Let me expand on this -- since I've investigated keyboards for a related project.
If you take apart a keyboard, there is usually a small circuitboard/chip in the upper right/middle of the keyboard, near where the cable comes in. This is the keyboard encoder. Its roughly, oh, say about 2"x1".
The rest of the keyboard is the casing and a few plastic membranes with traces for the keys. The keys on a keyboard form a matrix or grid, with, say, 13 inputs on each side. The top of the grid may be inputs A-M, and the side of the grid may be inputs 1-13. When a key is pressed, the two membranes meet at a junction of the grid, bridging the inputs. So pressing the 'b' key might bridge F-2, pressinig 'o' might bridge A-12. Rather nifty.
The encoder transates the grid junctions (A-12, F2, whatever) into key codes for the computer. When no keys are pressed, there are no grid junctions (ergo, none of the inputs are bridged/closed)
Therefore, to make a home-made dongle, take apart the keyboard, throw away the plastic membranes and casing, and put the circuit-board and most of the cord in a project-box from radioshack. Ergo, one keyboard dongle, no soldering.
If you are feeling adventurous, cut the cable down to 2" or so and resolder the keyboard.
If you have more money then time, why not google for "keyboard encoder". The KE18 model is $45 dollars, and is about 3"x2".
I've seen the [CPU] temp jump up to 61c-62c which from what I've heard is either fine to it's too hot. I've heard the gamut of people saying it's not a problem and not worry about it.
Er, why don't you do your own research? A quick google search shows that the maximum CPU temperature for XPs seems to be 85C. I believe the XPs have an on-chip temperature sensor, which should be pretty accurate. Figuring in a 15C margin-of-error, I wouldn't be concerned unless the CPU hit 65-70C on a hot day.
Life as we know it is based on chemical reactions. Life as we know it also is based on water and hydrocarbons. At very low temperatures, these chemical reactions don't work. At low temperatures, these reactions work slowly. At relatively high temperatures, these reactions take place quickly.
Now, it may be possible to have some sort of system for life that works at 40 Kelvin[1], but this is unlikely.
Life appears to need long chemical chains (at least for encoding its own data). Hydrocarbons are rather adept at this. Life also needs a fluid that will dissolve most compounds. Water is rather adept at this. So, most of us expect to find life where there are plenty of long-chain hydrocarbons in warm water.
Of course, the above explanation is rather simplified, and I encourage you to do further research.
[1] Robert Forward wrote a fictional book about this.
Finally, a ship they can use to seek out and disturb R'lyeh...
Wouldn't that be a positive change in leadership?
As a bonus, consider what will happen when the RIAA/MPAA sends lobbiests to plead for a new restrictive law? No more lobbiests and the bill isn't passed.
Article: "As long as new game titles are top quality - offering exciting game play and high production value - we believe that interactive Christian games will skyrocket in popularity much like Christian music did 15 years ago."
Well, if that is their baseline for success -- we can only hope.
You may not be familiar with it, but the amount of Christian music being sold isn't small -- 47 million albums/year according to one source.
Christian music is big business, with its own famous bands, concerts, and record lables. And don't think that its all old time gospel music either -- it runs the gauntlet from folk music to pop to Christian metal.
I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.
Procmail can do it, but please reconsider the auto-replies. What happens if I'm pissed at bob and decide to sent out 1m spams with the return address of bob@example.com? More common, what about viruses that forge headers?
but our other servers show many signs of possibly being compromised including unexplained outgoing traffic,... strange ports being open...
Perhaps I'm being naive, but what's preventing you from using 'netstat', 'nmap -sV', and plain old 'netcat' to figure out what the strange ports are doing?
My boyfriend and I are barely living about the poverty line.
My advice to you is -- learn to be frugal. Don't eat out. Don't make payments on a car. Shop at thrift stores and garage sales. Don't have a cable bill. Only have one phone bill. Don't buy movies, if you have to, only rent the cheap ones. Don't go to movies. Don't carry a balance on your credit card.
