Maybe. In a large project, it becomes difficult to find the right place to fix the bug. If you don't have a good understanding of the overall architecture your "fix" can easily break other concepts or code outright. Or you may be duplicating effort that exists elsewhere in the codebase.
Not to mention that a rather vast amount of bugs don't do something "visible", but just screw up things behind the scenes. You may know what the effect of the bug is, or the symptom that causes the bug, but that's not going to help you grep for a string in order to find the bug.
Most default 66 and 110 blocks are made for cross-connecting, not for distributing one line to many places. You need a phone connecting block like this. Home Depot used to sell something similar.
Well, yeah... but you can also take a 66/110 block, take some cat5/telephone cable, strip out the individual wires, and then run them between each section of the block. Voila, you have distribution.
For the love of God, don't try this for ethernet.
If you don't want to spend the $$ on a "real" 110 punchdown tool you can get a cheap (~$3) plastic one and cut the wires with diagonal cutters.
Yeah, but you can get a decent (for home owner use -- I wouldn't recommend it to a contractor) impact punch down tool off eBay for ~$10. Mine does 66/110, has a cutting/non-cutting tip, and . Sure, it's a cheapo plastic housing, but it works just fine.
On the drilling thing -- wires hanging down help tons, but I didn't get how this was going to work. If you drill in above the baseboard then you're going to have a 90 degree turn between the hole and the floor... how on earth do you rectify that?
I always put in boxes, so I cut the hole for the box and then have someone tap on the floor w/ a wire while I try and figure out where the hell the tapping is. Yeah, it's really not a great method.
For me the coax is just dangling... most of the wires don't even have connectors on them (I'll crimp 'em when I need 'em). When I was using the local cable provider I had the ones I needed hooked up to splitters. I have DirecTV now and the ones I need are connected to a multiblock.
You can do the whole patch panel thing for coax, but unless you're doing really funky stuff it's probably overkill (they're also still very expensive). I can certainly see the need in some cases though (whole house video distribution, etc).
Yeah, but the structured wiring is much more expensive than the individual cables. Somewhat more would be understandable, since there are additional construction costs, but since they sell far less structured than regular wiring economies of scale come into play as well.
That and last time I looked I couldn't find a structured wire with just the cabling I wanted. A lot of the higher end bundles start throwing in fiber and stuff too, which doesn't help the price.
but have so far been unable to find a way to route the wires there.
Well, unless the contractor stapled the RG6 to studs you can just use the existing cable as a lead line to pull more through. You'll end up with some spare RG6 that way, but it's doable.
Odds are they did staple it though, at least if they put it in before drywalling. In that case you're pretty well screwed.
My next house will have conduit in the walls
Yeah, but unless you either supervise it or get one of the very rare builders with a clue it'll still be done wrong.
My house was built in 1982. For whatever reason the original builder/buyer overlooked a couple of small things -- like phone jacks and cable (cable is somewhat understandable, but phone jacks?!?!). Every single phone jack was wired to a surface mount receptacle. The one in the kitchen was punched up through the pantry and through both sides of a wall to get to the kitchen.
I got a 110 block from my brother-in-law (if you're not so lucky, RadioShack, CompUSA, and Best Buy carry them. Best price will probably be from eBay though -- used ones work just fine), put it in a central location, ran the cable from the demarc to it (it wasn't long enough, but 3M has some cheap patch buttons for doing this kind of thing; work fine), and every place I put in phone jacks was run to the network closet (cable and cat5 are run there too). It's made adding more jacks easy, and I've gone from 3 poorly wired phone jacks to over a half dozen well wired ones (and I still need to add a couple, but drilling the holes is non-trivial for these locations).
Do yourself a favor -- everywhere you want to put in a phone jack run the cable for the phone, 1 or 2 coax (RG-6 Quad Shield only!), and 2 cat5 (for network) at the same time. The difficult bit is always running the cable. Get it all done at once - it's just as easy to pull 5 cables as it is to pull one. I used Leviton wallplates and connectors... they're a bit expensive, but work well. If you need to drill through wood, do yourself a favor and get an auger bit -- spade bits take forever, and if you're drilling through joists the cleanliness of the hole doesn't matter much (note -- US electrical code does not require low voltage cables to run through the joists; you can staple them to the bottom of the joist).
I do have my limits though. That wire is still punched up into the pantry and through two walls into the kitchen. It works.
Just buy the tivo and don't subscribe to the listings.
