Campers' Corner: Hosts K111j0y and 14m3r talk about the best way to grief-play in Multiplayer FPS's like Q3A, UT, CS, etc... They discuss the best aiming proxies, server mods, and latency attacks to use. Actual gaming advice will be a little bit on the thin side, however.
EverGeeks: "Verily, after I chugged my mountain dew and played gems for another forty-five minutes did the dread dragon Nagafen spawn. Heroicly, I thusly rushed in to slay the beast, along with my brethren, sixty-five other level 50+ druids. EQ R0XX0RS!"
Real Life vs. Gaming: Of course real gamers can't afford to eat and buy all the games they want to play at the same time, especially if they play consoles and can't leech warez copies of the games from IRC and Morpheus. This show is more in the way of financial advice like: "If you crush up gravel and put it in the bathtub with water, you can get your clothes almost as clean if you washed them with soap." and "Of course you can eat meat that's a little green if you cook it thouroughly enough. A little mold never hurt anybody. Watch out for bulging cans you find in the dumpster, tho. Botulism can kill you if you're not lucky."
If they were in the car business insted of the O/S business, a lot of people would be dead or mangled.
That's ultimately the only thing that can change the corporate machine... Death. Either the death of members of the machine or members of the public.
Look at the recent Ford/Firestone screwover: Sure, there have been reports about how unsafe SUV's were for years, but Ford was able to rationalize those deaths away as just part of the 'acceptable highway fatality level' that Americans seem to be comfortable with.
It wasn't until people were able to say with proof positive that Ford SUV's and/or Firestone tire were directly responsible for human deaths that Ford was forced to change its practices.
Microsoft is in the same boat. It won't be until the Blue Screen of Death is really, provably responsible for human fatalities (Think saftey control at a power plant, or a crash aboard a military vehicle of some kind) that Microsoft will start being more responsible about their security and program design.
Remember that Charon, Pluto's moon/co Planet is close to half of Pluto's mass. The tidal force they exert on each other is significant... probably enough to keep water liquid (warm enough to support life? I dunno 'bout that) near Pluto's center.
This is, of course, assuming that Pluto is mostly made of cometary ice, rather than rock, which a lot of cosmologists think is the case.
Not necessarily. The immense amount of forces that are involved in a supernova create conditions that allow black holes to form. All you really need for a black hole is enough heavy matter in small enough space.
It's like this... When planets and even small stars form, the electromagnetic force is enough to keep individual atoms from crushing each other. You can't push electrons any closer.
Stars who die without becoming any bigger become white, and eventually black dwarfs.
In larger stars, after they ignite, the nuclear force-- the constant fusion reaction-- is enough to do the same thing. Once that fusion reaction shuts down, however, the atoms begin to collapse, increasing density and pressure until the heavier atoms are able to fuse.
If a star this size goes nova, the electrons and protons collapse, leaving neutrons. The neutron matter will hold up to a certain point under the force of gravity. AP's correct me, but I think it's the electroweak force that is responisble for this resistance.
If a star dies at this stage, you get a neutron star.
If a star is very, very massive... Think blue giants... Even the force that keeps the neutrons from crushing eachother is not enough to overcome the force of gravity. The neutrons collapse under their own weight into an infinitly small point and the space around the singularity warps until the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
I'm certain what we all know that singularity + event horizon = black hole.
Despite the fact that the researchers were creating the same kinds of reaction that occurs in the latter period of the death of a star, they simply weren't dealing with the kind of mass necessarly to create a black hole. Even if scientists *did* manage to create enough pressure to force matter to collapse into a singularity, it would evaporate away into Hawking radiation almost instantly. You don't just need the singularity to keep a black hole, you need to have it be massive and keep feeding it to keep it alive.
Most of what the 'journalist' was saying came directly from the Encarta 2000 entry on 'Supernova', with a few quotes from Canadian researchers thrown in.
I'm not sure they have anything more than prototypes at the moment, but this is still a pretty nifty advance for people who need more storage for digital video and digital photography.