Does it suck? Kinda. But you have to cut back to pull yourself out of a hellhole.
When Otto von Bismarck invented the concept of public pensions in the late 1800s, the retirement age of 65 was chosen -- and life expectancy was 45.
When Social Security went into effect in the 30s, with a retirement age of 65 based on the German system, life expectancy was 63.
I don't think you understand the term "life expectancy" and what it means. Life expectancy is the amount of years lived divided by the number of people born. In humans, the age of highest mortality is infanthood and youth, and old age.
Ergo, if many infants died, the average life expectancy was low. The main gain in life expectancy in recent history was the reduction of infant mortality.
Now, if you looked at the average life expectancy for 20-year olds, you could derive some meaning from your statistics. As it stands, your statistics are meaningless.
Infant mortality lowered life expectancy in the late 1800's and in the 1930's. However, the infants who died never lived long enough to contribute money into public pensions. Ergo, flawed conclusion with your statistics.
This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.
This is an arm-chair economist viewpoint of the OS incentives:
Historically, there has been certain societies with a "giver" economy -- whoever had the biggest celibration or gave away the most gifts gained standing in their community. Some Polynesians and West Coast Indians had this economy.
Online, for Open Source, a giver economy works well -- one can improve their standing by being a well-known coder (ergo, being known for giving).
Don't confuse this with the other drive behind open source -- itch scratching. If I have an itch, and write a program to scratch it, unless I'm going to sell that program, it costs me very little to put that program online for others to download. Its not like a traditional commodity - once I give it away, I still have it.
The third possibility is that sharing knowledge (code) is good for a community (and its members) in the long run. Imagine two communities -- one community where the hunter tells the rest of his tribe his secrets, and another community where each hunter goes to his grave with his secrets. In the long run, which tribe will be more successful. "Shoulders of Giants."
You can get physics lectures on tape to listen to. I once borrowed lectures by Stephen Hawking, and Richard Fineman from a friend. The Fineman ones were great, but I can't find a link. The Hawking ones were good too, if you could stand the computer voice for hours on end.
Try searching for Richard Feynman.
IIRC, Amazon had them, but at a pretty good price.
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did.:(
Who modded this off-topic? It might be meta-article, but its far from being off topic.
Ne'ermind the title is wrong:
The title is Will Harvey On There Not Being There Anymore?
Lets expand that (without changing the meaning) for understandability.
[The person] Will Harvey on [the game] "There" not being there [online] anymore?
Is that a question? Perhaps. The title is a tad ambiguous, but the interview seems to imply that "There" may not be an online game.
Therefore, the title is more appropriately:
[The person] Will Harvey on [the possibility of the game] "There" not being there [online] anymore?
STILL doesn't rate as a question, but perhaps there is some other interpretation that I'm missing.
A clearer title, IMHO, would be along the lines of:
Founder of "There" Discusses the Game's Future.
That's only two characters longer then the current title, and a lot clearer. Not counting the period (which doesn't seem to be used in/. titles), that's only one character longer.
You think it's a conspiracy that "dinosaurs" went extinct and "reptiles" survived? Is your "tinfoil hat" shaped like a cone? Does it have the letters D-U-N-C-E written on it? You might want to check on that.
* SIGH * By "tinfoil hat", I meant a sort of paranoia -- Reptiles and Dinosaurs are different, and presumably, if there were any Dinosaurs running around (especially bird-hipped dinos), we would know them when we saw them.
I'm still confused on why *all* the Dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, yet the rest of land animals (amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds) survived.
Dinosaurs weren't all big dumb lumbering brutes -- some were as small as our present-day reptiles and amphibians, and had mostly the same environment. Ne'ermind that at least one of the reptiles had a brain/body mass ratio better than a wolf.
So why did every dinosaur die but reptiles survived? Why did every dinosaur die but birds survived?
Questions like these make me discount a climatic-event hypothesis. Sure, it may have been enough to kill off a lot of dinosaurs, but not all of them. Instead, I want to suspect that perhaps, biologically or genetically, there was something inferior about dinosaur physiology -- something so deeply embedded that even deviations away from the norm weren't enough to adapt to a new environment.
