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User: lsdino

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Comments · 182

  1. Re:Good point... on New MP3 Portables · · Score: 1

    No one ever called Winamp an mp3 player. It is a music player.

    I'm sure there's at least one person who has called winamp an mp3 player.

  2. Re:You are wrong on Competitors Cry Foul At Windows XP, 2K Service Packs · · Score: 1

    If it is so easy a 10 year old can use it, explain to the rest of us how to disable the .Net runtime? It isn't easy.

    And what icon are you looking at? The icon to run the CRL interpreter?


    If you installed it then to uninstall it all you need to do is Start->Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs, find and click on "Microsoft .NET Framework" and press "Change/Remove" - and answer "Yes". Is that really so difficult?

    If you didn't install it it won't be there. It's as simple as that.

    (Oh, and it's the Common Language Runtime, not the CRL)

  3. Re:Why not teach C#? on MS/Waterloo Curriculum Deal On Hold · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But You'll still have to install an (expensive) Mircorsoft compiler. You think they're gonna give that away for free?

    Yes, it's right here. It includes C++, C# and the VB.NET compiler. And the C++ compiler can compile to straight x86, but it doesn't do good optimizations either - so it's just like gcc ;)

  4. Re:In defense of GNU and Backdoor Trojans. on MS Exec: 'Our products just aren't engineered for security' · · Score: 1

    I have actually thought about creating and distributing a version
    of Emacs that is functionally identical but with all the key
    bindings changed around to cut the initial learning curve down
    to size. If I could get two other people to work on it with me,
    I'd do it. It would be a huge undertaking, though, because once
    you dork with Ctrl-X and Ctrl-C (which you have to do) you have
    to change all the keybindings that rely on those prefixes, in
    every major mode (well, every one that you distribute with your
    modified Emacs). So I'm not undertaking it alone.


    Well isn't it obvious? You should write a mode for Emacs to make the editing very easy or even automatic. :)

  5. Re:Um, how would anything change? on How Could TV Survive Without Commercials? · · Score: 1

    This would happen to be that Dino indeed :) Don't know if you realize this, but Rolla was recently rated the unhappiest college (as reported here on Slashdot a while ago).

    Although I'm failing to remember the chicken / cow jokes, but I'm betting this is Steinke. Am I right? E-mail me at lsdino at hot mail dot com.
    Obviously use some intelligence in interpruting this, and then I'll send you my REAL e-mail address :)

  6. Re:Um, how would anything change? on How Could TV Survive Without Commercials? · · Score: 1

    Would consumers be better off relying on word-of-mouth advertising?

    Oh yeah, capitalism doesn't care about the well-being of consumers as much as the well-being of those who supply the goods.


    I'm not sure where you get this impression, but capitalism doesn't care about the well-being of anyone. I'll ignore the obvious that capitalism is not a person, and therefore cannot actually "care" about anything.

    But capitalism is based upon rational self-interest leading to both sides coming out better. For example, if I have 4 cows, but no chickens, and you have 100 chickens, but no cows, maybe we can work something out and both be better off for it. Then we can all have steak and eggs for breakfest (or work something out with soy beans & rice for hypothetical vegeterians, whatever...).

    The thing to remember is that in ANY transaction both sides are supplying a good. They may be supplying me stuff (or a service), but I'm supplying them with cash. So if you think capitalism only cares about the well-being of the suppliers, then it obviously cares about everyone, except for those with nothing to offer.

  7. Re:The why rip and collect it if so bad? on Napster Not To Blame · · Score: 1

    I agree the bits in the banks computer are your money - was obvious from my assertion you would cry foul when somebody played with them.

    But in exactly the same way, the bits that hold the pirated MP3 music are EVERY bit as tangible to the authors and copyright holders as is YOUR money. Both are totally intangable assets of value to the real owners.


    The better money analogy is counterfeiting. If you produce money which is identical to real money you are depriving no one of anything. In the US at least, money is not backed by gold. So it really represents nothing. It is artificially priced due to it's scarcity. Music is artificially priced due to it's scarcity. The only thing that keeps either of any value is stopping illegal reproduction.

    "But if I didn't counterfeit that money I would have just bought a smaller house! I could live without it!"

    If a money supply could be reproduced illegally without checks, it's value would be zero. The same principle applies to intellectual property.

    Now, someone will probably say by copying money you will make everyone lose a little bit of value. But this is exactly what many people want to happen with music. Many complain it costs too much. Pirating it will certainly solve that problem by decreasing it's value.

  8. Re:Their price model is BAD too.. $15 a CD?! NUTSO on Napster Not To Blame · · Score: 1

    I could buy a DVD for that much! Full digital 5.1 audio that is over 2 hrs long! Whats a $15 Audio CD provide? 60 mins of stereo music... Joy.. Their business model has DIED, they need to start selling Audio CDs for $5 to sell them.

