Yes, privacy is very important -- unless you are dead, that is...
I value my privacy (in the abstract) more than your life (as an
anonymous number). Unless I personally count as a court-determined
likely suspect to deprive you of the latter, I would treat a virus
from the FBI the same as any other virus - Isolate it, fingerprint it, and
post detection/removal (if possible) info to the appropriate newsgroups and
inboxes.
Now, in this case, the FBI actually had a court order. Although we could
debate the ease with which judges hand those out, I don't consider this
specific case as any form of miscarriage of justice or abuse of the
system. Guy made a bomb threat, FBI tracked him to a specific MySpace
account, then got a court order to proceed further, then compromised
the suspect's computer. That sounds like everything happened in the correct
order (for a change), so no foul.
The pendulum is now swinging into the other direction and already
there are dimwits, who break Godwin's Law and still get moderated to
heavens by fellow dimwits
Sometimes, you just have to call a spade a spade, regardless of
netiquette. Personally, I find it even more amazing that so
many people will fall back on cheesy "laws" of social norms
such as Godwin's rather than admit they can see the Emperor's
schlong.
If they'd be more subtle in their advertising (text-only, relevant links a la
AdWords that you might actually want to click on) then we could all turn off our
blockers and they'd start making money again.
Once, I would have agreed with you. And I still think an unobtrusive text
sidebar a la Google's will work in the long run. But AdWords? They worked
at first, I even liked them as unobtrusive... Right up until many pages (and the
"tech journalist" sites seem like some of the worst offenders here) started
looking like little colored minefields of mouseover popups, where one wrong
twitch of the mouse ends up hiding half of the visible content (I say "content" rather
than "page" because these same sites seem to prefer thick ad-laden sidebars on both
sides, leaving the actual content to only the middle third of the actual page... Get
that, ads covering other ads!).
Unfortunately, short of turning off Javascript (which I once advocated but today you
really can't use even the most basic of sites without it), AdWords seem nearly
unblockable. Sometimes the "printable" form of the page gives some relief, but even
then you often get every other paragraph interlaced with a half-printed-page
banner.
Surely all you generous patrons of the arts will be jumping at the chance to belatedly pay!
I already paid for (almost) all of my music. And no way in hell will I pay again just to have
it in my computer or my car or at work or on my phone or my portable player or anywhere. I bought
the CD, I ripped the CD, and I will unapologetically play that rip in any way I so desire.
Now, the strawman you've made, while it may not apply yet, will come to matter more and more,
as we see artists releasing content available from only a single DRM-using provider, such as iTunes[*]
or the Zune. Then, the situation you describe may well come to pass, in that I will pirate
the music before I'll accept a DRM-encumbered form of it.
* - I already have one such track, though not actually pirated in that I "own" it (spare me the
licensing-vs-buying BS), as a free promotional download available only through iTMS to subscribers
of the band's mailing list. But if not for the magic of Hymn nee PlayFair, I'd have no use
for it, as I refuse to run iTunes and don't have an iPod.
But GMail has advertisments based on keywords of your email.
Not if you use POP to get your GMail rather than their web interface.
Thats Evil Capitalism too.
Despite the impression you could easily get from reading Slashdot,
most of us don't actually dislike capitalism (though some of
us might not realize as much). In reality, a closer reading of the
more well-written Slashrants on the subject reveals that most of us
actually object to corporate protectionism and profit-before-humans
laws in general.
Hey, I have a good job, my boss lets me read Slashdot, I make
enough to afford plenty of toys. I can thank capitalism in general
for most of that (as opposed to communism, where I honestly don't even
see the point of getting up every morning to go to work). I can't,
however, overlook the fact that we have people punished with paying
basically their life's savings for sharing music, while companies like
the former Union Carbide can kill people and walk away with a
slap on the wrist; You or I risk imprisonment for letting a website
know it has a security flaw, while Sony distributes rootkits and only
basically had to say "oops, sorry, our bad"; We get stiffer sentences
for dosing ourselves with THC than Merck gets for falsifying clinical
trial data on COX2 inhibitors leading to numerous premature deaths.
Why cant a company just pay millions of dollars to keep a good email
service for free
If you think they don't get anything out of "giving" us all those
"free" email accounts, I have a bridge for sale...
As the most obvious, they get massive amounts of personal information
about us - Even if you give completely fake info to sign up, they
can reconstruct a given user's social network better than that
user can. And although GMail lets you use POP, as you mention, they
do indeed show targetted ads to the webmail-using majority of their
viewers. And don't discount "brand loyalty" through laziness. Already
at MSN, as your default IE homepage? Well, may as well use Microsoft's
search, and get a free Live account.
When it comes to human accomplishment, the Jesus statue is comparatively pathetic.
Actually, I consider it worthy of "wonder" status simply as a monument to human hypocrisy...
They had the nads to build a giant idol to a god who specifically gave a rule
stating: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or
any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above."
Of course, we could debate the current location (relative to "in heaven
above") of the corpse once called Yehoshua Bin Yosef, but I'd say
these guys definitely missed the spirit (pardon my pun) of
the commandment, if not the letter, of the commandment.
Now you figure out which one it was and how to decompress it.
Well, with only 256 choices, it didn't take long to check all
possible decodings for one that makes sense. Ended up
working for "}".