On my tinfoil-hat days, I start thinking about how we might want to look closer at everything we classify as 'reptile' and make sure we aren't mistaken.
Actually, I've found that very few "geeks" want freedom, because freedom also brings with it responsibility. I've found that what many geeks really want is really lack of responsibility. Look at the various "geek issues"... it's all about doing whatever they want with no responsibility or cost.
Er, are you really sure? Lets look at your examples more closely:
Downloading music for free.
Er, downloading music for free is not illegal. Downloading copyrighted music for free is not illegal. Here's a short list of free music to download.
As for infringed copyrighted music, there are plenty of Slashdotters (geeks) who said "go after the downloaders" and are content to see them go under.
Downloading software for free.
Er, yes, geeks like to download software for no cost. Almost all of the software I use on my machines was downloaded for free -- Debian, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Abiword, Sodipodi, etc.
For the issues of illegal music downloading and illegal software downloading, I think you confuse geeks getting upset at the high penalties with support for the crimes. Its one thing to support copyright infringement. Its another thing to get upset with copyright infringers getting more severe sentences than violent criminals.
Creating viruses (it's Microsoft's fault, don't you know).
You are confusing the issues. Windows viruses are, in a large part, encouraged by Microsoft's lack of security. When many people "blame" Microsoft for viruses, they mean that Microsoft Windows shows a stunning lack of security by default. We all know that there are a few script-kiddies out there writing viruses, and they are the source of viruses, but if it wasn't for Microsoft lowering the amount of effort needed, we wouldn't see as many viruses.
As for copyright, us geeks are paranoid. I doubt many people here would have problems with a copyright flag for TV or radio broadcasts (other then correctly assuming that (1) they will require new purchases of hardware and (2) they will be cracked rather quickly). But we are paranoid -- if, say, every MP3 was tagged according to if the artist wanted redistribution or not, a lot of indie bands would have a leg up on the mainstream bands. This gives the indie bands an edge that the RIAA does not want. Ergo, we are assuming that any DRM in music will automatically assume that all music is pirated, unless proven otherwise.
As for DRM on the PC, we see that Microsoft is launching an offensive against Open Source. If they can create a huge financial cost for any piece of software to be certified to run on a new PC, and if they can be in control of the certification, they can use that against Open Source.
Finally, I will admit, a lot of us geeks have a slight problem with legality vs morality. The anime fan-subbing community is a perfect example: A lot of the groups will only fan-sub anime not available in the US, and will stop distribution as soon as an official English copy comes out. Is that legal? No. Is it moral? Perhaps.
A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time.
I just finished playing both Doom I and Doom II through Doom Legacy, and I want to say -- there still isn't anything like Doom I.
Doom I is brilliantly balanced.
Its interesting, its scary, and it encourages brains, not mindless shooting. [Mindless shooting will get you through Doom I, but tactics will make the job a lot easier.]
The lighting is superb, the level designs are smart, the hidden areas well done.[0]. 10 years later, its still a hell of a good game.
Quake doesn't have it, Half-Life doesn't have it, and even Doom II doesn't have it, but there's something about Doom that makes it worth replaying.
I wish there were more games like Doom I.
[0] Compare this to Doom II, which had a tendency to throw monsters at you in large groups just to increase "difficulty". Even with the double-barrel shotgun, secret Wolfenstein levels, and elder sign, I still prefer Doom I.
Someone please enlighten me as to how this could possibly be bad.
The cost of such a project is huge.
The benefits of such a project is minor.
Ergo: Waste of money.
If the supply of resources is infinite, then this wouldn't be a problem.
However, we are living in the real world, and there are other things that this money could be spent on.
For 911, we could be investing into 911 infrastructure -- call centers, dispatching, maps, etc. Or we could invest this money into healthcare -- low-cost loans for medical and nursing students, hospital expansions, etc. Or perhaps into more police staff, etc.