Ok, I'm a TiVo advocate, but you can't do that. At least not unless you buy an old S1 that shipped with v1.3 or earlier of the software.
Current TiVo's will go into boat anchor mode if unsubscribed -- you cannot even use them as a digital VCR.
There's a sweet *nix program called byrequest (http://sourceforge.net/projects/byrequest/) that lets you serve files without windows, and they claim is will serve video also...
I have byRequest running on my Linux MP3 server. It's nice, and I prefer it to the perl HMO server. Needs a lot of hacking done on it still -- it has more features than the Windows based HMO server, but that's hardly enough:)
It does NOT serve video though. There is no way to do that without seriously hacking your TiVo. It does serve pictures (gif, jpeg, bmp), but that's a standard feature of HMO.
I'll agree with the various other people that have said this though -- if you want something that just plain works then TiVo is the answer. You won't beat it in price, even with a lifetime subscription factored in. If you like to twiddle around with stuff and don't mind the user interface issues then an HTPC can be a big boon -- in particular it lets you do things that TiVo and competitors still don't, and probably won't for a long, long time (if ever). Pick your poison.
Somewhat... there's Microsoft's Movie Editor that's free (but not as good as iMovie I suspect). There's a plethora of calendar apps available, development tools, etc.
You really have to limit the comparison to hardware though. Software is simply not comparable between the two. There's a vast amount of software available for x86 that isn't available for Apple (particularly games and business apps) and some that's vica versa (mostly multimedia editing/publishing stuff, like Final Cut Pro).
And, of course, you'd be foolish to buy purely on hardware -- whether or not it runs the software you need is far more important. If both platforms run the software you need then you can decide on which hardware/environment you prefer.
Compared to Compaq's offering it is. But that's not saying much, I agree.
Until then I'll keep drooling over a G5 (which is only a few hundred dollars more, with TONS more stuff).
Configuring a 1.6GHz G5 to be roughly equivalent to the eMachines system gives a cost of $2070 (upgrade memory, HD, video). And, as best I can tell, offers nothing in excess of what eMachines does. You can talk about XP vs OS X, but if you prefer one or the other then the cost of the system is irrelevant since it's not something you can choose irrelevant of the hardware. The only substantial difference I can see hardware-wise is that the eMachines has two optical drives (one CD-RW, one DVD) while the G5 only has one. Two optical drives have their advantages.
Oh, and the G5 is going to be considerably slower than the Athlon64. The fastest G5 is roughly the same speed as the Athlon64's, but this is the slowest G5, not the fastest.
The G5 is still a sweet system, mind you, it's just not a "few hundred more" (at least, I don't count nearly $800 as that, but "few" is hardly a definitive number;) ).
Wow, I'm so sorry to disappoint you. Now go take your flaming off to someone it applies to.
In the case of music it is the very content that suffers. I'm not talking about talk radio (which I listen to far more than I do music at this point, and for which AM is perfectly acceptable, much less FM), I'm talking about actual music. And yes, there is content in the lyrics, but there's also content in the actual (shock) music. And commercial FM mangles the hell out of that music. Not moderately -- severely. This isn't an audiophile thing either. If I was a died in the wool audiophile do you think I'd be using stock speakers and head unit? I am. And I even listen to commercial FM too. And ClearChannel! The horror of horrors.
I suggest that you get over yourself and realize what on earth you're saying in the first place. If you actually do enjoy the music, instead of just having it on as background noise (which is fine too, but it's not at all the same) then you'd be able to tell the rather startling difference between commercial FM broadcasts and CD quality sound. They're not even remotely alike.
Oh, and to get back to where this thread originally was, before you decided to go wildly off topic and vet your own pet peeve, if the Neuros does do full FM spectrum (which I have no reason to doubt), 50 Hz-15 kHz is more than adequate for nearly all cars. You'd need an upgraded audio system to hear much more than that, and I doubt you'd get much out of it since cars are pretty miserable audio environments.
No thanks. FM does really horrible things to audio quality. If you can't hear it, that's fine, but I can -- even on stock speakers. The most audible area is low bass -- FM radio only transmits 50 Hz-15 kHz.
Note that this is broadcast FM, but AFAIK all of the local-area broadcast devices are subject to the same limitations. Most FM stations do more compression on the signal than this, so it should still sound better than they do.
is that >4/5 of music downloaders still only listen to that music on their computers
Or in their cars (many cars have MP3 capable CD players now, and virtually all OEM head units are MP3 capable).