Oddly, though, the algorithm not only restored, but improved
the original! I get:
"The King's English version of Wikipedia should fit in eight gigabits,
I do believe. Only humanity's sphexish adherence to grammatical rules
limits the attainable compression ratio; the good gentleman might
wish to consider filtering to a more base patois prior to
applying his algorithm".
Amazing... This discovery could single-handedly render the next
generation (nearly) intelligible!
What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?' I thought saying
'Read Slashdot' wouldn't be what he was looking for -- so I made up something, I'm sure,
equally lame
Perhaps he just wanted to see if you'd lie to tell him what he wanted to hear.
That question has only one "right" answer - You get coffee, check Slashdot and read your
email (possibly not in that exact order), then you glaze over until you hit the bottom of at
least your first cup of coffee. Any interruptions before then, you respond to with
"Mmmmmpph? Grrrrrrumph. Mrphythuber kurbendurby! Mrffff". Anyone failing to understand
that response clearly doesn't work in IT, or worse, likes mornings (grounds
for immediate dismissal, IMO).
And anyone that mods this "funny" either lies or doesn't work in IT.
There's one huge problem you seem to have completely left out of your post. YOU CAN'T BUY EXPLOSIVES WITHOUT PROPER LICENSING/PERMITS/ETC.
Black powder.
Match heads (no, they don't just burn, they decompose, making them a high explosive).
Cold packs (the classic "fuel oil" bomb, the fuel actually does nothing but keep it dry).
And for the suicidal do-it-yourselfers...
Ammonia + iodine.
Toluene + sulfuric acid, + nitric acid.
Or for that matter, nitric acid + just about anything (glycerine, hexamine, corn starch, etc).
If someone wants to blow something up, no pesky licensing scheme will stop them.
Education, awareness, and most importantly, not pissing in the rest of the world's Cheerios
will do far more to keep us safe than trusting Uncle Sam to wrap the world in Nerf.
Combine those two and it's easy to see that creatures can't really be
small enough to have an exoskeleton and yet also large enough to have a
brain capable of human-level intelligence.
Except, we do effectively have an exoskeleton protecting our
brains, with just a quarter inch of meat on it to allow for the growth
of hair that helps hide exact weak-points from predators. No other part
of us has nearly so much nonfunctional armor... Even considering
our ribcage, that serves a vital role in letting our lungs act as a
bellows, with protection a side effect.
But I do think it's not THAT unlikely that other intelligent races
would be bipedal, upright, large-brained, and endowed with fine
manipulators on their upper appendages.
Agreed. You make a number of good points, though I would point out
one radically different arrangement that has a lot of potential - The
cephalopod. It can support a large brain and other viscera at the center
of a mass of protective muscular appendages, each of which can act for
any combination of sensory, locomotive, or manipulative purposes.
Four limbs and ten digits work well for land-based bipeds, but in an
aquatic environment, mightn't twenty tentacles work just as well? And
it provides far more redundancy in the case of injury as a bonus - We
lose an arm and it partially cripples us; lose one out of twenty
tentacles, and it would more closely resemble us losing a finger.
The thing with power usage is that nobody seems interested in attacking the 2 largest areas of power wastage. (except maybe google)
Except, those don't really waste most of the power.
With AC/DC, you already
have equipment available that can push over 90% efficient. With air conditioning, central home units manage
90-94% efficient, and I'd expect industrial models to do even better. So not a lot of room for improvement
there.
With servers, however... The better they scale to their load, the more efficient they get. In theory, depending on
your required maximum transaction time, you could actually suspend the whole machine giving very nearly zero
power consumption during offpeak loads. In practice you can't really do that (completely waking up can take
half a minute even under ideal conditions), but using ondemand CPU and memory speed scaling, halting all but one
core, and spinning drives down (but not stopped), you can still get huge power savings (just for the CPUs
in an 8-way Xeon machine, that drops you to literally 2-5% of the power draw!).
Of course, improving all three gives ever better savings, but it makes more sense to focus on the easy targets
first. And in this case, the servers themselves present the easiest targets.
While we are at it here is another simple power tip. Turn your rows of racks back to back.
Or better yet, just line them all up in a single long row, such that a wall divides the front from the
back, with the back exhausting outside (or into the offices in the winter, as you suggest). That way
you can still get to the back when needed, just by going into the other half of the room. I have to
agree, unless you have a datacenter in the desert, I don't understand why we AC them instead of just
pumping as much outside air as possible through the room. Moving a large volume of air (given a
low pressure change) costs next to nothing compared to actual air conditioning.
I'm really trying to figure out if you're kidding or just an idiot.
No, quite serious. I won't say I hated my visit, because I went for a
specific event that I quite enjoyed. But everything else about the
entire city I found loathesome.
I would not go there again, and I would not recommed it as a tourist destination
to anyone that asked.
Just my opinion... Take it or leave it. And if you think that makes me an idiot,
well, you have a right to your opinions as well.
And more importanty - so what? "Professional" photographers have just as much
right as a tourist to stand around taking pictures. Even (gasp!) for commercial
purposes!
This is simply absurd and as a photographer, I will *not* be traveling
into NYC if this proposed policy becomes law.
You won't miss out on much. I've visited once - Wouldn't go back, for
anything (though Spamalot tempted me). The air sucks, you feel like
you need a shower after touching anything, you can hear cars
all night long even from 30 floors up, "cheap" coffee and snacks cost
a fortune (though if you want to pay a lot for food, I have to
admit you can get some pretty good stuff there). And the "sights"
they apparently now don't want people to photograph - Really, what?