    I find the value of a CD is a lot greater than the value of a DVD. I spend more hours / day listening to music then I do watching DVDs. Infact, I probably listen to music *every* day, but I don't watch a DVD everyday, not even close.

    So, you pay $15 and you listen to your CD hundreds of times. You pay $15 and you watch your DVD 5 times? 10 times? 20 times? It's an order of magnitude difference.

    On the other hand, DVDs are a significant improvement in value over VHS. So in the case of the motion picture industry, they can still turn out crappy movies all they want, because they're making hella cash off the people converting to their new splendid format.

  9. Re:To serve and protect whom? on Did MS Lobbying Stop NSA Work On SELinux? · · Score: 1

    Responding to the uber-parent & parent:

    uber-parent wrote:
    The USPS does something that really does help the economy, though: it equalizes the cost of delivery anywhere in the US. Under a privatized system, mail would be a lot cheaper between Chicago and New York City, but it would be a lot MORE expensive to send from Lower Armpit, Arkansas to Road Hole, Alaska. This dramatically lowers costs for developing areas away from the largest cities.

    parent wrote:
    Bullshit. Do UPS and FedEx deliver to remote rual areas like the USPS does? No they pretty much don't. Left to their own devices do you think UPS and FedEx would serve people living in the inner city? Damn right they wouldn't. They would skim off the profitable routes in the suburbs and leave the rest to the USPS. As for UPS and FedEx being better than the USPS, that's a load of BS. My brother-in-law who lives in VA buys RedHat cdroms from CheapBytes which is in CA and gets them *IN ONE OR TWO DAYS* when he tells CheapBytes to mail the cdroms to him using Priority Mail.


    The government still regulates interstate commerce. Rather than going out of it's way to create a large government controlled bueracracy, the government could have easily set regulations for the mail/package delivery industry. Each company would have to choose a flat rate for US mail, and would have to deliver mail to everyone. That, of course, would include the ability to pick up mail on par with USPS.

    As for the parent's claim that UPS & FedEx don't deliver to remote rural areas, that's not true, at least not for UPS, who does deliver to remote rural areas.

    Of course, this is really a moot point. USPS is generally run as a seperate entity from the government, and they are generally profitable. The government may as well spin them off, but it doesn't really matter if they do or don't because USPS is generally profitable overall. So who really cares...

  10. Re:Google offers interesting desktop usage stats on Where's GNU/Linux Usage Headed? · · Score: 1

    You're right, I didn't scroll down far enough and just looked at the graph at the top. That's what I get for not paying attention.

  11. Re:Google offers interesting desktop usage stats on Where's GNU/Linux Usage Headed? · · Score: 1

    A year ago you would have been right but now Google is decidely mainstream. Check out the total search hours per month graphs in these [searchenginewatch.com] two [searchenginewatch.com] reports. Google is by far and away the leading search engine now.


    I look at both of those and I see Google as the number #3 search engine (MSN #1 & Yahoo is #2). Not that that isn't a major accomplishment in-and-of it's self, but it's not "the leading search engine" (although it's the only search engine *I* use).

  12. Re:Web sites shouldn't specify fonts. on Microsoft Typography Withdraws Free Web Fonts · · Score: 1

    Relying on specific fonts for pages to render correctly is just asking for breakage -- and the FONT tag is deprecated, anyhow.

    You say this as if modern web specs don't offer a way to control fonts. The fact of the matter is that HTML is (and has been) moving from controling the look-and-feel in HTML to controling the look-and-feel in CSS. And of course setting the font is supported in CSS: fonts and more fonts.

    CSS font support is much better than HTML, and this is certainly the reason the font tag has been deprecated.

  13. Re:Everyone would just get a real job on Will CGI Collapse the Hollywood Economy? · · Score: 1

    First, where do you live that they still employ people to pump gas. Around here (California), every gas station I know of is self serve only.

    I don't live there but as I understand it's illegal to pump your own gas in Oregon - not too far from you :)

  14. Re:SOAP, WDSL, etc. on .NET for Apache · · Score: 1

    Ok, to make this comparison fair, if you take into account reading, interruptions, learning the tools, etc... it would have taken you fifteen minutes, not five. :)

    I mean, it's *REALLY* easy:

    File->New Project
    Visual C# Projects->ASP.NET Web Service
    OK

    At this point you now have the code for a simple HelloWorld service (it just returns HelloWorld as a string to the caller), although that method's uncommented. You can begin adding your implementation details.

    This base code is all of 61 lines of code. 17 lines of comments, 8 lines of white space, so 36 lines of real code. And a lot of the stuff in here is actually completely unnecessary. The HelloWorld web service can actually be done in 7 lines of code.

    Deploying? Create a virtual directory pointing to your VS.NET project.

    Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->IIS
    localcomputer -> Web Sites -> Default Web Site
    Right Click, New Virtual Directory.
    FooBar, Next
    Location of project, Next

    And you're done. You have a running web service.

    I know, you're going to say "But you need to know how to do all of that, and I would have had to learn that". This is a very well documented in a Walkthroughs book which comes with VS.NET (although they give a more complex way to deploy the app making a setup program for it, etc...)

    My point is simply this: One of the things VS.NET was designed to do was make creating web services extremely simple. It is. And it goes the other way too: It's extremely easy to consume web services. A great comparison is the difference between the Google web service code for VS.NET & Java.

  15. Re:SOAP, WDSL, etc. on .NET for Apache · · Score: 1

    It's not difficult at all to do SOAP in Apache (well, Tomcat actually:) with Java... you just write your service class and then write a deployment descriptor, then throw the whole thing in a WAR and drop it in the webservices directory. I had a simple stub up and running in about a day... and I was still teaching myself Java at the time. All I needed to do was flesh out the business logic and it was all ready to go. Of course, I've since decided my architecture was crap and thrown the whole thing out because it turns out I didn't need SOAP to begin with, but it ain't hard to do... I could very quickly build a SOAP front-end to the new code.

    Now, I did have the advantage that my service was not meant to be a public service--it's a simple interface between us and one of our vendors--so I didn't bother figuring out how to do the WSDL.


    The comparison to VS.NET here is that it literally takes 5 minutes to build a web service, and you get the WSDL for free. 5 minutes versus a day - which one do you think is more productive? (and you could even do this w/o really knowing C# or VB).

    A better comparison is if you do the whole thing by hand: you just write your service class (no "deployment descriptor" or WAR involved) and drop it in a web server directory. Then, you can go it http://website/file.asmx?wsdl and you get back it's wsdl automagically.

    If you want to actually use the service there are tools which auto-generate proxys for the web service. Run the tool, link, and it's just like using a normal class, but it goes across the web. Another 5 minute operation.

  16. Re:Random Walkers and other algorithems on "Random Walkers" may speed P2P networks · · Score: 1

    Presently the network works much like how old routhers worked. Search packets are broadcasted to peering nodes which then broadcast the same packets off to their own neighbors. But the problem is that their own neigbors are sometimes the ones that sent the orignial packets. If this was to be done efficently (and how routers implement it), they need to create buffers to hold searches, once a search is recived a search would not be propagated to the other peers, it would be held for a given time period (say a few milliseconds), the node would then wait for the same search to appear from other neighoring nodes, it if does then it wouldnt send this search off down that node. This would cut down a lot of the wasted bandwidth and I am not sure why Gnutella ppl didn't model p2p after these routing methods.

    What you're essentially proposing is that each client has a hashtable for all the searches. The length of time that stores probably shouldn't be a few milliseconds. This technique can reduce traffic from the duplicates you mention (circiling around in the graph of nodes) and reduce traffic from 2 peers asking for the same search. What needs to be done is that the hashtable should also store the TTL of each search - then if the TTL of the incoming search is greater than the TTL of the hashed search, it gets sent out. Otherwise it gets propagated on, and the results received overwrite the old entry in the hashtable. This way you even improve the maximum lengths of searched.

  17. Re:The Amiga is coming back. on New Amiga Hardware Runs Mac OS · · Score: 1

    I think you're living in a dream world. The best hardware and software, even when combined, don't always win, and even when they do they generally don't do so because they were the best. I would have thought betamax, os/2 and linux would have told you that. Personally I've always considered Apple to be a far worse company than Bill's - they're just nowhere near as competent from a business pov.

    Betamax lost because the tapes were too short - VHS offered twice the length, and that's what mattered to people.

    I'm not sure what the exact reasons for OS/2 losing, but one probably was the OEMs. What OEM wants to pay IBM for an OS? All of a sudden IBM has a huge competitive advantage: they get their OS for free. No, wait, they make money off of their OS from the other OEMs who have to pay them for it!

    As for Linux, that battle is not over yet.

    I think generally when one product loses that was supposedly better someone's failing to take into account the consumer's definition of better. It's easy to look at just one or only a few metrics of "better", and then decide that one product should win over another, leaving out what the consumer's are really basing their decision on.

    Another common example that comes up of this which you left off is QWERTY vs Dvorak. The studies showing Dvorak are linked to Dvorak. There were many contents when the keyboard first came out about those who could type the fastest - these happened on many different keyboards. Dvorak patented his keyboard. There were no offers of retraining, etc...

  18. Re:Intel Rules( currently) on Cheaper SMP AMD Motherboards? · · Score: 1

    next AMD's current Athlon MP and XP processor dont rule. They are beaten hollow by Intel, considering that Intel Xeons have 128KB more on chip cache and not to mention atleast a 700MHz clock speed advantage. Along with the PC1066 RDRAM, they rock. AMD is nowhere nearby, still stuck with DDR266.