I suppose I technically qualify in this survey -- I've downloaded a few things (which were available free from the artist), but most of our 80 GB collection (MP3, --alt-preset extreme) was ripped from our own CDs. And we have no portable MP3 players of any kind (I have a portable CD player/AM/FM tuner somewhere). We're content to use CDs in our cars for now (a Phatbox would be cool... but $750 ea is freaking expensive).
Sure, an iPod or other HD based player would be nifty, but that's about it... they're very expensive and we don't have much use for a portable player -- we're both desk jockeys and could play music via headphone from our PC (me)/laptop (her). At home we have TiVo's with HMO and PCs to play the music from. In between we're basically in our cars (see above). And the flash based players just don't have the capacity to be attractive (at least not to me).
Re:Stick with Windows and if you do...
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
By knowing what to do with something that you didn't ask for, and file types you don't recognize, you can automatically count yourself in the top 95th percentile of the smartest windows/PC users.
Windows thrives on people who know nothing about computers.
And so Linux is going to fix this? It won't. Most of the worms and trojans that have come out in the past year or so have exploited the idiocy of users; not holes in the OS. If these same idiots were running Linux then they'd have the same problems (and now you can't rely purely on file extension, since they're meaningless -- I can send you a.jpg that's actually an executable/script. Smart email programs won't +x files that aren't allegedly executable, but I don't count on there being a whole lot of smart emailers out there. And yes, they'll need to allow you to auto-execute email attachments because that's what people want and expect. Deal.)
I run both XP and RH9 at home. Different uses, different OSes. I wouldn't turn my desktop PC into a Linux box because it won't do what I want from my home PC -- play games. I could turn my RH9 box into a XP box, but since it's just a file server it's a lot cheaper and more efficient to run it as a Linux box.
At work I wish to God I could run Linux. I'm a Unix developer. But our upper management isn't sold on Linux as a solution yet (we do have some customers on RH; most on AIX) and we have some Windows specific programs that we use. So I'm stuck on Windows, even though most of my day is simply spent using putty terminals to our AIX box (I could and do use CygWin at times, but our dev box is horrendously slow as is).
Er, presuming that they didn't play games with statistics you're misreading what they stated. (I cannot verify or debunk the statement, since there was no attribution for it).
In the two subsets (the 70% who have played and the 30% who have not played), a larger portion of the former got into fights than the latter. I wouldn't exactly consider this scientific proof, since it's probably a single study and the study group may not be representative, but it's not exactly surprising nor is it encouraging.
Look at the recommendations though. They're not calling for the end to violent video games like some of the kooks out there. They simply want the rules (not laws! Big difference here!) to be enforced. Can you really tell me that parental education on what the ratings mean is a bad thing? How about enforcement of the ratings to actually enforce the meaning? Certainly the ESRB should actually comply with their own policies -- and Manhunt should've gotten an AO.
I'm all for the labeling of games. I'm an adult, I'll buy whatever the hell I want to play. But parents should be able to discern between games acceptable for their kids and those that aren't.
Well, we now have one "electronic" whiteboard that will happily spit out anything written on it to a PC or print it on paper, but it's (of course) in a back boardroom that's not at all useful to developers (hopefully management is getting some use out of it).
Most of our design sessions are done on the 4'x6' whiteboard in my cube (yes, I have an astoundingly large cube; there's one other person in it, but it could house 4 people very comfortably). A digital camera would be a good start. I think it was even mentioned at one point for doing things like this.
The telcos still have a major problem with selling and deploying DSL. Their copper wire infrastructure sucks and they aren't interested in doing anything, especially spending money, to improve it.
That's because the phone companies have no incentive to improve it. The cable companies do.
Why? Simple. Competition.
The cable companies have a monopoly. They're the only ones providing cable service in an area (this is true virtually everywhere in the US -- I don't want to hear from the 0.1% of the US that actually has competition -- you're the exception, and I bet that will disappear in the next decade too) and they don't have to provide access to their cable farms. If they decide to wire an area for "advanced cable" (digital cable, high speed internet, phone over cable) then they don't have to let anyone else resell the service over their wires.
Phone companies, on the other hand, have to provide access to any ISP at "fair and reasonable" prices. And they're required to have a Chinese Wall between the local phone service company and the high speed internet company. They have to charge the external companies the same amount per line as they charge internal companies, which basically means they have to pick who gets to be profitable. There have been further restrictions on this too, but the FCC keeps playing with the regulations and I lost track long ago.
