Everybody (well, almost everybody - see a previous poster's story/stories) pays the same amount. They're rewarding the people who give them money without gettign much in return.
Yeah, but the question of frequency is unmentioned in your post - not all programs need to allocate memory over and over, right?
So inneficient programs aren't the only ones that aren't effected by this. There are programs which only need to allocate new memory every so often, or programs which aren't "done" with memory very quickly.
If you're talking about building a media system, yes, it is possible for most people on/. to do that. But the cost effort involved in getting, for example, component video output or with good resolution working with linux drivers (i.e. has to be supported by X drivers or V4L or any of that) (I'm not going to make any dedicated/embedded system Windows if I can help it - much easier to customize a linux system appropriately).
All in all, while you can make a working one of these in a few hours, odds are, you can't make a consumer-grade one for less than the cost of something made for a consumer market (I didn't see any mention of cost, but I wouldn't expect to drop more than a few hundred on this when there are fairly decent DVD players on the market for less than $50).
Ok, as somebody closer to his age (19), I agree that I would have been pissed off if I had to put up with that nonsense - but that doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
I also thought/think that my parents' views of religion, pre-marital sex, the way the government should be run and many social issues were wrong. But their role as parents, unfortuantely, is to battle against a constant deluge of outside ideas so that some of their ethical and moral system is built into their children. They may fail (and may be wrong in the view of the majority), but they can't very well not try.
As such, while I wholeheartedly believe in restriction - a parental block on a television is not unwarranted censorship. It's a parent's responsibility. Parents have a responsibility to know where their kids are - al this system does is stop kids from doing things their parents won't let them - if their parents get a message, all they have to do is call the kid and find out where they're going, or just make sure that the kid's ok. As with everything else in parenting, it's purely discretionary how restrictive it is. Parents who smother their children a.) won't be stopped by not having this tool and b.) have a right to smother their kids - just as their kids have a right to rebel (not saying they should).
Hell when I got a cell phone, it was essentially a leash - but with a huge length and that didn't knock things over - I could go pretty much anywhere, as long as I called my parents and told them where I was and when i was getting back - which was vastly preferable to having to follow a pre-set plan of going home when my friends decided they wanted to go out.
Oh yeah - now I remember. It compares its own location with what it gets from GPS, and tells the unit how much to correct by...
I suppose, though it only expects certain kinds of discrepancies (that is to say - for example it looks for a constant clock offset that corrects things). If the introduced discrepancies are not systematic like that, it may brak down (that is, the regression used to correct by the ground station is based on knowing the shape of the regression curve - if it's in any way not that shape, it's no good any more.)
I thought about encryption, but then I realized - no actual information is sent in the bits - all information is derived from timing. Encrypting an already arbitrary stream of bits seems a little... fruitless to me.
It's not like they're sabotaging a civilian system. The GPS sattelites are owned and run by the US government. It is sheerly at the government's discretion with whom they share information needed to use the sattelites - I suppose, in theory, they could mute sattelites when they were out of the line of sight of the US (though that wouldn't really serve a purpose).
Actually, won't work - differential GPS only really corrects the innacuracies inherent to the correctly operating system.
IIRC, differential GPS is where you correct for clock error by using a fixed point with a very accurate latitude/longitude measurement as one of your "sattelites". However, let's say the GPS sattelites decide to coordinatedly broadcast the signal that according to the receiver's internal database hey would a few nanoseconds in the future - it would throw off all correction measures, since they all depend on all your sattelites (including your ground station "sattelite") to be using the same clock, and that that clock matches up with the database.
Because that would defeat the purpose of the military code.
GPS 101:
Every GPS unit stores internally a fairly accurate clock, a database of every GPS sattelite's individual code and its expected position in the sky for something like the next few weeks. This information is updated by syncing with a sattelite every so often. These codes are long enough that based on what portion of the code the receiver is receiving at a given time from a particular sattelite, it can calculate the time elapsed since the signal left the sattelite (by comparing to what portion of the code the sattelite should be transmitting according to its internal clock). Using time elapsed, and roughly the speed of light (with minor corrections) for the speed of the wave, it can then calculate distance from the sattelite. Given three sattelites, you narrow down your location to one of two points (the maximum number of points of intersection of two non-congruent spheres. Luckily, one of these points is almost always inside the earth or in outer space, so a fourth sattelite isn't needed for that triangulation. A fourth sattelite is used, however to make corrections for the GPS receiver's internal clock. That is, the receiver assumes its clock is off of the atomic clock in each sattelite by a constante amount, and therefore a fourth sphere won't intersect either of the points of intersection. However, by correcting for a constant time difference, the points of intersection eventually line up, and that is a fairly good approximation of the unit's location. This means, by telling the sattelitest to vary the rate of transmission of their own unique code in some random way, the accuracy can be made much lower. Since the system is based on knowledge of the codes, and only the civilian codes are published, the military codes look like just noise.