Times Square looks kinda neat, in a sesory overload way, but NYC
really doesn't have a whole lot worth seeing in the first place.
Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of
random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate
poinsoning.
Simple example, that people (including myself) really do...
Go to your grocery store and apply for one of their annoying
"we promise we won't track you but your coupons will
magically relate to things you usually buy" customer cards. They
generally give you two of them (sometimes even four, as two
keychain fobs and two wallet photo sized cards). Give each of
these to different random people, making sure to get at least
one back in trade. Every few weeks, trade again. Congratulations,
you have now very thoroughly poisoned the store's database of your
buying habits.
That's hilarious. One of PopCap's best-known games, Dynomite,
is a direct ripoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble, one of the best-known
(and -loved) puzzle games of all time.
Not to mention, even PopCap's crown (Be)Jewel(ed) directly rips off similar
Japanese puzzle games (and even American clones from before PopCap ever
existed). Talk about balls, daring to complain about others producing
similar games...
I hate to break it to you, but those weren't really teenage girls.
...
Sweet16Thing: Hey, weird, I work there too! Gary91 has joined the room
Bunny15: Waitasec, guys - Do we have any non-cops in the PedoLovers chat
room?
GeezrLovr: Uh... Not me
RoophieMe: Nope
Nymph1993: Sorry Gary91 has logged off
Bunny15: Oh, damn.
We have ideals. People live in pursuit of dreams...We give up sex for them
sometimes! We die for them when we must.
Pretty good examples - For the opposing argument.
Of course, you could just as well make the argument that our
"ideals" merely count as yet another way to attract a mate; an expensive
waste of energy and resources that show members of the opposite gender
that, if we can so flagrantly flaunt our survivability, we can support
children better than the next poor shmuck just trying to make a living.
Birds give one of the best examples of this "showy" waste of resources.
Most (males) have plumage that makes it much harder to hide from
predators. Some build ornate nests far more complex than necessary, with
completely useless shiny decorations. Hell, they sing, letting
every predator within a mile know their location!
None of this makes us (or them) "special". It just represents an
evolutionarily successful strategy for getting laid.
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity
(as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself.
I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video
stream simultaneously in real-time
With a VM, you'd probably have the easiest time using virtual screen captures (no need to
look at the real screen, just look at the right spot in the player's decoded memory).
In your described case, you don't need to bother with such a mess - You could just use a
virtual display driver that either writes the raw data directly to HDD for later
recompression, or acts as a buffered frameserver for something like VirtualDub. Both
of those require rather fast hardware (HDD in the first case, CPU in the second), so
you'd probably lose frames.
A VM does gives you an obvious solution to the performance bottleneck... Suspend the VM after
every frame (or whenever a rather large buffer fills would probably work better) and wait for the HDD
or compressor to catch up. You may also need to deal with forcing clock slew or tricking the player
into never skipping frames to keep up, but once you can debug a process (which DRM basically cannot
ever tolerate) without it knowing, any amount of "gotchas" just lead to a straightforward
sequence of behind-the-scenes corrections to the running player.
Re:XP? Y'all from the future?
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
I have a fully licensed copy of Win2K Pro that I have faithfully moved from machine to machine for
the past 7 years. It doesn't require registration, is rock solid, and does everything that I need it
to do as well as XP or better, including software development and gaming.
You would probably quite like Win2k3 as well - If you have a chance to pick up a copy, I
recommend it.
It has all the speed and tightness of Win2k, with the much-improved hardware support of XP,
without XP's bloat (it even defaults to having themes turned off!).
Unfortunately, you may find a few programs that refuse to run (for no good reason)
on a "server" OS unless you buy a "server" version, whatever the hell that means.
As the most annoying, I currently don't know of any free ondemand AV programs
that will run on 2k3 (AVG used to, but the new version refuses).
I didn't have a lot of patience with what I removed or included, but once, due to
dependencies, it started to remove some really base packages, and I got fed up.
I find that, for the most part, apt will warn you if you try to remove something
important... But not always. When in doubt about one of the packages it shows,
try checking what it does with something like:
dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package} ${Description} ${Status}' packagenamegoeshere
You should also run deborphan every few removals to see if you can throw away another library or three.
Also, with Knoppix, you'll eventually notice you have three un(easily)removeable sets of rather large files
installed on your system - apt-get itself, locales, and kernel modules.
As one of your very last steps, delete your dpkg and apt caches (the size of those will depend on how much
you installed, but can really add up if you make a lot of changes), and then just rm -rf your/var/lib/apt/lists for a whopping 85MB or so (this won't even break apt, amazingly enough! You'll just
need to do an apt-get update to repair it if you ever need it again).
For the locales, put only the locale(s) you want in "/etc/locales.gen" (probably only "en_US ISO-8859-1"
if you live in the US) and running "locale-gen". This will drop your/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
from 15MB to around 1MB, and then you can manually delete all the useless ones from/usr/share/locales
to save another 27-29MB.
Do you want to keep 65MB worth of kernel modules around for things like ISDN/ATM/IPX/Appletalk, any FS other
than EXT2/Reiser/CIFS, and support for ancient ISA cards? Most likely you plan to target a single
system; boot to it and see what modules get loaded. Keep a few extra really common ones if
you want, but you can easily throw away 90% of them with zero loss of functionality.