What it boils down to, however, is that in order to provide DSL service in an area the phone company may need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading the CO and the lines to residential customers. And they may never be able to recoup the money because the PSCs/PUCs and Federal regulations prevent them from charging those costs to customers -- internal or external. It's one of the things that's caused the telecomm market to go into the shitter -- telco's aren't willing to drop money on upgrading the system because they're regulated against recouping that money in a reasonable time frame.
That said, I'm all for competition in the local phone and internet service market. But I'm pretty sure that the current system isn't the right way to go, at least not if we want to speed up transition to more modern equipment and technologies.
And don't go off crying and pointing at how much the Baby Bell's make either. Let's be perfectly honest -- a good bit of their income is from charging exorbitant rates because they're essentially a monopoly provider (mostly to businesses; residential is a smaller percentage of their income and in rural areas it's a loss center). If they upgrade their systems and allow competition in the rates will fall. You want them to expend huge amounts of money in order to cut their own throats? Do you pay to be mugged too?
Modeling on a whiteboard is all well and good -- we did it at my job (and still do it) for all of our initial design.
The problem is, that whiteboard eventually needs to be erased. And when new people come on board drawing the same damn picture on the board over and over is tedious, not to mention error prone and bloody difficult for anything but high level representations.
We copied the whiteboard drawings to paper and then did some basic modeling in Dia. While OSS and Free, it's really not very good for this kind of thing and can't auto-generate mappings or anything like that.
I don't really have an answer here, but a data modeling tool is pretty essential unless you expect all of your developers, QA, management, and support to be around forever. You can get away without it, but you'll burn $4K in man hours pretty fast doing it by hand. I know we've burned considerably more than that and our diagrams still suck and are rapidly outdated. (We're in the process of buying tools... but I'm not in the loop by my own choice, except for the C++ debugger).
I'm sure IBM will still pursue their claims against SCO, when this case is ended once an for all.
Why?
Some of the claims were clearly retalitory against SCO -- if they weren't, then why wasn't IBM already suing SCO (as well as everyone else) for having violated their patents?
As another poster said, it's likely that IBM would settle the remaining issues with SCO out of court. Litigation is expensive. And a summary dismissal of SCO's claims plus an out of court settlement between SCO and IBM would probably serve as sufficient warning against anyone else being so stupid as to attack IBM like this again. IBM is not a charity. IBM is not altruistic. They're not going to fight the GPL battle, or any other battle, unless they feel it's necessary. And under this theoretical case (dismissal), I doubt it would be.
Note that RedHat's case is still outstanding though. Depending on what IBM does, RedHat may decide to drop their case too. Maybe not. But they're not a charity either.
If the FSF had decided to get involved, they'd probably pursue it to the end. But the FSF has, very wisely, decided to stay the hell out and let people with far more money take this battle.
Unless, of course, the judge decides that the disallowed portion is "derivative works" in which case SCO gets the enviable position of really trying to prove the GPL is unconstitutional.
Your scenario, however, is much more likely. Particularly given the claims to date.
If you own SCO stock, I'd advise dumping and running now.
Which would be very wise -- the news wires don't appear to have this info yet. SCOX is down only 1.44% currently, while the facts of these decisions should mean a much harsher fall off. (Note, I don't have access to the "insider" wires, which typically have stuff long, long before it makes it to the general press).
Or perhaps shorting the stock.
Looks like you'd be joining the party... back in June/July under 5% of SCOX was shorted. According to Yahoo! Finances, they're up to 1.62M shares shorted (as of 10-Nov-03), which is slightly over 21% now. More impressive is that last month there were only 926K shares shorted -- a 75% increase in the number of shares shorted. Looks like there's some serious players who want to short it.
Note - there's still no option market on SCOX. They're not big enough or heavily traded enough. Don't expect there to be one either. Unless, for some ungodly reason, SCO actually wins.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a chance if they start by fixing a bug.
Maybe. In a large project, it becomes difficult to find the right place to fix the bug. If you don't have a good understanding of the overall architecture your "fix" can easily break other concepts or code outright. Or you may be duplicating effort that exists elsewhere in the codebase.
Not to mention that a rather vast amount of bugs don't do something "visible", but just screw up things behind the scenes. You may know what the effect of the bug is, or the symptom that causes the bug, but that's not going to help you grep for a string in order to find the bug.