For terrorism, we could be spending the money in the former USSR, tracking where the Soviet biological and radioactive weapons are. We could spend that money securing said weapons. Or we could spend that money luring more Arabic translators into our intelligence services.
What the company actually wants is a simple program that is fairly static and simple.
That's for programming.
This is web design.
In my cynical experience, most small companies have no idea what they want in a website and have little, if any need for a website. The only reason why they want a website is that other people have a website.
The net result of this tends to be a flashy website that has no purpose and isn't used by anyone.
Yeah. It's not like I'm paying your money or anything, so why in the hell would you want to do what I say?
If you are willing to hire someone to do work you don't know how to do, you should be willing to listen to them.
Example: Lets say a client comes up to me and asks about upgrading his CPU in an AMD 1.13GHz/64MB machine because his machine is too slow.
I'd ask him what he was doing and probably suggest upgrading the memory instead.
The problem is when he ignores my suggestion and goes with the CPU -- in the end, his machine will be slow, he won't be happy, and it will look like I did a crappy job.
There's no such thing as "public land" -- the government owns every single bit of land in the country that's not owned privately (and even then -- there's property tax)
Depending on how you define "country", there are two exceptions that I can think of off the top of my head.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me expand on this -- since I've investigated keyboards for a related project.
If you take apart a keyboard, there is usually a small circuitboard/chip in the upper right/middle of the keyboard, near where the cable comes in. This is the keyboard encoder. Its roughly, oh, say about 2"x1".
The rest of the keyboard is the casing and a few plastic membranes with traces for the keys. The keys on a keyboard form a matrix or grid, with, say, 13 inputs on each side. The top of the grid may be inputs A-M, and the side of the grid may be inputs 1-13. When a key is pressed, the two membranes meet at a junction of the grid, bridging the inputs. So pressing the 'b' key might bridge F-2, pressinig 'o' might bridge A-12. Rather nifty.
The encoder transates the grid junctions (A-12, F2, whatever) into key codes for the computer. When no keys are pressed, there are no grid junctions (ergo, none of the inputs are bridged/closed)
Therefore, to make a home-made dongle, take apart the keyboard, throw away the plastic membranes and casing, and put the circuit-board and most of the cord in a project-box from radioshack. Ergo, one keyboard dongle, no soldering.
If you are feeling adventurous, cut the cable down to 2" or so and resolder the keyboard.
If you have more money then time, why not google for "keyboard encoder". The KE18 model is $45 dollars, and is about 3"x2".
I have run into the no-keyboard-present error when trying to convert an old desktop machine into a headless file server.
A bios upgrade gave me the ability to ignore the keyboard error.
Perhaps you should investigate that first.
I've seen the [CPU] temp jump up to 61c-62c which from what I've heard is either fine to it's too hot. I've heard the gamut of people saying it's not a problem and not worry about it.
Er, why don't you do your own research? A quick google search shows that the maximum CPU temperature for XPs seems to be 85C. I believe the XPs have an on-chip temperature sensor, which should be pretty accurate. Figuring in a 15C margin-of-error, I wouldn't be concerned unless the CPU hit 65-70C on a hot day.
C.S. Lewis's non-fiction has a better portrayal of modern Christianity, IMHO.
Not as dry as the bible either.
Heat? Who says that life needs heat?
Life as we know it is based on chemical reactions. Life as we know it also is based on water and hydrocarbons. At very low temperatures, these chemical reactions don't work. At low temperatures, these reactions work slowly. At relatively high temperatures, these reactions take place quickly.
Now, it may be possible to have some sort of system for life that works at 40 Kelvin[1], but this is unlikely.
Life appears to need long chemical chains (at least for encoding its own data). Hydrocarbons are rather adept at this. Life also needs a fluid that will dissolve most compounds. Water is rather adept at this. So, most of us expect to find life where there are plenty of long-chain hydrocarbons in warm water.
Of course, the above explanation is rather simplified, and I encourage you to do further research.
[1] Robert Forward wrote a fictional book about this.
Finally, a ship they can use to seek out and disturb R'lyeh...
