Corporate mentality? Maybe you should say corporate egomania. I don't care what opinion you have on warez and abandonware, this line should scare you:
...in November of 2000 the IDSA sent a cease-and-desist letter to the site's domain registrar requesting that the domain name be cancelled.
I hate the implications of that line. Without a legal trial, they tried to remove the domain name of a site. Just imagine all the news sites that have been sued for libel/slander, and now imagine what would happen to those sites if this became an accepted practice.
Check out Virtual CD-ROM, a program for win9x/ME machines that emulates a CD drive. The program copies the CD image so you can "load" it into the emulated CD drive to play the game. Although it doesn't work for all games, it has a good chance of success on older games and works for some newer games, I have played Starcraft (and expansion), Warcraft 2 (and expansion), Diablo, Age of Empires, and I think that Halflife and TFC might work on it, but, IIRC, one of the disks in the 3-CD halflife pack won't copy.:( Virtual CDrom is rather convienent if you have plenty of hard drive space and hate having to have a stack of CD's by your computer, or, in your case, if you have a laptop. The homepage is http://www.virtualcd-online.com/, and the product is shareware, with a 30-day evaluation period, and $40 to register. If the price seems a little steep, there are free equivelents that are supposed to do the same thing, I haven't used any of them so I can't give any reviews. Also, I'm using version 1.0, later versions might run more CDs.
The x86 line was never meant to lead to heavy duty CPUs, and it has never been a heavy duty CPU. Its a consumer grade CPU, and it does well as a consumer grade CPU.
Some fluke long long ago lead us to settle on the x86 line for PCs. With all the backwards compatability in the x86 line and microsoft DOS/windows9x/windowsME, I don't think twice about running some old DOS program that last executed under a 286 processor running at 16 mhz on my current win98SE machine with a CPU a few generations later. The whole force behind the PC market is that Joe Consumer can upgrade his machine or buy a new one and not have to worry about his old software. Do you think PCs would be as cheap, and as advanced as they are if every new PC meant that Joe Consumer had to buy an entire new software package?
If you want a real cpu for heavy work, then avoid the x86 and grab a nice unix varient for your OS. Don't complain because you buy a desktop machine and discover that it was made for the mass market consumer, and not for heavy duty work.
Choose your tools carefully, and remember, 99.9% of all the people out there are so perfectly happy with the x86 architecture, they have no clue that anything else exists.
Off the top of my head, the 486 DX line looks like this:
25 mhz DX
33 mhz DX
40 mhz DX
50 mhz DX
50 mhz DX/2
66 mhz DX/2
80 mhz DX/2
100 mhz DX/4
120 mhz DX/4
Now the difference between the DX and the SX is that the DX had the built in math coprocessor, the SX did not (except that it usually did have one, but wasn't enabled). The DX/2 was a DX with the core running at 2x the bus speed, and the DX/4 was a DX with the core running at 3x the bus speed. The DX/3 was never produced, but was supposed to be a processor with the core running at 2.5x the bus speed.
Litestep crashes on me and conflicted with a program or two I had, it looks good, but it didn't work in practice, and I went fleeing back to explorer. Although, I recommend all windows users who are interested to try it, it might work for you. Geoshell is the nicest shell I've tried, and, with a few more features, would be my shell of choice. I haven't tried darkstep, but I'm told its supposed to be good. The problem with most shells is that they look better at higher resolution then lower, unfortunately, I'm trapped at 640x480.:(
I listen to shoutcast radio stations using winamp on a windows OS, which I suspect is a very common way of listening to online radio stations. AFAIK, there is no way of saving the low bitrate stream I am currently listening to.
If they enforce this ruling and make online radio stations pay, I'm guessing that all of my non-commercial anime radio stations I listen to are going to be wiped out. Its a niche market, nobody is going to fill it, or if they do, its gonna be the 'popular' anime. I'm sorry, but the day I hear the pokemon theme song on one of my stations is the day I actively try to summon the great Cthulu to eath the RIAA.