Most Artists are not that technically inclined. Most of them are not even that business savvy. This is evident that most of them are overjoyed just to 'have a contract' despite the fact that they will almost certainly be screwed over by this contract when their fifteen minutes of fame are up.
I have this mental image of a giant RIAA stable where prime cuts of meat like Britney Spears, *NSYNC, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin are kept like birds in guilded cages. So long as they keep laying golden eggs for their sleazy masters, they're kept comfortable, happy, and warm. Just as soon as they stop producing, however, they are sent to the slaughter so that the machine can soak up every last bit of wealth that can be squeezed from their pores.
Disney has a similiar stable where they keep the Olsen twins, Brendon Frasier, and a host of other people who would be better off in the long run working a 9-5 job.
Sure, it's a little bit exaggerated, but not by much. This is the process that has produced the obvious mental cases like Michael Jackson and Stevie Nicks. It's the process that let individuals like Rick James become utter human wastes in a way that normal people would never be able to afford.
Yet still, every garage band's ultimate hope is to 'Get a Contract'.
If anything, any time I see a post on Usenet of Mp3's from a CD that is supposedly copy protected, the poster usually takes great pains to brag discuss the fact that he was able to rip despite copy protection.
Really, I think that even the record industry didn't expect the various copy protections to really work. What they're doing is building an easily hackable content protection system so that they can prosecute MP3 traders under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
When I was about 15, I mowed lawns all summer in order to afford to buy NES cartridges. One of the 'cartridges' I bought was a Game Genie adapter.
Once I had done all the 'special effects' on the games I owned, I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Sure, it was fun to always have the elusive Hammer suit in SMB3, but at the same time, if you don't have to work hard and stay alive all the way through World 6 or 7, then you don't really appreciate it as much and don't play so carefully in order to keep it.
Now days, even the graphics altering abilities of such devices or programs aren't that impressive. There's very little you can do graphics-wise to a 3D, immersive game that doesn't break the game play. One of the few legitimate uses I've seen for this is to allow the player to play as characters that he wouldn't usually get to... such as Bowser in Super Mario 64. Even then, the animation and clipping is broken, hurting the play experience.
Some trainers do have positive uses. Here, I'm thinking about the trainers that exist for games like Roller Coaster Tycoon that allow the player to more or less play in the 'Free Form Building' mode that everyone agrees is missing from the game.
The conclusion that I've drawn from these observation is that trainers usually detract from gaming... at least for people who are interested in playing. If a game needs a trainer in order to be enjoyable, such as RCT... then there's something wrong with the game.
Then 'Stealth' means it looks like a duct-tape bound pile of junk, similiar to what is usually found in my redneck neighbor's driveway.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the Russian government has money to spend on Military R&D when they just recently resorted to renting out the Russian segments of the ISS/Alpha as a tourist trap. Perhaps this practice is paying off?
Whatever is the case, I hope that this signals that the Russians are able to start competing in terms of scientific and technological advances again. Competition is good, and competition between superpowers-- so long as they're not openly hostile about it-- can result in some pretty impressive things.... The Apollo Program for example.
The fact that it was a good test case is probably amoung the foremost of the reasons it was dropped.
Say what you will about evil crackers and hackers who restlessly violate people's property. Dmitry was obviously not one of these people. He wrote a tool to do something that is still quite legal in Russia, and is considered to be quite a scholar and expert by many. Any competent lawyer would have been able to present him as such. He would have a huge chance of getting
The U.S. has zero chance to uphold the DMCA unless they get precident behind it that come from using it to prosecute someone who they can present as having evil purposes... such as any of the alleged DoD crackers arrested this week.
As long as the people who get involved in lawsuits are fairly upstanding individuals, they can't afford to prosecute. Once they come across someone who would probably be sent up the river even without the DMCA, then they'll prosecute.
Of course, certain personalities are more interested in making policy decisions than technology decisions, as well as vice-versa.
Do you plan to stand over Gates and Balmer cracking the anti-trust whip, or do you intend to deal more with the executive board as a whole, saying 'You can't do that' to certain policy decisions.
