defend against this ? Are you saying there's no reason for concern ?
And while you're at it, please provide statistics about the dollar-value of damage conducted by the people who DON'T fall into your schema. It'd be great to know that a few million dollars lost here or some credit card numbers stolen there don't merit real concern.
Could anyone have done more damage to your oh-so-discriminated-against community then a posterboy like Kevin Mitnick, by undermining the trust that people have in these systems ?
I wonder...what's the point of book reviews on/., when you know that almost every reader will turn from the/. review to Amazon to read a larger body of opinions - and with no vested interest in boosting the book, to boot ?
There is a school of thought that says that vision can be improved by stretching the eye muscles. This is advocated by behavioral optometrists. The idea is that when you spend time focused at a certain distance, as so many of us do, our eye muscles tighten chronically. When this happens, the cornea and lens distort and vision problems arise. The problem is not helped in the long run by corrective lenses.
I believe some other behavioral optometrists have some other theories about "learning to see", etc.
I know this all sounds crazy, but my vision got worse every time I go in for a few months of really intensive coding. A few months ago, I was certain my prescription had gotten worse - I can usually tell because on top of not seeing distances clearly, I have headaches and feel sick a lot.
On a lark I bought a book (really, an ~80 page pamphlet) on eye exercises, and also a bigger one on behavioral optometry. I did the eye exercises they prescribed, and within a week or so I was seeing noticeably better.
Now, I believe behavioral optometrists would prescribe a regimen of steadily weaker corrective lenses, to exercise your eyes. I haven't gone that far yet, but I do have to say I was stunned by the marked improvement in my vision a few weeks of exercises got me. I've dealt with steadily worsening vision for the last 20 years, so I KNOW I am not imagining it.
While MS OSes are notably insecure, I wonder what the University's policy is towards OTHER insecure OSes - like a Linux box that isn't secured properly. Do they run audits and checks against every Linux machine on their network to verify against known hacks ? It seems to me like they should, if only to be consistent.
If this technology is anything like the "rumble packs" in today's joysticks, I'll take a pass.
Anyways, half the time when you would want the sensation of motion (jet plane taking off ? explosions ? car accelerating ?), there's a lot of noise coming out of your speakers, andif you have a half-decent system, your sofa's probably shaking already.
Take the hint - consumers do not want to pay $18 for crappy CDs.
So who's forcing them to ? If CDs aren't worth what the companies are charging for them, people have all the choice and freedom they need - to buy or not buy them.
We don't have some God-given right to be able to acquire whatever music we want at the price we want to buy it at.
I honestly can't see how people rationalize opinions like that of the poster I'm replying to with opinions that defend the GPL. With the GPL, if you don't like the license attached to a piece of code and the conditions the license engenders, DON'T USE THE CODE. With current music copyrights, if you don't like the licenses attached to a piece of music and the conditions the licenses engender, DON'T USE THE PRODUCT.
Just because SOME P2P users are buying CDs doesn't mean that MOST of the rest of them are, or are not buying CDs. I don't doubt that P2P is helping to sell some CDs, the question is whether or not P2P is hurting CD sales overall.
Patrick Toland, a vice president for sales and marketing at TopMoxie, said that the company did not intend for its software to displace other affiliates' rights
Like so many claims surround P2P, this claim is utterly unbelievable: how do you build a program that hijacks sales and NOT know you're doing this ?
I just hope Amazon and whomever is affected by this sues their asses off.
Without having read the book, I would expect this question is best answered by reading any introductory (micro)economics book.
Engineering is more difficult now
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What this article neglects to recognize is that engineering things nowadays is vastle more difficult than engineering in the time of, say, Edison. You could engineer a lightbulb on the back of an envelope. Think you engineer a CPU like that ?
Slashdot Mirror
That is when I scratch my head and ask why the hell they are not using cable or DSL.
Newsflash: Not everyone cares about surfing the Net enough to want to pay for the extra $30/40 for cable. And those who care enough to spend the extra $20 for an extra phone line, still do get the use of an extra phone line when they're not online. Not everyone is online more than 30 minutes a day.
As to whether or not you should ditch AOL just because cable is cnot that much more expensive, if you do that you don't GET AOL, which many people still enjoy having; you just get Internet access. In fact, many people pay for AOL's service whereby you can use AOL from another ISP, often broadband. That goes to show you that people who CAN afford to pay for broadband, often also choose to pay for AOL's service, and not their connectivity.
Some of the laws that are emerging to regulate accessibility look positively scary
These laws are not only scary, they are crazy. If serving people with disabilities is so important, then I'll do it, because it makes financial sense for me to do so. But if these people are largely irrelevant to my target market (say, I run a website for bird-watchers or target-shooting enthusiasts - should I be obligated to put up a version readable by vision-impaired people ?), I should have the right to ignore this segment of the market - at my own peril, of course.