On the other hand, could this have been pushed by the regular brick & mortar radio stations? Setting up a station is expensive, and with only so much space on the dial, on-air radio stations are going to have an oligopoly for broadcasting. The internet changes that, all I need is a nice connection and I could make Radio-Dasunt, no hassles with the FCC or anyone else. Give me a nice server stuck anywhere in the world with the afore mentioned nice connection, let me stick a playlist on it and a script to make sure the software is always up, and I have made one heck of a cheap radio station. With another script, I could insert commercials (I'm guessing online retailers would be a big buyer). Sure, the mp3's would probably have to be legal, since I need a country with a nice enough web infrastructure, and that probably means there will be strict laws about this sort of thing, but I'm not paying a DJ, once everything is in MP3, I can store all the records/CDs anywhere I want, and I need little, if any, office space. My only operating expense is the broadband connection, the server, and the storage for the physical media, plus around an hour a day for previewing ads and running a script to randomly insert them into the playlist.
High Prices + Crappy Selection -> High Demand For An Alternative, Cheaper Source + Widespread Internet Access + Efficient File Compression For Sound (*.mp3) -> Booming Trade in MP3 -> Greater demand for High Capacity Drives -> More Supply of High Capacity Drives & Cheaper Prices!
So, in the end, the light side and the dark side of the force cancels eachother out.
The patent is not for the idea of a database, its for the idea of identifying a cd based on a database accessed through a network by matching the cd's tracklengths to information in the database, and thus identifying the album.
So, what is prior art? A database? A database searchable through the internet (like a search engine)? A database searchable through the internet full of song information and album information (which includes the track length - I'm sure there is some prior art for this, knowing musicophiles). Or does that data have to be used to identify a specific CD? What can you point to as prior art and say the CDDB's patent is just a logical outgrowth of x?
So, a thief might want your stereo, but they don't want to know what financial records you have on your computer? Sorry, sounds like the analogy was correct.
Actually, browsing some lyrics sites, Insane Clowne Posse seems to be the most offensive, Tupac has the most swearing, and Marilyn Manson just has lyrics that tries to be offensive. Manson is just another icon of pop culture, the media made him what he is, because they understand that its popular to rebel. All of the artists I've listed have some good lyrics, but the average Manson fan is no different from the average Brittany Spears fan, 'cept the Manson fan thinks he's being 'cool' and 'different' since he doesn't buy into media hype. Get a clue, when the local stores sells CD's of your band, its the first clue that your band is mainstream.
Chumbawamba is different. They just advocate shoplifting their CDs, as well as their general philosophy of anarchy.
I wouldn't call any of these bands extreme, and I'm not for censorship, but if you were going to make a list of bands to censor, these bands would be it. Don't be shocked about the bands, be shocked that sci.archeology is blocked, as well as the computer sites.
I tried mozilla (win32 binary) about a month ago, I wasn't impressed. I have an older machine, a Pentium 100 OC'ed to 125 mhz, 32 megs of memory, and a monitor that refuses to display any sane resolution, which limits me to a working resolution of 640x480. Yes, I know, the machine is a POS, but hey, I'm broke.:( The OS is Windows 98SE, normally a stable machine, a BSOD is very rare for me, and entire system crashes aren't freqent either.
On the lower resolution the windows build of mozilla has some problems. Boxes for settings tend to flow off the screen, hard to grab, move, remove. They have a tendency to 'persist' even after they are supposed to be gone. Mozilla itself is a memory hog, not to mention a CPU hog, and it crashed my system a few times. Argh! Tried the built-in IRC client, ran screaming back to mIRC. Newsgroups and mail were okay, but nothing to praise. In the end, I left mozilla installed, but gave up on using it, due to the stability problems.
I now stick to Opera and IE, with IE being used most of the time. I'm sorry, but Netscape and Mozilla are not at all stable on low-end windows machines.