Wouldn't that be a positive change in leadership?
As a bonus, consider what will happen when the RIAA/MPAA sends lobbiests to plead for a new restrictive law? No more lobbiests and the bill isn't passed.
I'm really not seeing a downside.
Article: "As long as new game titles are top quality - offering exciting game play and high production value - we believe that interactive Christian games will skyrocket in popularity much like Christian music did 15 years ago."
Well, if that is their baseline for success -- we can only hope.
You may not be familiar with it, but the amount of Christian music being sold isn't small -- 47 million albums/year according to one source.
Or how about "$800 million in [Christian music] sales [that] topped sales of classical music and jazz combined..." (from a story talking about, oddly enough, the piracy of Xian music).
Christian music is big business, with its own famous bands, concerts, and record lables. And don't think that its all old time gospel music either -- it runs the gauntlet from folk music to pop to Christian metal.
I need a better tool for handling mail SA has identified as spam, either server-side or client-side. I'd like to delete anything with a score > 15, simply store anything with a score > 5, and send an auto-reply for scores between 5 and 10 indicating that the message was marked as spam and I'll probably never look at it.
Procmail can do it, but please reconsider the auto-replies. What happens if I'm pissed at bob and decide to sent out 1m spams with the return address of bob@example.com? More common, what about viruses that forge headers?
I would consider auto-whitelisting instead.
but our other servers show many signs of possibly being compromised including unexplained outgoing traffic, ... strange ports being open...
Perhaps I'm being naive, but what's preventing you from using 'netstat', 'nmap -sV', and plain old 'netcat' to figure out what the strange ports are doing?
Sorry, but middle class jackasses like you have no business telling someone who absolutely has no money how to live frugally.
I will be blunt:
Judging by your post, your problem isn't education or experience, but your poor attitude and lack of people skills.
My boyfriend and I are barely living about the poverty line.
My advice to you is -- learn to be frugal. Don't eat out. Don't make payments on a car. Shop at thrift stores and garage sales. Don't have a cable bill. Only have one phone bill. Don't buy movies, if you have to, only rent the cheap ones. Don't go to movies. Don't carry a balance on your credit card.
Does it suck? Kinda. But you have to cut back to pull yourself out of a hellhole.
When Otto von Bismarck invented the concept of public pensions in the late 1800s, the retirement age of 65 was chosen -- and life expectancy was 45.
When Social Security went into effect in the 30s, with a retirement age of 65 based on the German system, life expectancy was 63.
I don't think you understand the term "life expectancy" and what it means. Life expectancy is the amount of years lived divided by the number of people born. In humans, the age of highest mortality is infanthood and youth, and old age.
Ergo, if many infants died, the average life expectancy was low. The main gain in life expectancy in recent history was the reduction of infant mortality.
Now, if you looked at the average life expectancy for 20-year olds, you could derive some meaning from your statistics. As it stands, your statistics are meaningless.
Infant mortality lowered life expectancy in the late 1800's and in the 1930's. However, the infants who died never lived long enough to contribute money into public pensions. Ergo, flawed conclusion with your statistics.
This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.
This is an arm-chair economist viewpoint of the OS incentives:
Historically, there has been certain societies with a "giver" economy -- whoever had the biggest celibration or gave away the most gifts gained standing in their community. Some Polynesians and West Coast Indians had this economy.
Online, for Open Source, a giver economy works well -- one can improve their standing by being a well-known coder (ergo, being known for giving).
Don't confuse this with the other drive behind open source -- itch scratching. If I have an itch, and write a program to scratch it, unless I'm going to sell that program, it costs me very little to put that program online for others to download. Its not like a traditional commodity - once I give it away, I still have it.
The third possibility is that sharing knowledge (code) is good for a community (and its members) in the long run. Imagine two communities -- one community where the hunter tells the rest of his tribe his secrets, and another community where each hunter goes to his grave with his secrets. In the long run, which tribe will be more successful. "Shoulders of Giants."