The U.S. auto industry and the U.S. oil industry are so tight that work has been slowed or delayed for decades on all-electric cars.
While this fuel-cell uses borax derivatives, I would be willing to bet money that any production fuel-cell based vehicles deployed in the U.S. use hydrocarbon-based cells. They're not going to let you just stop filling up every week, after all.
What causes an EMP? Nuclear explosions. With all the terrorists and their suitcase nukes around, you're magnetic data's not safe! Go Optical. Better yet, break out the punch-cards!
</fearmongering>
Seriously, if your backup media is magnetic, be it a tape, mirrored harddrive, or a vast pile of old AOL 3.5" floppy disks, you've got to watch out.
Case in point: A company I know of stores off-site tape backups at a reputable insurance firm's lock-up. There are all sorts of gurantees against fire, flood, tornados, etc...
What there is not a guarantee for is Larry, the night watchman, who brings his ancient portable television up to work with him every night. He sits it directly on top of the tapes he's supposed to file that night.
The previous didn't happen, but it *could*. There are all sorts of accidents that can corrupt magnetic media that wouldn't harm CD or DVD media.CD-R's are especially cheap, and you can reasonably back up everything short of massive databases or large AV projects on one. If you regularly make massive databases and/or large AV projects, you can probably afford DVD-RW.
Tape is getting obsolete and DVD's are getting cheaper all the time.
May be a futile question to ask, but we're in probably the intensest period of debate on freedom, law, justice, and crimincal conduct since the American civil war.
Since you are such a big figure in the realm of online freedom, where do you *hope* the level of online freedom is in about 2101, and where do you realistically *think* it will be?
I mean, if you're a big enough fan to spend however long it takes to download a 700mb DiVX AVI, aren't you probably going to go to the theater several times, just so you can see it on the big screen, the way it was 'meant' to be seen? Aren't you also going to buy the 2 DVD Box Set collector's edition next year and have all-night Fellowship of the DVD parties watching it over and over again with all your closest geek buddies?
Case in point.... if your an anime fan: I just bought 2 $25 DVD's this week. One was the Utena Movie and the other was the 'Oh My Goddess' movie. Neither is 'perfect' in the way that most fanboys will perceive any one of the 3 LOTR movies. Still, they are fun movies. Before they were released in the U.S., however, I obtained low-quality DivX and VCD anime fansubs of these two titles.
Even though I 'pirated' the movies, the American dub/sub houses and indirectly, the Japanese studios, still got their money from me.
Therefore, I encourage *true* Tolkein Fanboys and everyone else who plans to eventually legitimately see or buy this movie to download it to your heart's content
I don't think that there is any question that at one point water was much more abundant on Mars than it is now, but those pictures really drive the nails into the coffin. Some of those formations are so obviously erosion effects that it's impossible not to see the connection.
I went to Bestbuy last night and saw a generic CD-RW drive for $79 before rebate. If you shop around, you can get CDR's or CDRW's for about $.50 apeice, usually with a rebate that makes them more or less free.
You can also get a DVD-Rom drive for about $100.
All this considered, it would literally be cheaper to buy both drives than the all-in-one combo. Even if it did manage to burn DVD-RW, it would still be cheaper in terms of media cost to have both drives and burn data onto CDR or CDRW... that is... unless you actually *need* an entire DVD-RW's worth of storage capacity in contiguous media.
This is actually a fairly decent idea. I don't think it has a whelk's chance in a supernova of actually happening, but it's still a good idea.
IE has some real strengths when compared to Moz and the others... such as a fairly intellegent 'quickload' preloading mode that both Moz and Staroffice are trying to emulate, activex plugin archetecture, which is actually a pretty ideal environment for browser plugins (not applets), and all the microsoft specific html 'extensions' like Favicon and page transitions which the other projects haven't emulated because of their Microsoftness.
If these features were really OSS'd it in a Free manner, all the other OSS browser projects would benefit greatly.
Question for me is, are the different mpeg4 formats similiar enough that I can play my DiVX 3 and DiVX4 anime fansubs on it?
Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...Server
on
Email Turns Thirty
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· Score: 2
Why not have a fax server? Incoming faxes are digitally stored & manipulated. Much easier to manage and hardcopy is still easy to generate. The people on the other end are none the wiser.
Originally, we did have a fax server, but it was scrapped in favor of mulitple fax lines for management reasons... read: management thinks they understand the fax machines, but can't grasp the fax server, even when it plunks faxes in their Outlook inbox. The justification was 'cost of operation'. Yeah, sure. Whatever.
Even with a fax server, however, the data still has to go between an image format and Ascii to fit inside the DB. Frankly, I trust OCR software more than data entry, but results may vary...
The main problem with Gnutella and its derivatives is the fact that it relies on aggregate network bandwidth to perform searches. The Gnutella derivatives such as Limewire and Bearshare all try to get around this by keeping central search databases, but, of course, that makes them vulnerable to the same argument that killed Napster, and is starting to kill Kazaa/Morpheus/Fasttrack.
Having a huge backbone like this could make Gnutella work, at least as far as the backbone goes.
Re:Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 2
Trying to grab someone's packets without controlling their direct ISP is significantly more difficult.
Even if they manage that, using Blowfish or Rijndael (sp) in your emails would make it impossible to glean information from an intercepted email. 2048 bit DH encryption is significant enough to deter the FBI, so you can bet that it will throw a wrench into the works of potential theives/embezzlers.
It wouldn't even be as hard as forcing the no-nothing account managers at banks to encrypt and email the applications instead of faxing them. All you'd really have to do is rewrite the application program they're already using to take down customer information so that it encrypts the data and emails it, rather than printing or faxing it. This is a 1-2 day project for most of the coders I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Campers' Corner: Hosts K111j0y and 14m3r talk about the best way to grief-play in Multiplayer FPS's like Q3A, UT, CS, etc... They discuss the best aiming proxies, server mods, and latency attacks to use. Actual gaming advice will be a little bit on the thin side, however.
EverGeeks: "Verily, after I chugged my mountain dew and played gems for another forty-five minutes did the dread dragon Nagafen spawn. Heroicly, I thusly rushed in to slay the beast, along with my brethren, sixty-five other level 50+ druids. EQ R0XX0RS!"
Real Life vs. Gaming: Of course real gamers can't afford to eat and buy all the games they want to play at the same time, especially if they play consoles and can't leech warez copies of the games from IRC and Morpheus. This show is more in the way of financial advice like: "If you crush up gravel and put it in the bathtub with water, you can get your clothes almost as clean if you washed them with soap." and "Of course you can eat meat that's a little green if you cook it thouroughly enough. A little mold never hurt anybody. Watch out for bulging cans you find in the dumpster, tho. Botulism can kill you if you're not lucky."
If they were in the car business insted of the O/S business, a lot of people would be dead or mangled.
That's ultimately the only thing that can change the corporate machine... Death. Either the death of members of the machine or members of the public.
Look at the recent Ford/Firestone screwover: Sure, there have been reports about how unsafe SUV's were for years, but Ford was able to rationalize those deaths away as just part of the 'acceptable highway fatality level' that Americans seem to be comfortable with.
It wasn't until people were able to say with proof positive that Ford SUV's and/or Firestone tire were directly responsible for human deaths that Ford was forced to change its practices.
Microsoft is in the same boat. It won't be until the Blue Screen of Death is really, provably responsible for human fatalities (Think saftey control at a power plant, or a crash aboard a military vehicle of some kind) that Microsoft will start being more responsible about their security and program design.
Pluto Planet Power... MAKE UP!
Remember that Charon, Pluto's moon/co Planet is close to half of Pluto's mass. The tidal force they exert on each other is significant... probably enough to keep water liquid (warm enough to support life? I dunno 'bout that) near Pluto's center.
This is, of course, assuming that Pluto is mostly made of cometary ice, rather than rock, which a lot of cosmologists think is the case.
Astrophysicists please correct me on the details.
Dead Scream...
but aren't supernovas the cause of black holes?