You can also find some significant savings by removing your manpages and documentation; and if you need X,
do you really need the latest-and-greatest 3d accelerated drivers just to scroll your MP3 playlist,
or would the relatively tiny framebuffer driver suffice? Deleting all your useless timezones helps too,
but that will only buy you an extra 5MB (though as you noticed, once you pass the 100MB mark, every byte
helps). You should also make friends with "strip", though at that point you really do start saving only
a few KB per use. And at the tightest end of the spectrum of space-saving, a statically-linked BusyBox
can singlehandledly save you 10-30MB of binaries and assorted libraries.
Finally, keep in mind that the "c" in "cloop" stands for "compressed"... Getting the FS down to around 400MB (pre-compression)
means it should fit comfortably on a mini-cdr, and DSL (v3.3) itself weighs in at 124MB uncompressed. This might not so much
matter if you want to do a "real" HDD-like install onto a small USB or flash drive, but if you plan to boot from readonly media,
even using the "toram" option, only the compressed size matters (with enough RAM, of course).
Would increasing the use of your brain like this, to give
commands, make you smarter in some way, as well?
Yes, in that one niche area.
If you train it by doing long division in your head, for example,
you would soon get very, very good at long division.
Which actually raises another interesting question - It sounds like
the interface works only because doing a "hard" problem causes a
significant localized increase in activity in some parts of the brain;
As people used these over time, the "hardness" of a given type of
problem would start to decrease, and (at least for discrete types of
problems, such as the long division example) you would also start to
shift some of the burden from conscious calculation (CPU time) to
memory (lookup tables). Would those effects thereby make the
interface less effective over time?
Or, more likely, anyone using such devices over time would probably
just learn exactly what thought patterns it responds to, and not
even need to bother with the chore of doing mental exercises, any more
than an experience typist needs to "think" about where to move their
fingers to hit the next key.
In a former life, I used to build custom embedded Linux distros
as the base platform for other company projects; Knoppix makes
it so easy, if I hadn't already moved on from that job,
it would have sent me to the unemployment line.
Actually, I exagerate a tad there - Knoppix makes it almost trivial to
get a customized Debian-based system down to the 40-50MB range; On my most
challenging project, I managed to get a stable system running custom
builds of X and Mozilla to fit on a 16MB flash disk. But presuming you
don't have quite such minimalistic hardware requirements, Knoppix
makes the task a breeze. Just unpack it, chroot into it, "apt-get remove"
whatever you don't want and build whatever else you do, and roll it back
into a cloop'd iso. C'est fini.
For comparison, I usually prefer to run Slackware as my normal Linux
distro, and looked into Slax before
Knoppix. For some tasks you might find it easier to work with, as it
uses a more modular approach, but I found that far more limiting
and inconvenient if you want to make fine-grained tweaks or even just
alter configuration details without swapping out whole packages.
Grades aren't meaningless if you have any plans to
attend University.
I had fairly poor grades all through school up until I
attended University. From which, I graduated with
multiple degrees with high honors.
Grades mean nothing. In elementary school, grades
mean kissing ass and "plays well with others". In
highschool, grades mean kissing ass and "doesn't cause
trouble". In college, grades mean kissing ass and
regurgitating memorized facts. Care to guess which
of those four criteria I satisfy?
For many people, grades are a major factor in determining acceptance or rejection to paths of life that guarantee some amount of financial success.
Grades mean absolutely nothing six months after you start
your first professional job. From that point on, your
pay and career path depends only on your employment
history (and of course a bit of luck). Whether you
graduated with straight-Cs or straight-As, no one cares
anymore.
Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and
get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost
than what you can do on a home inkjet.
Not really. The original picture usually presents the limiting factor
on printout quality. A 12MP camera just barely matches the
resolution of 8.5x11 paper at 300DPI. Few people have 12MP cameras,
and fewer still have the optics or photography skill to make proper use
of that resolution anyway.
You should only take your pictures to a specialty print shop
for oversized or extremely thick (heavy cardstock) paper. For anything
else, believe it or not your cheap home inkjet does a good enough job.
As for "cheaper" - Everyone in this discussion seems obsessed with buying
the cheapest printers possible then complaining that they eat very expensive
ink. Check out an HP Business Inkjet 1200 (I have no relation to HP, I've
just used those and love 'em)... Separate 28/69ml CMYK cartridges with
separate printheads; The ink costs the same (per cart) as the typical
wimpy tricolor cart with a mere 3ml per color. And it even duplexes
automatically! Of course, you'll blow $150 on the printer itself, but
that comes with a complete set of inks and printheads - Which under
typical light home use, you might realistically never need to
replace. Oh, and I've opened empty carts - It sucks those things
so dry you couldn't stain your fingers with the remains.
Looks like five years later, it's still the only plan.
A solution will appear.
Even if the community can't somehow come up with a solution
agreeable to Zap2It, this seems like quite a good opportunity
for someone to make a few bucks...
How long does it take to manually enter a channel guide each
day? An hour at most? Now Imagine tens of thousands of Myth
users each paying one dollar per month for listing that you provide
via a handful of minumum-wage employees getting it from the
daily newspaper. You wouldn't even need all that much duplication,
really, since only a handful of cable companies provide service to
the vast majority of the US - You'd just need to stay up-to-date
on local mappings of what the various CableCos offer in each region.
Hmmm... Excuse me, I need to go file for a patent and a business
license...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, privacy is very important -- unless you are dead, that is...