If they're going to legislate me into putting in 'assistive technology' into my websites, why don't they force magazines to put out Braille versions, or make them supply audio-cassettes or CDs with the contents transcribed ? Why don't they widen airplane and car and bus seats so morbidly obese people can sit in them ?
I'd say that they miss to point out that Microsofts Office suite combined with VBA scripting makes Windows more insecure than anything I've ever seen
That would be a good point if not for the fact that 1) Microsoft Office is not part of Windows, and 2) a lot more people would switch to Linux on their desktop if Microsoft Office (and not some pale imitation) were available on Linux. But it isn't, is it ?
which is already present in newer games...all this will do is frustrate the average joe trying to make legit copies
You know, the claims that some music CD user owner will want to make a legit rip/copy of some CD he bought is plausible. But how many game owners make backup copies of his game CDs ? And do people really want to argue that the majority of game CDs burned are for legitimate reasons ?
Please, someone tell us what the XBOx license is, if any, so we can stop this navel-gazing about what we 'should' and 'should not' be able to do with someone's X-Box.
If there's a license attached to it, and it prohibits X, then you shouldn't be able to do X, and if you want to do X, you shouldn't buy the XBox. Deal with it.
This is like the GPL, I might believe I should be able to do WHATEVER I want with source code (a la BSD licensing), including redistributing and/or selling modified versions without source code, but if the GPL puts restrictions on me that I don't like, then I shouldn't use GPL'ed code.
People have a choice - to use or not use something with a particular license. Just because someone might not like a license does not mean they can supercede it unilaterally with terms THEY deem reasonable.
So please, someone with an XBox enlighten us ?
Many non-profit companies thrive & make a ton of bucks (Underwriters Labs, for ex), but they do not distribute dividends to shareholders. "Profit" is reinvested in the company.
The profitability of a company is not determined by the dividends it does or does not pay out. A company can be highly profitable and yet retain these profits. It all boils down to the company's decision as to whether paying out a dividend or not is best in the shareholder's interest - with all this engenders. A company in a high-growth industry might decide to retain its profits because it can earn a higher rate of return that the shareholder could on a risk-adjusted basis. A company in a low-growth industry might decide to pay out some of its profits.
I cannot believe the other countries involved in the ISS are tolerating the Russians sending up every Tom, Dick and Harry that can front $20M, indirectly or directly. What about the safety issues presented by an incompetent civilian in an environment where a screw-up could jeopardize the lives of all the people on board ?
The Russians are making a mockery of the other nations' investments, jeopardizing lives, and compromising the amount of scientific work that can get done. For the amount and value of work that can get done by a single (competent) astronaut on the station, and for the cost of launching a ship to the station, you'd think it'd almost be worth it for some other nation to just PAY the Russians $20M just so the Russians can taxi one of their own stronauts up to the ISS.
Phoenix code is based completely on Mozilla code, so the development should move rather quickly.
Bwahahahaha ! Now that put a smile on my face.
(title borrowed from one of my favorite lines from a PJ's episode)
...that a website (/.) that itself is well known for being down, is speculating about what OTHER (far more heavily trafficked) sites should do ? I have to wonder how /. would do if IT were under the same sort of traffic that CNN's or BBC's website experienced on 9/11 ??
"apparently, it's ok for Americans to break Russian law if they're in the U.S., but not ok for Russians to break U.S. law, even while in Russia."
You complain about the discipling of the Russian hackers, yet call for the government officials to be disciplined for the same thing ?
The only people who can say that the government officials broke the law is the Russian judicial system. If they think the US broke their laws, they should go and prosecute them.
I had the same game and I loved it. I remember once, when I was sick with the chicken pox I spend days at home practicing said shooting game, and being so proud of the scores I could rack up- until I realized I was getting 100% accuracy even when the gun was pointed AWAY FROM THE SCREEN. Not sure why, but the game lost a lot after that revelation.
You Americans might not care that much, but I'm reading this book because it is being published in Britain... No where on the cover does it say Illustrated History of Electronic Games played by Americans.
So the reviewer complains about no mention of machines like the Sinclair, but all the games he described were Apple II games or arcade games ? Jeez, if the Sinclair was so important to his own personal gaming history you'd think he'd reminisce about a game on this platform, wouldn't you ?
There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard. So why mention it in any history of the genre ?
I have never been able to tolerate the self-important, judgemental nature of these awards. Who are they to determine what is and is not of merit ? Basic science, especially, is FULL of research which seems largely irrelevant to many and is easy to ridicule when described out of context.
