I only walk and ride my bicycle. In the last 4 years (since I gave up driving) I haven't used any gasoline (hydrogen, natural gas, or electricity) while going from point A to point B.
However, you will have burnt off calories that you otherwise would not have needed to ingest in the first place.
Along the way from solar energy to your feet, a lot of energy is lost. For example, aots are only 1% effective at converting sunlight for use in growing. And that's not even counting all of the farming going on, transportation, packaging, making the stuff into oatmeal etc. etc.
In case you can't figure out the energy efficiency, just enter something like 76 kcal / 4600 btu in google. It works out to a measly 6%. Imagine the savings if you used a car (running on hydrogen, perhaps) that was powered by solar energy somewhere down the line.
While there's nothing groundbreaking about the 'inventions' themselves, the fact that he has persisted with his tinkering in the midst of an Arab culture speaks of incredible curiosity, freethinking, and persistence.
WTF? Exactly how does "an Arab culture" impede invention? There's a lack of research spending in most of the Arab world, granted, and there's a lot of illiteracy (keeping the people stupid makes ruling over them a lot easier) but nowhere in the Quran does it say "thou shalt not tinker", I'm sure.
Just because the Taleban were notoriously down on music doesn't mean even they were anti-technology. Anti dependence on the West for technology, perhaps. Anti-satellite television, most assuredly. But an anti-technology mindset isn't something you can claim for some of the earliest adopters of heat seeking handheld surface-to-air missiles.
And even all of that has precious little to do with the Taleban being Arabs, than with them just being a bunch of nut jobs.
In fact, the fact that most of the people in the Arab world are pretty poor, probably means they're a lot more inventive on a day-to-day basis than you or I, just because they need to be. They can hardly run down to Best Buy to replace broken stuff or to buy high-end alarm systems and the like. Expect the same to go on everywhere where the economy is pretty crappy for the average Joe.
Now, getting engaged in politics in certain countries in the Arab world (for example, US big buddies Saudi Arabia, the country that brought you Bin Laden before he got US funds to become mujahedin in Afghanistan *cough*) is most definately discouraged.
Unfortunately I don't know what is considered limit for DC voltage. In Europe, 50V AC is considered when you design inhouse electrical wiring.
Well, my power supply is 230V, AC and, IIRC up to 16 amps. (20 and 25 amps are also common values).
Perhaps you mean the Safety Extra Low Voltage norm (Low Voltage is anything between 50-1000V AC and 75-1500V DC).
SELV specifies that the maximum potential difference between anything you can contact on a device, or anything on the device and ground, must not exceed 42.4 V peak, or 60V DC.
Devices conforming to SELV don't need to be grounded, nor do they need special insulation.
60V is not very nice to feel btw - it's the ringing voltage on a regular POTS phone line - been there, been shocked by it.
Even at those voltages you can cause quite some damage, given enough amps.
I've never noticed water towers on top of any of the tall buildings here, including some 30+ story condos I've worked on.
These days you also rarely see those little elevator shacks that you sometimes see on top of buildings. It's all built-in.
The waterpressure in my flat is actually much better (i.e. higher) than in regular low-rise houses exactly because it's pumped in this way. That makes for excellent showering:)
Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.
Dictionaries should report on what a term means in common parlance. They're to be used to look up utteranced from common parlance, so you can understand what the language user was on about. If the dictionary said "100%", even though people overwhelmingly mean "the greater part", you could get quite confused, especially if English was not your first language.
Dictionaries that list the original meaning, or rather, the evolution of words and their meanings also exist. Those are called etymological dictionaries. There are also dictionaries that list jargon, specialized technical terms, business dictionaries, etc.
To say which meaning of a word is the correct one is entirely dependent on who you're going to be communication that word to. The point is to bring the messages across, after all.
Magpie also includes tools for adjusting a site's URL by incrementing or decrementing the numbers in it... This is a good extension for those who do a lot of research online.
Yup. I find this priceless while "researching" the webs many sequentially numbered jpegs.