Gravity drops off by a square root the farther away you get from center of mass. Therefore, the 200 or so miles you gain can be used for your advantage. And there is nothing that limits you from using a 'space elevator' as a giant magnetically fired gun a few hundred miles long.
You're right about Sol's gravity well though. A space elevator doesn't do much for that.
Aspio writes: 4. Everyone agrees that a new propulsion form(s) is needed for space exploration to become a viable and regular occurrence.
Perhaps we need a new propulsion system for interplanetary travel, but we don't need one to get from the planet into orbit. There is already an idea called "Skyhook" (as well as several other names) that basically proposes to take a geosynchronous satelite and corresponding spot below it, and build up from that spot, and down from the satelite, until we have a thead from the earth to space. Then, only a small amount of electricity would be needed to get things into orbit. The physics behind this idea are valid, even if we do not have the technology to build as strong of a material needed for the job.
Its been a long time since I sat in a physics class but as far as I can tell, this isn't a reactionless drive. The metal is repulsed by the magnetic field, therefore, if Newton is correct, then the magnetic field is also repulsed by the metal, its just due to the fact that the magnets are anchored to the earth that there is no visible movements.
The US government has guidelines specifying how many bug parts per [unit] for different types of food. So, your strawberry jam does probably have a partial fly's wing or segment of beetle leg in it. Even our food isn't bug free, and it will never be bug free, why do we expect our programs to be bug free?
tewwetruggur writes: So ask yourself, which is more important to you, seeing mob bosses, terrorists, and child pornographers get caught before they can hurt anybody, or protecting yourself from having some FBI bureaucrat reading over your shopping list?
Its a fine line we tread these days between our rights, and the powers we give the government. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't want my privacy invaded just because I *might* be involved with the mob, terrorists, or child pornographers. To get a search warrent and/or a wiretap, the police have to go through a judge, which (theoretically) provides a check against abuse. Otherwise, what prevents law enforcement from monitoring everyone to prevent crime? Human beings need their privacy, I wouldn't like my entire life to be examined by another human being, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. Sure, stricter laws will catch more criminals, but the same laws will infringe on the rights of non-criminals.
I believe there is something seriously flawed about a system of law and order that assumes everyone is a criminal. The default assumption of law enforcement should be that everyone is a law-abiding citizen, and they should have to show evidence to the contrary before they can invade an individual's right to privacy.
IIRC, planets such as "earth" and "mercury" (as well as the other 7) have different layers of material inside of them. Earth, for example, as a core, a mantel, and a crust (at a quick glance). Astroids on the other hand are pretty roughly the same, through and through, perhaps with greater concentrations of one metal here and another metal there, but there is no arrangement of differentiated layers of matter. So, a planet can be something that orbits the sun and has a ordered, differentiate composition, and an astroid can be something that orbits a sun and has an unordered composition.
Why not have a 12+ hours version of dune? Instead of making it into a miniseries, make it into an one-season series. Plenty of time to explain the book, and because of filler and the director's changes,/.ers will find something to flame about.
Whoever is elected president is going to have one big fear on his mind. Due to the openness of Florida "sunshine" laws, someone has a good chance of doing a manual recount of the ballots themselves, and if they do, their is a chance that their findings will be that the wrong man was given Florida's 25 electoral votes.
Just imagine being president, and 1/4 of the way through your term, Dateline runs a nice little special on how the other guy *really* won.
I pay for my internet connection, and as far as I'm concerned, that is the ability to move data to and from the rest of the internet. When I use a "free" service like dialpad, I pay for it by having to watch advertisements that flash on my screen, and I pay for it because it takes up all of my bandwidth on my 56k dialup. If I use my own program to do it and ignore the ads, I still have the costs of the internet connection and the limitation that the party I'm calling needs to use the same protocol and/or program.