Most default 66 and 110 blocks are made for cross-connecting, not for distributing one line to many places. You need a phone connecting block like this. Home Depot used to sell something similar.
Well, yeah... but you can also take a 66/110 block, take some cat5/telephone cable, strip out the individual wires, and then run them between each section of the block. Voila, you have distribution.
For the love of God, don't try this for ethernet.
If you don't want to spend the $$ on a "real" 110 punchdown tool you can get a cheap (~$3) plastic one and cut the wires with diagonal cutters.
Yeah, but you can get a decent (for home owner use -- I wouldn't recommend it to a contractor) impact punch down tool off eBay for ~$10. Mine does 66/110, has a cutting/non-cutting tip, and . Sure, it's a cheapo plastic housing, but it works just fine.
On the drilling thing -- wires hanging down help tons, but I didn't get how this was going to work. If you drill in above the baseboard then you're going to have a 90 degree turn between the hole and the floor... how on earth do you rectify that?
I always put in boxes, so I cut the hole for the box and then have someone tap on the floor w/ a wire while I try and figure out where the hell the tapping is. Yeah, it's really not a great method.
For me the coax is just dangling... most of the wires don't even have connectors on them (I'll crimp 'em when I need 'em). When I was using the local cable provider I had the ones I needed hooked up to splitters. I have DirecTV now and the ones I need are connected to a multiblock.
You can do the whole patch panel thing for coax, but unless you're doing really funky stuff it's probably overkill (they're also still very expensive). I can certainly see the need in some cases though (whole house video distribution, etc).
Yeah, but the structured wiring is much more expensive than the individual cables. Somewhat more would be understandable, since there are additional construction costs, but since they sell far less structured than regular wiring economies of scale come into play as well.
That and last time I looked I couldn't find a structured wire with just the cabling I wanted. A lot of the higher end bundles start throwing in fiber and stuff too, which doesn't help the price.
but have so far been unable to find a way to route the wires there.
Well, unless the contractor stapled the RG6 to studs you can just use the existing cable as a lead line to pull more through. You'll end up with some spare RG6 that way, but it's doable.
Odds are they did staple it though, at least if they put it in before drywalling. In that case you're pretty well screwed.
My next house will have conduit in the walls
Yeah, but unless you either supervise it or get one of the very rare builders with a clue it'll still be done wrong.
Mod up the parent.
My house was built in 1982. For whatever reason the original builder/buyer overlooked a couple of small things -- like phone jacks and cable (cable is somewhat understandable, but phone jacks?!?!). Every single phone jack was wired to a surface mount receptacle. The one in the kitchen was punched up through the pantry and through both sides of a wall to get to the kitchen.
I got a 110 block from my brother-in-law (if you're not so lucky, RadioShack, CompUSA, and Best Buy carry them. Best price will probably be from eBay though -- used ones work just fine), put it in a central location, ran the cable from the demarc to it (it wasn't long enough, but 3M has some cheap patch buttons for doing this kind of thing; work fine), and every place I put in phone jacks was run to the network closet (cable and cat5 are run there too). It's made adding more jacks easy, and I've gone from 3 poorly wired phone jacks to over a half dozen well wired ones (and I still need to add a couple, but drilling the holes is non-trivial for these locations).
Do yourself a favor -- everywhere you want to put in a phone jack run the cable for the phone, 1 or 2 coax (RG-6 Quad Shield only!), and 2 cat5 (for network) at the same time. The difficult bit is always running the cable. Get it all done at once - it's just as easy to pull 5 cables as it is to pull one. I used Leviton wallplates and connectors... they're a bit expensive, but work well. If you need to drill through wood, do yourself a favor and get an auger bit -- spade bits take forever, and if you're drilling through joists the cleanliness of the hole doesn't matter much (note -- US electrical code does not require low voltage cables to run through the joists; you can staple them to the bottom of the joist).
I do have my limits though. That wire is still punched up into the pantry and through two walls into the kitchen. It works.
Yes, but this is only on the Toshiba DVD-R and Pioneer DVD-R with TiVo service. They cost well over $800.
You cannot get TiVo Basic on a standard TiVo receiver. It also eliminates most of the cool TiVo features (like Season Passes and Wishlists).
Just buy the tivo and don't subscribe to the listings.
:)
Ok, I'm a TiVo advocate, but you can't do that. At least not unless you buy an old S1 that shipped with v1.3 or earlier of the software.
Current TiVo's will go into boat anchor mode if unsubscribed -- you cannot even use them as a digital VCR.