Not necessarily. The immense amount of forces that are involved in a supernova create conditions that allow black holes to form. All you really need for a black hole is enough heavy matter in small enough space.
It's like this... When planets and even small stars form, the electromagnetic force is enough to keep individual atoms from crushing each other. You can't push electrons any closer.
Stars who die without becoming any bigger become white, and eventually black dwarfs.
In larger stars, after they ignite, the nuclear force-- the constant fusion reaction-- is enough to do the same thing. Once that fusion reaction shuts down, however, the atoms begin to collapse, increasing density and pressure until the heavier atoms are able to fuse.
If a star this size goes nova, the electrons and protons collapse, leaving neutrons. The neutron matter will hold up to a certain point under the force of gravity. AP's correct me, but I think it's the electroweak force that is responisble for this resistance.
If a star dies at this stage, you get a neutron star.
If a star is very, very massive... Think blue giants... Even the force that keeps the neutrons from crushing eachother is not enough to overcome the force of gravity. The neutrons collapse under their own weight into an infinitly small point and the space around the singularity warps until the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
I'm certain what we all know that singularity + event horizon = black hole.
Despite the fact that the researchers were creating the same kinds of reaction that occurs in the latter period of the death of a star, they simply weren't dealing with the kind of mass necessarly to create a black hole. Even if scientists *did* manage to create enough pressure to force matter to collapse into a singularity, it would evaporate away into Hawking radiation almost instantly. You don't just need the singularity to keep a black hole, you need to have it be massive and keep feeding it to keep it alive.
Most of what the 'journalist' was saying came directly from the Encarta 2000 entry on 'Supernova', with a few quotes from Canadian researchers thrown in.
According to the product spec page:
67mm w/cap x 20mm x 9mm
60mm w/o cap x 20mm x 9mm
I'm not sure they have anything more than prototypes at the moment, but this is still a pretty nifty advance for people who need more storage for digital video and digital photography.
Most Artists are not that technically inclined. Most of them are not even that business savvy. This is evident that most of them are overjoyed just to 'have a contract' despite the fact that they will almost certainly be screwed over by this contract when their fifteen minutes of fame are up.
I have this mental image of a giant RIAA stable where prime cuts of meat like Britney Spears, *NSYNC, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin are kept like birds in guilded cages. So long as they keep laying golden eggs for their sleazy masters, they're kept comfortable, happy, and warm. Just as soon as they stop producing, however, they are sent to the slaughter so that the machine can soak up every last bit of wealth that can be squeezed from their pores.
Disney has a similiar stable where they keep the Olsen twins, Brendon Frasier, and a host of other people who would be better off in the long run working a 9-5 job.
Sure, it's a little bit exaggerated, but not by much. This is the process that has produced the obvious mental cases like Michael Jackson and Stevie Nicks. It's the process that let individuals like Rick James become utter human wastes in a way that normal people would never be able to afford.
Yet still, every garage band's ultimate hope is to 'Get a Contract'.
*sigh*...
Au contrare!
If anything, any time I see a post on Usenet of Mp3's from a CD that is supposedly copy protected, the poster usually takes great pains to brag discuss the fact that he was able to rip despite copy protection.
Really, I think that even the record industry didn't expect the various copy protections to really work. What they're doing is building an easily hackable content protection system so that they can prosecute MP3 traders under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.
Game Genie/Game Shark codes...
Trainers either, for that matter.
When I was about 15, I mowed lawns all summer in order to afford to buy NES cartridges. One of the 'cartridges' I bought was a Game Genie adapter.
Once I had done all the 'special effects' on the games I owned, I realized that any of the difficulty-altering codes took all the challenge out of the game.
Sure, it was fun to always have the elusive Hammer suit in SMB3, but at the same time, if you don't have to work hard and stay alive all the way through World 6 or 7, then you don't really appreciate it as much and don't play so carefully in order to keep it.