If you're stuck browsing sequentially numbered jpegs at work using internet explorer (or you just don't use extensions), you can also use Jesse's bookmarklets. Just drag them to your bookmark bar!
The examples you mention are not realistic either, I think - for one thing, which judge or other authority would take complaints of that nature serious?
The FCC? Remember, the FCC imposes fines, no judge required at all. The FCC is dreaming up all these new and exciting categories like "profane speech" that wildly extent its authority (beyond the previous 7-words dogma, shit piss fuck cunt motherfucker cocksucker and tits.) No checks and balances there.
So what your saying is that people like howard stern should not be liable for what comes out of their mouths. I am held liable for what I say at every job I have ever had. How is he above that? Because he is a celebrity? Please explain it to me.
Because you can switch him off if you find him offensive? Same as your boss tells you to shut your mouth, only you don't even have to tell him to his face, just hit that dial! The feeling of POWER must be overwhelming!
Inoffensive speech needs no protection. That's what the First Amendment is all about. Protecting speech that others don't like.
What about sitting on the side of the road writing speed tickets? I guess THAT'S a waste of time too? I should be able to say or do whatever the fuck [emp. added-w] I want, just because I don't agree with a law, huh?
Why is it censorship if you require the broadcaster to keep a record of what was transmitted? And if a broadcaster has something to say, whether contentious or not, why would you not want to keep a record of it?
Why would you impose the burden of indecency enforcement on the overwhelming majority of decent broadcasters? Shouldn't the guilty bear the burden of their misdeeds?
Besides, if the broadcast was so offensive, and had such a nefarious impact on society, shouldn't you be able to find witnesses who saw the program themselves? Won't complainants now have the opportunity to comb over every second of every program on every channel for every word that might have sounded like a naughty sex act? Like "that floor is DIRTY, SANCHEZ, can you stop dropping stuff there"? Or how about "during the medical procedure A WAND IS INSERTED IN THE URETHRA"? "the Chinese restaurant FOOK LONG.."?
For crying out loud, I saw an Oprah show in which a nipple was blurred out during an explanation of a breastcancer self-examination!! You'd think it's fairly important to mention that one bump that's NORMAL to have on your breast?
Besides, the FCC is going censorship crazy anyway at the moment. Profane speech? What's up with that? You have nothing to hide if you're innocent (YEAH RIGHT), but under the FCC's new rules and decisions, who know's when you're innocent, and when you're (retroactively!) guilty?
On the other hand, I'd love it if broadcasters would just hang on to their programs (especially without all the logo's and interruptions and bullshit) on some sort of quality medium, like DVD. I positively hate seeing "old" footage that looks like shit, even though you remember seeing it only a year or two ago in broadcast quality. What do they use to store news footage and episodes of "Friends" anyway? VHS??
In fact, the FCC is encouraging broadcasters to BURN THEIR TAPES after 60-90 days, to prevent costly complaints. Kind of like burning books because you might not like what's in them. Yay for future historians!
For a free+gratis firewall for windows, try tdifw on sourceforge. Or, if it's for personal use, just stick with sygate. It's slightly more useful since it will not just log stuff, but alert you to programs wanting to go out over the internet, and you can decide there and then, rather than adding it after the fact to tdifw's conf file.
Nero is nice, and comes with most burners, but not perfect. I find the cdrao tools very nice. Free for personal use, and really just a GUI for some of the tools that exist on linux.
IDSL is not the same as ADSL-over-ISDN. The latter is the same as ADSL over analogue, but shifted a bit w.r.t. frequencies to stay clear of the slightly wider band of frequencies used by ISDN. The ADSL "channels" are actually modulated using (usually) OFDM.
IDSL uses a simple 2B1Q modulation (same as ISDN), and is pretty slow at only 144 kbps. Plus, you don't get a voice line, only data - the data channel replaces the voice channels.
That's what I ment, just it being Gentoo and everything is compiled. So while gcc is compiling firefox and it "flips a bit", that could compile an error into the firefox code, correct? Which is why I've heard many times not to be overclocking while your compiling anything.