So there you have it - if the military doesn't give us the necessary information about the sattelites (information that changes every so often), we have no way of using the military-level accuracy.
This may seriously affect my handy-dandy Honda navigation system built into my Odyssey - it already has trouble guessing which road I'm on when the roads are close together - imagine it thinking I'm a block away from where I really am.
You can't say "There are many chances" when using the word to mean probability - the best you can say are "The chances are high" or "The chances are good".
Unfortunately, as this is a point of grammar, the dictionary wasn't so useful.
They do that in the US, too, but only because they are given sovreignty within the reserves, as an effort to assuage national guilt and appease conscience.
Not the point. The person with a ticket may have infinitely more chance, or probability - but only one more chance... (or one more chance per ticket, anyway).
"Chances" as in a count noun is not the same as probability.
I think his point is, if you ban non-military, non-civil use (or even just non-military use), you ban the pentagon from using linux servers or work stations. You ban the pentagon, what's to get anyboy in ght egovernment to do it? Even if they're not killing - essentially, licensing is a hairy issue where often the breadth or narrowness of limitations is often hard to measure.
The problem with freedom - be it of speech or of software - is that you don't get to choose who you grant it to - otherwise it is no longer freedom.
You can choose not to give it to your enemies, but what's to stop you from arbitrarily dciding that your enemies are everyone except a select few.
There is always a responsibility that goes along with any project you work on - but it will get done with or without you. Ask Oppenheimer or Feynman or Einstein.
Nobody wants to spend more tha an hour in one day, sure... But give them a bit more time, spending a few minutes a day - or even half an hour a day drooling over good deals... maybe.
While what you're saying about merchandise going fast is true, last Black Friday, when I went shopping with my family, we hit the stores in squads, some going one place, some going another, and still others going elsewhere. Perhaps they were worried that this planning would get more organized? Especially, if everybody goes to CompUSA, for example, instead of BestBuy, they're sold out of the great deal, and so, assuming that BestBuy is almost wiped clean, too, and not wasting the time to go there, tons of people make the "peripheral purchases" that they're counting on... like that more expensive hard drive of the previous poster's friend.
Black Friday is a field day for stores... they essentially thrive on making people make rush purchases - this is why so many sales end at noon or early afternoon. The trick is, while everybody is slashing prices - sometimes to below cost, make your store the priority store to go to... now when you give people maybe one or two days to figure out all the deals, they're less likely to systematically plan and take advantage of the best deals, after all - the best deals aren't why they want you at their store - they want you to make periheral purchases, which are worse deals - ones which make them profit. However, if you can plan your shopping much in advance knowing all the prices, you are more likely to buy the cheapest stuff from store A, the cheapest stuff from store B, etc, without bothering to even look around very much at the other deals, since you already know all the prices.
It isn't that these stores aren't competetively priced, as some have suggested, it's simply that the competetive pricing is only a lure - giving all the prices for hot items makes that lure nearly worthless.
Re:The First Worm Written By a Microsoft Lawyer...
on
First Worm with a EULA?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But see, they're supposed to - that's the point. Just because people will sign any paper that crosses their desk doesn't make that signature any less binding.
I know I would be caught by this (except that I never install software without specifically wanting it), and it is downright nasty.
But it's all nice and legal.
I remember when I used to read EULAs. These days I don't even read my email.
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody (well, almost everybody - see a previous poster's story/stories) pays the same amount. They're rewarding the people who give them money without gettign much in return.
You don't make more money gross, but net, you do - postage, etc. costs money for each DVD you send out.
I think the person thought you meant below productio cost instead of below cost to retailers.