Now days, even the graphics altering abilities of such devices or programs aren't that impressive. There's very little you can do graphics-wise to a 3D, immersive game that doesn't break the game play. One of the few legitimate uses I've seen for this is to allow the player to play as characters that he wouldn't usually get to... such as Bowser in Super Mario 64. Even then, the animation and clipping is broken, hurting the play experience.
Some trainers do have positive uses. Here, I'm thinking about the trainers that exist for games like Roller Coaster Tycoon that allow the player to more or less play in the 'Free Form Building' mode that everyone agrees is missing from the game.
The conclusion that I've drawn from these observation is that trainers usually detract from gaming... at least for people who are interested in playing. If a game needs a trainer in order to be enjoyable, such as RCT... then there's something wrong with the game.
Then 'Stealth' means it looks like a duct-tape bound pile of junk, similiar to what is usually found in my redneck neighbor's driveway.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the Russian government has money to spend on Military R&D when they just recently resorted to renting out the Russian segments of the ISS/Alpha as a tourist trap. Perhaps this practice is paying off?
Whatever is the case, I hope that this signals that the Russians are able to start competing in terms of scientific and technological advances again. Competition is good, and competition between superpowers-- so long as they're not openly hostile about it-- can result in some pretty impressive things.... The Apollo Program for example.
The fact that it was a good test case is probably amoung the foremost of the reasons it was dropped.
Say what you will about evil crackers and hackers who restlessly violate people's property. Dmitry was obviously not one of these people. He wrote a tool to do something that is still quite legal in Russia, and is considered to be quite a scholar and expert by many. Any competent lawyer would have been able to present him as such. He would have a huge chance of getting
The U.S. has zero chance to uphold the DMCA unless they get precident behind it that come from using it to prosecute someone who they can present as having evil purposes... such as any of the alleged DoD crackers arrested this week.
As long as the people who get involved in lawsuits are fairly upstanding individuals, they can't afford to prosecute. Once they come across someone who would probably be sent up the river even without the DMCA, then they'll prosecute.
Just watch...
Of course, certain personalities are more interested in making policy decisions than technology decisions, as well as vice-versa.
Do you plan to stand over Gates and Balmer cracking the anti-trust whip, or do you intend to deal more with the executive board as a whole, saying 'You can't do that' to certain policy decisions.
Hardly...
The U.S. auto industry and the U.S. oil industry are so tight that work has been slowed or delayed for decades on all-electric cars.
While this fuel-cell uses borax derivatives, I would be willing to bet money that any production fuel-cell based vehicles deployed in the U.S. use hydrocarbon-based cells. They're not going to let you just stop filling up every week, after all.
Hmmm... what will we call the Addition command?
What causes an EMP? Nuclear explosions. With all the terrorists and their suitcase nukes around, you're magnetic data's not safe! Go Optical. Better yet, break out the punch-cards!
</fearmongering>
Seriously, if your backup media is magnetic, be it a tape, mirrored harddrive, or a vast pile of old AOL 3.5" floppy disks, you've got to watch out.
Case in point: A company I know of stores off-site tape backups at a reputable insurance firm's lock-up. There are all sorts of gurantees against fire, flood, tornados, etc...
What there is not a guarantee for is Larry, the night watchman, who brings his ancient portable television up to work with him every night. He sits it directly on top of the tapes he's supposed to file that night.
The previous didn't happen, but it *could*. There are all sorts of accidents that can corrupt magnetic media that wouldn't harm CD or DVD media.CD-R's are especially cheap, and you can reasonably back up everything short of massive databases or large AV projects on one. If you regularly make massive databases and/or large AV projects, you can probably afford DVD-RW.
Tape is getting obsolete and DVD's are getting cheaper all the time.
May be a futile question to ask, but we're in probably the intensest period of debate on freedom, law, justice, and crimincal conduct since the American civil war.
Since you are such a big figure in the realm of online freedom, where do you *hope* the level of online freedom is in about 2101, and where do you realistically *think* it will be?
I just hope they didn't recycle Jar Jar Binks and use him as Gollum.
"Weesa loosa ring to kwazy hobbit? Uhoh! Pretty ain't gonna lika dat!"