    I think when it comes to Dual processors that they DO rule. Currently dual-proc P4 boards are running in the mid 300s, and that's for the low-ball dealers on pricewatch - so we're talking OEM box, crappy warranty, etc... By the time you go retail you're talking around >390. If you want to get a better than "the cheapest P4 motherboard" you're going to be paying even more.

    For $400 you can get an Asus A7M266-D & 1 Athlon MP - which is a much better deal.

    Basically AMD is back to playing to the low-cost market, but that should be familiar territory to them. Now they can offer good performance though :)

  19. Re:Gallery is some good software on To Digitize or Not Digitize the Family Photo Album? · · Score: 1

    File format longevity is the real killer, though. I have quite a few 5.25" floppy disks with documents that were created in industry-leading formats in the mid-1980s. I would like to retrieve some of them, but I (a) haven't seen a 5.25" floppy drive in years (b) can't find any software that will read those formats. And that is only 17 years! Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?

    Problem A is easily solved: 1.2MB 5 1/4" floppy drives at pricewatch. I'd hurry up if I were you though, the list is short :) I'd bet you could always ebay the software you need too.

  20. PVR use on Archiving Content from a PVR? · · Score: 2

    Here's what I'm doing:

    I have a ReplayTV 4040. I figured I can get one of the lower models they offer because I can just network it, and save everything on my PC.

    I've been using SwapDV which basically acts as a ReplayTV.

    I can download shows from my ReplayTV to my computer, and it can serve shows back up to my ReplayTV. So I just use my ReplayTV, browse over to my computer, and can watch shows off of it.

    I'm about to setup a 5 80gig HD IDE RAID-5 system to keep all my data on. That way I get some redundancy. The only thing I need now is some offsite backups!

  21. Re:This quote from The Reg caught me... on No Love From Microsoft For Xbox Modders · · Score: 1

    I'm all for short term protection of copyright. 10 years. 15 years TOPS.


    I don't see why the original 14 year (US) copyright ever had to be changed :(

  22. Re:They're flooding in on AMD Introduces the Athlon XP 2200+ · · Score: 1

    I have two Win XP machines at home, on a PIII 1GHz laptop and one a Duron 800 Desktop, 256MB RAM on each. Win XP runs like a lame sloth on both machines, and from what I can deduce, it is because it access the hard disk a lot, and slows down application launching, disk browsing. Clicking on the start button->programs is a good reason to find something to think about, as it always takes a long time for the application menu to come up. (Red light on the hard disk is on).
    Applications run fine once they have started, unless they have to access the hard disk.


    You know, I've had the exact same experiences, and I thought - there's gotta be a way to fix this!

    So, I did a quick search on Google and came up with a site that looks pretty promising.

    Specifically it looks like DisableExecutivePaging is going to help a lot with the start menu problem (it'll refuse to page out OS related files). Then, the LargeSystemCache seems to be the equivalent of what Linux runs with by default - and that is to use all available memory to cache the filesystem, and free it up when an app needs it. This will probably help with the start menu too.

    I just turned them both on... gotta reboot to enable them though :(

  23. Re:anti-intelligence on Artificial Inteligence Common Sense Database · · Score: 1

    Seriously, the article says that cyc already knows enough to check its inputs by crossreferencing and using its vaulted common sense. So it should be Bushproof. Pretty cool, eh?

    This makes me think of a great broader use for this, and that is for debates. Imagine a presidential debate. You have the candidates and a computer running this program (w/ software to do voice->text conversion). The computer has a big red light. Whenever the canidate says something which is blatantly incorrect, the light goes off :)

    It'd be great.

  24. Re:Flashbacks (my list to add) on Remembering the BBS · · Score: 1

    Especially useful on warez sites that used uploads for credits for downloads ... upload a file or two, get some download credits ... use this version of ZMODEM which would download everything but the very last block (which ended up being a checksum or something "useless" if I remember), and it would then abort the download at the very end.

    Actually, it DID download the last block, it's just that it would send back that it didn't receive it and that it's canceling the transfer.

  25. Re:ANSI archive sites? on Remembering the BBS · · Score: 1

    On WWIV BBs's, you could include an Ansi signiture. I put a fake "SysOp Chat mode Enabled" then pretrended to hang up them and pause. I dont Remember exact WWIV chat, but it was something like. And I put pauses between keystrokes, to fake a real person. :)



    Actually, WWIV (non modified) wouldn't let you use full ANSI, did it? It would let you use the 7 colors which users could redefine to suit their own color schemes. What was it? Ctrl-P [0-7] to get a different color?

    Then you could use ^H to get the backspacing effect, but I didn't think you could do anything you wanted (unless the sysop modded it, of course...)