As for real life precedents, its called a newspaper and television. The $.50 or so you pay for a newspaper doesn't cover the costs of producing it. The broadcast towers the US networks put up aren't out of the goodness of their own hearts. Both rely on advertising to pay their costs and to make a profit. I'm sure no fool would rant about broadcast television, yet it has the same effect - I get a "free" service with only the cost of electricity and the willingness to watch ads.
This isn't about getting a free lunch, its about allowing companies to dictate what we can and can't do.
I'm assuming you are British by the content of your post. Just look what careful editing of your comment does (and yes, some would say I'm twisting your words, I just think I'm capturing the intent.):
Imagine it. A [country] beholden to [another country]'s security interests, passing draconian security legislation at the whim of the powers that be across the Atlantic, with at any moment the ruling party deciding it's at war against [an opposing superpower]...
I find this ironic (and if you don't, you don't know your American history).
Gather around, boys and girls, for a story how Dasunt was really dumb. This is a great story, btw, I want to kick myself in the arse every time I recall it.
About 5 years ago, one of my friends was at a police auction, and there were 10 upright arcade machines there, all in working order. They had been siezed, since they were modified to run illegal gambling. Since my friend has $10 on him at the time, he made the only bid, and got all the machines for the lowly price of $1/machine.
A year later he was moving out, and he offered to sell me the machines at $10/machine. I said no, since I didn't want to have a big hulking machine that only could play one game (I believe it was poker, blackjack, etc on the machines). The machines had great monitors and all the controls worked.
Then, about 2 years ago I got into console and arcade emulation heavily. I found out that a lowly K6-2 stuck in a machine with a special adapter/driver could run plenty of games and use the original monitor. *Sigh* I looked up prices on Ebay. Conservatively, since the machines did have a slot in the front to dispense money and thus weren't exactly mint, each machine could have been sold for $250.
D'oh, I am dumb.
My friend was happy, he bought them for the remote controlled relays in the machines that were used to "flip" the machine over to a non-gambling game whenever the cops came around. So, he got a ton of relays. I, in my naive state, got shafted. I believe he sold all his remaining machines (5) for $50.
Since I researched a bit on emulation and arcade cabinents in hopes of building a cocktail style machine, here's some useful links I found.
Happ Controls, the source of arcade quality joysticks, buttons, and other controls. They also sell keyboard encoders and other neat stuff. If you look around on the web page, you can find a place to order a free catalog, which can give you an idea of prices. (Please though, only ask for a catalog if you're interested, I hate to see the/. effect decend on this nice company)
That is my list of resources, if you have any, please put them in a reply to this comment, or mail me at dasunt@hotmail.com. I'm especially interested in cocktail-style cabinents, hacks for controls, and translation sites (so many nice games never made it out of Japan).
The only reason that Dell is doing this is to gain favor in the linux community, nothing more, and nothing less. Since linux is free (beer), Dell can stick it on as many computers as it wants and all it costs them is the time it takes them to install. I'm guessing costs are further reduced since a lot of these computers would be standardized, and it should be possible to copy a disk image over, like some computer shops do with windows and Norton Ghost (great program btw).
The general impression that I get from the linux community is that most true computer geeks out there are going to format the hard drive and install their own flavor of linux with the packages they want. How many of you would use a computer with a linux installation that you didn't do?
A more meaningful gesture would be to release computers with nothing on the hard drive and include on a CD or two your choice of distro (with Dell promising that all the distro's they offer have been tested and will run on their machines.)
Slashdot Mirror
Corporate mentality? Maybe you should say corporate egomania. I don't care what opinion you have on warez and abandonware, this line should scare you:
...in November of 2000 the IDSA sent a cease-and-desist letter to the site's domain registrar requesting that the domain name be cancelled.
I hate the implications of that line. Without a legal trial, they tried to remove the domain name of a site. Just imagine all the news sites that have been sued for libel/slander, and now imagine what would happen to those sites if this became an accepted practice.