There's a sweet *nix program called byrequest (http://sourceforge.net/projects/byrequest/) that lets you serve files without windows, and they claim is will serve video also...
I have byRequest running on my Linux MP3 server. It's nice, and I prefer it to the perl HMO server. Needs a lot of hacking done on it still -- it has more features than the Windows based HMO server, but that's hardly enough
It does NOT serve video though. There is no way to do that without seriously hacking your TiVo. It does serve pictures (gif, jpeg, bmp), but that's a standard feature of HMO.
I'll agree with the various other people that have said this though -- if you want something that just plain works then TiVo is the answer. You won't beat it in price, even with a lifetime subscription factored in. If you like to twiddle around with stuff and don't mind the user interface issues then an HTPC can be a big boon -- in particular it lets you do things that TiVo and competitors still don't, and probably won't for a long, long time (if ever). Pick your poison.
Somewhat... there's Microsoft's Movie Editor that's free (but not as good as iMovie I suspect). There's a plethora of calendar apps available, development tools, etc.
You really have to limit the comparison to hardware though. Software is simply not comparable between the two. There's a vast amount of software available for x86 that isn't available for Apple (particularly games and business apps) and some that's vica versa (mostly multimedia editing/publishing stuff, like Final Cut Pro).
And, of course, you'd be foolish to buy purely on hardware -- whether or not it runs the software you need is far more important. If both platforms run the software you need then you can decide on which hardware/environment you prefer.
$1299 is cheap?
;) ).
Compared to Compaq's offering it is. But that's not saying much, I agree.
Until then I'll keep drooling over a G5 (which is only a few hundred dollars more, with TONS more stuff).
Configuring a 1.6GHz G5 to be roughly equivalent to the eMachines system gives a cost of $2070 (upgrade memory, HD, video). And, as best I can tell, offers nothing in excess of what eMachines does. You can talk about XP vs OS X, but if you prefer one or the other then the cost of the system is irrelevant since it's not something you can choose irrelevant of the hardware. The only substantial difference I can see hardware-wise is that the eMachines has two optical drives (one CD-RW, one DVD) while the G5 only has one. Two optical drives have their advantages.
Oh, and the G5 is going to be considerably slower than the Athlon64. The fastest G5 is roughly the same speed as the Athlon64's, but this is the slowest G5, not the fastest.
The G5 is still a sweet system, mind you, it's just not a "few hundred more" (at least, I don't count nearly $800 as that, but "few" is hardly a definitive number
Wow, I'm so sorry to disappoint you. Now go take your flaming off to someone it applies to.
In the case of music it is the very content that suffers. I'm not talking about talk radio (which I listen to far more than I do music at this point, and for which AM is perfectly acceptable, much less FM), I'm talking about actual music. And yes, there is content in the lyrics, but there's also content in the actual (shock) music. And commercial FM mangles the hell out of that music. Not moderately -- severely. This isn't an audiophile thing either. If I was a died in the wool audiophile do you think I'd be using stock speakers and head unit? I am. And I even listen to commercial FM too. And ClearChannel! The horror of horrors.
I suggest that you get over yourself and realize what on earth you're saying in the first place. If you actually do enjoy the music, instead of just having it on as background noise (which is fine too, but it's not at all the same) then you'd be able to tell the rather startling difference between commercial FM broadcasts and CD quality sound. They're not even remotely alike.
Oh, and to get back to where this thread originally was, before you decided to go wildly off topic and vet your own pet peeve, if the Neuros does do full FM spectrum (which I have no reason to doubt), 50 Hz-15 kHz is more than adequate for nearly all cars. You'd need an upgraded audio system to hear much more than that, and I doubt you'd get much out of it since cars are pretty miserable audio environments.
when they started removing features with their forced "upgrades" awhile back.
And exactly what features would these be?
Real features only please. Not backdoors or other such things. There may, indeed, be some, but I can't recall any off the top of my head.
I believe your opinion is too heavily weighted on the quality (or lack) of commercial FM broadcasts
Probably true. Commercial FM just plain sucks, and to the point that it's audible even in the miserable audio environment of a car.
No thanks. FM does really horrible things to audio quality. If you can't hear it, that's fine, but I can -- even on stock speakers. The most audible area is low bass -- FM radio only transmits 50 Hz-15 kHz.