The annals of basic science are full of findings that seemed irrelevant at one point, only until they were interpreted later from another framework or in light of other findings.
Basic science is all about asking questions for the sake of asking questions, because it would be arrogant for ANYONE to presuppose they know what is and is not going to be 'of scientific merit'. The people who run these awards, and the ones who snicker at the recipients, are arrogant in the extreme.
It's a simple fact that 95% of "attacks" are quite harmless game-playing by "script kiddies", against which there's no need to defend.
Virtually all of the remaining five percent are the work of honorable hackers
Kindly provide us with the statistics that support this simple fact, so that the rest of the world can dispense with its bigotry.
The "I love you" and "melissa" viruses were written by little more than a script kiddies. Are you telling me there is no reason to defend against this ? Are you saying there's no reason for concern ?
And while you're at it, please provide statistics about the dollar-value of damage conducted by the people who DON'T fall into your schema. It'd be great to know that a few million dollars lost here or some credit card numbers stolen there don't merit real concern.
Could anyone have done more damage to your oh-so-discriminated-against community then a posterboy like Kevin Mitnick, by undermining the trust that people have in these systems ?
I wonder...what's the point of book reviews on /., when you know that almost every reader will turn from the /. review to Amazon to read a larger body of opinions - and with no vested interest in boosting the book, to boot ?
due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut,
You mean you didn't backup your database before you did your import ??? And what kind of import could ruin the imported data, anyways ??
Note to self: never take sysadmin'ing advice from Taco.
There is a school of thought that says that vision can be improved by stretching the eye muscles. This is advocated by behavioral optometrists. The idea is that when you spend time focused at a certain distance, as so many of us do, our eye muscles tighten chronically. When this happens, the cornea and lens distort and vision problems arise. The problem is not helped in the long run by corrective lenses.
I believe some other behavioral optometrists have some other theories about "learning to see", etc.
I know this all sounds crazy, but my vision got worse every time I go in for a few months of really intensive coding. A few months ago, I was certain my prescription had gotten worse - I can usually tell because on top of not seeing distances clearly, I have headaches and feel sick a lot.
On a lark I bought a book (really, an ~80 page pamphlet) on eye exercises, and also a bigger one on behavioral optometry. I did the eye exercises they prescribed, and within a week or so I was seeing noticeably better.
Now, I believe behavioral optometrists would prescribe a regimen of steadily weaker corrective lenses, to exercise your eyes. I haven't gone that far yet, but I do have to say I was stunned by the marked improvement in my vision a few weeks of exercises got me. I've dealt with steadily worsening vision for the last 20 years, so I KNOW I am not imagining it.
While MS OSes are notably insecure, I wonder what the University's policy is towards OTHER insecure OSes - like a Linux box that isn't secured properly. Do they run audits and checks against every Linux machine on their network to verify against known hacks ? It seems to me like they should, if only to be consistent.
Getting beaten up by a bunch of computer geeks (who else would run NT instead of one of MS' consumer OSes) - Now THAT would be embarassing.
If this technology is anything like the "rumble packs" in today's joysticks, I'll take a pass.
Anyways, half the time when you would want the sensation of motion (jet plane taking off ? explosions ? car accelerating ?), there's a lot of noise coming out of your speakers, andif you have a half-decent system, your sofa's probably shaking already.
Take the hint - consumers do not want to pay $18 for crappy CDs.
So who's forcing them to ? If CDs aren't worth what the companies are charging for them, people have all the choice and freedom they need - to buy or not buy them.
We don't have some God-given right to be able to acquire whatever music we want at the price we want to buy it at.
I honestly can't see how people rationalize opinions like that of the poster I'm replying to with opinions that defend the GPL. With the GPL, if you don't like the license attached to a piece of code and the conditions the license engenders, DON'T USE THE CODE. With current music copyrights, if you don't like the licenses attached to a piece of music and the conditions the licenses engender, DON'T USE THE PRODUCT.
Seems simple, doesn't it ?
Just because SOME P2P users are buying CDs doesn't mean that MOST of the rest of them are, or are not buying CDs. I don't doubt that P2P is helping to sell some CDs, the question is whether or not P2P is hurting CD sales overall.
Patrick Toland, a vice president for sales and marketing at TopMoxie, said that the company did not intend for its software to displace other affiliates' rights
Like so many claims surround P2P, this claim is utterly unbelievable: how do you build a program that hijacks sales and NOT know you're doing this ?
I just hope Amazon and whomever is affected by this sues their asses off.
Without having read the book, I would expect this question is best answered by reading any introductory (micro)economics book.
What this article neglects to recognize is that engineering things nowadays is vastle more difficult than engineering in the time of, say, Edison. You could engineer a lightbulb on the back of an envelope. Think you engineer a CPU like that ?