Check out Virtual CD-ROM, a program for win9x/ME machines that emulates a CD drive. The program copies the CD image so you can "load" it into the emulated CD drive to play the game. Although it doesn't work for all games, it has a good chance of success on older games and works for some newer games, I have played Starcraft (and expansion), Warcraft 2 (and expansion), Diablo, Age of Empires, and I think that Halflife and TFC might work on it, but, IIRC, one of the disks in the 3-CD halflife pack won't copy. :( Virtual CDrom is rather convienent if you have plenty of hard drive space and hate having to have a stack of CD's by your computer, or, in your case, if you have a laptop. The homepage is http://www.virtualcd-online.com/, and the product is shareware, with a 30-day evaluation period, and $40 to register. If the price seems a little steep, there are free equivelents that are supposed to do the same thing, I haven't used any of them so I can't give any reviews. Also, I'm using version 1.0, later versions might run more CDs.
The x86 line was never meant to lead to heavy duty CPUs, and it has never been a heavy duty CPU. Its a consumer grade CPU, and it does well as a consumer grade CPU.
Some fluke long long ago lead us to settle on the x86 line for PCs. With all the backwards compatability in the x86 line and microsoft DOS/windows9x/windowsME, I don't think twice about running some old DOS program that last executed under a 286 processor running at 16 mhz on my current win98SE machine with a CPU a few generations later. The whole force behind the PC market is that Joe Consumer can upgrade his machine or buy a new one and not have to worry about his old software. Do you think PCs would be as cheap, and as advanced as they are if every new PC meant that Joe Consumer had to buy an entire new software package?
If you want a real cpu for heavy work, then avoid the x86 and grab a nice unix varient for your OS. Don't complain because you buy a desktop machine and discover that it was made for the mass market consumer, and not for heavy duty work.
Choose your tools carefully, and remember, 99.9% of all the people out there are so perfectly happy with the x86 architecture, they have no clue that anything else exists.
Off the top of my head, the 486 DX line looks like this:
- 25 mhz DX
- 33 mhz DX
- 40 mhz DX
- 50 mhz DX
- 50 mhz DX/2
- 66 mhz DX/2
- 80 mhz DX/2
- 100 mhz DX/4
- 120 mhz DX/4
Now the difference between the DX and the SX is that the DX had the built in math coprocessor, the SX did not (except that it usually did have one, but wasn't enabled). The DX/2 was a DX with the core running at 2x the bus speed, and the DX/4 was a DX with the core running at 3x the bus speed. The DX/3 was never produced, but was supposed to be a processor with the core running at 2.5x the bus speed.Here is a link to a guide that explains the major ones : http://www.filemine.com/showDig?id=37
:(
Litestep crashes on me and conflicted with a program or two I had, it looks good, but it didn't work in practice, and I went fleeing back to explorer. Although, I recommend all windows users who are interested to try it, it might work for you. Geoshell is the nicest shell I've tried, and, with a few more features, would be my shell of choice. I haven't tried darkstep, but I'm told its supposed to be good. The problem with most shells is that they look better at higher resolution then lower, unfortunately, I'm trapped at 640x480.
I listen to shoutcast radio stations using winamp on a windows OS, which I suspect is a very common way of listening to online radio stations. AFAIK, there is no way of saving the low bitrate stream I am currently listening to.
If they enforce this ruling and make online radio stations pay, I'm guessing that all of my non-commercial anime radio stations I listen to are going to be wiped out. Its a niche market, nobody is going to fill it, or if they do, its gonna be the 'popular' anime. I'm sorry, but the day I hear the pokemon theme song on one of my stations is the day I actively try to summon the great Cthulu to eath the RIAA.