Note that this is broadcast FM, but AFAIK all of the local-area broadcast devices are subject to the same limitations. Most FM stations do more compression on the signal than this, so it should still sound better than they do.
is that >4/5 of music downloaders still only listen to that music on their computers
Or in their cars (many cars have MP3 capable CD players now, and virtually all OEM head units are MP3 capable).
I suppose I technically qualify in this survey -- I've downloaded a few things (which were available free from the artist), but most of our 80 GB collection (MP3, --alt-preset extreme) was ripped from our own CDs. And we have no portable MP3 players of any kind (I have a portable CD player/AM/FM tuner somewhere). We're content to use CDs in our cars for now (a Phatbox would be cool... but $750 ea is freaking expensive).
Sure, an iPod or other HD based player would be nifty, but that's about it... they're very expensive and we don't have much use for a portable player -- we're both desk jockeys and could play music via headphone from our PC (me)/laptop (her). At home we have TiVo's with HMO and PCs to play the music from. In between we're basically in our cars (see above). And the flash based players just don't have the capacity to be attractive (at least not to me).
By knowing what to do with something that you didn't ask for, and file types you don't recognize, you can automatically count yourself in the top 95th percentile of the smartest windows/PC users.
.jpg that's actually an executable/script. Smart email programs won't +x files that aren't allegedly executable, but I don't count on there being a whole lot of smart emailers out there. And yes, they'll need to allow you to auto-execute email attachments because that's what people want and expect. Deal.)
Windows thrives on people who know nothing about computers.
And so Linux is going to fix this? It won't. Most of the worms and trojans that have come out in the past year or so have exploited the idiocy of users; not holes in the OS. If these same idiots were running Linux then they'd have the same problems (and now you can't rely purely on file extension, since they're meaningless -- I can send you a
I run both XP and RH9 at home. Different uses, different OSes. I wouldn't turn my desktop PC into a Linux box because it won't do what I want from my home PC -- play games. I could turn my RH9 box into a XP box, but since it's just a file server it's a lot cheaper and more efficient to run it as a Linux box.
At work I wish to God I could run Linux. I'm a Unix developer. But our upper management isn't sold on Linux as a solution yet (we do have some customers on RH; most on AIX) and we have some Windows specific programs that we use. So I'm stuck on Windows, even though most of my day is simply spent using putty terminals to our AIX box (I could and do use CygWin at times, but our dev box is horrendously slow as is).
Er, presuming that they didn't play games with statistics you're misreading what they stated. (I cannot verify or debunk the statement, since there was no attribution for it).
In the two subsets (the 70% who have played and the 30% who have not played), a larger portion of the former got into fights than the latter. I wouldn't exactly consider this scientific proof, since it's probably a single study and the study group may not be representative, but it's not exactly surprising nor is it encouraging.
Look at the recommendations though. They're not calling for the end to violent video games like some of the kooks out there. They simply want the rules (not laws! Big difference here!) to be enforced. Can you really tell me that parental education on what the ratings mean is a bad thing? How about enforcement of the ratings to actually enforce the meaning? Certainly the ESRB should actually comply with their own policies -- and Manhunt should've gotten an AO.
I'm all for the labeling of games. I'm an adult, I'll buy whatever the hell I want to play. But parents should be able to discern between games acceptable for their kids and those that aren't.
Well, we now have one "electronic" whiteboard that will happily spit out anything written on it to a PC or print it on paper, but it's (of course) in a back boardroom that's not at all useful to developers (hopefully management is getting some use out of it).
Most of our design sessions are done on the 4'x6' whiteboard in my cube (yes, I have an astoundingly large cube; there's one other person in it, but it could house 4 people very comfortably). A digital camera would be a good start. I think it was even mentioned at one point for doing things like this.
The telcos still have a major problem with selling and deploying DSL. Their copper wire infrastructure sucks and they aren't interested in doing anything, especially spending money, to improve it.
That's because the phone companies have no incentive to improve it. The cable companies do.
Why? Simple. Competition.
The cable companies have a monopoly. They're the only ones providing cable service in an area (this is true virtually everywhere in the US -- I don't want to hear from the 0.1% of the US that actually has competition -- you're the exception, and I bet that will disappear in the next decade too) and they don't have to provide access to their cable farms. If they decide to wire an area for "advanced cable" (digital cable, high speed internet, phone over cable) then they don't have to let anyone else resell the service over their wires.