I value my privacy (in the abstract) more than your life (as an anonymous number). Unless I personally count as a court-determined likely suspect to deprive you of the latter, I would treat a virus from the FBI the same as any other virus - Isolate it, fingerprint it, and post detection/removal (if possible) info to the appropriate newsgroups and inboxes.
Now, in this case, the FBI actually had a court order. Although we could debate the ease with which judges hand those out, I don't consider this specific case as any form of miscarriage of justice or abuse of the system. Guy made a bomb threat, FBI tracked him to a specific MySpace account, then got a court order to proceed further, then compromised the suspect's computer. That sounds like everything happened in the correct order (for a change), so no foul.
The pendulum is now swinging into the other direction and already there are dimwits, who break Godwin's Law and still get moderated to heavens by fellow dimwits
Sometimes, you just have to call a spade a spade, regardless of netiquette. Personally, I find it even more amazing that so many people will fall back on cheesy "laws" of social norms such as Godwin's rather than admit they can see the Emperor's schlong.
If they'd be more subtle in their advertising (text-only, relevant links a la AdWords that you might actually want to click on) then we could all turn off our blockers and they'd start making money again.
Once, I would have agreed with you. And I still think an unobtrusive text sidebar a la Google's will work in the long run. But AdWords? They worked at first, I even liked them as unobtrusive... Right up until many pages (and the "tech journalist" sites seem like some of the worst offenders here) started looking like little colored minefields of mouseover popups, where one wrong twitch of the mouse ends up hiding half of the visible content (I say "content" rather than "page" because these same sites seem to prefer thick ad-laden sidebars on both sides, leaving the actual content to only the middle third of the actual page... Get that, ads covering other ads!).
Unfortunately, short of turning off Javascript (which I once advocated but today you really can't use even the most basic of sites without it), AdWords seem nearly unblockable. Sometimes the "printable" form of the page gives some relief, but even then you often get every other paragraph interlaced with a half-printed-page banner.
Surely all you generous patrons of the arts will be jumping at the chance to belatedly pay!
I already paid for (almost) all of my music. And no way in hell will I pay again just to have it in my computer or my car or at work or on my phone or my portable player or anywhere. I bought the CD, I ripped the CD, and I will unapologetically play that rip in any way I so desire.
Now, the strawman you've made, while it may not apply yet, will come to matter more and more, as we see artists releasing content available from only a single DRM-using provider, such as iTunes[*] or the Zune. Then, the situation you describe may well come to pass, in that I will pirate the music before I'll accept a DRM-encumbered form of it.
* - I already have one such track, though not actually pirated in that I "own" it (spare me the licensing-vs-buying BS), as a free promotional download available only through iTMS to subscribers of the band's mailing list. But if not for the magic of Hymn nee PlayFair, I'd have no use for it, as I refuse to run iTunes and don't have an iPod.
But GMail has advertisments based on keywords of your email.
Not if you use POP to get your GMail rather than their web interface.
Thats Evil Capitalism too.
Despite the impression you could easily get from reading Slashdot, most of us don't actually dislike capitalism (though some of us might not realize as much). In reality, a closer reading of the more well-written Slashrants on the subject reveals that most of us actually object to corporate protectionism and profit-before-humans laws in general.
Hey, I have a good job, my boss lets me read Slashdot, I make enough to afford plenty of toys. I can thank capitalism in general for most of that (as opposed to communism, where I honestly don't even see the point of getting up every morning to go to work). I can't, however, overlook the fact that we have people punished with paying basically their life's savings for sharing music, while companies like the former Union Carbide can kill people and walk away with a slap on the wrist; You or I risk imprisonment for letting a website know it has a security flaw, while Sony distributes rootkits and only basically had to say "oops, sorry, our bad"; We get stiffer sentences for dosing ourselves with THC than Merck gets for falsifying clinical trial data on COX2 inhibitors leading to numerous premature deaths.
Why cant a company just pay millions of dollars to keep a good email service for free
If you think they don't get anything out of "giving" us all those "free" email accounts, I have a bridge for sale...
As the most obvious, they get massive amounts of personal information about us - Even if you give completely fake info to sign up, they can reconstruct a given user's social network better than that user can. And although GMail lets you use POP, as you mention, they do indeed show targetted ads to the webmail-using majority of their viewers. And don't discount "brand loyalty" through laziness. Already at MSN, as your default IE homepage? Well, may as well use Microsoft's search, and get a free Live account.
When it comes to human accomplishment, the Jesus statue is comparatively pathetic.
Actually, I consider it worthy of "wonder" status simply as a monument to human hypocrisy... They had the nads to build a giant idol to a god who specifically gave a rule stating: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above."
Of course, we could debate the current location (relative to "in heaven above") of the corpse once called Yehoshua Bin Yosef, but I'd say these guys definitely missed the spirit (pardon my pun) of the commandment, if not the letter, of the commandment.
Now you figure out which one it was and how to decompress it.
Well, with only 256 choices, it didn't take long to check all possible decodings for one that makes sense. Ended up working for "}".
Oddly, though, the algorithm not only restored, but improved the original! I get:
"The King's English version of Wikipedia should fit in eight gigabits, I do believe. Only humanity's sphexish adherence to grammatical rules limits the attainable compression ratio; the good gentleman might wish to consider filtering to a more base patois prior to applying his algorithm".