On the other hand, could this have been pushed by the regular brick & mortar radio stations? Setting up a station is expensive, and with only so much space on the dial, on-air radio stations are going to have an oligopoly for broadcasting. The internet changes that, all I need is a nice connection and I could make Radio-Dasunt, no hassles with the FCC or anyone else. Give me a nice server stuck anywhere in the world with the afore mentioned nice connection, let me stick a playlist on it and a script to make sure the software is always up, and I have made one heck of a cheap radio station. With another script, I could insert commercials (I'm guessing online retailers would be a big buyer). Sure, the mp3's would probably have to be legal, since I need a country with a nice enough web infrastructure, and that probably means there will be strict laws about this sort of thing, but I'm not paying a DJ, once everything is in MP3, I can store all the records/CDs anywhere I want, and I need little, if any, office space. My only operating expense is the broadband connection, the server, and the storage for the physical media, plus around an hour a day for previewing ads and running a script to randomly insert them into the playlist.
But the high prices are good!
High Prices + Crappy Selection -> High Demand For An Alternative, Cheaper Source + Widespread Internet Access + Efficient File Compression For Sound (*.mp3) -> Booming Trade in MP3 -> Greater demand for High Capacity Drives -> More Supply of High Capacity Drives & Cheaper Prices!
So, in the end, the light side and the dark side of the force cancels eachother out.
The patent is not for the idea of a database, its for the idea of identifying a cd based on a database accessed through a network by matching the cd's tracklengths to information in the database, and thus identifying the album.
So, what is prior art? A database? A database searchable through the internet (like a search engine)? A database searchable through the internet full of song information and album information (which includes the track length - I'm sure there is some prior art for this, knowing musicophiles). Or does that data have to be used to identify a specific CD? What can you point to as prior art and say the CDDB's patent is just a logical outgrowth of x?
So, a thief might want your stereo, but they don't want to know what financial records you have on your computer? Sorry, sounds like the analogy was correct.
Actually, browsing some lyrics sites, Insane Clowne Posse seems to be the most offensive, Tupac has the most swearing, and Marilyn Manson just has lyrics that tries to be offensive. Manson is just another icon of pop culture, the media made him what he is, because they understand that its popular to rebel. All of the artists I've listed have some good lyrics, but the average Manson fan is no different from the average Brittany Spears fan, 'cept the Manson fan thinks he's being 'cool' and 'different' since he doesn't buy into media hype. Get a clue, when the local stores sells CD's of your band, its the first clue that your band is mainstream.
Chumbawamba is different. They just advocate shoplifting their CDs, as well as their general philosophy of anarchy.
I wouldn't call any of these bands extreme, and I'm not for censorship, but if you were going to make a list of bands to censor, these bands would be it. Don't be shocked about the bands, be shocked that sci.archeology is blocked, as well as the computer sites.
I tried mozilla (win32 binary) about a month ago, I wasn't impressed. I have an older machine, a Pentium 100 OC'ed to 125 mhz, 32 megs of memory, and a monitor that refuses to display any sane resolution, which limits me to a working resolution of 640x480. Yes, I know, the machine is a POS, but hey, I'm broke. :( The OS is Windows 98SE, normally a stable machine, a BSOD is very rare for me, and entire system crashes aren't freqent either.
On the lower resolution the windows build of mozilla has some problems. Boxes for settings tend to flow off the screen, hard to grab, move, remove. They have a tendency to 'persist' even after they are supposed to be gone. Mozilla itself is a memory hog, not to mention a CPU hog, and it crashed my system a few times. Argh! Tried the built-in IRC client, ran screaming back to mIRC. Newsgroups and mail were okay, but nothing to praise. In the end, I left mozilla installed, but gave up on using it, due to the stability problems.
I now stick to Opera and IE, with IE being used most of the time. I'm sorry, but Netscape and Mozilla are not at all stable on low-end windows machines.
True but...
Gravity drops off by a square root the farther away you get from center of mass. Therefore, the 200 or so miles you gain can be used for your advantage. And there is nothing that limits you from using a 'space elevator' as a giant magnetically fired gun a few hundred miles long.
You're right about Sol's gravity well though. A space elevator doesn't do much for that.
Aspio writes:
4. Everyone agrees that a new propulsion form(s) is needed for space exploration to become a viable and regular occurrence.