Obviously, that is entirely different from the remote possibility of the CPU "flipping a bit" randomly when you're downloading (precompiled) stuff... exactly how? Not at all, perhaps?
Mind linking us to where we can buy mp3 players for $10 each? I'd love to buy a bunch, at that price.
Call the Taiwanese embassy and have them send you their trade catalogue. Select mp3 gadget manufacturer, e-mail them for a quote on 10.000 devices, arrange shipping by container, pay duties, and you're set!
Nokia expects to "launch" 35 new models this year. Thirty-five! And that's down from a projection of 40. Launching them 5 at a time as Nokia does, that means that their "product cycle" is less than 2 months.. And I still happen across shops that happen to have the phone I owned 5 year ago sitting quietly on the shelf, still unused in its original wrappings.
And they all do the same job. Whilst there's no shortage of potentially substantial features to be added, you can count the number of phones that support for example 3G on the fingers of 1 hand. The rest send text-messages, dial and play a game or two.
In truth, nobody needs all those new features. Bluetooth is very handy, and GPRS is nice for data (until 3G comes along), but you can already get all of that in last year's boring businessman-model.
These new models are all basically the same, or rather, based on only a few underlying hardware platforms. Obviously the N-Gage is different from your average teenager's phone or a smartphone, but within each type the variation is both endless and pitifully trivial.
Motorola was a master at this, they even kept older models in production by placing the new hardware with dumbed-down software in the older shell, adding a weight to keep the handset weighing as much as the old model(!).
The same is of course true of Digital Cameras. Each new model only replaces the CCD with a few more megapixels, or adds some software feature, perhaps changes the shell to something less plasticcy looking. The Olympus range is a good example. Or IIRC the Canon 10D which can be made to do almost all of the 1D's tricks, except take more pictures per second (due to RAM speed/amount apparently).
The large assumption would be (and is), that PHP being a scripting language, is easy to develop for. It is to an extent. Anyone can make a quick message board.
[Pet peeve alert!!]
You'd think anyone can make a quick message board.. But actually, there is no end to the number of relative newbies who can't get their heads around the task, especially when it comes to threading. Which I suppose is the reason you see so many PHP forums that don't have threading, unlike our beloved slashdot that even indents messages correctly.
These people are completely befuddled that their database of choice (usually MySQL) can't do recursive queries, so if every post contains a pointer to its parentpost, it's pretty expensive to thread it. I've tried steering people in the right direction by explaining that a path also uniquely identifies a node in a tree, even comparing it with your favorite directory; the filesystem. They never catch on.
Perhaps it's not "OO" enough..
(Explaining that you can thread messages *after* you've performed the query bewilders them as well.. Even if you give example code. And I'm no hot shot programmer, either..)
He sold it to Lion's Gate. What do you want him to do, buy a lot of film, do all the transcoding himself and then drive around in a van and give them to theaters? You know, distributors DO have a purpose (well at least until digital distribution and advertising become the mainstream).
He sold it to Miramax (a Disney corporation) who then sold it onto Lion's Gate for distribution. Lion's Gate doesn't have the copyright, only a license.
There is such a thing as non-exclusive rights, which Moore could have sold to Miramax, rather than the copyright itself, which he did.
For example; if you release software under the GPL (assuming it's made entirely by yourself) you can still go ahead and sell it, since the GPL is a non-exclusive license. Vice versa, if you want to release your stuff under the GPL, you have to make sure you didn't sell the copyright (or an exclusive license).
Moore could have thought of it before he sold his/our rights. It wasn't like this whole p2p/copyright/Disney|MPAA==Evil thing just dropped out of the clear blue sky, now is it?
Michaeal Moore as an agent of the company which owns the copyright has authorized the duplication of the said work.
No he's not. Otherwise he wouldn't have had all that trouble with Disney not going out and finding him a US distributor - he could have done that himself if in fact he had the authority. He signed away his (and by extension, our) rights to Miramax/Disney.
The story says "Fahrenheit 9/11 director backs illegal not-for-profit downloads".