Amazing... This discovery could single-handedly render the next generation (nearly) intelligible!
What is the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning?' I thought saying 'Read Slashdot' wouldn't be what he was looking for -- so I made up something, I'm sure, equally lame
Perhaps he just wanted to see if you'd lie to tell him what he wanted to hear.
That question has only one "right" answer - You get coffee, check Slashdot and read your email (possibly not in that exact order), then you glaze over until you hit the bottom of at least your first cup of coffee. Any interruptions before then, you respond to with "Mmmmmpph? Grrrrrrumph. Mrphythuber kurbendurby! Mrffff". Anyone failing to understand that response clearly doesn't work in IT, or worse, likes mornings (grounds for immediate dismissal, IMO).
And anyone that mods this "funny" either lies or doesn't work in IT.
There's one huge problem you seem to have completely left out of your post. YOU CAN'T BUY EXPLOSIVES WITHOUT PROPER LICENSING/PERMITS/ETC.
Black powder.
Match heads (no, they don't just burn, they decompose, making them a high explosive).
Cold packs (the classic "fuel oil" bomb, the fuel actually does nothing but keep it dry).
And for the suicidal do-it-yourselfers...
Ammonia + iodine.
Toluene + sulfuric acid, + nitric acid.
Or for that matter, nitric acid + just about anything (glycerine, hexamine, corn starch, etc).
If someone wants to blow something up, no pesky licensing scheme will stop them. Education, awareness, and most importantly, not pissing in the rest of the world's Cheerios will do far more to keep us safe than trusting Uncle Sam to wrap the world in Nerf.
Fallout 3's tears can cure cancer. Too bad Fallout 3 doesn't cry. Ever.
But the real mystery - Can Chuck Norris's characters die in Fallout3?
Combine those two and it's easy to see that creatures can't really be small enough to have an exoskeleton and yet also large enough to have a brain capable of human-level intelligence.
Except, we do effectively have an exoskeleton protecting our brains, with just a quarter inch of meat on it to allow for the growth of hair that helps hide exact weak-points from predators. No other part of us has nearly so much nonfunctional armor... Even considering our ribcage, that serves a vital role in letting our lungs act as a bellows, with protection a side effect.
But I do think it's not THAT unlikely that other intelligent races would be bipedal, upright, large-brained, and endowed with fine manipulators on their upper appendages.
Agreed. You make a number of good points, though I would point out one radically different arrangement that has a lot of potential - The cephalopod. It can support a large brain and other viscera at the center of a mass of protective muscular appendages, each of which can act for any combination of sensory, locomotive, or manipulative purposes. Four limbs and ten digits work well for land-based bipeds, but in an aquatic environment, mightn't twenty tentacles work just as well? And it provides far more redundancy in the case of injury as a bonus - We lose an arm and it partially cripples us; lose one out of twenty tentacles, and it would more closely resemble us losing a finger.
The thing with power usage is that nobody seems interested in attacking the 2 largest areas of power wastage. (except maybe google)
Except, those don't really waste most of the power.
With AC/DC, you already have equipment available that can push over 90% efficient. With air conditioning, central home units manage 90-94% efficient, and I'd expect industrial models to do even better. So not a lot of room for improvement there.
With servers, however... The better they scale to their load, the more efficient they get. In theory, depending on your required maximum transaction time, you could actually suspend the whole machine giving very nearly zero power consumption during offpeak loads. In practice you can't really do that (completely waking up can take half a minute even under ideal conditions), but using ondemand CPU and memory speed scaling, halting all but one core, and spinning drives down (but not stopped), you can still get huge power savings (just for the CPUs in an 8-way Xeon machine, that drops you to literally 2-5% of the power draw!).
Of course, improving all three gives ever better savings, but it makes more sense to focus on the easy targets first. And in this case, the servers themselves present the easiest targets.
While we are at it here is another simple power tip. Turn your rows of racks back to back.
Or better yet, just line them all up in a single long row, such that a wall divides the front from the back, with the back exhausting outside (or into the offices in the winter, as you suggest). That way you can still get to the back when needed, just by going into the other half of the room. I have to agree, unless you have a datacenter in the desert, I don't understand why we AC them instead of just pumping as much outside air as possible through the room. Moving a large volume of air (given a low pressure change) costs next to nothing compared to actual air conditioning.
I'm really trying to figure out if you're kidding or just an idiot.
No, quite serious. I won't say I hated my visit, because I went for a specific event that I quite enjoyed. But everything else about the entire city I found loathesome.
I would not go there again, and I would not recommed it as a tourist destination to anyone that asked.
Just my opinion... Take it or leave it. And if you think that makes me an idiot, well, you have a right to your opinions as well.
Why a tripod? Does that make for a professional?
And more importanty - so what? "Professional" photographers have just as much right as a tourist to stand around taking pictures. Even (gasp!) for commercial purposes!
This is simply absurd and as a photographer, I will *not* be traveling into NYC if this proposed policy becomes law.
You won't miss out on much. I've visited once - Wouldn't go back, for anything (though Spamalot tempted me). The air sucks, you feel like you need a shower after touching anything, you can hear cars all night long even from 30 floors up, "cheap" coffee and snacks cost a fortune (though if you want to pay a lot for food, I have to admit you can get some pretty good stuff there). And the "sights" they apparently now don't want people to photograph - Really, what? Times Square looks kinda neat, in a sesory overload way, but NYC really doesn't have a whole lot worth seeing in the first place.