Perhaps we need a new propulsion system for interplanetary travel, but we don't need one to get from the planet into orbit. There is already an idea called "Skyhook" (as well as several other names) that basically proposes to take a geosynchronous satelite and corresponding spot below it, and build up from that spot, and down from the satelite, until we have a thead from the earth to space. Then, only a small amount of electricity would be needed to get things into orbit. The physics behind this idea are valid, even if we do not have the technology to build as strong of a material needed for the job.
Its been a long time since I sat in a physics class but as far as I can tell, this isn't a reactionless drive. The metal is repulsed by the magnetic field, therefore, if Newton is correct, then the magnetic field is also repulsed by the metal, its just due to the fact that the magnets are anchored to the earth that there is no visible movements.
Or am I missing something?
The US government has guidelines specifying how many bug parts per [unit] for different types of food. So, your strawberry jam does probably have a partial fly's wing or segment of beetle leg in it. Even our food isn't bug free, and it will never be bug free, why do we expect our programs to be bug free?
tewwetruggur writes: So ask yourself, which is more important to you, seeing mob bosses, terrorists, and child pornographers get caught before they can hurt anybody, or protecting yourself from having some FBI bureaucrat reading over your shopping list?
Its a fine line we tread these days between our rights, and the powers we give the government. I'm not sure about you, but I wouldn't want my privacy invaded just because I *might* be involved with the mob, terrorists, or child pornographers. To get a search warrent and/or a wiretap, the police have to go through a judge, which (theoretically) provides a check against abuse. Otherwise, what prevents law enforcement from monitoring everyone to prevent crime? Human beings need their privacy, I wouldn't like my entire life to be examined by another human being, and I'm pretty sure you don't either. Sure, stricter laws will catch more criminals, but the same laws will infringe on the rights of non-criminals.
I believe there is something seriously flawed about a system of law and order that assumes everyone is a criminal. The default assumption of law enforcement should be that everyone is a law-abiding citizen, and they should have to show evidence to the contrary before they can invade an individual's right to privacy.
Just my $.02
IIRC, planets such as "earth" and "mercury" (as well as the other 7) have different layers of material inside of them. Earth, for example, as a core, a mantel, and a crust (at a quick glance). Astroids on the other hand are pretty roughly the same, through and through, perhaps with greater concentrations of one metal here and another metal there, but there is no arrangement of differentiated layers of matter. So, a planet can be something that orbits the sun and has a ordered, differentiate composition, and an astroid can be something that orbits a sun and has an unordered composition.
Oh well, just my $.02
Think of a nice imaginary product that would appeal to the slashdot crowd.
:o)
Register www.mycoolproduct.com
Put an ad on the page to generate $.03 in revenue each time its viewed.
Submit a story to slashdot about mycoolproduct and let the page hits accumulate.
Spiffy, now I have money to upgrade.
Why not have a 12+ hours version of dune? Instead of making it into a miniseries, make it into an one-season series. Plenty of time to explain the book, and because of filler and the director's changes, /.ers will find something to flame about.
Whoever is elected president is going to have one big fear on his mind. Due to the openness of Florida "sunshine" laws, someone has a good chance of doing a manual recount of the ballots themselves, and if they do, their is a chance that their findings will be that the wrong man was given Florida's 25 electoral votes.
Just imagine being president, and 1/4 of the way through your term, Dateline runs a nice little special on how the other guy *really* won.
I pay for my internet connection, and as far as I'm concerned, that is the ability to move data to and from the rest of the internet. When I use a "free" service like dialpad, I pay for it by having to watch advertisements that flash on my screen, and I pay for it because it takes up all of my bandwidth on my 56k dialup. If I use my own program to do it and ignore the ads, I still have the costs of the internet connection and the limitation that the party I'm calling needs to use the same protocol and/or program.