But if the copyright owner backs it, then it's not illegal. Moore had the copyright to begin with, since he made the flick. But wait, he signed it away! So now he has to back people illegally distributing his own brainchild?
Or maybe, just maybe, he should have thought harder before he signed away our rights to some distributor. Disney, was it not? You know.. Extend-copyrights-"temporarily" over-and-over-again-Disney? That one.
Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption. It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.
It gets easier the more discs you have, though, since then you end up in the realm of differential cryptanalysis.
Also, they seem to be most worried about the academy members themselves - and they still get to see the movies (plaintext!). Even if they're mostly worried about academy member's evil nieces that they might have obliviously handed DVDs to in the past, what's to say members won't lend DVDs+the special player to their friends and family now?
3 acedemy members acting in cahoots can also defeat watermarking efforts - simply compare the three streams and throw away any artifacts that appear in only 1 stream. This would probably be even easier to do when you (have to) depend on analogue outputs. It only makes the challenge greater.
But perhaps they're not worried about academy members, all those DVD screeners that get onto the web are all down to dumpster-diving fiends who get access to one disk, no player.
This is something most people never think about. You actually could have several passwds that work for a given account...anything that hashes to the same thing is a working passwd.
Another neat example of this principle at work is the soundex hash function, which was designed for the US Census to lookup names. It encodes a name such as Johnson as an alphanumerical code J525. Other, similar names, such as Jonsson, Joganson and even Jamieson and Jenkins are converted to J525 as well. In this way, even if people's names are misspelled in some way in the census (or when they were registered at birth; family names tend to evolve over time) they can still be found by a reasonable approximation.
And because the soundex hash is computed when the records are stored, there isn't the kind of overhead that you'd get from a regular expression/glob search over all the records.
The modest computational requirements for what amounts to a very clever phonetic lookup mechanish aren't surprising in a way; Soundex was patented in 1918.
Now imagine your password was stored as a soundex hash.. Ouch! Even if someone looking over your shoulder when you type in your password got half the letters wrong, he'd still get in!
This is exactly why it's so important that cryptographic one-way hashes don't regularly produce the same hash. The name for finding a password that's not the same, but hashes the same is a birthday attack, named after the birthday paradox.
Procomm sucked total ass. Telemate also had an editor, backlog, scripting (83 page reference! very easy to learn; I even made a simple BBS (though without forums/echo's, but with support for doors) at one time), and pretty much all the other features that are listed for Telix.
It was also very, very nice to use when dialling BBSes.. You just selected a number of BBSes, and it would try all their numbers, and skip to the next one on a busy tone. If it connected to a BBS, it would then not try to dial its alternate numbers, but go straight on ahead to the next BBS. I think it could also import/export the list of BBSes easily.
The sad thing is that Telemate was so good, it led to me downloading trumpet winsock and netscape. Ultimately, it signed its own death warrant. Seeing JPEGs as the download doesn't seem such a big deal anymore.. Connecting to only one BBS at a time? Sometimes even at long distance rates? E-mail addresses like S.Omedude@1:128/459.56? Walking to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways?
OMG the author mentions Telemate! I've forgotten all about it. Well, not really forgotten it, only forgot its name (the name Terminate, from its l33t competitor hangs in my mind for some reason).
Telemate was the ULTIMATE BBS terminal application! It did all sorts of funky protocols (like Z-modem with resumed downloads), it did chained downloads with correctly guesstimated time-left for current/all file(s), you could use plugins (like one plugin that let you see JPGs when downloading so you could easily cancel the ghey ones before having completed them) it was multi-threaded, had cool text-based windows, scripts, it was totally the bomb!
*snif* finally a Microsoft employee brings a tear to my eye for something else than excruciating frustration..
Slashdot Mirror
I only walk and ride my bicycle. In the last 4 years (since I gave up driving) I haven't used any gasoline (hydrogen, natural gas, or electricity) while going from point A to point B.
However, you will have burnt off calories that you otherwise would not have needed to ingest in the first place.