You can get physics lectures on tape to listen to. I once borrowed lectures by Stephen Hawking, and Richard Fineman from a friend. The Fineman ones were great, but I can't find a link. The Hawking ones were good too, if you could stand the computer voice for hours on end.
Try searching for Richard Feynman.
IIRC, Amazon had them, but at a pretty good price.
IPv6 is irrelevent right now outside of lab environments and isolated networks (cell phone providers, etc.).
How about this then: OpenBSD had ipsec in its core long before linux ever did. The vanilla linux kernel didn't get ipsec until the 2.6 series, everything before that was either 3rd-party kernel patches and daemons.
Hell, windows had ipsec before vanilla linux did. :(
If you don't like it, it's only because you're messy! SUBMIT!
I think that was the best part.
Of course, I have filepaths that look like:
That's because I'm unorganized.
Who modded this off-topic? It might be meta-article, but its far from being off topic.
Ne'ermind the title is wrong:
The title is Will Harvey On There Not Being There Anymore?
Lets expand that (without changing the meaning) for understandability.
[The person] Will Harvey on [the game] "There" not being there [online] anymore?
Is that a question? Perhaps. The title is a tad ambiguous, but the interview seems to imply that "There" may not be an online game.
Therefore, the title is more appropriately:
[The person] Will Harvey on [the possibility of the game] "There" not being there [online] anymore?STILL doesn't rate as a question, but perhaps there is some other interpretation that I'm missing.
A clearer title, IMHO, would be along the lines of:
Founder of "There" Discusses the Game's Future.
That's only two characters longer then the current title, and a lot clearer. Not counting the period (which doesn't seem to be used in /. titles), that's only one character longer.
You think it's a conspiracy that "dinosaurs" went extinct and "reptiles" survived? Is your "tinfoil hat" shaped like a cone? Does it have the letters D-U-N-C-E written on it? You might want to check on that.
* SIGH * By "tinfoil hat", I meant a sort of paranoia -- Reptiles and Dinosaurs are different, and presumably, if there were any Dinosaurs running around (especially bird-hipped dinos), we would know them when we saw them.
I'm still confused on why *all* the Dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, yet the rest of land animals (amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds) survived.
Dinosaurs weren't all big dumb lumbering brutes -- some were as small as our present-day reptiles and amphibians, and had mostly the same environment. Ne'ermind that at least one of the reptiles had a brain/body mass ratio better than a wolf.
So why did every dinosaur die but reptiles survived? Why did every dinosaur die but birds survived?
Questions like these make me discount a climatic-event hypothesis. Sure, it may have been enough to kill off a lot of dinosaurs, but not all of them. Instead, I want to suspect that perhaps, biologically or genetically, there was something inferior about dinosaur physiology -- something so deeply embedded that even deviations away from the norm weren't enough to adapt to a new environment.
On my tinfoil-hat days, I start thinking about how we might want to look closer at everything we classify as 'reptile' and make sure we aren't mistaken.
Actually, I've found that very few "geeks" want freedom, because freedom also brings with it responsibility. I've found that what many geeks really want is really lack of responsibility. Look at the various "geek issues"... it's all about doing whatever they want with no responsibility or cost.
Er, are you really sure? Lets look at your examples more closely:
Downloading music for free.
Er, downloading music for free is not illegal. Downloading copyrighted music for free is not illegal. Here's a short list of free music to download.
As for infringed copyrighted music, there are plenty of Slashdotters (geeks) who said "go after the downloaders" and are content to see them go under.
Downloading software for free.
Er, yes, geeks like to download software for no cost. Almost all of the software I use on my machines was downloaded for free -- Debian, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Abiword, Sodipodi, etc.
For the issues of illegal music downloading and illegal software downloading, I think you confuse geeks getting upset at the high penalties with support for the crimes. Its one thing to support copyright infringement. Its another thing to get upset with copyright infringers getting more severe sentences than violent criminals.
Creating viruses (it's Microsoft's fault, don't you know).