As for real life precedents, its called a newspaper and television. The $.50 or so you pay for a newspaper doesn't cover the costs of producing it. The broadcast towers the US networks put up aren't out of the goodness of their own hearts. Both rely on advertising to pay their costs and to make a profit. I'm sure no fool would rant about broadcast television, yet it has the same effect - I get a "free" service with only the cost of electricity and the willingness to watch ads.
This isn't about getting a free lunch, its about allowing companies to dictate what we can and can't do.
I'm assuming you are British by the content of your post. Just look what careful editing of your comment does (and yes, some would say I'm twisting your words, I just think I'm capturing the intent.):
Imagine it. A [country] beholden to [another country]'s security interests, passing draconian security legislation at the whim of the powers that be across the Atlantic, with at any moment the ruling party deciding it's at war against [an opposing superpower]...
I find this ironic (and if you don't, you don't know your American history).
Well, if we are talking about feature creep, maybe they are copying Emacs developement model.
About 5 years ago, one of my friends was at a police auction, and there were 10 upright arcade machines there, all in working order. They had been siezed, since they were modified to run illegal gambling. Since my friend has $10 on him at the time, he made the only bid, and got all the machines for the lowly price of $1/machine.
A year later he was moving out, and he offered to sell me the machines at $10/machine. I said no, since I didn't want to have a big hulking machine that only could play one game (I believe it was poker, blackjack, etc on the machines). The machines had great monitors and all the controls worked.
Then, about 2 years ago I got into console and arcade emulation heavily. I found out that a lowly K6-2 stuck in a machine with a special adapter/driver could run plenty of games and use the original monitor. *Sigh* I looked up prices on Ebay. Conservatively, since the machines did have a slot in the front to dispense money and thus weren't exactly mint, each machine could have been sold for $250.
D'oh, I am dumb.
My friend was happy, he bought them for the remote controlled relays in the machines that were used to "flip" the machine over to a non-gambling game whenever the cops came around. So, he got a ton of relays. I, in my naive state, got shafted. I believe he sold all his remaining machines (5) for $50.
Since I researched a bit on emulation and arcade cabinents in hopes of building a cocktail style machine, here's some useful links I found.
- A list of links for arcade cabinents, especially about building your own.
- A M.A.M.E cocktale project, looks closely like the machine I want.
- Another build-your-own cabinet page (using consoles, not M.A.M.E)
- A great faq on how to build an arcade console, a must read for anyone thinking about it. Includes stuff like the problem of keyboard ghosting and encoders.
- Another build-a-cabinet page, with pics and diagrams
- Diagrams for a dual keyboard circuit and automatic joystick switch + other fun stuff. Another must read.
- Keyboard Matrix Help
- Happ Controls, the source of arcade quality joysticks, buttons, and other controls. They also sell keyboard encoders and other neat stuff. If you look around on the web page, you can find a place to order a free catalog, which can give you an idea of prices. (Please though, only ask for a catalog if you're interested, I hate to see the
/. effect decend on this nice company)
- A source for emulators, and emulator news.
- An emulator front-end.
- English translations for NES & SNES. The reason why I became interested in emulation in the first place.
That is my list of resources, if you have any, please put them in a reply to this comment, or mail me at dasunt@hotmail.com. I'm especially interested in cocktail-style cabinents, hacks for controls, and translation sites (so many nice games never made it out of Japan).The only reason that Dell is doing this is to gain favor in the linux community, nothing more, and nothing less. Since linux is free (beer), Dell can stick it on as many computers as it wants and all it costs them is the time it takes them to install. I'm guessing costs are further reduced since a lot of these computers would be standardized, and it should be possible to copy a disk image over, like some computer shops do with windows and Norton Ghost (great program btw).
The general impression that I get from the linux community is that most true computer geeks out there are going to format the hard drive and install their own flavor of linux with the packages they want. How many of you would use a computer with a linux installation that you didn't do?
A more meaningful gesture would be to release computers with nothing on the hard drive and include on a CD or two your choice of distro (with Dell promising that all the distro's they offer have been tested and will run on their machines.)