Along the way from solar energy to your feet, a lot of energy is lost. For example, aots are only 1% effective at converting sunlight for use in growing. And that's not even counting all of the farming going on, transportation, packaging, making the stuff into oatmeal etc. etc.
Here is an interesting link.
In case you can't figure out the energy efficiency, just enter something like 76 kcal / 4600 btu in google. It works out to a measly 6%. Imagine the savings if you used a car (running on hydrogen, perhaps) that was powered by solar energy somewhere down the line.
And that's for a vegetarian breakfast!
While there's nothing groundbreaking about the 'inventions' themselves, the fact that he has persisted with his tinkering in the midst of an Arab culture speaks of incredible curiosity, freethinking, and persistence.
WTF? Exactly how does "an Arab culture" impede invention? There's a lack of research spending in most of the Arab world, granted, and there's a lot of illiteracy (keeping the people stupid makes ruling over them a lot easier) but nowhere in the Quran does it say "thou shalt not tinker", I'm sure.
Just because the Taleban were notoriously down on music doesn't mean even they were anti-technology. Anti dependence on the West for technology, perhaps. Anti-satellite television, most assuredly. But an anti-technology mindset isn't something you can claim for some of the earliest adopters of heat seeking handheld surface-to-air missiles.
And even all of that has precious little to do with the Taleban being Arabs, than with them just being a bunch of nut jobs.
In fact, the fact that most of the people in the Arab world are pretty poor, probably means they're a lot more inventive on a day-to-day basis than you or I, just because they need to be. They can hardly run down to Best Buy to replace broken stuff or to buy high-end alarm systems and the like. Expect the same to go on everywhere where the economy is pretty crappy for the average Joe.
Now, getting engaged in politics in certain countries in the Arab world (for example, US big buddies Saudi Arabia, the country that brought you Bin Laden before he got US funds to become mujahedin in Afghanistan *cough*) is most definately discouraged.
Unfortunately I don't know what is considered limit for DC voltage. In Europe, 50V AC is considered when you design inhouse electrical wiring.
Well, my power supply is 230V, AC and, IIRC up to 16 amps. (20 and 25 amps are also common values).
Perhaps you mean the Safety Extra Low Voltage norm (Low Voltage is anything between 50-1000V AC and 75-1500V DC).
SELV specifies that the maximum potential difference between anything you can contact on a device, or anything on the device and ground, must not exceed 42.4 V peak, or 60V DC.
Devices conforming to SELV don't need to be grounded, nor do they need special insulation.
60V is not very nice to feel btw - it's the ringing voltage on a regular POTS phone line - been there, been shocked by it.
Even at those voltages you can cause quite some damage, given enough amps.
I've never noticed water towers on top of any of the tall buildings here, including some 30+ story condos I've worked on.
:)
These days you also rarely see those little elevator shacks that you sometimes see on top of buildings. It's all built-in.
The waterpressure in my flat is actually much better (i.e. higher) than in regular low-rise houses exactly because it's pumped in this way. That makes for excellent showering
Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.
Dictionaries should report on what a term means in common parlance. They're to be used to look up utteranced from common parlance, so you can understand what the language user was on about. If the dictionary said "100%", even though people overwhelmingly mean "the greater part", you could get quite confused, especially if English was not your first language.
Dictionaries that list the original meaning, or rather, the evolution of words and their meanings also exist. Those are called etymological dictionaries. There are also dictionaries that list jargon, specialized technical terms, business dictionaries, etc.
To say which meaning of a word is the correct one is entirely dependent on who you're going to be communication that word to. The point is to bring the messages across, after all.
Even smaller USB flash drive.
Though I've seen one that's even smaller, actually as flat as a creditcard.
Magpie also includes tools for adjusting a site's URL by incrementing or decrementing the numbers in it ... This is a good extension for those who do a lot of research online.
Yup. I find this priceless while "researching" the webs many sequentially numbered jpegs.
If you're stuck browsing sequentially numbered jpegs at work using internet explorer (or you just don't use extensions), you can also use Jesse's bookmarklets.