Phone companies, on the other hand, have to provide access to any ISP at "fair and reasonable" prices. And they're required to have a Chinese Wall between the local phone service company and the high speed internet company. They have to charge the external companies the same amount per line as they charge internal companies, which basically means they have to pick who gets to be profitable. There have been further restrictions on this too, but the FCC keeps playing with the regulations and I lost track long ago.
What it boils down to, however, is that in order to provide DSL service in an area the phone company may need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars upgrading the CO and the lines to residential customers. And they may never be able to recoup the money because the PSCs/PUCs and Federal regulations prevent them from charging those costs to customers -- internal or external. It's one of the things that's caused the telecomm market to go into the shitter -- telco's aren't willing to drop money on upgrading the system because they're regulated against recouping that money in a reasonable time frame.
That said, I'm all for competition in the local phone and internet service market. But I'm pretty sure that the current system isn't the right way to go, at least not if we want to speed up transition to more modern equipment and technologies.
And don't go off crying and pointing at how much the Baby Bell's make either. Let's be perfectly honest -- a good bit of their income is from charging exorbitant rates because they're essentially a monopoly provider (mostly to businesses; residential is a smaller percentage of their income and in rural areas it's a loss center). If they upgrade their systems and allow competition in the rates will fall. You want them to expend huge amounts of money in order to cut their own throats? Do you pay to be mugged too?
Modeling on a whiteboard is all well and good -- we did it at my job (and still do it) for all of our initial design.
The problem is, that whiteboard eventually needs to be erased. And when new people come on board drawing the same damn picture on the board over and over is tedious, not to mention error prone and bloody difficult for anything but high level representations.
We copied the whiteboard drawings to paper and then did some basic modeling in Dia. While OSS and Free, it's really not very good for this kind of thing and can't auto-generate mappings or anything like that.
I don't really have an answer here, but a data modeling tool is pretty essential unless you expect all of your developers, QA, management, and support to be around forever. You can get away without it, but you'll burn $4K in man hours pretty fast doing it by hand. I know we've burned considerably more than that and our diagrams still suck and are rapidly outdated. (We're in the process of buying tools... but I'm not in the loop by my own choice, except for the C++ debugger).
Clicking on that link shows short data from 10-Nov-03. If it's not showing it for you, I have no idea why.
I'm sure IBM will still pursue their claims against SCO, when this case is ended once an for all.
Why?
Some of the claims were clearly retalitory against SCO -- if they weren't, then why wasn't IBM already suing SCO (as well as everyone else) for having violated their patents?
As another poster said, it's likely that IBM would settle the remaining issues with SCO out of court. Litigation is expensive. And a summary dismissal of SCO's claims plus an out of court settlement between SCO and IBM would probably serve as sufficient warning against anyone else being so stupid as to attack IBM like this again. IBM is not a charity. IBM is not altruistic. They're not going to fight the GPL battle, or any other battle, unless they feel it's necessary. And under this theoretical case (dismissal), I doubt it would be.
Note that RedHat's case is still outstanding though. Depending on what IBM does, RedHat may decide to drop their case too. Maybe not. But they're not a charity either.
If the FSF had decided to get involved, they'd probably pursue it to the end. But the FSF has, very wisely, decided to stay the hell out and let people with far more money take this battle.
Unless, of course, the judge decides that the disallowed portion is "derivative works" in which case SCO gets the enviable position of really trying to prove the GPL is unconstitutional.
Your scenario, however, is much more likely. Particularly given the claims to date.
If you own SCO stock, I'd advise dumping and running now.
Which would be very wise -- the news wires don't appear to have this info yet. SCOX is down only 1.44% currently, while the facts of these decisions should mean a much harsher fall off. (Note, I don't have access to the "insider" wires, which typically have stuff long, long before it makes it to the general press).
Or perhaps shorting the stock.
Looks like you'd be joining the party... back in June/July under 5% of SCOX was shorted. According to Yahoo! Finances, they're up to 1.62M shares shorted (as of 10-Nov-03), which is slightly over 21% now. More impressive is that last month there were only 926K shares shorted -- a 75% increase in the number of shares shorted. Looks like there's some serious players who want to short it.
Note - there's still no option market on SCOX. They're not big enough or heavily traded enough. Don't expect there to be one either. Unless, for some ungodly reason, SCO actually wins.
In a similar vein, my high school physics teacher (yes, this was a long time ago) had a sign over the equipment room labeled:
DANGER! HIGH RESISTANCE! 10,000 Ohms! DANGER!
The wood door probably had a resistance well in excess of that.