Wow - if the paren'ts going to get into shit with microsoft lawyers, you're just screwed.
Yeah, but the question of frequency is unmentioned in your post - not all programs need to allocate memory over and over, right?
So inneficient programs aren't the only ones that aren't effected by this. There are programs which only need to allocate new memory every so often, or programs which aren't "done" with memory very quickly.
i.e. Buying a CD and ripping it to your shared Kazaa/etc. folder?
If you're talking about building a media system, yes, it is possible for most people on /. to do that. But the cost effort involved in getting, for example, component video output or with good resolution working with linux drivers (i.e. has to be supported by X drivers or V4L or any of that) (I'm not going to make any dedicated/embedded system Windows if I can help it - much easier to customize a linux system appropriately).
All in all, while you can make a working one of these in a few hours, odds are, you can't make a consumer-grade one for less than the cost of something made for a consumer market (I didn't see any mention of cost, but I wouldn't expect to drop more than a few hundred on this when there are fairly decent DVD players on the market for less than $50).
Ok, as somebody closer to his age (19), I agree that I would have been pissed off if I had to put up with that nonsense - but that doesn't mean it was a bad idea.
I also thought/think that my parents' views of religion, pre-marital sex, the way the government should be run and many social issues were wrong. But their role as parents, unfortuantely, is to battle against a constant deluge of outside ideas so that some of their ethical and moral system is built into their children. They may fail (and may be wrong in the view of the majority), but they can't very well not try.
As such, while I wholeheartedly believe in restriction - a parental block on a television is not unwarranted censorship. It's a parent's responsibility. Parents have a responsibility to know where their kids are - al this system does is stop kids from doing things their parents won't let them - if their parents get a message, all they have to do is call the kid and find out where they're going, or just make sure that the kid's ok. As with everything else in parenting, it's purely discretionary how restrictive it is. Parents who smother their children a.) won't be stopped by not having this tool and b.) have a right to smother their kids - just as their kids have a right to rebel (not saying they should).
Hell when I got a cell phone, it was essentially a leash - but with a huge length and that didn't knock things over - I could go pretty much anywhere, as long as I called my parents and told them where I was and when i was getting back - which was vastly preferable to having to follow a pre-set plan of going home when my friends decided they wanted to go out.
Or, if you live in Texas, it can be adult Johnny and adult Tyron.
That aside, I think your idea is brilliant, if horrible for the time honored tradition of kids fooling around and more "too early".
Besides - this works for situations like adult Sammy and little Suzy...
Oh yeah - now I remember. It compares its own location with what it gets from GPS, and tells the unit how much to correct by...
I suppose, though it only expects certain kinds of discrepancies (that is to say - for example it looks for a constant clock offset that corrects things). If the introduced discrepancies are not systematic like that, it may brak down (that is, the regression used to correct by the ground station is based on knowing the shape of the regression curve - if it's in any way not that shape, it's no good any more.)
I thought about encryption, but then I realized - no actual information is sent in the bits - all information is derived from timing. Encrypting an already arbitrary stream of bits seems a little... fruitless to me.
Up until 3-4 years ago, they did do this - so there are few questions as to their willingness.
It's not like they're sabotaging a civilian system. The GPS sattelites are owned and run by the US government. It is sheerly at the government's discretion with whom they share information needed to use the sattelites - I suppose, in theory, they could mute sattelites when they were out of the line of sight of the US (though that wouldn't really serve a purpose).
Actually, won't work - differential GPS only really corrects the innacuracies inherent to the correctly operating system.
IIRC, differential GPS is where you correct for clock error by using a fixed point with a very accurate latitude/longitude measurement as one of your "sattelites". However, let's say the GPS sattelites decide to coordinatedly broadcast the signal that according to the receiver's internal database hey would a few nanoseconds in the future - it would throw off all correction measures, since they all depend on all your sattelites (including your ground station "sattelite") to be using the same clock, and that that clock matches up with the database.
Because that would defeat the purpose of the military code.
GPS 101:
Every GPS unit stores internally a fairly accurate clock, a database of every GPS sattelite's individual code and its expected position in the sky for something like the next few weeks. This information is updated by syncing with a sattelite every so often. These codes are long enough that based on what portion of the code the receiver is receiving at a given time from a particular sattelite, it can calculate the time elapsed since the signal left the sattelite (by comparing to what portion of the code the sattelite should be transmitting according to its internal clock).