Just drag them to your bookmark bar!
The examples you mention are not realistic either, I think - for one thing, which judge or other authority would take complaints of that nature serious?
The FCC? Remember, the FCC imposes fines, no judge required at all. The FCC is dreaming up all these new and exciting categories like "profane speech" that wildly extent its authority (beyond the previous 7-words dogma, shit piss fuck cunt motherfucker cocksucker and tits.) No checks and balances there.
So what your saying is that people like howard stern should not be liable for what comes out of their mouths. I am held liable for what I say at every job I have ever had. How is he above that? Because he is a celebrity? Please explain it to me.
Because you can switch him off if you find him offensive? Same as your boss tells you to shut your mouth, only you don't even have to tell him to his face, just hit that dial! The feeling of POWER must be overwhelming!
Inoffensive speech needs no protection. That's what the First Amendment is all about. Protecting speech that others don't like.
What about sitting on the side of the road writing speed tickets? I guess THAT'S a waste of time too? I should be able to say or do whatever the fuck [emp. added-w] I want, just because I don't agree with a law, huh?
Amen, brother! FUCK indecent speech!
Why is it censorship if you require the broadcaster to keep a record of what was transmitted?
And if a broadcaster has something to say, whether contentious or not, why would you not want to keep a record of it?
Why would you impose the burden of indecency enforcement on the overwhelming majority of decent broadcasters? Shouldn't the guilty bear the burden of their misdeeds?
Besides, if the broadcast was so offensive, and had such a nefarious impact on society, shouldn't you be able to find witnesses who saw the program themselves? Won't complainants now have the opportunity to comb over every second of every program on every channel for every word that might have sounded like a naughty sex act? Like "that floor is DIRTY, SANCHEZ, can you stop dropping stuff there"? Or how about "during the medical procedure A WAND IS INSERTED IN THE URETHRA"? "the Chinese restaurant FOOK LONG.."?
For crying out loud, I saw an Oprah show in which a nipple was blurred out during an explanation of a breastcancer self-examination!! You'd think it's fairly important to mention that one bump that's NORMAL to have on your breast?
Besides, the FCC is going censorship crazy anyway at the moment. Profane speech? What's up with that? You have nothing to hide if you're innocent (YEAH RIGHT), but under the FCC's new rules and decisions, who know's when you're innocent, and when you're (retroactively!) guilty?
On the other hand, I'd love it if broadcasters would just hang on to their programs (especially without all the logo's and interruptions and bullshit) on some sort of quality medium, like DVD. I positively hate seeing "old" footage that looks like shit, even though you remember seeing it only a year or two ago in broadcast quality. What do they use to store news footage and episodes of "Friends" anyway? VHS??
In fact, the FCC is encouraging broadcasters to BURN THEIR TAPES after 60-90 days, to prevent costly complaints. Kind of like burning books because you might not like what's in them. Yay for future historians!
For a free+gratis firewall for windows, try tdifw on sourceforge.
Or, if it's for personal use, just stick with sygate. It's slightly more useful since it will not just log stuff, but alert you to programs wanting to go out over the internet, and you can decide there and then, rather than adding it after the fact to tdifw's conf file.
Nero is nice, and comes with most burners, but not perfect. I find the cdrao tools very nice. Free for personal use, and really just a GUI for some of the tools that exist on linux.
IDSL is not the same as ADSL-over-ISDN. The latter is the same as ADSL over analogue, but shifted a bit w.r.t. frequencies to stay clear of the slightly wider band of frequencies used by ISDN. The ADSL "channels" are actually modulated using (usually) OFDM.
IDSL uses a simple 2B1Q modulation (same as ISDN), and is pretty slow at only 144 kbps. Plus, you don't get a voice line, only data - the data channel replaces the voice channels.
That's what I ment, just it being Gentoo and everything is compiled. So while gcc is compiling firefox and it "flips a bit", that could compile an error into the firefox code, correct? Which is why I've heard many times not to be overclocking while your compiling anything.