I mean, if you're a big enough fan to spend however long it takes to download a 700mb DiVX AVI, aren't you probably going to go to the theater several times, just so you can see it on the big screen, the way it was 'meant' to be seen? Aren't you also going to buy the 2 DVD Box Set collector's edition next year and have all-night Fellowship of the DVD parties watching it over and over again with all your closest geek buddies?
Case in point.... if your an anime fan: I just bought 2 $25 DVD's this week. One was the Utena Movie and the other was the 'Oh My Goddess' movie. Neither is 'perfect' in the way that most fanboys will perceive any one of the 3 LOTR movies. Still, they are fun movies. Before they were released in the U.S., however, I obtained low-quality DivX and VCD anime fansubs of these two titles.
Even though I 'pirated' the movies, the American dub/sub houses and indirectly, the Japanese studios, still got their money from me.
Therefore, I encourage *true* Tolkein Fanboys and everyone else who plans to eventually legitimately see or buy this movie to download it to your heart's content
I don't think that there is any question that at one point water was much more abundant on Mars than it is now, but those pictures really drive the nails into the coffin. Some of those formations are so obviously erosion effects that it's impossible not to see the connection.
I went to Bestbuy last night and saw a generic CD-RW drive for $79 before rebate. If you shop around, you can get CDR's or CDRW's for about $.50 apeice, usually with a rebate that makes them more or less free.
You can also get a DVD-Rom drive for about $100.
All this considered, it would literally be cheaper to buy both drives than the all-in-one combo. Even if it did manage to burn DVD-RW, it would still be cheaper in terms of media cost to have both drives and burn data onto CDR or CDRW... that is... unless you actually *need* an entire DVD-RW's worth of storage capacity in contiguous media.
This is actually a fairly decent idea. I don't think it has a whelk's chance in a supernova of actually happening, but it's still a good idea.
IE has some real strengths when compared to Moz and the others... such as a fairly intellegent 'quickload' preloading mode that both Moz and Staroffice are trying to emulate, activex plugin archetecture, which is actually a pretty ideal environment for browser plugins (not applets), and all the microsoft specific html 'extensions' like Favicon and page transitions which the other projects haven't emulated because of their Microsoftness.
If these features were really OSS'd it in a Free manner, all the other OSS browser projects would benefit greatly.
Question for me is, are the different mpeg4 formats similiar enough that I can play my DiVX 3 and DiVX4 anime fansubs on it?
Why not have a fax server? Incoming faxes are digitally stored & manipulated. Much easier to manage and hardcopy is still easy to generate. The people on the other end are none the wiser.
Originally, we did have a fax server, but it was scrapped in favor of mulitple fax lines for management reasons... read: management thinks they understand the fax machines, but can't grasp the fax server, even when it plunks faxes in their Outlook inbox. The justification was 'cost of operation'. Yeah, sure. Whatever.
Even with a fax server, however, the data still has to go between an image format and Ascii to fit inside the DB. Frankly, I trust OCR software more than data entry, but results may vary...
The main problem with Gnutella and its derivatives is the fact that it relies on aggregate network bandwidth to perform searches. The Gnutella derivatives such as Limewire and Bearshare all try to get around this by keeping central search databases, but, of course, that makes them vulnerable to the same argument that killed Napster, and is starting to kill Kazaa/Morpheus/Fasttrack.
Having a huge backbone like this could make Gnutella work, at least as far as the backbone goes.
Trying to grab someone's packets without controlling their direct ISP is significantly more difficult.
Even if they manage that, using Blowfish or Rijndael (sp) in your emails would make it impossible to glean information from an intercepted email. 2048 bit DH encryption is significant enough to deter the FBI, so you can bet that it will throw a wrench into the works of potential theives/embezzlers.
It wouldn't even be as hard as forcing the no-nothing account managers at banks to encrypt and email the applications instead of faxing them. All you'd really have to do is rewrite the application program they're already using to take down customer information so that it encrypts the data and emails it, rather than printing or faxing it. This is a 1-2 day project for most of the coders I know.