Using time elapsed, and roughly the speed of light (with minor corrections) for the speed of the wave, it can then calculate distance from the sattelite. Given three sattelites, you narrow down your location to one of two points (the maximum number of points of intersection of two non-congruent spheres. Luckily, one of these points is almost always inside the earth or in outer space, so a fourth sattelite isn't needed for that triangulation.
A fourth sattelite is used, however to make corrections for the GPS receiver's internal clock. That is, the receiver assumes its clock is off of the atomic clock in each sattelite by a constante amount, and therefore a fourth sphere won't intersect either of the points of intersection. However, by correcting for a constant time difference, the points of intersection eventually line up, and that is a fairly good approximation of the unit's location.
This means, by telling the sattelitest to vary the rate of transmission of their own unique code in some random way, the accuracy can be made much lower.
Since the system is based on knowledge of the codes, and only the civilian codes are published, the military codes look like just noise.
So there you have it - if the military doesn't give us the necessary information about the sattelites (information that changes every so often), we have no way of using the military-level accuracy.
This may seriously affect my handy-dandy Honda navigation system built into my Odyssey - it already has trouble guessing which road I'm on when the roads are close together - imagine it thinking I'm a block away from where I really am.
As in "I'll take my chances" which is non-count.
You can't say "There are many chances" when using the word to mean probability - the best you can say are "The chances are high" or "The chances are good".
Unfortunately, as this is a point of grammar, the dictionary wasn't so useful.
They do that in the US, too, but only because they are given sovreignty within the reserves, as an effort to assuage national guilt and appease conscience.
Not the point. The person with a ticket may have infinitely more chance, or probability - but only one more chance... (or one more chance per ticket, anyway).
"Chances" as in a count noun is not the same as probability.
I think his point is, if you ban non-military, non-civil use (or even just non-military use), you ban the pentagon from using linux servers or work stations. You ban the pentagon, what's to get anyboy in ght egovernment to do it? Even if they're not killing - essentially, licensing is a hairy issue where often the breadth or narrowness of limitations is often hard to measure.
The problem with freedom - be it of speech or of software - is that you don't get to choose who you grant it to - otherwise it is no longer freedom.
You can choose not to give it to your enemies, but what's to stop you from arbitrarily dciding that your enemies are everyone except a select few.
There is always a responsibility that goes along with any project you work on - but it will get done with or without you. Ask Oppenheimer or Feynman or Einstein.
Only 15?
Nobody wants to spend more tha an hour in one day, sure... But give them a bit more time, spending a few minutes a day - or even half an hour a day drooling over good deals... maybe.
While what you're saying about merchandise going fast is true, last Black Friday, when I went shopping with my family, we hit the stores in squads, some going one place, some going another, and still others going elsewhere. Perhaps they were worried that this planning would get more organized? Especially, if everybody goes to CompUSA, for example, instead of BestBuy, they're sold out of the great deal, and so, assuming that BestBuy is almost wiped clean, too, and not wasting the time to go there, tons of people make the "peripheral purchases" that they're counting on... like that more expensive hard drive of the previous poster's friend.
Black Friday is a field day for stores... they essentially thrive on making people make rush purchases - this is why so many sales end at noon or early afternoon. The trick is, while everybody is slashing prices - sometimes to below cost, make your store the priority store to go to... now when you give people maybe one or two days to figure out all the deals, they're less likely to systematically plan and take advantage of the best deals, after all - the best deals aren't why they want you at their store - they want you to make periheral purchases, which are worse deals - ones which make them profit. However, if you can plan your shopping much in advance knowing all the prices, you are more likely to buy the cheapest stuff from store A, the cheapest stuff from store B, etc, without bothering to even look around very much at the other deals, since you already know all the prices.
It isn't that these stores aren't competetively priced, as some have suggested, it's simply that the competetive pricing is only a lure - giving all the prices for hot items makes that lure nearly worthless.
But see, they're supposed to - that's the point. Just because people will sign any paper that crosses their desk doesn't make that signature any less binding.
I know I would be caught by this (except that I never install software without specifically wanting it), and it is downright nasty.
But it's all nice and legal.
I remember when I used to read EULAs. These days I don't even read my email.