Obviously, that is entirely different from the remote possibility of the CPU "flipping a bit" randomly when you're downloading (precompiled) stuff... exactly how? Not at all, perhaps?
Mind linking us to where we can buy mp3 players for $10 each? I'd love to buy a bunch, at that price.
Call the Taiwanese embassy and have them send you their trade catalogue. Select mp3 gadget manufacturer, e-mail them for a quote on 10.000 devices, arrange shipping by container, pay duties, and you're set!
Nokia expects to "launch" 35 new models this year. Thirty-five! And that's down from a projection of 40. Launching them 5 at a time as Nokia does, that means that their "product cycle" is less than 2 months.. And I still happen across shops that happen to have the phone I owned 5 year ago sitting quietly on the shelf, still unused in its original wrappings.
And they all do the same job. Whilst there's no shortage of potentially substantial features to be added, you can count the number of phones that support for example 3G on the fingers of 1 hand. The rest send text-messages, dial and play a game or two.
In truth, nobody needs all those new features. Bluetooth is very handy, and GPRS is nice for data (until 3G comes along), but you can already get all of that in last year's boring businessman-model.
These new models are all basically the same, or rather, based on only a few underlying hardware platforms. Obviously the N-Gage is different from your average teenager's phone or a smartphone, but within each type the variation is both endless and pitifully trivial.
Motorola was a master at this, they even kept older models in production by placing the new hardware with dumbed-down software in the older shell, adding a weight to keep the handset weighing as much as the old model(!).
The same is of course true of Digital Cameras. Each new model only replaces the CCD with a few more megapixels, or adds some software feature, perhaps changes the shell to something less plasticcy looking. The Olympus range is a good example. Or IIRC the Canon 10D which can be made to do almost all of the 1D's tricks, except take more pictures per second (due to RAM speed/amount apparently).
The large assumption would be (and is), that PHP being a scripting language, is easy to develop for. It is to an extent. Anyone can make a quick message board.
[Pet peeve alert!!]
You'd think anyone can make a quick message board.. But actually, there is no end to the number of relative newbies who can't get their heads around the task, especially when it comes to threading. Which I suppose is the reason you see so many PHP forums that don't have threading, unlike our beloved slashdot that even indents messages correctly.
These people are completely befuddled that their database of choice (usually MySQL) can't do recursive queries, so if every post contains a pointer to its parentpost, it's pretty expensive to thread it. I've tried steering people in the right direction by explaining that a path also uniquely identifies a node in a tree, even comparing it with your favorite directory; the filesystem. They never catch on.
Perhaps it's not "OO" enough..
(Explaining that you can thread messages *after* you've performed the query bewilders them as well.. Even if you give example code. And I'm no hot shot programmer, either..)
The article writer was almost exactly paraphrasing verbatim.
He sold it to Lion's Gate. What do you want him to do, buy a lot of film, do all the transcoding himself and then drive around in a van and give them to theaters? You know, distributors DO have a purpose (well at least until digital distribution and advertising become the mainstream).
He sold it to Miramax (a Disney corporation) who then sold it onto Lion's Gate for distribution. Lion's Gate doesn't have the copyright, only a license.
There is such a thing as non-exclusive rights, which Moore could have sold to Miramax, rather than the copyright itself, which he did.
For example; if you release software under the GPL (assuming it's made entirely by yourself) you can still go ahead and sell it, since the GPL is a non-exclusive license. Vice versa, if you want to release your stuff under the GPL, you have to make sure you didn't sell the copyright (or an exclusive license).
Moore could have thought of it before he sold his/our rights. It wasn't like this whole p2p/copyright/Disney|MPAA==Evil thing just dropped out of the clear blue sky, now is it?
Michaeal Moore as an agent of the company which owns the copyright has authorized the duplication of the said work.
No he's not. Otherwise he wouldn't have had all that trouble with Disney not going out and finding him a US distributor - he could have done that himself if in fact he had the authority. He signed away his (and by extension, our) rights to Miramax/Disney.
The story says "Fahrenheit 9/11 director backs illegal not-for-profit downloads".