You are confusing the issues. Windows viruses are, in a large part, encouraged by Microsoft's lack of security. When many people "blame" Microsoft for viruses, they mean that Microsoft Windows shows a stunning lack of security by default. We all know that there are a few script-kiddies out there writing viruses, and they are the source of viruses, but if it wasn't for Microsoft lowering the amount of effort needed, we wouldn't see as many viruses.
As for copyright, us geeks are paranoid. I doubt many people here would have problems with a copyright flag for TV or radio broadcasts (other then correctly assuming that (1) they will require new purchases of hardware and (2) they will be cracked rather quickly). But we are paranoid -- if, say, every MP3 was tagged according to if the artist wanted redistribution or not, a lot of indie bands would have a leg up on the mainstream bands. This gives the indie bands an edge that the RIAA does not want. Ergo, we are assuming that any DRM in music will automatically assume that all music is pirated, unless proven otherwise.
As for DRM on the PC, we see that Microsoft is launching an offensive against Open Source. If they can create a huge financial cost for any piece of software to be certified to run on a new PC, and if they can be in control of the certification, they can use that against Open Source.
Finally, I will admit, a lot of us geeks have a slight problem with legality vs morality. The anime fan-subbing community is a perfect example: A lot of the groups will only fan-sub anime not available in the US, and will stop distribution as soon as an official English copy comes out. Is that legal? No. Is it moral? Perhaps.
A large part of Doom's success was due to the fact that there was really nothing else like it at the time.
I just finished playing both Doom I and Doom II through Doom Legacy, and I want to say -- there still isn't anything like Doom I.
Doom I is brilliantly balanced.
Its interesting, its scary, and it encourages brains, not mindless shooting. [Mindless shooting will get you through Doom I, but tactics will make the job a lot easier.]
The lighting is superb, the level designs are smart, the hidden areas well done.[0]. 10 years later, its still a hell of a good game.
Quake doesn't have it, Half-Life doesn't have it, and even Doom II doesn't have it, but there's something about Doom that makes it worth replaying.
I wish there were more games like Doom I.
[0] Compare this to Doom II, which had a tendency to throw monsters at you in large groups just to increase "difficulty". Even with the double-barrel shotgun, secret Wolfenstein levels, and elder sign, I still prefer Doom I.
Someone please enlighten me as to how this could possibly be bad.
The cost of such a project is huge.
The benefits of such a project is minor.
Ergo: Waste of money.
If the supply of resources is infinite, then this wouldn't be a problem.
However, we are living in the real world, and there are other things that this money could be spent on.
For 911, we could be investing into 911 infrastructure -- call centers, dispatching, maps, etc. Or we could invest this money into healthcare -- low-cost loans for medical and nursing students, hospital expansions, etc. Or perhaps into more police staff, etc.
For terrorism, we could be spending the money in the former USSR, tracking where the Soviet biological and radioactive weapons are. We could spend that money securing said weapons. Or we could spend that money luring more Arabic translators into our intelligence services.
I pay my taxes -- I care how they are spent!
What the company actually wants is a simple program that is fairly static and simple.
That's for programming.
This is web design.
In my cynical experience, most small companies have no idea what they want in a website and have little, if any need for a website. The only reason why they want a website is that other people have a website.
The net result of this tends to be a flashy website that has no purpose and isn't used by anyone.
Yeah. It's not like I'm paying your money or anything, so why in the hell would you want to do what I say?
If you are willing to hire someone to do work you don't know how to do, you should be willing to listen to them.
Example: Lets say a client comes up to me and asks about upgrading his CPU in an AMD 1.13GHz/64MB machine because his machine is too slow.
I'd ask him what he was doing and probably suggest upgrading the memory instead.
The problem is when he ignores my suggestion and goes with the CPU -- in the end, his machine will be slow, he won't be happy, and it will look like I did a crappy job.
There's no such thing as "public land" -- the government owns every single bit of land in the country that's not owned privately (and even then -- there's property tax)
Depending on how you define "country", there are two exceptions that I can think of off the top of my head.
The first is embassies.
The second is Indian reservations.