Evil as this is... can it be prevented?
Yes. Systems like this work well against a low level of random noise, but have a high vulnerability to deliberate poinsoning.
Simple example, that people (including myself) really do... Go to your grocery store and apply for one of their annoying "we promise we won't track you but your coupons will magically relate to things you usually buy" customer cards. They generally give you two of them (sometimes even four, as two keychain fobs and two wallet photo sized cards). Give each of these to different random people, making sure to get at least one back in trade. Every few weeks, trade again. Congratulations, you have now very thoroughly poisoned the store's database of your buying habits.
That's hilarious. One of PopCap's best-known games, Dynomite, is a direct ripoff of Taito's Puzzle Bobble, one of the best-known (and -loved) puzzle games of all time.
Not to mention, even PopCap's crown (Be)Jewel(ed) directly rips off similar Japanese puzzle games (and even American clones from before PopCap ever existed). Talk about balls, daring to complain about others producing similar games...
I hate to break it to you, but those weren't really teenage girls.
...
Sweet16Thing: Hey, weird, I work there too!
Gary91 has joined the room
Bunny15: Waitasec, guys - Do we have any non-cops in the PedoLovers chat room?
GeezrLovr: Uh... Not me
RoophieMe: Nope
Nymph1993: Sorry
Gary91 has logged off
Bunny15: Oh, damn.
We have ideals. People live in pursuit of dreams...We give up sex for them sometimes! We die for them when we must.
Pretty good examples - For the opposing argument.
Of course, you could just as well make the argument that our "ideals" merely count as yet another way to attract a mate; an expensive waste of energy and resources that show members of the opposite gender that, if we can so flagrantly flaunt our survivability, we can support children better than the next poor shmuck just trying to make a living.
Birds give one of the best examples of this "showy" waste of resources. Most (males) have plumage that makes it much harder to hide from predators. Some build ornate nests far more complex than necessary, with completely useless shiny decorations. Hell, they sing, letting every predator within a mile know their location!
None of this makes us (or them) "special". It just represents an evolutionarily successful strategy for getting laid.
And for the rest, god gave us beer.
The same can conceptually be done for video, although with certain added complexity (as I'd need to capture just a region of the display, and not the entire display itself. I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time
With a VM, you'd probably have the easiest time using virtual screen captures (no need to look at the real screen, just look at the right spot in the player's decoded memory). In your described case, you don't need to bother with such a mess - You could just use a virtual display driver that either writes the raw data directly to HDD for later recompression, or acts as a buffered frameserver for something like VirtualDub. Both of those require rather fast hardware (HDD in the first case, CPU in the second), so you'd probably lose frames.
A VM does gives you an obvious solution to the performance bottleneck... Suspend the VM after every frame (or whenever a rather large buffer fills would probably work better) and wait for the HDD or compressor to catch up. You may also need to deal with forcing clock slew or tricking the player into never skipping frames to keep up, but once you can debug a process (which DRM basically cannot ever tolerate) without it knowing, any amount of "gotchas" just lead to a straightforward sequence of behind-the-scenes corrections to the running player.
I have a fully licensed copy of Win2K Pro that I have faithfully moved from machine to machine for the past 7 years. It doesn't require registration, is rock solid, and does everything that I need it to do as well as XP or better, including software development and gaming.
You would probably quite like Win2k3 as well - If you have a chance to pick up a copy, I recommend it.
It has all the speed and tightness of Win2k, with the much-improved hardware support of XP, without XP's bloat (it even defaults to having themes turned off!).
Unfortunately, you may find a few programs that refuse to run (for no good reason) on a "server" OS unless you buy a "server" version, whatever the hell that means. As the most annoying, I currently don't know of any free ondemand AV programs that will run on 2k3 (AVG used to, but the new version refuses).
I didn't have a lot of patience with what I removed or included, but once, due to dependencies, it started to remove some really base packages, and I got fed up.
/var/lib/apt/lists for a whopping 85MB or so (this won't even break apt, amazingly enough! You'll just
need to do an apt-get update to repair it if you ever need it again).
/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
from 15MB to around 1MB, and then you can manually delete all the useless ones from /usr/share/locales
to save another 27-29MB.
I find that, for the most part, apt will warn you if you try to remove something important... But not always. When in doubt about one of the packages it shows, try checking what it does with something like:
dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package} ${Description} ${Status}' packagenamegoeshere
You should also run deborphan every few removals to see if you can throw away another library or three.
Also, with Knoppix, you'll eventually notice you have three un(easily)removeable sets of rather large files installed on your system - apt-get itself, locales, and kernel modules.
As one of your very last steps, delete your dpkg and apt caches (the size of those will depend on how much you installed, but can really add up if you make a lot of changes), and then just rm -rf your
For the locales, put only the locale(s) you want in "/etc/locales.gen" (probably only "en_US ISO-8859-1" if you live in the US) and running "locale-gen". This will drop your
Do you want to keep 65MB worth of kernel modules around for things like ISDN/ATM/IPX/Appletalk, any FS other than EXT2/Reiser/CIFS, and support for ancient ISA cards? Most likely you plan to target a single system; boot to it and see what modules get loaded. Keep a few extra really common ones if you want, but you can easily throw away 90% of them with zero loss of functionality.