But if the copyright owner backs it, then it's not illegal. Moore had the copyright to begin with, since he made the flick. But wait, he signed it away! So now he has to back people illegally distributing his own brainchild?
Or maybe, just maybe, he should have thought harder before he signed away our rights to some distributor. Disney, was it not? You know.. Extend-copyrights-"temporarily" over-and-over-again-Disney? That one.
Suppose this new system has only one key per disc, coded for a particular private player, using 256-bit Rijndael encryption. It will indeed be uncrackable given only the disc, which is what the quote said.
It gets easier the more discs you have, though, since then you end up in the realm of differential cryptanalysis.
Also, they seem to be most worried about the academy members themselves - and they still get to see the movies (plaintext!). Even if they're mostly worried about academy member's evil nieces that they might have obliviously handed DVDs to in the past, what's to say members won't lend DVDs+the special player to their friends and family now?
3 acedemy members acting in cahoots can also defeat watermarking efforts - simply compare the three streams and throw away any artifacts that appear in only 1 stream. This would probably be even easier to do when you (have to) depend on analogue outputs. It only makes the challenge greater.
But perhaps they're not worried about academy members, all those DVD screeners that get onto the web are all down to dumpster-diving fiends who get access to one disk, no player.
This is something most people never think about. You actually could have several passwds that work for a given account...anything that hashes to the same thing is a working passwd.
Another neat example of this principle at work is the soundex hash function, which was designed for the US Census to lookup names. It encodes a name such as Johnson as an alphanumerical code J525. Other, similar names, such as Jonsson, Joganson and even Jamieson and Jenkins are converted to J525 as well. In this way, even if people's names are misspelled in some way in the census (or when they were registered at birth; family names tend to evolve over time) they can still be found by a reasonable approximation.
And because the soundex hash is computed when the records are stored, there isn't the kind of overhead that you'd get from a regular expression/glob search over all the records.
The modest computational requirements for what amounts to a very clever phonetic lookup mechanish aren't surprising in a way; Soundex was patented in 1918.
You can play with soundex on this page.
Now imagine your password was stored as a soundex hash.. Ouch! Even if someone looking over your shoulder when you type in your password got half the letters wrong, he'd still get in!
This is exactly why it's so important that cryptographic one-way hashes don't regularly produce the same hash. The name for finding a password that's not the same, but hashes the same is a birthday attack, named after the birthday paradox.
This is the reason why you should salt!
Procomm sucked total ass. Telemate also had an editor, backlog, scripting (83 page reference! very easy to learn; I even made a simple BBS (though without forums/echo's, but with support for doors) at one time), and pretty much all the other features that are listed for Telix.
It was also very, very nice to use when dialling BBSes.. You just selected a number of BBSes, and it would try all their numbers, and skip to the next one on a busy tone. If it connected to a BBS, it would then not try to dial its alternate numbers, but go straight on ahead to the next BBS. I think it could also import/export the list of BBSes easily.
The sad thing is that Telemate was so good, it led to me downloading trumpet winsock and netscape. Ultimately, it signed its own death warrant. Seeing JPEGs as the download doesn't seem such a big deal anymore.. Connecting to only one BBS at a time? Sometimes even at long distance rates? E-mail addresses like S.Omedude@1:128/459.56? Walking to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways?
It all seems such a distant past now..
OMG the author mentions Telemate! I've forgotten all about it. Well, not really forgotten it, only forgot its name (the name Terminate, from its l33t competitor hangs in my mind for some reason).
Telemate was the ULTIMATE BBS terminal application! It did all sorts of funky protocols (like Z-modem with resumed downloads), it did chained downloads with correctly guesstimated time-left for current/all file(s), you could use plugins (like one plugin that let you see JPGs when downloading so you could easily cancel the ghey ones before having completed them) it was multi-threaded, had cool text-based windows, scripts, it was totally the bomb!
*snif* finally a Microsoft employee brings a tear to my eye for something else than excruciating frustration..
Excuse me while I wallow in nostalgia..