You can also find some significant savings by removing your manpages and documentation; and if you need X, do you really need the latest-and-greatest 3d accelerated drivers just to scroll your MP3 playlist, or would the relatively tiny framebuffer driver suffice? Deleting all your useless timezones helps too, but that will only buy you an extra 5MB (though as you noticed, once you pass the 100MB mark, every byte helps). You should also make friends with "strip", though at that point you really do start saving only a few KB per use. And at the tightest end of the spectrum of space-saving, a statically-linked BusyBox can singlehandledly save you 10-30MB of binaries and assorted libraries.
Finally, keep in mind that the "c" in "cloop" stands for "compressed"... Getting the FS down to around 400MB (pre-compression) means it should fit comfortably on a mini-cdr, and DSL (v3.3) itself weighs in at 124MB uncompressed. This might not so much matter if you want to do a "real" HDD-like install onto a small USB or flash drive, but if you plan to boot from readonly media, even using the "toram" option, only the compressed size matters (with enough RAM, of course).
Would increasing the use of your brain like this, to give commands, make you smarter in some way, as well?
Yes, in that one niche area.
If you train it by doing long division in your head, for example, you would soon get very, very good at long division.
Which actually raises another interesting question - It sounds like the interface works only because doing a "hard" problem causes a significant localized increase in activity in some parts of the brain; As people used these over time, the "hardness" of a given type of problem would start to decrease, and (at least for discrete types of problems, such as the long division example) you would also start to shift some of the burden from conscious calculation (CPU time) to memory (lookup tables). Would those effects thereby make the interface less effective over time?
Or, more likely, anyone using such devices over time would probably just learn exactly what thought patterns it responds to, and not even need to bother with the chore of doing mental exercises, any more than an experience typist needs to "think" about where to move their fingers to hit the next key.
Are there any alternative that'll spit out custom ISOs which our non-technical staff can use to install a complete Linux system?
Take a look at Knoppix Remastering.
In a former life, I used to build custom embedded Linux distros as the base platform for other company projects; Knoppix makes it so easy, if I hadn't already moved on from that job, it would have sent me to the unemployment line.
Actually, I exagerate a tad there - Knoppix makes it almost trivial to get a customized Debian-based system down to the 40-50MB range; On my most challenging project, I managed to get a stable system running custom builds of X and Mozilla to fit on a 16MB flash disk. But presuming you don't have quite such minimalistic hardware requirements, Knoppix makes the task a breeze. Just unpack it, chroot into it, "apt-get remove" whatever you don't want and build whatever else you do, and roll it back into a cloop'd iso. C'est fini.
For comparison, I usually prefer to run Slackware as my normal Linux distro, and looked into Slax before Knoppix. For some tasks you might find it easier to work with, as it uses a more modular approach, but I found that far more limiting and inconvenient if you want to make fine-grained tweaks or even just alter configuration details without swapping out whole packages.
Grades aren't meaningless if you have any plans to attend University.
I had fairly poor grades all through school up until I attended University. From which, I graduated with multiple degrees with high honors.
Grades mean nothing. In elementary school, grades mean kissing ass and "plays well with others". In highschool, grades mean kissing ass and "doesn't cause trouble". In college, grades mean kissing ass and regurgitating memorized facts. Care to guess which of those four criteria I satisfy?
For many people, grades are a major factor in determining acceptance or rejection to paths of life that guarantee some amount of financial success.
Grades mean absolutely nothing six months after you start your first professional job. From that point on, your pay and career path depends only on your employment history (and of course a bit of luck). Whether you graduated with straight-Cs or straight-As, no one cares anymore.
Take your nicely-edited photos down to a printing booth or shop and get your photos printed in *MUCH BETTER QUALITY* and at a cheaper cost than what you can do on a home inkjet.
Not really. The original picture usually presents the limiting factor on printout quality. A 12MP camera just barely matches the resolution of 8.5x11 paper at 300DPI. Few people have 12MP cameras, and fewer still have the optics or photography skill to make proper use of that resolution anyway.
You should only take your pictures to a specialty print shop for oversized or extremely thick (heavy cardstock) paper. For anything else, believe it or not your cheap home inkjet does a good enough job.
As for "cheaper" - Everyone in this discussion seems obsessed with buying the cheapest printers possible then complaining that they eat very expensive ink. Check out an HP Business Inkjet 1200 (I have no relation to HP, I've just used those and love 'em)... Separate 28/69ml CMYK cartridges with separate printheads; The ink costs the same (per cart) as the typical wimpy tricolor cart with a mere 3ml per color. And it even duplexes automatically! Of course, you'll blow $150 on the printer itself, but that comes with a complete set of inks and printheads - Which under typical light home use, you might realistically never need to replace. Oh, and I've opened empty carts - It sucks those things so dry you couldn't stain your fingers with the remains.
Looks like five years later, it's still the only plan.
;-)
A solution will appear.
Even if the community can't somehow come up with a solution agreeable to Zap2It, this seems like quite a good opportunity for someone to make a few bucks...
How long does it take to manually enter a channel guide each day? An hour at most? Now Imagine tens of thousands of Myth users each paying one dollar per month for listing that you provide via a handful of minumum-wage employees getting it from the daily newspaper. You wouldn't even need all that much duplication, really, since only a handful of cable companies provide service to the vast majority of the US - You'd just need to stay up-to-date on local mappings of what the various CableCos offer in each region.
Hmmm... Excuse me, I need to go file for a patent and a business license...